A Radical Riverscape: Architecture and Revolution down the Fleet

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Finsbury

I’m pleased to share another guest post this week; this by Mike Althorpe, aka the London Ambler. This post, based on one of Mike’s guided walks, traces the fascinating housing history and politics of one of London’s most radical quarters. I’ll be participating, alongside author Owen Hatherley and art historian Rosamund West, in Mike’s next tour of the Fleet on June 3.

Of all of London’s great hidden waterways, none can claim the radicalism of the River Fleet. Weaving a route from Highgate to the Thames it has been both life source and life taker, carving out a landscape that became the epicentre for Victorian speculators and have-a-go railway pioneers, but also a landscape where London’s social campaigners, civic reformers and revolutionary agitators found their voice and their architectural expression.

Farringdon Road and the Metropolitan Railway, 1868

To trace its course today, through modern day Kings Cross, Clerkenwell and Farringdon is to reveal the memories of a set of ideas and episodes in housing and urban form that were to have profound national consequences for the UK.

The upper part of the Fleet was locally called the Bagnigge and it was upon the Bagnigge Marsh or Wash where new ideas in housing were pioneered. The river valley defined rich and poor. Put simply, for most of the 19th century the money held the high ground and those without waded in the marsh sharing cheap rents with a host of ramshackle warehouses, service yards, hospitals and factories.

In 1845, living conditions for the poor in Pentonville were deemed critical enough for the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes to step in with one of the earliest philanthropic housing ventures in London. On a narrow strip of land behind Calthorpe Street, they created a ‘Model Street’ of 15 buildings for 23 families in a variety of unit types arranged as two respectable terraces.

The ‘model dwellings’ in Pentonville

In one of them there were 30 rooms designated for widows and single women. It was a major advance, but was panned due to its cramped proportions. Writing at the time of its completion The Builder, an influential trade journal of the day, called it a ‘disgrace’, adding that if they didn’t buck their ideas up:

they will rear a hot-bed for infection, and throw a great impediment in the way of that improvement which they profess to seek.

Learning from the mistakes of the Society, just upstream on Wicklow Street, the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company (IIDC) created one of its most outstanding model tenement schemes, Derby Buildings by their builder architect Matthew Allen in 1865.

Derby Buildings (c) Mike Althorpe

The design of the blocks was the outcome of years of refinement loosely based on Henry Robert’s Great Exhibition model dwelling cottages of 1851. At Kings Cross, the IIDC scaled up the idea and gave it a heroic urban form with wrought iron access decks taking pride of place at the street. It was architecture where function and the necessity of plan, creating decent space and good ventilation, led. Many more followed.

The IIDC’s site had been left over by the creation of the Metropolitan Railway who smashed out 50 houses and displaced many local residents in the process. This was a story repeated down the length of the Fleet. The valley was a frenzy of commercial activity. As the railway pushed its way down to Farringdon it laid waste to poor neighbourhoods.

Railway cutting from Farringdon (c) Mike Althorpe

In the 1870s the Metropolitan Board of Works stepped in to make good the destruction, acquiring sites via compulsory purchase and selling them at a discount to private builders who would provide new affordable housing. At the edge of Clerkenwell Green, the Peabody Trust was offered one such site and completed Pear Tree Court, one of its characteristic artisan estates in London stock and Suffolk white brick. Clean and straightforward but, for many critics, monotonous and barracks-like.

Pear Tree Court (c) Mike Althorpe

Critics also highlighted that Peabody, common with many philanthropic housing ventures at the time, operated a strict tenant policy aimed at ‘the deserving poor’. This basically meant that it rehoused those morally upstanding members of the working class who had got married, had stable jobs and the economic means to exercise some choice in their lives. If you were unmarried, jobless, in casual low-paid work or homeless you wouldn’t qualify. It meant therefore that many in most urgent need of housing continued to suffer and were pushed outwards from the area.

By the 1880s, a number of parliamentary acts had been passed to improve working-class housing but the powers and machinery of local government – particularly in London – were grossly inadequate to the task. At a district level, some 30 local vestries existed, most rate-payer dominated and unwilling to act. The Clerkenwell Vestry, on the east side of the Fleet, however, was an unusually activist body as its new town hall, built in avant-garde arts and crafts style in the 1890s, testified.

Finsbury Town Hall

In 1900, this became home to Finsbury Metropolitan Borough Council – one of the 28 new boroughs created in a radical reform of London’s lower tier of local government.  Finsbury would maintain its predecessor’s reforming traditions.

The controversial problem of London’s strategic governance had been dealt with earlier. The Metropolitan Board of Works, established in 1855 to oversee sewerage, streets and bridges, had long been criticised as unfit for purpose – undemocratic (it was indirectly elected by the vestries and district boards) and, in part, corrupt. The establishment, in 1889, of the London County Council (LCC) transformed this picture and its vision and drive was early manifested in the valley of the Fleet where the new municipal government inherited the Rosebery Avenue urban improvement scheme from its predecessor and expanded and completed it in grand style.

The Rosebery Avenue viaduct from Warner Street (c) Mike Althorpe

Straddling the Fleet Valley by means of a hidden viaduct between Clerkenwell and Holborn and engineered by the Edward Bazalgette (son of Joseph of the engineering dynasty), Rosebery Avenue was a new type of joined up urban improvement. It provided not only improved communication across the river valley, but land for housing, for business, civic infrastructure and amenities, tramways, public toilets, gardens and fire station. Clerkenwell Vestry’s new town hall at its northerly end was recognition of this transformation.

At the turn of the twentieth century where once Georgian slums and Dickensian rookeries stood, the LCC could claim this part of the Fleet valley as a piece of model city, a practical monument to social and urban progress which they continued to develop upon. A few years later, on the western side of the valley in Holborn, work started on the Bourne Estate, the third in a new generation of large council housing schemes by the LCC after its celebrated work in Bethnal Green and Millbank.

The Bourne Estate

Elsewhere on the slopes of the Fleet and later in the century, a confident Finsbury Borough Council embraced revolutionary architecture to demonstrate their commitment to social progress, pushing building design further than any other authority in the country had previously dared.

Behind Exmouth Market they completed the Finsbury Health Centre in 1938. Local in purpose, its bold modernist design by Russian émigré architect, Berthold Lubetkin, was ground-breaking and it became a rallying call across the UK for a bold new tomorrow, cementing Finsbury’s reputation as one of the most radical and progressive local authorities in the country and inspiring those campaigning for a National Health Service and an integrated Welfare State.

The Finsbury Health Centre (c) Mike Althorpe

Lubetkin’s association with the borough of Finbury went deep. In his architecture, the leaders of the council had at last found its radical form. It was bold and it was the future. As the health centre was completed, he turned his attention to housing and began work on designing what became the Spa Green Estate, commissioned in 1938 but completed after the war in 1949.

The Spa Green Estate

During the post-war years, to the north of the borough and up the hill from Bagnigge Wash and 90 years on from the IIDC blocks on Wicklow Street, Finsbury’s resolve was unshakable. Sweeping away Georgian terraces and squares originally built for the rich, the tiny borough continued to punch well above its weight and created Bevin Court in 1954, Y-shaped block of 112 flats and maisonettes designed again by Lubetkin.

Bevin Court

With its gymnastic display of concrete engineering and patterns of alternating balconies and windows, Bevin was inspired by the work of constructivist architects in Russia and it is here that the revolutionary spirit of Finsbury perhaps beats at its strongest with the block marking the site of Lenin’s 1903 London home. It was between here and the secret printing press downstream at Clerkenwell Green that revolution in Russia was forged.

With an election looming a walk through the valley of the Fleet is reminder of London’s own radical inheritance. While some of our most severe urban social problems may now lie elsewhere, it is a landscape loaded with the landmarks of a struggle that in 2017 is as poignant and perhaps as urgent as ever.

There are a few remaining places left for the 3 June walk, A Radical Riverscape: Architecture and Revolution down the Fleet. Click the link if you’d like to book.

You can follow Mike on Instagram and on Twitter.

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

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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’?

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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.

The Rise and Fall of Glasgow’s Red Road Flats, Part 1: Glasgow Housing in Historical Context

Tags

1920s, 1930s, 1940s

I’m delighted to feature this guest post by Gerry Mooney of The Open University in Scotland and its follow-up next week. You’ll find additional details of Gerry’s work and writings at the end of the post. 

Introduction

On October 9 2015, the BFI London Film Festival screened the UK première of the late JG Ballard’s 1975 novel, High-Rise. (1) The story revolves around the residents of a 40 storey tower block and the gradual deterioration in relations between them all. Elsewhere in October 2015 other high-rise tower blocks have been in the news. Two days following the London screening, a set of high-rise housing blocks in Glasgow was demolished. (2)

Demolition of the remaining Red Road flats, October 11 2015 © The Scotsman and John Devlin

At one level there appears to be little to connect the fictional account of life in a high-rise as described by Ballard and the reality of what was life for the residents of some of the highest tower blocks in Europe at the Red Road in Glasgow. Ballard’s tower block was equipped with all the necessary amenities that its residents –all middle-class professionals – would wish to have around them: swimming pools, a supermarket, school and so on.

The Red Road Flats awaiting demolition, October 2015 © Hilary Mooney

While the Red Road flats had an underground bingo hall and some limited shopping facilities nearby, the lack of amenities – particularly for younger residents – was a hallmark of what came to be regarded as a failed housing experiment. The class structure of Glasgow’s Red Road Flats was sharply distinct from that of the tower block in Ballard’s story. This was not a place for middle class professionals – but for working class Glaswegians, many of whom who had previously been living in housing that was often run down and unfit for human habitation, largely in old tenement blocks in central areas of the city.

A map of Glasgow showing the principal locations mentioned in the text

Glasgow’s Housing in Historical Context

The rationale behind the construction of the Red Road Flats, and their subsequent decline, can best be understood when placed in the context of Glasgow’s historic housing problems and patterns of industrial decline in the post-1945 era.

The 1920s Mosspark Estate in the south-west of the city: an early cottage suburb © Wikimedia Commons

During the 1920s and 1930s, in the first waves of council housing development following the 1919 Housing and Town Planning Act – and subsequent housing legislation in 1924, 1930 and 1935, Glasgow Corporation built a number of housing estates across the city. In doing so a particular classed geography came to characterise the landscape of Glasgow at that time.

Moorepark housing scheme in the Govan area, photographed in the 1970s: a typical 1930s Glasgow slum clearance estate. Moorepark was widely referred to as ‘Wine Alley’, ensuring its notoriety. © Sean Damer

Each of the inter-war housing acts provided accommodation for different classes of Glaswegians with housing built under the auspices of the 1919 Act representing the best housing – for what was then the labour aristocracy of industrial Glasgow. In the 1930s, by contrast, poor quality slum clearance housing was built for a lower class of tenant – and the housing constructed to very different, and as befitted the target population – much poorer standards, even if they were better than the dilapidated tenement slums. (3)

Carnoustie Street tenements, 1930s, in what is now the long demolished Tradeston area south of the River Clyde

Despite the building efforts of Glasgow Corporation during the 1920s and 1930s, Glasgow emerged from World War Two with enormous housing problems. It was then by far the most overcrowded city in the British Isles. 44 per cent of the entire housing stock was considered to be overcrowded and, in figures which today defy belief, 1/7^th of the entire Scottish population, note Scottish population not just the population of Glasgow, lived within 3 square miles of central Glasgow.

Post-1945 Glasgow: What is to be Done?

As with other UK cities, urban and regional planning was gaining momentum, not least as a means of addressing the widespread social and economic problems that characterised many of the older industrial cities and conurbations at the time. Glasgow’s problems – and those of the Clydeside conurbation more generally – were among the worst, if not the worst, in Britain. Together with the severe overcrowding problems, many houses were unfit and/or lacked basic amenities. Poverty, unemployment, ill-health and long-term problems of economic and industrial decline were all too evident.

Sir Patrick Abercrombie (to left) and Robert Matthew, joint authors of the 1946 Clyde Valley Regional Plan

Headed by Sir Patrick Abercrombie, The Clyde Valley Regional Plan of 1946 (4) called for the decentralisation of Glasgow’s population who would be rehoused in purpose built new towns and in ‘overspill’ areas. ‘Overspill’ suggests a rather technical approach to planning but this was nothing more than the large-scale social and spatial engineering of a substantial proportion of Glasgow’s population. In turn industry would be directed away from the city to these overspill districts and new inward investment from foreign companies encouraged to avoid Glasgow.

The centre of Glasgow re-imagined in the 1945 Bruce Report

The CVRP’s recommendations stood in sharp contrast to the conclusions of another major planning report of the time. Produced for the Corporation of Glasgow, The Bruce Report of 1945 (5) was the work of the Corporation’s Chief Engineer, Robert Bruce. Its proposals were very different to those that would emerge in the CVRP a few years later in that it recommended the large-scale redevelopment and rebuilding of Glasgow to enable its growing population – then approaching its 1951 peak of 1.1m – to be rehoused entirely within the existing city boundaries. This would necessitate the wholesale clearance of huge areas of central Glasgow and the development of four large housing estates on the outer edges of the city – often referred to as ‘peripheral’ or ‘outer’ estates – and numerous other smaller council estates across the city.

While the fashion of the time for lower density housing was reflected in Bruce’s proposals, it was to become evident during the late 1940s and early 1950s that Glasgow would not be able to rehouse its population within the existing confines of the city. The expansion of the city into neighbouring districts was prevented by the establishment of a green belt around Glasgow, which meant that population overspill was the only answer – or the building of new housing estates on the periphery to higher densities than had been envisaged in the Bruce Plan. This created a legacy that was to come back and haunt the city in the period to follow, and which continues to shape Glasgow’s housing estates today.

The demolition of tenements and their high-rise replacement shown in an undated photograph from Parliament Road in Townhead.

The conflict between these two competing visions of post-war Glasgow was to shape the development of the city throughout the post-war period. Each of the reports saw important proposals enacted but the overspill and new town proposals of the CVRP came to dominate the post-1945 planning of the Clydeside conurbation and within that, of course, Glasgow itself.

Hutchesontown Area B, 1961

Taken together, the Bruce Plan and CVRP led to the large-scale demolition of many working class residential districts in Glasgow – and the ‘decanting’, displacement and rehousing of upwards of 250,000 Glaswegians. Older tenemental areas were bulldozed, family and community life disrupted, and older senses of attachment and of belonging to particular places were also disrupted in the process. For Bruce this was a radical plan, a ‘surgical plan’ in his words for the renewal of Glasgow through what today may be referred to as a process of ‘creative disruption’.

From the Peripheral to the Vertical: Glasgow Embraces High-Rise

With the peripheral estates under development in the 1950s, amidst the growing awareness by Glasgow Corporation that it was to lose a substantial proportion of its population through overspill, the city’s leaders were still determined to rehouse as much of the population as it could within the city and, in seeking to do so, the eyes of the leaders of the politicians and planners turned upwards! Glasgow was to embrace like no other city, high-rise housing development.

In 1947 a Glasgow Corporation delegation travelled to the French city of Marseilles to see at first hand the new tower blocks designed by famous Swiss architect, Le Corbusier as part of his Cité Radieuse (Radiant City). Constructed between 1947 and 1952, this was to be a hugely influential development, not least on the visitors from Glasgow.

Moss Heights, 1953 ©The Glasgow Story (Glasgow City Archives, Photographic Series)

In 1953 Glasgow’s first ‘multi-storey’ housing was constructed at the Moss Heights, in the Cardonald area in the South West of the city. On their opening the then Chairman of Glasgow Corporation’s Housing Committee commented: (6)

Let the planners check that all available city land is being built on. Let them push the frontier upwards instead of outwards. Where 10 floors are planned let them build 20 instead.

The scene was thus set for Glasgow’s foray into high-rise housing and the development of these blocks over the next half century or so was to reshape the city in ways that few could have imagined at the time.  We’ll examine what followed in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Chris Hall, ‘Why JG Ballard’s High-Rise takes dystopian science fiction to a new level’, The Guardian, October 3 2015

(2) BBC News, ‘Glasgow’s Red Road Flats to be Demolished Later this Year’, BBC News online, August 3 2015

(3) Sean Damer, From Moorepark to Wine Alley: The Rise and Fall of a Glasgow Housing Scheme, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (1989)

(4) Sir Patrick Abercrombie and Robert H Matthew, Clyde Valley Regional Plan 1946, Edinburgh: His Majesty’s Stationery Office (1949)

(5) Robert Bruce, First Planning Report to the Highways and Planning Committee of the Corporation of the City of Glasgow, Glasgow: Corporation of the City of Glasgow (1945). For more on Bruce’s proposals, see BBC 4: Dreaming the Impossible: Unbuilt Britain, A Revolution in the City: The Bruce Plan for Glasgow, August 21, 2013 and ‘The Bruce Plan‘ from the bestlaidschemes.com website.

(6) From the Glasgow Evening Citizen, quoted in Glasgow Centre for Population Health, Will Glasgow Flourish?, Glasgow: GCPH, 2007: p16

Gerry Mooney is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy and Criminology in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the The Open University in Scotland, his academic profile here.  For additional information and writings, see his OU OpenLearn page. He has also written for The Conversation and you’ll find his dedicated pages here.  Follow Gerry on Twitter at @gerrymooney60.

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

Tags

1940s

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

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

Coloured Plate 1: Social and Functional Analysis

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

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

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

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

Coloured Plate 3: Open Space Plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coloured Plate 4: Road Plan

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

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

Axonometric view

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

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

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

The world of the future: Broadwater neighbourhood centre, Stevenage

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags

1940s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A poster from Stalag Luft III, Sagan, Germany

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stevenage New Town: ‘Building for the new way of life’

Tags

1940s, 1950s

From the arts and crafts estates – council-built – to the huge garden suburbs of the interwar period, we’ve followed a dream.  And that dream came to fruition in Stevenage.  That is not a sneer but an elegy.

The students of planning will tell you – quite rightly – how that dream first formed in the mind of Ebenezer Howard and the garden city movement he founded.   But it dwelt powerfully in the lived reality and the political aspirations of a generation of working-class politicians who thought their people deserved better than the crowded inner-city slums.

Good housing, secure and well-paid employment and a healthy environment in which to bring up children – these were the goals: not revolutionary, modest but democratic in the deepest sense.  And there was a time when Stevenage – and the other post-war New Towns – seemed to be their fulfilment.

The facts are straightforward enough.  Patrick Abercrombie’s 1944 Greater London Plan called for a ring of new towns built beyond the green belt to house some 380,000 people who would be decanted from an overcrowded, blighted and war-damaged city.

That vision was taken up by Attlee’s new Labour government in 1945, entrusted fittingly to Lewis Silkin, a former member of the London County Council’s Town Planning and Housing and Public Health Committees, appointed to the post of Minister of Town and Country Planning. And it was, in its own way, as central to the ideal of a Welfare State as a national health service and comprehensive social security.

Planning for Stevenage New Town began early.  The old town of Stevenage, home to a population of 6000, seemed an ideal location – 30 miles north of London with excellent transport links, suitable land and a local council receptive to growth. Gordon Stephenson drafted a plan – which would be honoured in all its essentials – in the summer of 1945.

Town plan, 1955

The 1946 New Towns Act provided the apparatus to build, establishing the Development Corporations which would mastermind and implement these grandiose projects.  The eight members of the Stevenage Development Corporation – appointed by Silkin – comprised town planning luminaries, local authority representatives and a couple of businessmen.

It was described as ‘liberal, bold and less inclined to hold a business point of view, than some others’. (1)  But it was hardly democratic and Stevenage Urban District Council remained essentially a service and subservient body until the Corporation was wound up in 1980.

On 11 November 1946 Stevenage was designated the first new town. There was no hype in Silkin’s celebratory remarks, indeed there was a proud sense of a better world being born: (2)

Stevenage in a short time will become world famous.  People from all over the world will come to Stevenage to see how we, here in this country, are building for the new way of life.

Then there was a hitch. As the first letters went out to local landowners, opposition mobilised.  A Stevenage Residents’ Protection Association was formed. It was not reassured as the men from the Ministry arrived and very far from mollified when Silkin himself visited.

‘It’s no good you jeering. It’s going to be done’, he stated, to a very hostile public meeting.  He then left – under police escort.  The protestors replaced existing town signs with the name ‘Silkingrad’, in Russian-style script lest anyone miss the point they were making.

In keeping with British tradition, however, there was no Gulag but, rather, recourse to the law.  The opponents’ case was initially upheld but rejected on appeal.  Finally, in July 1947, the House of Lords itself sanctioned the plans.

The Stevenage Master Plan which emerged, taking finished form in 1950, envisaged a town of some 60,000, dwelling in six neighbourhoods of about 10,000 each, each with their own shopping centres, primary schools and community facilities.  This ideal of created community was powerful in its day.  Even the street signs were colour-coded to help give each neighbourhood its own distinct identity.

A pedestrianised town centre – the first of its kind – would also be built and a substantial industrial zone would be sited, separated from residential areas, to the west of the main road and railway.  Some major firms– including De Havilland (later British Aerospace), Kodak and Bowaters – would locate in Stevenage.

The first houses were begun in September 1949.  By the end of 1952 1070 houses had been completed and 2367 were being built.  Ten years later, 12,377 homes had been completed, all but 1177 built by the Development Corporation.

Marymead, Broadwater

Leaves Spring, Shephall

The vast majority of these were two-storey two- and three-bedroom houses, architecturally undistinguished but solid, comfortable and, of course, of much higher quality than any the vast majority of new residents had previously enjoyed.  Some variety was achieved through the twelve plan variations employed.

Broadwater neighbourhood centre

The planners also worked hard to maintain a neighbourhood ‘feel’ with a careful range of streetscapes and designs, using curves, cul-de-sacs, ‘village greens’ and always attempting to separate people and cars.  Stevenage’s extensive system of segregated cycleways was pioneering.

Interestingly, the one attempt at ‘high rise’ – a seven-storey block of 54 flats completed in 1952 in the Stoney Hall area – was deemed a failure.  The Corporation – seemingly anticipating a view of high rise that would become common fifty years later – had envisaged these as middle-class dwellings but middle-class tenants were, as yet, thin on the ground.  Two years later, the Corporation concluded: (3)

Almost every person coming to live in a new house at Stevenage, which is after all a country town, wants at least a small patch of garden to make the country seem yet a little closer.  Discussion with representatives of the Stevenage Residents’ Federation has shown that few wish to have a flat as a home…They have expressed their desire to get away from communal staircases, balconies or landings, and to have a house with its own front door.

This brings us neatly to the sociology of the New Town.  Most of the newcomers came from London but a particularly important group in the early years were construction workers.  Those on London council house waiting lists prepared to work on the new town for at least six months were granted a Corporation house. Of the first 2000 houses completed, over a quarter went to building workers and their families.

They brought – and fought for – traditions of organisation and solidarity, successfully resisting victimisation, lay-offs and ‘the lump’ (labour-only subcontracting).  And they provided the New Town’s residents vital early leadership – in the residents’ associations and in one-off campaigns which secured a by-pass and preserved the Fairlands Valley as open space against plans for high-density housing. Six would be elected to the local council. (4)

But they were perhaps the exception.  The town planning advocates, Frederick Osborn and Arnold Whittick, welcomed the New Town’s ‘dramatic societies, art clubs, horticultural and gardening societies, political groups, sports clubs for almost every sport, numerous women’s and youth organisations’. But they acknowledged honestly that many wanted simpler pleasures and these welcomed the Locarno Ballroom opened in 1962 and the ‘American-style bowling hall’ opened the following year: (5)

The people have had well-paid regular jobs in the factories and this has conduced to producing a feeling of contentment. It has enabled them to furnish their homes well, to acquire television, cars, and domestic gadgets, so that many who came as habitual grousers were transformed into contented citizens in a few years.

This, then, was an affluent working class, enjoying domestic pleasures and rising living standards, not so much lacking class consciousness as seeming in this period not to need it.  John Goldthorpe’s work on the affluent worker was published the very same year and was based on the nearby and economically similar town of Luton.

Broom Barns, Bedwell

But Stevenage remained sociologically distinct, not least because the large majority of its inhabitants lived in council housing. ‘There was no sense of incongruity in Stevenage between being a young professional and living in social housing.’ (6)  Social housing had not yet become residual housing for those who couldn’t afford ‘better’, still less could it possibly be considered accommodation for a so-called ‘sink population’.

And the Council and the Corporation were the benign guardians of this mixed – not classless – community, providing housing, education and leisure.  At the play schemes he attended, Gary Younge recalls how, as prizes for sporting success or good behaviour, they ‘would hand out tokens for free admission to the bowling alley and the swimming pool since all were council-run’.

None of this sounds revolutionary; it doesn’t even sound like the New Jerusalem that early Labour Party activists aspired to.  But it contains an essential decency and a sense of community – nothing saccharin or pious, a simple responsibility of one for the other – that superseded the ugly exploitation which been the lot of working people hitherto.  We might wish for it again.

Right to buy came in the same year that the Development Corporation was abolished. And the eighties more broadly brought new – more competitive and individualistic – values that challenged the principles on which Stevenage New Town was built.

Clock tower with Franta Belsky’s 1974 memorial to Lewis Silkin. © Steve Cadnam, made available under the Creative Commons licence

Stevenage remains, of course – not a monument but a more ordinary town, still a good place to live for many though wrestling with problems common to all. But perhaps the idea it represented has – for the moment – died.

Sources

(1) Robert B Black, The British New Towns – A Case Study of Stevenage,  Land Economics, Vol. 27, No. 1, February  1951

(2) Quoted in Gary Younge, ‘Stevenage’, Granta, Issue 119, Spring 2012

(3) Quoted in Frederic J. Osborn and Arnold Whittick, The New Towns. The Answer to Megalopolis (1963)

(4) University of Westminster and the Leverhulme Trust, Construction Workers in Stevenage, 1950-1970 (2011)

(5)  Osborn and Whittick, The New Towns. The Answer to Megalopolis

(6) Gary Younge, ‘Stevenage’

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

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1940s, 1950s

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

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

Pre-war Plymouth centre

Temporary market erected to replace shops destroyed in Blitz

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

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

Abercrombie and Watson proclaimed a:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shopping Precinct looking north

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

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

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

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

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

Proposed distribution of population

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

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

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

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

Stonehouse Reconstruction scheme before and after

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Sources

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

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

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

A Plan for Plymouth: ‘our first great welfare-state city’

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1940s, 1950s

The Plymouth Blitz, concentrated in seven devastating German air raids over March and April 1941, left Plymouth reportedly the most heavily damaged city in the country and destroyed its medieval centre.

In this bleakest period of the war when much energy was focused on sheer survival, Plymouth City Council looked to the future. Plymouth would be rebuilt but not merely rebuilt – it would be re-imagined: redesigned and reconstructed as a city for a new era in which rational planning served the needs of the common people.

On 1 September 1941 the City Council agreed that a Redevelopment Plan be prepared. That plan – A Plan for Plymouth – was prepared by Sir Patrick Abercrombie, the leading town planner of the day, in conjunction with the City Engineer James Paton Watson.  It was ready by September 1943 and approved by the Council in the following year.

In foreground, Paton Watson, Abercrombie, Lord Mayor Lord Astor and Town Clerk Colin Campbell (1944)

J.D.M. Harvey illustrated the completed plan.

Derry’s Cross

The railway station

So far, so good but history is awash with abandoned blueprints and failed ideas. Plymouth made good on these aspirations.  Firstly, it lobbied Parliament – in conjunction with many other local councils – for the comprehensive planning and compulsory purchase powers vital to large-scale projects enshrined in the 1944 Town and Country Planning Act.

And then it acted. It was the first British city to begin reconstruction in April 1947; the first new buildings opened in 1951.

Abercrombie’s plan was visionary, owing most to the designs of New Delhi and Canberra and the 19th century Beaux-Arts ideals which shaped Washington DC and Paris. The city centre itself would be divided into functional precincts reflecting varied urban roles including retail, offices, culture and civic government.

This was planning on a grand scale but the larger vision was also influenced by more modest indigenous strains, not least the garden city movement which sought to separate homes from industry and recreation from commerce. The Plan envisaged suburbs formed into ‘neighbourhood units,’ each with a centre incorporating schools, a church, a library, swimming pool, cinema and other community facilities. These principles gave humanity to the cold term of functionalism sometimes used to characterise such post-war planning.

However, it was the design of the city centre which was most radical. The war had destroyed old street patterns already strained by modern demands. They were replaced by an orderly grid centred on one grand axis running north-south from the railway station to the grand open space of the Hoe surrounded by a ring road connecting the major transit arteries. To Professor Jeremy Gould this was (1):

an egalitarian grid, spacious, airy, uncomplicated, accessible and gapingly open to all – the very model in stone, brick, glass and metal of the post-war welfare edifice.

The execution of the plan used some of the foremost architects of the day – such as Thomas Tait (who designed the new Dingles department store) and William Crabtree (who had previously designed the Peter Jones and John Lewis stores in London). They were employed by private developers but worked within the controlling vision of the City Architect and Engineer who designated width, height, form and materials. And the city retained the freehold.

Time and the judgment of altered aesthetics are not always kind to plans of such ambition and scale. There may appear some merit to the criticism of those who have complained subsequently of a certain cold uniformity; there is more so to those who note neglect and decline. To Gould, what is needed now ‘above all is a little love’ and this blog at least will give a little love to the vision and original execution of the Plan for Plymouth.

The architects certainly were not so naive as to ignore the potential missteps inherent in such planning. In fact, street elevations were ‘composed en masse as a series of highly contrived symmetries and asymmetries, with major to minor rhythms.’ (2) Corners and terminations were equally carefully contrived to please the eye.  The images below show the real aesthetic quality of Plymouth’s streetscapes – a far cry from the brutalist label sometimes attached.

Pearl Assurance (c) Plymouth: 20th Century City

Derry’s Cross (c) Plymouth: 20th Century City. The western section contained the offices of the new nationalised industries.

The white Portland stone which faces many of the city centre buildings is criticised for its dullness but was originally envisaged as a neutral background to highly coloured shop fronts, displays and signs. Some buildings were built – in deliberate contrast – of red and brown brick. There is beautiful detailing too, not fussy and often overlooked, which challenges those who have accused the design of blandness.

Dingles (c) Plymouth: 20th Century City

Martins Bank (c) Plymouth: 20th Century City

Whilst slower, more organic – messier – growth might have given a more comfortable and ‘human’ feel to the Plan, Plymouth didn’t have this option. Instead the council chose boldly not only to face but to embrace the future and create a new city (3):

Plymouth represented the architecture of the future – clean, bright, democratic and, most of all, optimistic.

Much of the architecture remains stunning and captures still the optimism of the era.

National Provincial Bank (c) Plymouth Man. Bronze doorways, granite-clad columns and a Venetian glass façade – a fitting termination to Royal Parade.

Pearl Assurance House (c) Plymouth Man. Part of the grand gateway to Armada Square from Royal Parade and the Great Square in front of the Civic Centre.

Civic Centre and Council House (c) Plymouth Man. 14 stories high, lavishly finished, the Civic Centre ‘expresses the aspirations of a confident authority at the height of its powers’.

Dingles (c) Wikimedia Commons. Thomas Tait, the architect, also designed the pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

In the affluent fifties and sixties, such optimism may have seen well-placed. 50,000 worked in the dockyards, Plymouth was doing well. Now that number is just 2,500 and the city has fallen on harder times. The future envisaged in the 1940s didn’t quite materialise and the city is having to reinvent itself once more.

That, in a sense, is true of the city centre too. Straitened finances combined with an antipathy towards the modernist architecture of the post-war period led to serious decline. But Plymouth is resilient and that is changing. A new generation is overseeing a ‘scale of regeneration’ claimed as ‘second only to the post-war regeneration period’.(4)

The Coop in its heyday. The only store to occupy a whole block of the Abercrombie Plan.  The underside of the canopy was originally painted bright yellow whilst the interior contained a domed banking hall and a stage for dance bands in the cafeteria.

The Coop lives on but there was a time when up to 25 per cent of the adult population were members.

The Coop building in 2011 (c) Steve Cadman Twentieth Century Society.

As is the way, the transformation envisaged in what the Council has named ‘A Vision for Plymouth’ will depend far more on tourism and culture than traditional staples but it will, at least, both respect and revive Plymouth’s heritage as ‘the twentieth century city’ –  ‘the greatest built example of post-war British planning and architecture’ (5)

There are more listed fifties’ buildings in Plymouth than anywhere other than London. Jeremy Gould and the Architecture Centre Devon and Cornwall are fighting for it despite recent funding cuts. English Heritage is defending it as a city ‘as representative of its time as Bath and York.’ (6)

This is great. But the task for all is to ensure that the label Twentieth Century City is not an epitaph to the past but a call to the future which captures the dynamism and idealism of former generations and gives momentum to the present.

PS I’ve written a second post on the Plan for Plymouth which includes additional detail and illustrations from the Plan itself.

Sources:

(1) Quoted in ‘Plymouth: a pearl on the seashore,’ The Independent, 21 February, 2010

(2) Jeremy Gould and the Institute for Historic Building Conservation, ‘The architecture of the plan for Plymouth’, September 2006.

(3) and (4)  Plymouth: Twentieth Century City, Heritage Trail Buildings Guide

(5) Plymouth City Council, A Vision for Plymouth

(6) Simon Thurley speaking at the launch of Jeremy Gould’s book, Plymouth: Vision of a Modern City, 8 June 2011

The essential online source is Plymouth: Twentieth Century City.  My grateful thanks to the Architecture Centre Devon and Cornwall for making available the text and photos of this site and their hard-copy Heritage Trail Buildings Guide. Visit the city and support their efforts.

The online Encyclopaedia of Plymouth History contains information on A Plan for Plymouth and much else beside.

A wonderful documentary film on the Plan, The Way We Live (1946) is available on YouTube.  Its director, Jill Craigie, met Michael Foot, MP for Plymouth Devonport, whilst shooting the film and they married three years later.

Commentary and stills from the film and the images of the original artwork included above can be found at cyberheritage.co.uk.

My thanks to Plymouth Man for allowing use of some of the images to be found in his informative and well-illustrated celebration of postwar Plymouth on Flickr.

Other contemporary images above are taken with permission from Simon Cadman’s Twentieth Century Society Flickr page on Plymouth.