The Jubilee Pool, Penzance: ‘Municipal modernity and faith in a brighter, more enlightened future’ UPDATE

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1930s, Penzance

I don’t normally update posts but four years ago, when I last visited the Jubilee Pool in Penzance, it was closed and storm damaged. A fundraising campaign was in place to secure its repair and re-opening.  Well, last week I saw that the campaign had succeeded magnificently so I’m pleased to add to that earlier post and bring things up-to-date. (The revisions are in italics.)

Jubilee Pool, August 2018

Municipal Dreams is on holiday this week but the Jubilee Pool in Penzance is so municipal and so dreamy it just had to be shared. Opened in 1935, the pool is maybe the finest of Britain’s open-air lidos – a beautiful Arc Deco memento of a municipal commitment to health, fun and modernity that illuminated an otherwise gloomy decade.

My original photos were taken in August 2014 and show the pool closed and awaiting repair.

Penzance became a borough in 1614 and seems over the years to have been a rather enterprising one – a reservoir to supply the town with water was constructed in 1759, the first gas lighting arrived in 1830. In 1849, the Corporation was one of the first to form a local board of health and numerous improvements followed.

The Prom: originally built in 1843, this is the 1896 renovation with pink tinted slabs to reduce glare, August 2018

Fishing, minerals and trade formed the basis of its early prosperity but the Napoleonic Wars (which prevented the wealthy travelling to watering places on the Continent) opened new possibilities as one commentator praised the town for ‘the mildness of its air, the agreeableness of the situation and the respectability of its inhabitants’. He dubbed it ‘the Montpellier of England’. (1)

The Corporation built a seaside promenade to the west of the town in 1843 and the first Borough Surveyor built wide new roads to its rear from the 1860s. The rail link to London established in 1859 made these aspirations to resort gentility far more realistic. The first large hotel, Queen’s, opened in 1861. In its interwar resort heyday, Penzance was hailed as the ‘Cannes of the Cornish Riviera’. (2)

To its working population, Penzance was less idyllic. Battery Square – an area of run-down cottages and industrial works to the south of the town centre and adjacent to the promenade – was ‘one of the slummiest parts of the town’. (3)

In 1933, it was cleared. In a couple of years, large new municipal housing estates were built on the outskirts of town but meanwhile the Corporation focused on Penzance, the resort. Where Battery Square stood, the Borough Surveyor, Captain Frank Latham, created pleasure gardens and – a sign of the times – a car park.

At this time, Penzance was also lamenting the ‘unkind act of nature’ which had destroyed ‘the lovely beach which once ran from the Battery Rocks to the Tolcarne river’. A solution suggested itself – a lido built on the Rocks themselves.

The view from Tolcarne towards Battery Rocks and the Pool, August 2014

In this, Penzance was following the fashion of the day: (4)

By the early 1930s, open-air pools had become emblems of municipal modernity and of faith in a brighter, more enlightened future, in much the same way as public libraries had become a generation or two earlier.

Undated photograph © Jubilee Pool Penzance Ltd.

The pools also reflected a greater independence enjoyed by women – a cultural shift but, in this context, a practical one too made possible by new swimwear designs which allowed them to take up swimming in addition to the more sedate bathing previously judged more seemly. 

Opening Day, 1935 © Jubilee Pool Penzance Ltd. 

As we saw in Victoria Park, East London, Herbert Morrison – leader of the Labour administration which ran the London County Council from 1934 – had declared London would be ‘a city of lidos’. In the year that the Jubilee Pool opened, the Tinside lido was opened in Plymouth, Saltdean in Brighton and open-air pools in Ilkley, Norwich, Peterborough and Aylesbury.

The Jubilee Pool was officially opened on 31 May, 1935. It was, the programme stated, ‘ the consummation of one of the most important projects undertaken by the Borough of Penzance’ . The celebratory prose went on to praise the clearance of the:

slum property that had marred the eastern approach to the Promenade – today this depressing and unattractive scene has been swept away and a complete transformation effected.

‘Professor Hicks’ takes the first plunge at the official opening © Jubilee Pool Penzance Ltd. 

A full programme of activities followed with the accompaniment of the Penzance Silver Band.  ‘Professor’ Hicks, ‘the Cornish Veteran’ and former West of England swimming champion whose swim career had begun in 1868 was present and his inaugural laps were followed by a ‘programme of aquatic sports and exhibitions’ including races for ladies and girls. The ‘Beauty Parade of Bathing Belles’ was perhaps less of a blow struck for feminism. 

Prices, at 6d (2.5p) for adults and 3d for children, were relatively high but more controversial to some was the fact that the pool was to be open on Sundays and Councillor Birch went so far as to proclaim that ‘people in favour of Sunday labour were tyrants’.  The Mayor himself declared he would rather the pool be permanently closed than open on Sundays but later took part in the opening ceremony nevertheless. By 16 votes to 9, the Council overruled the primarily religious objections to Sunday opening (4a)

Members of the Penzance Swimming Association and Water Polo Club, mid-1950s (?) © Jubilee Pool Penzance Ltd.

The Jubilee Pool was 330 feet long by 240 feet wide at its greatest extent, not the biggest of its time but, apparently, the largest by volume of water – seawater regularly replenished by seven sluice gates. The size was designed to meet national and international standards for swimming and water polo matches. 

August 2014

But beyond the dry detail, the pool is a thing of beauty, spectacularly sited on Battery Rocks with commanding views of Mount’s Bay, resting, in the words of the latest Pevsner:

sleekly like a liner at anchor projecting into the sea…a subtle Art Deco composition of curvilinear concrete terraces in cool blues and whites, separated to accommodate sunbathers below and spectators of the arena-like space within or views of the town without.

As the local press noted at the time, the pool wasn’t ‘only a fine piece of engineering’. It was also:

a work of art. The monotony of straight walls and right angles – the domain of the compass and ruler – has been entirely avoided. Instead there are graceful curves and pleasing lines.

The programme, in full awareness of these artistic credentials, commented conversely on ‘the cubist style … adopted in the interior in the matter of diving platforms and steps’. 

August 2014

The architect of this masterpiece was Borough Surveyor, Captain Latham. He usually gets a name-check in descriptions of the pool but I’m intrigued by him. He had been appointed to the post in 1899, aged 25. His rank came from a commission in the Royal Engineers during the First World War. He retired, awarded the Freedom of the Borough, in 1938 and died in 1946.

Captain Frank Latham

In his younger years, he had written The Construction of Roads, Paths and Sea Defence, published in 1903. That expertise was clear in the skilful use made of Battery Rocks for the pool’s foundations. The same local press report was pleased, more prosaically, to record that, as a result, the whole project cost £14,000 whereas comparable pools elsewhere had cost over £100,000.

St Michael’s Mount to the rear and war memorial to right, August 2014

Latham – as I imagine him, this practical man and local government bureaucrat – somewhere possessed the soul of an artist. The design of the Pool was inspired, so he said, by watching a gull alight on the sea. Its architecture is a beautiful confection of Modernism and Art Deco, typical of its time but all of its own and making superb use of its site.

August 2014

It represented too, in the fashion of its day, fresh air and healthy exercise. As the mayor opined at the pool’s opening, ‘there can hardly be any better form of bodily exercise than swimming’. In any case, he added, ‘people who live by the sea and those who live on the sea should be able to swim’.

But the pool – which had seemed such a benefit to the town and its inhabitants and visitors, ‘an event of the greatest importance’ as the headline proclaimed – had come by the 1960s to seem a ‘white elephant’.

The lido craze didn’t last. War broke out within four years. The post-war world of foreign travel and indoor leisure centres – and, always, the vagaries of the English weather – contrived to make these outdoor pools seem old-fashioned, even rather uninviting. Somehow, the Jubilee Pool survived but, by the 1990s a sceptical local council reckoned each swim cost the local ratepayer between £16 and £18 and the case for closing it seemed strong. (5)

The Friends of Jubilee Pool were formed in 1992 and they achieved their first victory in the following year when the Pool was Grade II listed. Major funding followed from English Heritage and the European Regional Development Fund and a grand re-opening took place in May 1994.

Now lidos and open-air pools up and down the country are enjoying a revival though many are still dependent on the voluntary efforts of local enthusiasts. The ups and downs of the Jubilee Pool itself continue. February’s storms caused significant damage to the Pool and have prevented its opening this year.

Catching the full force of a winter storm © The Friends of Jubilee Pool

The most recent news is positive, however. A joint bid from Cornwall Council, Penzance Town Council and the Friends of Jubilee Pool for £1.95m funding from the Coastal Communities Fund was approved by the Department for Communities and Local Government this month.

The Friends are continuing their own fund-raising campaign to ensure that the Pool will be reopened with a wider range of activities that should safeguard its future in years to come. Captain Latham and the enterprising councillors whose vision created the Jubilee Pool in the 1930s would be pleased.

2018

A £3m renovation programme, supported by the Coastal Communities Fund and matching funding from local authorities and the Friends of Jubilee Pool, was completed in 2016 and the pool reopened in May that year.

August 2018

The Pool is now owned and managed by the Friends of Jubilee Pool operating as a Community Benefit Society committed its survival as a community asset.  The latest stage in this is the drilling of a geothermal well to provide renewable energy which will enable part of the pool to be heated.  A fundraising share offer is in place to complement the grant funding provided by the European Union. (6)

August 2018

Finally, that future is properly supported by a celebration of the Pool’s past. ‘Jubilee Pool Stories‘ is a project to create a digital archive as well as new media work and exhibitions. If you’re interested or can contribute your own memories, please follow the link.  My thanks to them for providing the historic photographs included in this post.

Sources

The amended post benefited from an exhibition in the Penzance Exchange gallery, ‘The Jubilee Pool: Then, Now, To Come’, which is running till 22 September 2018.

(1) WG Maton in 1794, quoted in Peter Beacham and Nikolaus Pevsner, Cornwall (2014)

(2) JH Wade in 1928, quoted in Cornwall Archaeological Unit, Cornwall and Scilly Urban Survey Historic characterisation for regeneration: Penzance (September 2003)

(3) The quotations are taken from ‘An Event of the Greatest Important’, The Cornishmen, a June 1935 newspaper report republished online in The West Briton, May 27, 2010

(4) Janet Smith, Liquid Assets: The lidos and open air swimming pools of Britain (English Heritage, 2005) quoted in Tom de Castella, review, New Statesman, 29 August 2005

(4a) ‘Penzance Town Council. The Bathing Pool’, The Cornishman and Cornish Telegraph, 15 May 1935

(5) See Martin Nixon, ‘Jubilee Pool: Enormous Liability or Massive Opportunity?’ for some of this later history. The figures are taken from the de Castella review.

(6)  Visit the Jubilee Pool’s dedicated website for full details on past work and future plans.

With planning permission granted for the proposals, Dezeen have just published ‘Penzance could become “spa town of Cornwall” with revamp of art-deco sea pool’

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Municipal Dreams goes to Liverpool, part II

Last week’s post followed my walk exploring the housing history of Liverpool with Ronnie Hughes.  We had a long, gloriously sunny Bank Holiday weekend in the city and lots more to do so what follows is a little more eclectic but, naturally, it remains firmly municipal.

In fact, later in the same day, I took time to time to visit what must be – alongside Eldon Grove – the most spectacular symbol of Liverpool’s housing history, St Andrew’s Gardens (or the Bullring to locals).  I’ll let a couple of pictures do the talking first.

St Andrew’s Gardens (The Bullring)

Impressed?  St Andrew’s Gardens, designed by John Hughes, was built by the Corporation between 1932 and 1935, the first of a stunning series of multi-storey tenement blocks (inspired by the cutting-edge public housing of Berlin and Vienna) built under the visionary leadership of City Architect and Director of Housing Lancelot Keay.

This, mark you, is a remnant of the original scheme and other similar grand blocks such as Gerard Gardens have been completely demolished.  To gain some sense of the scale and ambition of the latter, your best bet is to visit the Museum of Liverpool to admire the model constructed by Ged Fagan.

Gerard Gardens model, Museum of Liverpool

Just to the left of the model you’ll see a couple of original artefacts from the building – The Builder and The Architect: two reliefs by local sculptor Herbert Tyson Smith, commissioned by Keay to adorn its exterior.

The Builder and the Architect, formerly Gerard Garden now in the Museum of Liverpool

I’ve written in an earlier post about Liverpool’s unequalled interwar multi-storey housing. Now you just have St Andrew’s Gardens as a reminder of what was achieved – and it is student housing.  There are currently about 50,000 plus HE students in Liverpool and the city has bet big on their presence as a contribution to the local economy.  It had better hope that particular bubble doesn’t burst.

Back at St Andrew’s Gardens, you’ll see to the rear a more modern artwork depicting local people and their lives, created by Broadbent Studio in conjunction with the St Andrew’s Community Association and the Riverside Housing Association.  It was unveiled by the Queen in 1999.  It contains a biblical quotation from First Corinthians: ‘The eye cannot say to the hand I have no need of you, nor again the head to the feet I have no need of you’.  I’ll take that as a tribute to the value of the lives and labour of the ‘ordinary’ people who once lived in the Bullring.

‘The Bullring’ artwork

On this day, the Queen was earning her pittance too, popping over the road to unveil what must be one of the most incongruously-placed plaques in the country at 19 Bronte Street. All this was to mark the area’s ‘regeneration’.

19 Bronte Street

It all creates a strange mix (but Liverpool is a city of clashing contrasts) as the new build here in Gill Street and the older, 1960s (?) housing nearby in Dansie Street illustrates. Obviously Frederick Gibberd’s Metropolitan Cathedral is a looming presence too.

Gill Street

Dansie Street

OK, now for some unashamed tourism but you can’t visit Liverpool without ‘doing’ the Mersey and the Beatles…and, with eyes to see, there’s plenty of significant municipal history in those too.

Wikipedia probably isn’t the most reliable source but it claims the first Mersey Tunnel (the Queensway or Birkenhead Tunnel), opened in 1933, as the largest civil engineering project ever undertaken by a local authority. Its construction was driven (with the County Borough of Birkenhead in tow) by the Corporation of Liverpool and one of the most ambitious City Engineers in the country, John Brodie.  We’ll give credit too to the consulting engineer, Sir Basil Mott and the architect Herbert James Rowse who designed the most visually striking elements of the tunnel, its ventilation shafts.  Here’s the one on the Birkenhead side.

Ventilation shaft, Queensway Tunnel

The Kingsway Tunnel (to Wallasey) was opened – by the Queen again! – in 1971.  I won’t force a municipal connection here – it was built by civil engineers Edmund Nuttall Limited but I know that the fans of Brutalism who follow this blog really like the ventilation shafts of this one too.  To the left here in Seacombe is Mersey Court, a council block built in the mid-60s.

Ventilation shaft, Kingsway Tunnel

Just to the north, you’ll get the best view of the magnificent Wallasey Town Hall, designed by Briggs, Wolstenholme & Thornely – free Neo-Grecian in a Beaux Art tradition according to its Grade II listing.  Begun in 1914, it was used as a military hospital during the war and was finally opened for municipal purposes in 1920.

Wallasey Town Hall

Travelling from the Seacombe to the Woodside Pier Head, the latter gives you a glimpse of Birkenhead Town Hall, opened in 1882 from a design by local architect Christopher Ellison. You’ll need to walk to the Georgian and Victorian Hamilton Square to see its Grade II* grandeur properly. It was used as municipal offices to the early 1990s and I visited it later when it was the Wirral Museum.  Now it’s closed and awaiting a new role. I hope something fitting is secured.

Woodside Pier Head with the former Birkenhead Town Hall to the rear

Back to Liverpool and the waterside view of Liverpool’s crowning glory, not municipal but unmissable – the Three Graces: the Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building.  They’re maybe the reason that my wife’s ancestors thought that the ticket they’d bought to New York was genuine.  In the end, they made a good life in Liverpool. Towards the right of this picture taken from the Museum of Liverpool, you’ll see the ventilation shaft of the Liverpool end of the Queensway Tunnel, not looking a bit out of place.

The ‘Three Graces’

Liverpool 8, Toxteth, famous for the riots of 1981, may still evoke very different images of the city. In fact, the taxi-driver who dropped us off in the district asked if we were sure that’s where we wanted to be – ‘they’re tough as old boots round here’ was his parting shot. That was undeserved, unfair to its poorer residents (he didn’t mean it kindly) and ignorant of just what a mix the area contains – some of Liverpool’s finest Victorian housing, some of its humblest, and a couple of wonderful municipal parks.

We alighted in Granby Street and walked down to what is now known as the Granby Four Streets area.  I won’t begin to try to tell its story here – from good, solid Victorian housing to economic decline and dereliction, to the point when it seemed likely to be cleared as part of New Labour’s ill-judged Housing Market Renewal Pathfinder Programme, to the residents’ fight-back and the formation in 2011 of the Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust. Ronnie Hughes has been intimately involved with much of this and you should read his A Sense of Place blog to learn more.

Renovated homes in Cairns Street

Awaiting renovation in Ducie Street

Now some of its houses have been beautifully renovated (with more to come) and famously the creative reconstruction work of the Assemble arts collective won it the Turner Prize in 2015.

The houses are next to Princes Park, designed by Joseph Paxton and James Pennethorne and opened as a private park in 1842 (Pennethorne also designed Victoria Park in East London) and acquired by Liverpool Corporation in 1918.  There are some fine houses, formerly belonging to Liverpool’s well-to-do, nearby too though most of the terrace below in Belvidere Road has been converted to flats and is social rented.  These juxtapositions are strong in Liverpool.

Belvidere Road

A short walk brought us to this house in Ullet Road, once the home of John Brodie. Is he the only municipal engineer to get a blue plaque?  As the brains behind the Queensway Tunnel, the designer of the UK’s first ring road, its first intercity highway and – apparently his proudest achievement – the inventor of goal nets in football, he deserves one.

The former home of City Engineer, John Brodie, on Ullet Road

Down Linnet Lane at the edge of Sefton Park, you’ll see some dignified post-war council housing, notably Bloomfield Green, a scheme for elderly people which won a Civic Trust award in 1960.

Bloomfield Green

The 231 acre, Grade I-listed, Sefton Park was opened by the Corporation ‘for the health and enjoyment of the townspeople’ in 1872.  This stunning photograph (from the Yo! Liverpool forum and used with permission) shows the beauty of the park and its urban setting.  You’ll see some surviving, now refurbished, council tower blocks in Croxteth, built from the late 1950s around the perimeter.

Sefton Park (c) YO! Liverpool

That it was still providing for the ‘health and enjoyment’ of local people was obvious from the crowds in and around its most celebrated feature, the Palm House, opened in 1896, rescued from dereliction in the 1990s, and more recently more fully restored.

I’ve written more than intended and I haven’t even started on the housing history of the four lads from Liverpool who forever changed the world of popular music.  That will be a bonus post coming soon.

Notes

I’ve added a few additional contemporary images of St Andrew’s Gardens and some historic images of other multi-storey flats schemes on my Tumblr page here.

For some lovely images of the St Andrew’s community in 1967 take a look at this page from the Streets of Liverpool website.

The LCC and the Arts II: the ‘Patronage of the Arts’ Scheme

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1950s, 1960s, LCC

Last week’s post looked at the LCC’s open-air sculpture exhibitions but arguably the more significant contribution to the worthy attempt to bring art to the people lay in its ‘Arts Patronage Scheme’ inaugurated in 1956. By 1964 when it (and the LCC) were wound up, over 70 works of art had been purchased – adorning schools and housing estates across the capital.

Henry Moore, Two-Piece Reclining Figure No. 3, the Brandon Estate, Lambeth © Steve Cadman and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Many of these were significant pieces by some of the leading artists in the country. Nearly all were modernist works and its efforts were not, therefore, without controversy but they remain: (1)

outstanding in their ambition and coherence…In this respect, the LCC may be said to have assisted in the democratisation, if not the socialisation, of art.

The origins of the scheme are marked by their time and place.  Although a Conservative government ruled, a broadly social democratic consensus prevailed which held that a progressive and classless society would be achieved, in part, by a democratic civic culture.  In this, the arts would be a shared patrimony, neither solely derived from nor confined to a cultural elite.

Practically, there was a feeling – as the years of a genuine rather than enforced and politically motivated austerity passed – that the LCC could now look beyond immediate necessities and broaden its efforts to improve Londoners’ quality of life.  In 1954, Isaac Hayward, Labour Leader of the LCC, expressed his view that ‘the Council has both a cultural and an educational responsibility to do what it reasonably can to encourage and assist in the provision of works of art’. (2)

Isaac Hayward

If that, to jaundiced eyes, might reek of middle-class do-goodery, take another look.  Isaac (‘Ike’) Hayward was a former South Wales miner (he started work down the pits aged 12) brought to London by his trade union work. A councillor for Rotherhithe and Deptford, he had been chair of the Public Assistance Committee which reformed the Poor Law before playing a key role in introducing comprehensive education to the capital. The Royal Festival Hall – designed and constructed by the LCC – was built under his determined leadership.  The Hayward Gallery remains a fitting tribute to his role.

In 1956, with the approval of the Conservative Minister of Education, the LCC set aside £20,000 annually (the equivalent of perhaps £0.5m in present-day terms) for the purchase of artworks.  It was thought ‘a reasonable sum’ at a time when the LCC was spending around £20m a year on ‘new architectural work and open-space development’. Some of the money was to be spent on the acquisition of existing works of art but the bulk was to go towards ‘the commissioning of new work and the encouragement of living artists’.

The LCC understood the sensitivities involved in this: (3)

The Council’s fundamental problem in running the scheme lies in the collective exercise of taste: an exercise which has to be accepted by those who provide the money, by those responsible for the service concerned, and by those who ultimately have to live with it.

And, as it acknowledged, such sensitivities were exacerbated by the predominantly modernist form of the works themselves:

Because most of the works acquired were to be associated with the Council’s own contemporary architecture, they have in practice been examples of contemporary style in art. This has sometimes been the cause of criticism, particularly where advanced design was in question.

It’s a valid point. Traditional statuary – a classicist monument or some ‘great man’ memorial – would have been as visually out of place as it was politically inappropriate.  But the public art debate was usually couched in ideological terms: between modernists (criticised by some as ‘highbrow’ and ‘difficult’) and traditionalists who defended representational art and, they claimed, the taste of the ‘man in the street’.

Robert Clatworthy, The Bull, Alton Estate © Edwardx and made available through Wikimedia Commons

For all that sound and fury, however, there were relatively few open controversies around the Council’s selections.  A Reg Butler figure for the new Crystal Palace Recreation Centre commissioned in 1961 and eventually rejected was criticised by the Times as too abstract and opposed by a local Conservative councillor who wanted something with ‘the themes of vigour, strength or sport’.  He concluded that: (4)

All this is just another symptom of the current mystique of art – that it is much too clever for ordinary people to understand.  There are very clever things to be seen now in Battersea Park, and let no-one suggest that they are a load of old iron.

In the meantime, David Wynne’s Gorilla was installed nearby – a much safer and more popular choice at a time when its model Guy was a star attraction at the London Zoo.  A John Hoskins sculpture intended for the Chicksand Estate in Whitechapel was also rejected as ‘too advanced’ by the Housing Committee.

David Wynne, The Gorilla, Crystal Palace Park

But, conversely, the LCC, which had wanted a representational work at the Elmington Estate celebrating the poet Browning’s connection with Camberwell, ended up with a more abstract piece in Willi Soukop’s wall relief, The Pied Piper of Hamelin. (The sculpture was removed in 2000 when parts of the Estate were renovated but, to Southwark’s credit, has recently been restored to a wall at the adjacent Brunswick Park Primary School.)

Willi Soukop, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Elmington Estate, Camberwell

In general, the LCC’s selections reflect (in words quoted by Margaret Garlake) an ‘aesthetic eclecticism’.  This might reflect the cumbersome approval process involving – in fairly indecipherable fashion – departmental proposals, a Director of Arts, the Council’s General Purposes Committee and its Special Development and Arts Subcommittee and, finally, an Advisory Body on Art Acquisition itself advised by the Arts Council.  By some bureaucratic magic, public art emerged.

Siegfried Charoux, The Neighbours, Highbury Quadrant Estate, Islington

General themes and trends do stand out, however.  The earlier selections were marked by more thematic or obviously humanist content.  Siegfried Charoux’s The Neighbours, located in the Highbury Quadrant Estate in Islington is an example of this; Geoffrey Harris’s Generations in the Maitland Park Estate off Haverstock Hill, Camden, another.

Geoffrey Harris, Generations, Maitland Park Estate, Camden © Stu and made available through Wikimedia Commons

Some later works, such as Robert Clatworthy’s Bull, erected on the Alton Estate, Roehampton, in 1961 have a more obviously modernist sensibility.  Henry Moore was, of course, the prime contemporary exponent of the genre and two of his most prestigious works were placed in showpiece LCC estates – Two-Piece Reclining Figure No. 3 in the Brandon Estate, Lambeth, in 1961 and his Draped Seated Woman in the Stifford Estate, Stepney, in 1962.

Some of you will know the recent controversy that has surrounded this last work, affectionately known as Old Flo to local residents.  It was sold to the LCC by Moore at the knock-down price of £7000 – a mark of his own commitment to public art – and based in part on his celebrated Wartime Shelter drawings of East End residents taking refuge underground from the Blitz.  It represents, to its supporters, ‘the post-war desire to improve the lives of Londoners’ – its story ‘one of idealism, resilience and the marking of social change in London’. (5)

Henry Moore, Draped Seated Woman(‘Old Flo’), Stifford Estate, Stepney

That continuing social change was further marked by the demolition of the Estate’s three tower blocks in the 1990s.  Old Flo was removed and later moved for safekeeping to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.  In 2012 the then Mayor of Tower Hamlets, which claimed ownership , proposed to sell it off for £20m – a tempting sum for a cash-strapped and impoverished east London borough.  To cut a long story short, a public campaign in its defence, legal action and the recent change of political leadership in the Tower Hamlets appear to have saved the sculpture – and some of that vision it embodied – for the Borough though a new local location it is yet to be found. (6)

Lynn Chadwick, The Watchers, Alton Estate, Roehampton. Photograph by John Donat.

But this is only one element of the threat that these public artworks face.  Theft is another – the fate which befell one of the three figures contained in Lynn Chadwick’s The Watchers unveiled on the Alton Estate in Roehampton in 1966.  Having ‘discovered’ (their own words) the statues in their grounds, Roehampton University are now committed to re-casting the lost piece and safeguarding the work in the grounds of their Downshire House hall of residence. (7)

The vandalised remains of Sydney Harpley’s Dockers (1962) on the Lansbury Estate, Poplar

Another threat is sheer neglect and this perhaps is the most telling.  We have travelled a long way from the idealism of the post-war world.  Local government, once a flagship of a new and more democratic world, is now a beleaguered institution, its budgets cut to the bone, left fighting to defend its front-line services.

All that, inseparably, marks the new dispensation under which our state, society and culture labour – a world in which we know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The classless civic culture envisaged by Ike Hayward and the LCC seems a lost dream but we can and should value its remains.

Postscript

I hope to write more on this topic.  Much remains to be said on the LCC’s programme of school artworks and the less ‘high arts’ elements of its support for public art.  I’d be pleased to hear from anyone with memories, detail or photographs of lost or remaining LCC public artworks and would also be delighted to hear of municipal public art across the country.

Sources

(1) Margaret Garlake, ‘”A War of Taste”: The London County Council as Art Patron, 1948-1965’, The London Journal, vol 18, no 1, 1993

(2) Dolores Mitchell, ‘Art Patronage by the London County Council (L.C.C.) 1948-1965’, Leonardo, Vol. 10, 1977 

(3) London County Council, ‘Patronage of the Arts Scheme’ (1966), London Metropolitan Archives, GLC/DG/PUB/01/364/U2336

(4) Quoted in Garlake, ‘”A War of Taste”: The London County Council as Art Patron, 1948-1965’

(5) Art Fund, ‘Henry Moore’s Draped Seated Woman: timeline of events’

(6) Mike Brooke, ‘People of the East End win High Court battle for Henry Moore’s “Old Flo”’, East London Advertiser, 9 July 2015

(7) The theft is recorded in ‘Second bronze sculpture stolen’, The Guardian, 24 January 2006; the University’s commitment to restoration and safeguarding in University of  Roehampton, ‘Sculpture to stand watch over Roehampton once again’, 20 February 2015.

Especial thanks go to @SirWilliamD for answering an early Twitter query and supplying copies of the original sources which inform this post.  Any errors, of  course, are all mine.

The LCC and the Arts I: The Open-Air Sculpture Exhibitions

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1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Battersea, LCC

If we remember 1945 at all – and it seems, sadly, an increasingly distant memory – we remember it for its principles of a free and national health service, a system of social security (not ‘welfare’ or ‘benefits’) in which a common duty to share burdens and support the less fortunate was almost universally accepted, and for the seemingly radical idea that the economy should be the people’s servant, not their master.

But beyond this – as if those values were not sufficiently remarkable by contemporary standards – there was a belief in a democratic and shared civic culture.  The arts were understood as an integral part of this.

Labour’s 1945 manifesto, ‘Let Us Face the Future’ (modestly described as ‘A Declaration of Labour Policy for the Consideration of the Nation’), urged that:

National and local authorities should co-operate to enable people to enjoy their leisure to the full, to have opportunities for healthy recreation. By the provision of concert halls, modern libraries, theatres and suitable civic centres, we desire to assure to our people full access to the great heritage of culture in this nation.

At a national level, the Council for Encouragement of Music and the Arts founded in 1940 was replaced, in January 1945, by the Arts Council and its budget boosted from £50,000 to £235,000. But while described by some as ‘the cultural arm of the Welfare State’, the Council became circumscribed by the elite aesthetics and values of its ‘natural’ middle-class constituency.

It became, increasingly, the responsibility of local councils to navigate the difficult terrain between high-brow and popular culture.  Section 132 of the 1948 Local Government Act permitted local authorities to provide financial support (up to sixpence in the pound of local rates) to leisure and the arts and gave them this opportunity.  Typically, the London County Council was in the vanguard of such efforts.

Battersea Park open-air sculpture exhibition, 1948

In 1947, Patricia Strauss, the chair of the LCC’s Parks Committee, suggested holding open-air sculpture exhibitions in the capital’s parks.  Strauss herself (a wealthy middle-class member of the Labour Party and a patron of the arts in her own right) embodied the tensions in the enterprise but she was clear that she wanted it ‘to frankly be an exhibition of Modern Sculpture’ – ‘if the discussion aroused is controversial, so much the better’. (1)

In this, she represented the prevalent views of the more progressive sections of the contemporary arts world and was assisted by Henry Moore, the leading figure in British sculpture of the time.  Moore was an active member of the contemporary arts establishment: ‘a new brand of English public intellectual, committed to a more democratic culture’. (2)

Henry Moore shown working on Three Standing Figures; photograph Felix Man © Picture Post, May 15 1948

But his work, though undoubtedly ‘advanced’, was understood – with its themes of family and the human figure – as humanist and Moore himself was not a figure of the metropolitan elite.  He came from Yorkshire; his father had been a pitman and a Labour Party and trade union activist. As a Picture Post article of 1948 stated: (3)

Henry Moore is not one of those sheltered artists who have always lived on the margin of life.  He is a miner’s son, a matter-of-fact fellow, eminently sociable and sensible.

Moore was on the organising committee of the first LCC exhibition which took place in Battersea Park in 1948 and, with two pieces on show, probably its biggest name.

The show was adjudged a great success.  Over 150,000 paid to enter and some 50,000 bought the 6d programme, written to enable ‘a person on the threshold of the study of sculpture to take an intelligent interest in the exhibits’. (4)  It was also the topic of six radio broadcasts and an early television report and received very favourable international coverage.

It’s harder to judge the fine grain here but contemporary observations that most visitors were relatively well-heeled and that those who weren’t preferred the ‘less difficult’ works can’t come as any great surprise.  A contemporary Times report notes Zadkine’s Laocoon and Modigliani’s Head as among the more challenging works but concluded it required ‘no special training to appreciate the lovely figures by Rodin and Maillol, Epstein’s Girl with the Gardenias or John Skeaping’s spirited stallion’. (5)

Zadkine, Laocoon

John Skeaping, The Horse (1934); now in the Tate

Moore’s work, particularly Three Standing Figures, attracted most interest and comment. According to one guide ‘almost everyone wanted to know…what is the meaning of the Moore group’ though a London taxi-driver (then, as now, the go-to people for pithy comment) described them simply as ‘one-eyed, little minded women having a gossip’.

Henry Moore, Three Standing Figures, Battersea Park © Yair Haklai and made available through Wikimedia Commons

One of the exhibition guide/lecturers, Matvyn Wright, concluded that it attracted ‘a large public whose intelligence is on average, much higher than in the provinces’. (6)  (What would he have made of Henry Moore?)  But Strauss, who had fought for an accessible exhibition – physically at least to the extent that attendees were to be allowed to ‘pat and touch the work’ – concluded it provided firm evidence that ‘ordinary people could enjoy sculpture’.

The second exhibition in 1951, also in Battersea Park, with a stronger international presence, coincided with the Festival of Britain; the rival attraction held to be an explanation of its lower though still impressive attendance of 110,000. The Festival itself was a major source of artistic patronage and display – the Arts Council commissioned works from Lynn Chadwick, Frank Dobson, Jacob Epstein, Barbara Hepworth, FE McWilliam, Bernard Meadows, and Eduardo Paolozzi amongst others, some of these works being displayed at Battersea.

Frank Dobson, London Pride, commissioned for the Festival of Britain 1951 and still on the South Bank

The 1954 exhibition (held in Holland Park) focussed on British artists and was, apparently, influenced by the more conservative tastes of a new working-class Labour chair of the Parks Committee, Councillor Alfred Kemp.  The suggestion that potential exhibitors submit models or photographs of their work prior to its acceptance was also resented by the bigger beasts of the art world who withdrew their participation as a result and the exhibition was criticised for its ‘lack of lustre’. (7)  Just 60,000 attended.

The 1957 exhibition, also in Holland Park, was principally curated by Gilbert Ledward, the President of the Royal Society of British Sculptors and was exclusively British in content.  Numbers attending rose slightly – to 72,000 – but that would be the latter peak.  Although the final exhibitions – back in Battersea Park – were more innovative in content (that of 1960 was Anglo-French in theme, the 1963 show featured artists from the US), the public fervour for public arts and entertainments had receded.

1960 Programme. The illustration is Henry Moore, Glenkiln Cross

The 1963 Exhibition was notable for its inclusion of a piece by Barbara Hepworth: Single Form (Memorial), 1961-62. This was one of three iterations of the work (the others may be found at the United Nations building in New York and in Baltimore) and ‘would, but for the Council’s action’ – they purchased it for 6000 guineas – ‘have been sold abroad’. The General Purposes Committee had been advised that it was ‘the finest work produced by Miss Hepworth in recent years’. (8) It remains today to adorn Battersea Park.

Barbara Hepworth, ‘Single Form (Memorial), 1961-62’, Battersea Park

The final exhibition – the seventh of the triennial series, held under the auspices of the Greater London Council after the abolition of the LCC – took place in 1966 but the GLC would prove to be generally less high-minded and expansive in its promotion of public art than its predecessor.

The open-air exhibitions were only one strand of the LCC’s efforts to bring art to  the people. We’ll look at its arts patronage scheme which placed artworks in council estates and schools and other council buildings next week.

Sources

(1) Jennifer Powell, ‘Henry Moore and “Sculpture in the Open Air”: Exhibitions in London’s Parks’, in Anne Wagner, Robert Sutton (eds.), Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity, 2013

(2) Andrew Stephenson, ‘Fashioning a Post-War Reputation: Henry Moore as a Civic Sculptor c.1943’, in Anne Wagner, Robert Sutton (eds.), Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity

(3) Quoted in Dawn Pereira, ‘Henry Moore and the Welfare State’, in Anne Wagner, Robert Sutton (eds.), Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity.  Quotations and detail which follow are drawn from the same source.

(4) AL Lloyd, ‘Henry Moore Prepares for Battersea’, Picture Post, May 15 1948

(5) ‘Sculpture in Battersea’, The Times, 14 May 1948

(6) Quoted in Powell, ‘Henry Moore and “Sculpture in the Open Air”: Exhibitions in London’s Parks’.  We shouldn’t be too hard on Wright – he was also the illustrator of Andy Pandy.

(7) Margaret Garlake, ‘A War of Taste’: The London County Council as Art Patron, 1948-1965’, The London Journal, vol 18, no 1, 1993

(8) ‘LCC to Pay 6000 Gns for Hepworth Bronze’, The Times, 13 December 1963

The Jubilee Pool, Penzance: ‘Municipal modernity and faith in a brighter, more enlightened future’

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1930s, Penzance

Municipal Dreams is on holiday this week but the Jubilee Pool in Penzance is so municipal and so dreamy it just had to be shared.  Opened in 1935, the pool is maybe the finest of Britain’s open-air lidos – a beautiful Arc Deco memento of a municipal commitment to health, fun and modernity that illuminated an otherwise gloomy decade.

Penzance became a borough in 1614 and seems over the years to have been a rather enterprising one – a reservoir to supply the town with water was constructed in 1759, the first gas lighting arrived in 1830.  In 1849, the Corporation was one of the first to form a local board of health and numerous improvements followed.

Fishing, minerals and trade formed the basis of its early prosperity but the Napoleonic Wars (which prevented the wealthy travelling to watering places on the Continent) opened new possibilities as one commentator praised the town for ‘the mildness of its air, the agreeableness of the situation and the respectability of its inhabitants’.  He dubbed it ‘the Montpellier of England’.  (1)

The Corporation built a seaside promenade to the west of the town in 1843 and the first Borough Surveyor built wide new roads to its rear from the 1860s. The rail link to London established in 1859 made these aspirations to resort gentility far more realistic.  The first large hotel, Queen’s, opened in 1861.  In its interwar resort heyday, Penzance was hailed as the ‘Cannes of the Cornish Riviera’. (2)

To its working population, Penzance was less idyllic.  Battery Square – an area of run-down cottages and industrial works to the south of the town centre and adjacent to the promenade – was ‘one of the slummiest parts of the town’. (3)

In 1933, it was cleared.  In a couple of years, large new municipal housing estates were built on the outskirts of town but meanwhile the Corporation focused on Penzance, the resort.  Where Battery Square stood, the Borough Surveyor, Captain Frank Latham, created pleasure gardens and – a sign of the times – a car park.

At this time, Penzance was also lamenting the ‘unkind act of nature’ which had destroyed ‘the lovely beach which once ran from the Battery Rocks to the Tolcarne river’. A solution suggested itself – a lido built on the Rocks themselves.

The view from Tolcarne towards Battery Rocks and the Pool

In this, Penzance was following the fashion of the day: (4)

By the early 1930s, open-air pools had become emblems of municipal modernity and of faith in a brighter, more enlightened future, in much the same way as public libraries had become a generation or two earlier.

As we saw in Victoria Park, Herbert Morrison – leader of the Labour administration which ran the London County Council from 1934 – had declared London would be ‘a city of lidos’.  In the year that the Jubilee Pool opened, the Tinside lido was opened in Plymouth, Saltdean in Brighton and open-air pools in Ilkley, Norwich, Peterborough and Aylesbury.

The opening of the pool, 1935 © The Friends of Jubilee Pool

The Jubilee Pool was 330 feet long by 240 feet wide at its greatest extent, not the biggest of its time but, apparently, the largest by volume of water – seawater regularly replenished.

All my photographs were taken in August 2014 and show the pool closed and awaiting repair

But beyond the dry detail, the pool is a thing of beauty, spectacularly sited on Battery Rocks with commanding views of Mount’s Bay, resting, in the words of the latest Pevsner:

sleekly like a liner at anchor projecting into the sea…a subtle Art Deco composition of curvilinear concrete terraces in cool blues and whites, separated to accommodate sunbathers below and spectators of the arena-like space within or views of the town without.

As the local press noted at the time, the pool wasn’t ‘only a fine piece of engineering’.  It was also:

a work of art. The monotony of straight walls and right angles – the domain of the compass and ruler – has been entirely avoided. Instead there are graceful curves and pleasing lines.

The architect of this masterpiece was Borough Surveyor, Captain Latham.  He usually gets a name-check in descriptions of the pool but I’m intrigued by him.  He had been appointed to the post in 1899, aged 25.  His rank came from a commission in the Royal Engineers during the First World War.  He retired, awarded the Freedom of the Borough, in 1938 and died in 1946.

In his younger years, he had written The Construction of Roads, Paths and Sea Defence, published in 1903.  That expertise was clear in the skilful use made of Battery Rocks for the pool’s foundations.  The same local press report was pleased, more prosaically, to record that, as a result, the whole project cost £14,000 whereas comparable pools elsewhere had cost over £100,000.

St Michael’s Mount to the rear and the war memorial to the right

Latham – as I imagine him, this practical man and local government bureaucrat – somewhere possessed the soul of an artist.  The design of the Pool was inspired, so he said, by watching a gull alight on the sea.  Its architecture is a beautiful confection of Modernism and Art Deco, typical of its time but all of its own and making superb use of its site.

It represented too, in the fashion of its day, fresh air and healthy exercise.  As the mayor opined at the pool’s opening, ‘there can hardly be any better form of bodily exercise than swimming’.  In any case, he added, ‘people who live by the sea and those who live on the sea should be able to swim’.

But the pool – which had seemed such a benefit to the town and its inhabitants and visitors,‘an event of the greatest importance’ as the headline proclaimed – had come by the 1960s to seem a ‘white elephant’.

The lido craze didn’t last.  War broke out within four years.  The post-war world of foreign travel and indoor leisure centres – and, always, the vagaries of the English weather – contrived to make these outdoor pools seem old-fashioned, even rather uninviting.  Somehow, the Jubilee Pool survived but, by the 1990s a sceptical local council reckoned each swim cost the local ratepayer between £16 and £18 and the case for closing it seemed strong. (5)

The Friends of Jubilee Pool were formed in 1992 and they achieved their first victory in the following year when the Pool was Grade II listed.  Major funding followed from English Heritage and the European Regional Development Fund and a grand re-opening took place in May 1994.

Now lidos and open-air pools up and down the country are enjoying a revival though many are still dependent on the voluntary efforts of local enthusiasts. The ups and downs of the Jubilee Pool itself continue.  February’s storms caused significant damage to the Pool and have prevented its opening this year.

Catching the full force of a winter storm © The Friends of Jubilee Pool

The most recent news is positive, however.  A joint bid from Cornwall Council, Penzance Town Council and the Friends of Jubilee Pool for £1.95m funding from the Coastal Communities Fund was approved by the Department for Communities and Local Government this month.

The Friends are continuing their own fund-raising campaign to ensure that the Pool will be reopened with a wider range of activities that should safeguard its future in years to come.  Captain Latham and the enterprising councillors whose vision created the Jubilee Pool in the 1930s would be pleased.

Sources

(1) WG Maton in 1794, quoted in Peter Beacham and Nikolaus Pevsner, Cornwall (2014)

(2) JH Wade in 1928, quoted in Cornwall Archaeological Unit, Cornwall and Scilly Urban Survey Historic characterisation for regeneration: Penzance (September 2003)

(3) The quotations are taken from ‘An Event of the Greatest Important’, The Cornishmen, a June 1935 newspaper report republished online in The West Briton, May 27, 2010

(4) Janet Smith, Liquid Assets: The lidos and open air swimming pools of Britain (English Heritage, 2005) quoted in Tom de Castella, review, New Statesman, 29 August 2005

(5) See Martin Nixon, ‘Jubilee Pool: Enormous Liability or Massive Opportunity?’ for some of this later history.  The figures are taken from the de Castella review.

Do visit the Friends of the Jubilee Pool’s website for more information and the latest news on the pool.

Victoria Park, East London: ‘the People’s Park’

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LCC, Pre-1914

Victoria Park in east London, a park inaugurated under royal patronage in 1840, hardly seems to qualify as a municipal dream.  But it has a proud democratic history – it’s earned its nickname, the People’s Park – and has flourished under municipal patronage for many years. It deserves its place.

Still, let’s begin by exploring those early years and the involvement of the Great and the Good.  The first annual report of the Registrar-General of Births, Deaths and Marriages in 1839 contained an appendix by William Farr:(1)

A park in the East End of London would probably diminish the annual deaths by several thousands…and add several years to the lives of the entire population.  The poorer classes would be benefited by these measures, and the poor rates reduced.

His words sparked a response.  George Frederick Young, a shipbuilder and MP for Tynemouth but with local connections, called a public meeting to call for a park in June 1840.  Within weeks a petition of some 30,000 signatures in support and a very obsequious letter were sent to Queen Victoria.  Her apparent sympathy caused the government to act.

The 1841 plan for Victoria Park

An act of parliament to create a Royal Park was passed in 1841 and land procured – making use of the existing open space of Bonner’s Fields and a further expanse of brick fields, market gardens, gravel pits and farmland.  James Pennethorne, the architect of the Office of the Commissioners of Woods and Forests, was commissioned to design the new park.

By the mid-40s, as construction and planting continued, the park was open.  There was no official ceremony, ‘no feast of oratory and ceremonial to gladden the hearts of the East Enders.  They just took the park over in 1845 and used it’.(2)  The first victory for the people.

The sandpit, from Living London (1901) © The Encyclopaedia of Victorian London

In other respects too, popular action brought response.  There was no bathing pool provided and local youths were in the habit of bathing – naked! – in the adjacent Regent’s Canal.  Attempts to police such shocking behaviour were unavailing and within a few years a pool was provided in the park itself.

The upper classes professed themselves pleased with the effects of the park on local manners:(3)

…much good has been produced in this way I can most confidently state. Many a man whom I was accustomed to see passing the Sunday in utter idleness, smoking at his door in his shirt sleeves, unwashed and unshaven, now dresses himself as neatly and cleanly as he is able, and with his wife or children is seen walking in the park on the Sunday evening.

Whether Mr Alston, the author of this letter to the Times in 1847, showed the same equanimity in the following year – the year the Chartists delivered their third petition to parliament calling for universal manhood suffrage – is doubtful.  The authorities certainly didn’t.  A ‘monster meeting’ in the park on June 12 was to be a prelude to a mass march on parliament. Force of numbers was to prevail where reason and justice had failed.

This smelt of revolution and the government took all necessary measures.  The meeting was declared illegal and 1600 foot police, 100 mounted police, 500 recalled police pensioners and the cavalry of the 1st Life Guards were stationed in and around the park.  That show of force and the English weather – a terrific thunderstorm dispersed the few stragglers who had ignored the Chartists’ decision to cancel the meeting – prevailed. M’Douall, the Chartist leader, observed no incidents that day ‘except dreadful hooting and groaning at the mounted police’.(4)

If the British working classes never ever seemed quite so threatening again, their interest in reform remained and the park became a renowned venue for socialist meetings.  An attempt to ban public meetings in the park without written permission in 1862 was simply unenforceable as was a later attempt in 1888 prohibiting collections.  A rough democracy was in action.

William Morris

A roll call of an alternative ‘Great and Good’ spoke – Annie Besant, George Bernard Shaw, Tom Mann, Ben Tillett…and William Morris who declared the park ‘rather a pretty place with water (dirty though) and lots of trees’.  He complained that his pitch was ‘made noisy by other meetings, also a band not far off’ but, as up to 300 to 400 might attend these meetings, it was necessary to persevere.(5)

It’s true that fascist meetings were held in the park in the thirties but fascism has never gone uncontested.  The British Union of Fascists’ march through the Jewish East End in October 1936 which had Victoria Park as its destination was halted in Cable Street.  Rock Against Racism’s first gig was held in the park in April 1978, attended by a crowd of 80,000.

Still, let’s not forget that the park’s first function has always been as an escape from struggle and the daily grind.  The East End’s greatest socialist, George Lansbury, recalled how ‘we Lansbury children loved Victoria Park and enjoyed every minute we spent there’.  In fact, they were convinced that the pagoda in the park was inhabited by real Chinamen who came out at night to feed the swans and geese on the boating pool.

The pagoda Lansbury remembers, erected in 1875, was demolished in 1956. Another feature of the Park was the Victoria Fountain, donated by philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts in 1862 at a cost of £6000.

The Burdett-Coutts Fountain: the fencing has since been removed

The most popular amenity, however, and one that can be credited to municipalism since the park was taken over by the London County Council in 1892, was the swimming baths opened in 1936, 200 feet long with room for up to a thousand.  

London Labour Party leaflet, late 1930s. The image is of Victoria Park lido.

Herbert Morrison, the Labour leader of the LCC since 1934, declared ‘this is more than a swimming pool, it is East London’s own lido’.  Dick Coppock, trades unionist chair of the LCC’s Parks Committee, declared the pool:

as good as anything around London owned privately and let out to bathers at twice the price…We shall bring the seaside to East London. Why this is as good as Margate.

It was part of a three-year ‘Labour Plan of Health for London’ – ‘a London with fields right round it, with more parks and playgrounds and swimming pools than any other city in the world’.(6) 

Sadly, it closed permanently in 1989 and hasn’t been replaced.  But the pagoda has.  A major, lottery-funded, £12m refurbishment of the park was unveiled by the Mayor of Tower Hamlets in May 2012.  The borough took over responsibility for the park in 1986 after the abolition of the Greater London Council, initially with Hackney but solely since 1994.  He declared it the borough’s ‘jewel in the crown’.(7)

Today the park looks good.  The fountain too has been restored. Boats have returned to the West Lake, fish to the East.  A new community facility and café have been opened and a large adventure playground and ‘wheelpark’ (for skateboarders and BMX riders) for youngsters.

The author of this 1872 ballad to the park might not have envisaged all this but he surely wouldn’t  have objected too much.

The Park is called the People’s Park

And all the walks are theirs

And strolling through the flowery paths

They breathe exotic airs,

South Kensington, let it remain

Among the Upper Ten.

East London, with useful things,

Be left with working men.

 

The rich should ponder on the fact

Tis labour has built it up

A mountain of prodigious wealth

And filled the golden cup.

And surely workers who have toiled

Are worthy to behold

Some portion of the treasures won

And ribs of shining gold.

 

‘Vicky Park’ is, in every sense, ‘owned’ by the people.  Strangely that was true even in its days as a Royal Park – it is still technically Crown land – under the improving management of the upper classes.  It is truer today in municipal hands.

Sources

(1) Quoted in Charles Poulsen, Victoria Park. A Study in the History of East London (1976)

(2) Charles Poulsen, Victoria Park. A Study in the History of East London (1976)

(3) Letter to the Times, 7 September, 1847, quoted in The Dictionary of Victorian London

(4) Quoted in David Goodway, London Chartism, 1838-1848 (2002)

(5) Quoted in Rosemary Taylor, ‘The City of Dreadful Delight: William Morris in the East End of London‘

(6) A London Labour Party leaflet included in Raphael Samuel, Island Stories: Untravelling Britain (1999)

(7) Quoted in the Victoria Park Project Newsletter, October 2012

The Beautification of Bermondsey: ‘Fresh air and fun’

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1920s, Bermondsey

Excuse me if I begin my blog this week with a lengthy quote. It’s just that it seems to me to convey something simple and powerful about the drive and vision of a group of people who dreamed of nothing less than transforming a slum into a garden city.

If elected it will be our main aim to make Bermondsey a fit place to live in. We shall do everything we can to promote health, to lower the death rate, and to increase the well-being and comfort of the 120,000 people who live here.We will not allow our district to continue to be a by-word among the Boroughs and to be vilified by the Daily Press as a horrible, evil-smelling, slum-ridden and unlovely place. We will do what is possible to cleanse, repair, rebuild and beautify it, and to make it a city of which all citizens can be proud.   Bermondsey is our home and your home.  We will strive to make it a worthy home for all of us.  This is our conception of the object and purpose of local government…

Those were the opening words of the Bermondsey Labour Party’s address to local electors in November 1922. The party won 38 seats and an overall majority on the council which it retained till the borough’s abolition in 1965.

If ever such ambition was needed, it was needed in interwar Bermondsey. It was one of the smaller London boroughs but one of the most densely settled. Of its 1300 acres, 400 consisted of docks and warehousing. In the remainder, industry sat cheek by jowl with terraced housing and courts. In 1922, just 8.6 acres of the borough were public open space.

If such conditions oppressed local residents, they outraged the husband and wife team, Alfred and Ada Salter, who spearheaded local Labour politics. Alfred was the local GP, both were ardent Christian socialists. Their concern for the health and moral well-being of the people joined irresistibly in their fight for social justice.

Of those who had created this Bermondsey – ‘one huge slum’ as he described it unapologetically – Alfred could only lament:

They did not realise that they had cut off the people from the chiefest means of natural grace. They did not appreciate the curse and cruelty of ugliness.

And it was Ada who would do all in her power – all that local government allowed – to create grace and beauty in Bermondsey. One of the first actions of the new Labour administration was to set up a Beautification Committee and Ada chaired it for eleven years. Its first meeting in January 1923 announced its goal – ‘Fresh air and fun’ – and its agenda.

Ada Salter, shown with George Lansbury, then First Commisioner of Works in the Labour government, to her left, 1930 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

That agenda was ambitious. Council officers were to identify any waste ground – private or public – that could be planted with trees and shrubs and ornamented with tubs, rockeries, fountains and statuary.

The council was to provide window boxes free of charge to any resident that requested them and organise horticultural shows and gardening competitions to encourage those with green fingers.

Leisure would be catered for by a permanent bandstand and regular summer concerts. ‘Healthful exercise and bodily development’ would be promoted by providing new winter gardens and ‘other suitable places of public resort which can comprise gymnasia, bowling alleys, fives courts and open air baths’.

Even the borough’s public conveniences – an ugly necessity under the jealous eye of the Public Health Department – were to be made easier on the eye by screens of foliage and shrubs. The Committee would also seek powers to restrict unsightly advertising, dumping and constructions – in fact, ‘anything offensive to good taste.’

Not all of this was possible. The more elaborate plans for fountains, statues and the like just didn’t happen. The Town Clerk was adamant that the council’s powers did not allow free window boxes but free plants and compost were apparently permissible. Bermondsey never got its winter gardens though the London County Council did build a lido in Southwark Park in the 1930s. Those draconian powers restricting offences to good taste weren’t possible either though the railway companies were persuaded to better maintain the sidings which were a prominent feature of the borough.

Tulip beds, St James’s Churchyard, May 1931 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

St James’s Churchyard, ND © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

Still, what was achieved was impressive: (1)

Bermondsey became a place of unexpected beauty spots. Amidst soot-grimed buildings one suddenly came upon splashes of brilliant colour, red dahlias, yellow daffodils They were like vases of flowers in a dusty room.

The Observer claimed that ‘outside the Royal Parks it would be difficult to find anywhere such masses of colour’. The Labour councillor who proclaimed in 1928 that ‘what was good for the West End was equally good for the East’ would have been proud of this literal vindication of principle.

Storks Road, 1935 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

Storks Road today

Ten thousand trees were planted and seventy of the eighty grimy miles of street in Bermondsey became tree-lined. Most of the trees and shrubs – in the huge numbers that the Beautification Committee’s plans demanded – came from Fairby Grange in Kent, the house and gardens purchased by the Salters and given to the council as a convalescent home for nursing mothers and their children.

Keeton’s Road, 1932. View from Peek, Frean’s factory © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

Keeton’s Road today. This housing dates to the 1980s. The area was heavily bombed on 7 September 1940 – the first night of the Blitz with severe casualties in Keeton’s Road school which was being used as an evacuation centre. © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

To those who complained of the expense of all this tree planting, the Council simply pointed out that the work – subsidised by a 60 per cent subsidy from the Unemployment Grants Committee – provided work for those who would otherwise be on the dole.

Arthur Carr, chairman of Peek Freans at the opening of the ‘Joy Slide’, October 29, 1921 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

The dense, built-up nature of this inner London borough limited what could be provided in terms of additional open space but the existing parks and gardens – mainly former churchyards – were greatly improved in appearance and facilities. The pride and joy here was the large and elaborate covered slide in St James’s churchyard which had actually been donated by Peek, Freans, a large local employer, in 1921. Otherwise, the scope was limited and only three small open spaces were acquired and ‘beautified’ by the council in the twenties.

Opening of Tanner Street playground, May 1929 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

In fact, it is the intense quality of Bermondsey’s vision and the detail which capture the imagination. The Council was helped here by the dedication of two Superintendents of Gardens, Mr Aggett and Mr Johns – such proprieties of title were observed in those days – for whom beautification was both a labour of love and a matter of deep professional pride.

There’s no glamour in the dry detail of council staffing but it’s worth pointing out that the Beautification Department employed 36 people in 1926 and a further eight who were full-time caretakers of the parks and open spaces.

Local Labour’s 1925 manifesto uses a phrase that rings strangely today but the ‘mass upliftment’ they proclaimed was a two-way street.  The socialists of the day were both practical reformers and moralists.  They saw no contradiction in the two – betterment was something which both came from and was ‘done to’ the poor.  This was a community which treated morally would act morally. This was the radical respectability of the Salters and of the Labour rank and file in action.

Alfred Salter, planting a Tree of Heaven at the opening of the Tanner Street playground, May 1929 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

In 1928, Alfred Salter, celebrating six years of Labour rule, stated:

The Party is like this because it is inspired by idealism, because it has a vision, because its efforts for human welfare are part of its religion. A great spiritual motive is working itself out in devoted service and practical achievement.

Trees, window boxes, flower beds and slides, even two new strains of dahlia (Salter’s favourite flower) named the Rotherhithe Gem and the Bermondsey Gem and created by Mr Johns, all played their part in this.

As Elizabeth Lebas argues: (2)

In Bermondsey, ‘beautification’ was not a substitute to political action, but a political action in itself.

And it was, I hope you agree, a rather beautiful form of political action.

Sources: 

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

(2) Elizabeth Lebas, ‘The Making of a Socialist Arcadia: arboriculture and horticulture in the London Borough of Bermondsey after the Great War’, Garden History, vol 27, no 2, winter 1999.

All the historic images are taken, with permission, from the superb collection of photographs held by the Southwark Local History Library and Archive. Most of the direct quotations above are taken from contemporary newspapers and election leaflets held in the library’s cuttings collection.  A big thank you to library staff for their generous assistance in this and related posts on Bermondsey.

The other major source is the very useful and interesting article by Elizabeth Lebas referenced above.