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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Battersea Park open-air sculpture exhibition, 1948

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zadkine, Laocoon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1960 Programme. The illustration is Henry Moore, Glenkiln Cross

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Latchmere Estate, Battersea: ‘happy healthy homes for sober and industrious workmen’

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Battersea, Pre-1914

The Latchmere Estate, opened in August 1903, was the first council estate in Britain to be built by direct labour – by the Council’s own workforce.  It remains a superb exemplar of the practical idealism of Labour’s first generation of municipal reformers.

For those Labour pioneers, the case for direct labour was obvious: it safeguarded workers’ pay and conditions, it respected trades union rights and – as importantly – it guaranteed better value and higher quality than any that could be delivered by private interest.

The Battersea Trades and Labour Council thought direct labour vital: as ‘necessary to the well-being of the community’ as ‘municipal housing, electric light, libraries, baths and…many other things.’

Those arguments had peculiar power at a time when jerry-building private contractors dominated the housing market but they may seem as relevant today when privatisation is thought of by many as a panacea, when we know the cost of everything but the value of nothing.

At the turn of the last century Battersea had become the ‘Municipal Mecca’ – a bastion of left-wing politics which reflected the powerful local presence and radicalism of the Progressive Alliance. The Alliance had already secured a majority in the pre-reform Vestry in 1894 but it came into its own when metropolitan borough councils were created in 1900. In the first elections for the new Battersea council, Progressives won 37 seats against 17 for their Conservative opponents. John Burns, former union leader and campaigning socialist, now a leading independent Progressive, was the local MP.

Good quality and affordably priced housing was central to the progressive vision. An area of allotments on the former Latchmere Common had long been identified as potential building land but it took the perseverance of Burns and others to secure acts of parliament in 1899 and 1900 which finally granted the right to build.

The Council acted quickly. A design competition, attracting 58 entries, took place in 1901 and building began shortly after. The Estate, a mix of houses and tenements, was attractively designed and built – unapologetically – to high specifications.  As the Mayor explained:

The dwellings were novel of their kind, containing as they did what had once been regarded as luxuries, such as baths, combined ranges and electric light. Not many working men had such accommodation in which to bring up their families, but the Battersea Borough Council had come to the conclusion that such accommodation was an absolute necessity.

The provision of electric lighting was particularly controversial. There were those who did ‘not see why the working people of Battersea should be allowed electric light at all: it [was] a luxury…which should be confined to the well-to-do’.(1)  The Council’s pragmatic response was that the scheme was self-supporting.

That electricity was supplied from the Council’s own generating station whilst the Estate’s water supply came from an artesian well sunk by the Council which served the adjacent Latchmere Baths.  Sidney Webb’s satirical account of the ‘individualist councillor’ who walked ‘along the municipal pavement, lit by municipal gas and cleansed by municipal brooms with municipal water…’, penned in 1890, was becoming reality.(2)

315 dwellings were provided in total: 28 five-room houses, one four-room house, 70 houses each with two three-room tenements with bath scullery and 73 houses each with two four-room tenements with bath scullery. Each tenement had its own entrance and its own back garden (with stairway access in the case of first-floor tenements). Of 11 acres, three were preserved as open space.

Odger Street

Burns Road

The Estate was granted Conservation Area status in 1974.  In planner-speak, it is the houses’ good quality stock brick and decorative red band courses, their window quoins and entrance canopies with moulded brackets and Welsh slate roofs capped with red terracotta ridge tiles which merit attention.(3)

And, no doubt, the early tenants appreciated the sturdy build and good-looking design of the Estate. They were surely equally pleased by the new and cutting-edge Cornes and Haighton’s combined range, copper and bath that each home contained.

Cornes and Haighton combined range and boiler living room side

Cornes and Haighton combined range and boiler scullery side

The floor plan shows the siting of the range and generous accommodation of the dwellings

There were absences too which were as important. John Burns, a fierce temperance advocate, who formally opened the new estate, expressed his pleasure that it ‘would not be tainted by an off-licence or degraded by a beer-shop.’ It was for him – as it was probably for the large majority of the respectable new tenants – a ‘sanitary oasis in a wilderness of jerry-built houses’.

Indeed, Burns went further:

The home was the centre of health, the cradle of character. If they wanted to arrest drinking, and stop the decay of physique, they should multiply colonies like this estate all over London and the United Kingdom

Burns’ sentiments were a conscious reflection of the National Efficiency arguments of the day. These, in the light of recruitment concerns during the Boer War and fear of rising German competition, combined patriotic alarm at the poor physique of the British lower orders and genuine concern for working-class living conditions with – from both left and right and with no obvious differentiating logic – a repugnance at a working-class lifestyle too often tainted by alcohol and unredeemed by self-help.

It was, in contrast, exactly the slightly better-off and definitely more ‘respectable’ – sometimes rather self-consciously so, it might be admitted – working class who populated both the local labour movement and the Latchmere Estate itself. Indeed, as Sean Creighton demonstrates in his long list of working-class activists who settled in the Estate , there was a very close correspondence between the two. It was this self-improving working class – aided perhaps (whisper it) by a certain favouritism in allocations policy – that found in the early municipal housing schemes their natural home.

There are those now – with the awful knowledge of where precisely these eugenicist currents led later in the century – who condemn the judgmental sanctimony and loose talk of racial health of earlier progressivism. We will be less anachronistic and more humble: is our free use of the word ‘chav’ any different?

And we’ll remember just how radical and how brave in many respects this early labour movement was. Battersea itself was a centre of anti-war sentiment, fiercely critical of the imperial overreach and pretensions of the recent Boer War. This was evidenced in the naming of Joubert Street after General Joubert, a commander of the Boer forces. (Other streets in the Estate were named after Burns himself, local labour leaders and – in celebration of the movement’s aspirations – Freedom and Reform.) The politics of the so-called ‘loony left’ councils which invoked so frequently the name of Mandela look rather safe by comparison.

As a footnote here, it can also be recorded that the Latchmere ward elected John Archer, a black man from Liverpool, as its councillor in 1906 and that Archer became – in 1913 – the first black mayor in London.

Ultimately, we can only share John Burns’ ‘delight that one of his ideals of his early days had been realised, the securing of happy, healthy homes for sober and industrious workmen.’ Moreover, as he stated of the Latchmere Estate:

The land has a communal origin, the streets bear democratic names; the whole plan, history and achievement is redolent of the common victory of the common people.

Sources:

(1) James Cornes, Modern Housing in Town and Country, 1905

(2) Sidney Webb, Socialism in England, London, 1890, pp115-116

(3) Metropolitan Borough Council of Wandsworth, Latchmere Estate Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Strategy, 2007

Other quotations and much of the detail of this essay are taken from Sean Creighton’s excellent history of the Estate.

The photographs of Burns Road and Odger Street are the copyright of Derek Harper and are licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons licence.