Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (27 page)

Three long streets on a slight rise stood at right angles. We drove up one and down another, going very slowly, for the streets are unpaved, with small knolls of hard earth and cinders and runnels caused by rain. Patches of grass grew boldly. The streets were almost an unbroken line of miserable brick hovels, each street about 400 yards in length, most horrible and dreary. Our coming brought a few unkempt women and ill-clad children to the doors. Two hefty young men eyed us sullenly. It was nearer to hell, I thought, than anything I had seen since Belsen.

‘Yet it exists in 1946,’ reflected Hodson, ‘and hardly more than an hour’s journey from Newcastle-on-Tyne.’
¹⁴

Peterlee was one of 14 New Towns designated between 1946 and 1950. In line with the wartime
County of London Plan
, more than half were for Greater London – in order of designation, Stevenage, Crawley, Hemel Hempstead, Harlow, Hatfield, Welwyn, Basildon and Bracknell. The other six were Corby in Northamptonshire, Newton Aycliffe and Peterlee in the north-east, East Kilbride and Glenrothes in Scotland, and Cwmbran in Wales. Developed partly to relieve the housing shortage but also with explicit brave new world ambitions, they would become emblematic of the whole 1945 settlement.

The essential guiding spirit of these new towns followed on from Ebenezer Howard’s garden-city movement: they were to be economically self-contained and socially balanced communities that in national terms would stimulate decentralisation from the overcrowded big cities. Reporting in 1946 to the new Minister of Town and Country Planning, Lewis Silkin, the Reith Committee (with Osborn a prominent member) placed particular stress on the need for a strong sense of community and highlighted the potential benefits of the neighbourhood unit – which indeed was the model explicitly used in 11 out of the first 14 new towns. As with his inter-war stewardship of the BBC, Lord Reith did not really embrace popular culture. He hoped that each new town would have ‘a civic cinema’, thereby counteracting the commercial cinemas with their ‘limited cultural range and American productions’; he did not mention commercial dance halls; and he specifically repudiated greyhound racing: ‘While there may be a demand, it would bring in its train consequences likely to be specially objectionable in a new town because displeasing to a large proportion of the residents.’

How were these fun factories to be run? The Reith Committee canvassed various possibilities, but the New Towns Act 1946 which quickly followed its report came down decisively for government-funded, government-appointed public corporations, in the event called development corporations, with no directly elected element. It was a fundamental breach of the Howardian vision, which had involved the bottom-up creation of what have been called ‘self-governing local welfare states’. Not that this worried Silkin, whose much greater anxiety, he told the Commons in May 1946 in the course of moving his bill’s second reading, was that ‘the planning should be such that the 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 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?’ . . . Our aim must be to combine in the new town the friendly spirit of the former slum with the vastly improved health conditions of the new estate, but it must be a broadened spirit, embracing all classes of society.

A final burst of eloquence, perhaps helping to produce the notably bipartisan spirit that characterised the passage of his bill, reached for the sunlit uplands: ‘We may well produce in the new towns a new type of citizen, a healthy, self-respecting dignified person with a sense of beauty, culture and civic pride.’
¹⁵

By this time Stevenage had already been publicly identified as the first new town, with its population of some 6,000 expected to increase tenfold. ‘How do you feel about it?’ a Mass-Observation investigator asked some of the indigenous residents. ‘It’s time this town was woken up,’ replied a 45-year-old signwriter. A 30-year-old coachbuilder agreed: ‘It’s progress, and it’s what we badly need here.’ So, too, a 50-year-old housewife: ‘I think it will be a benefit myself. If you’ve got a family, well, it’s a good thing to know there’ll be work for them.’ Those expressing definite opposition included a 60-year-old car-park attendant. ‘My great grandfather was here, and his father before him,’ he explained. ‘We belong here, and I shouldn’t like to see the beauty taken away . . . Have you seen the beauty of the place? That avenue of chestnuts up by the school and parish church? You should see it.’

A few weeks later, on 6 May, Silkin himself was in Stevenage, to address a packed, tumultuous meeting in the small town hall, with up to 3,000 locked outside listening to loudspeakers. ‘I want to carry out in Stevenage a daring exercise in town planning,’ he declared at one point. ‘It is no good your jeering: it is going to be done.’ Silkin argued that Stevenage was ideally placed to attract both people and light industry from overcrowded London; called on the existing residents to ‘make some sacrifice’ in order to ‘provide for the happiness and welfare of some 50,000 men, women and children’; drew a picture of the new Stevenage recreating a village-like ‘spirit of friendliness and neighbourliness, the sense of belonging to a large family, a community’; and once more insisted that there was no choice in the matter: ‘The project will go forward, because it must go forward. It will do so more surely and more smoothly, and more successfully, with your help and co-operation. Stevenage will in a short time become world-famous.
(Laughter)
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.’ Amid cries of ‘Gestapo!’ and ‘Dictator!’, Silkin left the meeting and walked to his ministerial car, a 25 h.p. Wolseley, only to find that some boys had deflated the tyres and put sand in the petrol tank.

Less than a fortnight later, a referendum was held: some 2,500 residents took part, with 52 per cent voting that they were ‘entirely against the siting of a satellite town at Stevenage’. But it availed them little. Although considerable national publicity was garnered when Stevenage signs at the local railway station were temporarily replaced by Silkingrad ones, and although the High Court in February 1947 agreed with the Residents’ Protection Association (mainly comprising the well-to-do) that Silkin had not properly considered the objections raised at the public inquiry the previous October, the government was not to be thwarted, with Silkin later in 1947 winning first at the Court of Appeal and then at the House of Lords. The juggernaut was rolling. Old Stevenage had been the setting for the house in
Howards End
; new Stevenage would, as an unsympathetic, non-connecting E. M. Forster now put it, ‘fall out of a blue sky like a meteorite upon the ancient and delicate scenery of Hertfordshire’.
¹⁶

Not surprisingly, given this sort of local opposition (apparent also in Crawley and elsewhere), it took several years to get the new towns up and running. Faced by an acute housing shortage, the LCC responded by expanding the programme of ‘out-county’ estates that it had started between the wars, notably in Becontree, St Helier and Downham, which by the end of the 1930s were three of the largest housing estates in the world. The LCC also between 1946 and 1949 built more than 31,000 dwellings (a mixture of unprepossessing but functional houses and low-rise flats) on new estates at Harold Hill, Aveley, South Oxhey, Borehamwood, Debden, St Paul’s Cray and Hainault – all of them beyond the LCC’s boundary and in several cases, as was often pointed out, in the green belt that it was wanting to protect. Harold Hill in Essex was the largest of the estates, but its near neighbour Debden, together with South Oxhey in Hertfordshire, would attract the most sociological attention. From the start, these out-county estates suffered, like their inter-war predecessors, from an image problem. Suddenly the new dwelling places for many thousands of working-class Londoners, entirely bereft of architectural distinction and often communal facilities such as churches and pubs, the estates were in effect, to quote the architectural historian Andrew Saint, ‘lower-grade new towns without new town privileges’.
¹⁷
They were also the cause of considerable tension at the LCC. While the Valuer’s Department under Cyril Walker got on with its job of achieving ‘maximum output’ in new housing, the Architect’s Department (under Robert Matthew from 1947) was full of frustrated young graduate architects unable to implement their strongly modernist ideas about public housing. Not that this mattered much to the new residents of Harold Hill, Debden et al, happy enough to get on with their own lives with a roof over their head, an indoor lavatory, and hot and cold running water.

The new towns and out-county estates both reflected the widespread faith put in the 1940s on dispersal as the best way to relieve the familiar problems (overcrowding, congestion, poor health etc) of the modern industrial city. No city in Britain had worse problems – or a worse reputation – than Glasgow. ‘It is a disgustingly ugly town, a huddle of dirty buildings trying to outdo one another and not succeeding,’ Naomi Mitchison wrote in 1947. ‘The population is as ugly as the buildings. Walk down the Gallowgate; notice how many children you see with obvious rickets, impetigo or heads close clipped for lice, see the wild, slippered sluts, not caring any more to look decent!’

Two competing visions were now set out for Glasgow’s future. The first, the work of the City Engineer Robert Bruce, was essentially an urban one. The Bruce Plan advocated a radically new, high-speed road system, a geometrically planned city centre, the demolition of more than half the city’s housing stock, and the decanting of the urban poor to develop ments on the city’s periphery but within its boundaries. Ultimately, it was the vision of a Glasgow that would retain not only all its population but also its nineteenth-century heavy industrial base. By contrast, the Clyde Valley Regional Plan, appearing in interim form in 1946 and predominantly the work of the ubiquitous Sir Patrick Abercrombie, envisaged a depopulated, deindustrialised Glasgow, surrounded by a green belt and sending many of its ill-housed inhabitants to healthier, ‘overspill’ new towns beyond the city’s boundaries. ‘Whole districts are obsolescent and past the possibility of reconstruction to modern standards, alike for industry, commerce and housing,’ Abercrombie would declare in his final report, published in 1949; all told, he expected that nearly half of Glasgow’s 1.1 million population would move to outside the city.

This latter approach, seeing Glasgow as part of the region’s problem rather than as part of its solution, naturally appalled Glasgow Corporation – above all its Housing Committee, which stood to lose many thousands of tenants as well as (through the green-belt provisions) much potential building land. It was as if Abercrombie was preparing to blow up one of the great municipal power bases. The gloom deepened when the government, attracted by the prospect of (in Miles Glendinning’s words) ‘a constellation of planned, Whitehall-controlled garden cities set within a Green Belt’, plumped for Abercrombie, not Bruce.
¹⁸
The designation in 1947 of East Kilbride as Scotland’s new town was an unmistakable signal of intent. Yet for the Corporation, and for all those who still believed in Glasgow as ‘the Second City of the Empire’, the game was far from over.

Overall, looking at town planning in the 1940s, it is easy to exaggerate the radicalism and modernism. For instance, in Portsmouth, where a redevelopment plan was accepted by the city council in February 1946, not only was the gutted Guildhall to remain the city’s focal point, but the existing road pattern was to be kept, supplemented by a few new cross-routes. In Manchester, where a plan was formally unveiled in the first winter of peace, the City Surveyor and Engineer R. Nicholas accepted that some 100,000 of the city’s slum dwellings needed to be pulled down but specifically repudiated the high-rise solution. ‘It would,’ he insisted, ‘be a profound sociological mistake to force upon the British public, in defiance of its own widely expressed preference for separate houses with private gardens, a way of life that is fundamentally out of keeping with its traditions, instincts and opportunities.’ Adding that ‘the advocates of large-scale flat-building greatly overestimate the proportion of people now living in the congested areas who might thereby be decently housed on the site’, he concluded bluntly, ‘It is impossible to get rid of the effects of congested development by turning it on edge.’

Even in Coventry, epitome of the modern with its central area delineated by an inner ring road and containing zoned clusters of building types (shopping, entertainment, civic), Donald Gibson and his planning colleagues were far from slavish in the way they followed Le Corbusier’s
City of Tomorrow
. ‘We did not think that very high buildings were necessary for the centre of a smallish city which was unlikely ever to have more than 400,000 people,’ Percy Johnson-Marshall (brother of Stirrat) recalled. ‘We would have liked to have incorporated his dream of multi-level communications, but we were worried about expense, and felt that, anyway, our precinct form of development went a long way to bringing safety and convenience to the pedestrian.’ As with some other badly bombed cities, including Bristol, Exeter and Plymouth, the outcome was indeed modern, in the sense of not following the familiar pattern, but it was – quite deliberately on Gibson’s part – a generally restrained, unthreatening sort of modernism.