An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (24 page)

Few MPs understood what they voted through in Silkin’s Town and Country Planning Act, which stripped development rights from landlords, and vested new powers in local planning author-ities. During the 1950s the Labour Party propounded that housing was ‘no longer a proper field for the profit motive, and must be regarded as a social service’. Local authorities, Labour proposed, should be empowered to acquire properties for ‘structural rehabilitation’.
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The act contained an item called the ‘Third Schedule’, which allowed owners of existing buildings to make minor improvements without paying the charge levied on all other building work to discourage promiscuous development and prevent the waste of scant resources.

Macmillan, who was appointed Minister of Housing by Churchill in 1951, rejected Silkin’s creed of idealistic dirigisme as cumbersome and restrictive. His Housing, Repairs and Rents Act of 1954 abolished the development charge, but left the Third Schedule, which permitted buildings to be extended by up to ten per cent of their cubic capacity. This had few implications when developers were busy rebuilding bombsites. After 1957, however, they began demolishing older office blocks and erecting replacements with low ceilings, fewer corridors and stairwells, and open-plan offices. The developers not only exploited Schedule Three to achieve ten per cent greater cubic capacity, but arranged their amenities so that the working interiors far exceeded this percentage.

‘Plot ratios’ – devised in the 1940s with the intention of setting limits on the density of workers in given areas – were another factor. A plot ratio was the relationship between the area of the site and the gross floor area of the building. A developer could have a ratio of 1:1 by covering the entire site by a one-storey building. Alternatively the development could be set back from the road, so that not all the site was covered, but with more storeys rising skyward – an objectionable prospect to Silkin, who disliked the dehumanising scale of tower blocks. Developers cared only to cram as much onto sites as was permissible under plot ratio rules. The London County Council planning department, staffed by guileless milk-and-water idealists focussed on improving the housing stock, was startled by this red-blooded grasping. Entrepreneurs who resented any authority over them, and behaved to officials like quick, clever schoolboys making fools of fretful, unimaginative schoolmasters, enjoyed foiling the regulations and baffling the planners’ intentions. Plot ratio was described by one player as ‘a commercial joke and a commercial jackpot’.
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The lifting of building restrictions in 1954 by Macmillan ignited a London property boom which thundered on until 1964, when the incoming Labour government reimposed strict controls. Twenty-four million square feet of new office space was built in central London in the decade from 1954. Jack Cotton estimated in 1961 that the best office sites in Manhattan commanded just over £2 per square foot, while the best sites in the City of London were worth £3. Hence the spires and pinnacles, in cheap, flimsy materials, that soared in the age of I’m All Right Jack. The boom brought princely wealth to Cotton, Clore, Max Rayne, Max Joseph, Felix Fenston, Harry Hyams and others. It needed men who were traditionally disempowered but bursting with retaliatory initiative to see the possibilities, put together the deals, change England’s urban environment forever, and act as forcing agents of change in the Macmillan era. The property developers were an assault echelon on the status quo as well as the literal demolishers of old England. The governmental throttling of supply and demand, which Silkin had enacted, created conditions in which these men became as rich as Greek shipowners or Texan oilmen. They aroused intense resentment. ‘If you’re making pots of money, you’re exploiting somebody,’ said a Tyneside miner and union official in 1963. ‘You can disguise it any way you like, it’s exploitation.’
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Local authorities ladled out planning consents for office blocks, shop developments and town centre schemes. Tenants were eager for space. Money was loaned on easy terms for the borrower: long-term rates were five or six per cent at a time when inflation was running at three or four per cent. Borrowers did not have to part with any equity. The return on cost of new properties was seldom less than ten per cent. The value of a completed building was not based on its building cost, but on a calculation involving the annual rental income from the tenant of the completed building, the length of the lease, and rent review provisions. These calculations could double the value of the property over its building cost. Private companies owning new buildings could be floated on the Stock Exchange with immense profit to their promoters. There was a bull market in the City which ran from 1958 until 29 May 1962 – the Flash Crash, when the plunge on Wall Street was the worst on any day since 1929. During those easy years investors could sell shares half an hour after buying them, and keep all profits tax free. There were some fifty property companies listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1958 (often family-owned urban estates); two years later there were about two hundred, most of which scarred the country with coarse architecture.

The developers hired architects with proven ability to obtain – swiftly – the planners’ agreement to schemes with maximum possible density. About ten architectural practices were adept at the necessary negotiations and exploitation of loopholes. Foremost among these was Richard Seifert’s firm. The property boom of the Macmillan era can be measured by the fact that he had twelve employees in 1955 and about two hundred in 1966. His buildings had the disposable modernity of sputniks and moon rockets, as their names showed: fourteen-storey Planet House in Chiltern Street, near Baker Street station, completed in 1960; eleven-storey Orbit House in Blackfriars Road, completed in 1962; the oval Space House in Kingsway, completed in 1963 for Hyams, but left vacant for years; Telstar House in Eastbourne Terrace, Paddington, completed in 1963, but vacant for years. The office complex at Euston Station, which necessitated the demolition of Euston Arch; the Royal Garden Hotel ruining the approaches to Kensington Palace; Centre Point, creating motor-traffic canyons and killing pavement life on the corner of Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street; the Park Towers Hotel in Knightsbridge wrecking the scale of Lowndes Square. These were Seifert buildings which exploited the plot ratio formula in order to soar high.

Sir Mortimer Warren of the Church Commissioners admitted that most of the office blocks with which he was involved with Max Rayne, including Telstar House, looked as if they had been designed by accountants. On one occasion when Felix Fenston approved a development, his architect noticed that in studying the plans he had been holding them upside down. When Clore was asked of which development he was proudest, he named an ugly block in Southwark Bridge Road because it was ‘one of the largest office developments in London’ which had been ‘built in record time’, for Ernest Marples’s Ministry of Transport. He scoffed at ‘architectural triumphs which end in bankruptcy’.
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Seifert’s activities showed that vital forces – individuals little interested in community discipline or collective virtue – were pitted against the orderly plans of men like Abercrombie and Silkin. The defeat of the pure-minded planners was like a parable of London sexual life, with the purity campaigners fighting a failing battle with the libertines. ‘Kiss Goodnight, Sweetheart!’ was the way that a jovial cockney called Joe Levy, one of the great estate agents turned property developer, used to show that he was calling a deal off. In 1939, when the leading prewar developer Jack Phillips, a desperate gambler, was going broke, Levy and his brother took over his estate agency. He also adopted Phillips’s business credo: ‘If you can’t make a damned good living within three square miles of Piccadilly Circus, don’t try in this profession. And never go into a back street.’
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This advice for estate agents worked as well for sex workers.

A new generation of agents and property developers dominated the London scene from the late 1940s. Although most had prewar experience of the property market, they retained the eager pliancy of young men. Few of the agents who diversified into property development had sat the examinations of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors. Indeed, the established chartered surveyors of the period, accustomed to prewar conditions of static or falling values, kept their minds fixed on present stability, and were poor judges of future possibilities. Traditionally they lived by their fees, and did not sully themselves with the profits of property development.

The first developments by Levy and his brother (in 1937) were three depots for the Dunlop Rubber Company in Mile End, Brixton and Greenwich; £50,000 for this project was loaned to them by Robert Clark, a Paisley-born mogul of the film industry. The Levy brothers both served in the fire service during the war, working three days at a stretch, with two days off. On their free days they did plenty of buying and selling as the bombs fell. After the war they resumed dealings with Robert Clark, and together formed a development company called Stock Conversion, which undertook a vast scheme on Euston Square which had been rejected by Clore – with whom they did many early deals. ‘You never know,’ Levy joked of his alliance with Clark, ‘what can happen when a Scotsman and a Jewish boy get together. Why does it work so well? Because they would go blind watching one another if they weren’t together.’
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There were no grudges among Levy’s business collaborators: he made fortunes for them. His last years were devoted to the charitable foundation that he established with his profits.

One of Levy’s lucrative connections was with the Italian-born Charles Forte. Forte opened his first milk bar in Regent Street in 1935, and began serving a novelty called milkshakes. Further milk bars followed in Charing Cross Road, Oxford Street and Leicester Square. During the depths of postwar austerity, Forte began collaborating with Levy, who taught him the technique of buying and leasebacks of property. At Levy’s prompting, he bought the Lyons tearoom at Rainbow Corner on Shaftesbury Avenue, near Piccadilly Circus, with a £35,000 loan from Prudential Assurance. By leasing part of the site to himself at rent of £4,000 a year, and leasing the rest to other tenants at £8,000, he achieved an annual income of £12,000. Thereafter he enlarged his fortune by property deals as well as catering, and became known as a property financier as much as a restaurateur. In 1950 he leased the Criterion building on the south side of Piccadilly Circus at an annual rent of £12,000, used its Marble Hall as a cafeteria, serving Chicken Maryland, ice gateaux and the like, and leased back other parts of the building. In 1953 – again advised by Levy – Forte bought the Café Monico site at Piccadilly Circus. A year later he bought the Café Royal building in Regent Street. Journalists nicknamed him ‘Mr Piccadilly’. In 1958, Forte bought his first hotel, the Waldorf, for £600,000, which he raised by selling his lease of the Monico site to Jack Cotton for £500,000. He then arranged a sale and leaseback deal with Prudential Assurance on the Waldorf.

By 1960, Forte was a top table guest at Cotton’s famous annual luncheon at the Dorchester hotel. He did several property deals with Isaac Wolfson, from whom he bought a store at Oxford Circus in 1961. Anthony Sampson noted the retreat of industrialisation under Macmillan and the ascendancy of the property men: ‘The era of Nuffield and de Havilland is being succeeded by the era of Charles Forte and Jack Cotton.’ Forte was ‘one of the most respected businessmen in England’, reported the
Daily Express
in 1963 when he bought 1,200 acres at West Horsley in Surrey from the Bowater paper-making family. ‘Now he has joined the landed squirearchy.’
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The leading London developers were driven by ‘a profound psychological and social need for acceptance’, according to Charles Gordon, who was a journalist on the
Investors’ Chronicle
before becoming a consultant to the Clore-Cotton conglomerate. Their decisions were often the result of a defiant impulse that hid anxiety or lack of social confidence: they wanted to impress or annoy authority figures, ex-partners, competitors, unappreciative parents and resented siblings; big money for them was protective. Clore once asked his friend George Weidenfeld during a dinner, ‘What do you really think of all these people I’ve got here? What do they think of me in the West End?’ When Weidenfeld replied that some admired him but others could not quell their prejudices, Clore raised his voice defiantly: ‘To hell with them! Who needs them? They’re all bastards and bitches!’
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Developers hid their insecurities in schemes that were big enough to justify them doing whatever they wanted. The London property man was an ‘insecure animal whose main drive is vanity and whose main passion is a worship of prestige’, Gordon judged. ‘His headlong quests for creating wealth, implementing deals, mergers, takeovers, is really a quest for approbation, not for money and possessions
per se
, not for power
per se
, but for approbation from people mostly as insecure as himself.’ This was also the view of the psychiatrist Bernard Camber, who treated one or two developers and used to give them books by Alfred Adler, inventor of the ‘inferiority complex’.
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The social exclusion of Jewish East Enders, exemplified by the sabotage of Silkin’s Oxford scholarship, and Judaism’s prized sense of difference, contributed to these feelings. The murderous savagery of the Holocaust mattered more. Many developers were lavish benefactors of the state of Israel. For them the days of submission and propitiation were over. They neither made apologies nor offered truces. They had the intractable anger that was voiced by the author Frederic Raphael in 1963: ‘We tried being patriotic, we tried being philanthropic, we tried being everything, and it didn’t do us a damned bit of good. If they want to kill us, they’ll kill us. What does it matter what we do? We’ll do what we want to do and be damned to the lot of them.’
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