Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (6 page)

Sharp had been implacably anti-suburb through the 1930s, but this particular broadside was published in
Town Planning
, an influential 1940 Pelican paperback. ‘However little can be done in wartime towards the achievement of the ideals I have tried to set out, it is essential that we should get our minds clear
now
as to what we are going to do when the war is over,’ he stressed. ‘The thing is there for us to do if we will. We can continue to live in stale and shameful slum-towns. Or in sterile and disorderly suburbs. Or we can build clean proud towns of living and light. The choice is entirely our own.’ Two years later,
When We Build Again
(a documentary focusing on Bournville Village in Birmingham) was even more idealistic. ‘There must be no uncontrolled building, no more ugly houses and straggling roads, no stinting of effort before we build again,’ declared the film’s narrator, Dylan Thomas, who also wrote the script. ‘Nothing is too good for the people.’ The Beveridge Report did not concern itself specifically with town planning, but in February 1943 – the same year that a bespoke Ministry of Town and Country Planning was set up – it was Beveridge who opened a notable exhibition, Rebuilding Britain, at the National Gallery. ‘How can the war on Squalor be won?’ asked the accompanying catalogue, referring to one of the five evil giants that Sir William’s report hoped to slay. The answer was sublime in its certainty: ‘The very first thing to win is the Battle of Planning. We shall need to have planning on a national scale, boldly overstepping the traditional boundaries of urban council, rural council, County Council. Boldly overstepping the interests described so often as vested.’

The following year’s Town and Country Planning Act did indeed give far-reaching powers to local authorities for reconstruction and redevelopment, and by the time the war ended it was almost a truism that the future lay with the planners. Entirely characteristic was the plan published in March 1945 for the future of Glasgow, with the most stirring of mottoes on its front cover: ‘The Voice of Time Cries out to Man – ADVANCE!’ One old man, though, was unconvinced. ‘Ah, yes,’ said Churchill, as towards the end of the war he looked round the Cabinet and considered his minister’s favourable assessment of the latest town and country planning reports. ‘All this stuff about planning and compensation and betterment. Broad vistas and all that. But give to me the eighteenth-century alley, where foot-pads lurk, and the harlot plies her trade, and none of this new-fangled planning doctrine.’
¹⁰

Among those actively seeking a new and better post-war environment for the British people there were two main camps: baldly put, those who did not believe that the future lay in the big cities, and those who, broadly embracing modernism, did believe just that. They were, with on the whole unfortunate results, almost diametrically opposed to each other.

To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform
was the title of Ebenezer Howard’s influential 1898 treatise, a utopian vision (heavily influenced by William Morris) of dispersal of population from the huge industrial cities and the creation of new, self-supporting towns of some 30,000 residents of mixed social background, living in light, airy surroundings and surrounded by a ‘green belt’. The first ‘garden city’ was established five years later at Letchworth, in Herfordshire, and it was followed in 1920 by Welwyn Garden City. During the war, the Howardian agenda entered the political mainstream, as a series of reports and plans, culminating in the
Greater London Plan
published in 1945, recommended a less populous inner core, a suburbia contained by a substantial green-belt ring and, beyond that ring, the building of environmentally favoured new towns.

Howard’s direct successor, and a formidable but in many ways attractive figure in the planning world, was Frederic Osborn, kingpin by the 1940s of the Town and Country Planning Association and an indefatigable propagandist as well as administrator. ‘It is not a passion for order, or even for harmony (desirable as they are in measure) that has produced the demand for town planning,’ he wrote shortly before the end of the war. ‘The thing that has produced the dynamic for planning – the really big and fundamental thing that is wrong with our cities – is congestion: too many buildings and too many people in too little space.’
¹¹
Osborn, though just about willing to concede that suburbanites might actually enjoy living in the suburbs, never really faced foursquare the possibility that life in a high-density, imperfectly planned city might have its positive attractions. But unlike many planners, he was well aware that planning did not automatically fit the crooked timber of humanity.

The other camp comprised architects as much as town planners, with many (but not all) looking to the alternative utopia set out in the pronouncements and example of the charismatic French architect Le Corbusier. His
La Ville radieuse
had been translated in 1929 and
Vers une architecture
in 1931; in them he demonstrated his belief in the future of great cities – but great cities entirely transformed along ultra-modern lines. ‘Men can be paltry,’ he declared, ‘but the thing we call Man is great . . . What gives our dreams their daring is that they can be realized.’ There were also his four famous, increasingly verbless propositions: ‘Architecture has for its first duty that of bringing about a revision of values. We must create the mass production spirit. The spirit of constructing mass production houses. The spirit of living in mass production houses.’

Le Corbusier’s English followers had established the MARS (Modern Architectural Research) Group in 1933, with the young Maxwell Fry as one of its most active members. ‘Courts and alleys are swept away’ ran part of the caption to the visual plan of Fry’s ideal city published in the
Picture Post
special issue in 1941. ‘New flats stand in a park.’ These high-minded, modern-minded, well-intentioned men – who for a mixture of pragmatic and more or less socialist reasons tended to look to public housing (as yet the Cinderella of the British housing stock) as the likeliest opportunity for making an impact – took few prisoners in either their drawings or their writings. Another such individual with high ambitions and limited tolerance was Ernö Goldfinger: born in Hungary in 1902, a student in Paris until moving to England in 1933, a larger-than-life presence with a frightening temper. Writing in 1942 in the
Architectural Review
(one of modernism’s strongholds), he gave a hostile appraisal of a clutch of publications in Faber and Faber’s ‘Rebuilding Britain’ series, masterminded by Osborn and including Osborn’s own
Overture to
Planning
. After noting that all the publications ‘state as axiomatic truths the one-sided arguments of the Garden City Movement’, Goldfinger went on: ‘The problem before the re-planners of the country can be neatly and precisely defined by saying that
it is to
create a frame for human life
, liberated as far as possible from the drudgery of material need. Modern technology enables this to be done. But this aim will not be furthered by the introduction of sentimentality.’ Justifying this charge by picking out phrases from Osborn’s pamphlet like ‘values of our civilisation’ and ‘sacred fires’, Goldfinger then put his modernist cards on the table:

In all these publications the problem of the size of cities is treated again and again with an unrealistic and sentimental bias. The tendency to industrial concentration is brushed aside as one of the evil consequences of modern ways and not as it should be treated, as one of the basic means of efficient production . . . All the authors seem to be smitten by a kind of agoraphobia and a tendency to animize at the same time. The small, the child-like, seems to haunt them, they transpose their feelings for persons to geographical units.

He added, with a final put-down from a considerable height, that such infantilism was ‘noticeable not only in Garden City circles, but in a large section of well-meaning, so-called progressives’.

Fundamental to Le Corbusier’s vision was the high-rise, with his ideal city featuring at its centre towers of as many as 60 storeys. However, even though a fair number of new blocks of flats (rarely above four or five storeys) were built in the 1930s, that aspect of his vision elicited relatively little enthusiasm before the war, with even a modernist like Fry somewhat sceptical. The real flats versus houses (or, as they were often called, ‘cottages’) controversy only seriously flared up during the war. ‘It is eventually undeniable,’ insisted Sharp in his 1940 Pelican, ‘that the flat, if its own particular problems of design are sufficiently studied,
can
afford the pleasantest possible conditions of living for a very considerable proportion of the inhabitants of our towns.’ And although he conceded that flats were not ideal for everyone, there were ‘hosts’ of people who ‘could live far more happily in a block of flats, among all the communal facilities and advantages which that form of dwelling can offer, than in the social isolation of the small house, burdened with a private garden which they have neither the time nor the inclination to cultivate’.
¹²

Two key documents produced during the second half of the war tilted the balance towards flats. The first was the 1943
County of
London Plan
, the work of Patrick Abercrombie (the leading town planner of the day, with a foot in both camps) and J. H. Forshaw. They concluded that if even six out of ten former inhabitants of bombed-out inner London (above all of the East End) were to be rehoused in their own familiar districts, this would entail a density of 136 people per net residential acre – which in turn meant that only a third of these resettled residents would be in houses and almost two-thirds would be in flats of eight or ten storeys. A deeply disappointed Osborn was convinced that Abercrombie had been nobbled by the London County Council (LCC), to which Forshaw was Architect. He was probably right. The LCC, which unlike the subsequent Greater London Council did not include the new outer suburbs, was dominated by inner-London Labour boroughs; and their councillors were naturally fearful that excessive dispersal would not only play havoc with rateable values but significantly diminish their reliably loyal working-class electorates.

The other pivotal document appeared a year later, with the Dudley Committee’s report
The Design of Dwellings
, which for ‘large concentrated urban areas’ recommended a maximum density of 120 per acre – again, in other words, with significant high-rise implications. Importantly, the submissions that seem to have pushed the committee towards this conclusion were not from zealous architects but from thoroughly ‘sensible’ organisations like the National Council of Social Service, which argued that most of the low-rise housing estates built between the wars by the LCC had lacked adequate communal facilities, something that well-designed blocks of flats could provide, thereby obviating social problems. Between them, with fateful consequences, the plan and the report went a long way towards making the flat officially acceptable as a standard form of housing, especially public housing.

What gave such matters a new urgency was the Luftwaffe. ‘Hitler has at last brought us to our senses,’ declared Max Lock, a young architect and planner. ‘We, the British public, have suddenly seen our cities as they are! After experiencing the shock of familiar buildings disembowelled before our eyes – like an all too real surrealism – we find the cleared and cleaned up spaces a relief. In them we have hope for the future, opportunities to be taken or lost.’
¹³
It was apparent from soon after the worst of the Blitz that the government was broadly backing, albeit with considerable financial nervousness, major reconstruction in the most badly affected cities, so that by the end of the war a series of plans for the future of those cities had been published and/or exhibited.
¹⁴
Southampton was to have a wholly new road system and city centre; Portsmouth a rather more modest redevelopment; Bristol a heavily zoned new city centre, including an ambitious new shopping precinct in the Broadmead area; and Hull (through the joint efforts of Abercrombie and Lock) a fairly ambitious redevelopment that included segregated industrial zones and a new, semi-pedestrianised shopping area.

Abercrombie – in his mid-60s, exceedingly well connected, author of the hugely influential textbook
Town and Country Planning
(1933) that saw virtually no role for preservation, even in the most historic cities – was also persuaded, for a not especially generous fee of 250 guineas, to submit a plan for Plymouth. The doyen of town planning did not disappoint. ‘The outworn street pattern was totally abandoned, the old Devonport shopping area was swallowed up, and the precinct principle was applied to the civic, business and shopping areas’ is how the planning historian Gordon Cherry has aptly summed up Abercrombie’s 1943 vision for a city where less than a tenth of its pre-war housing stock was irrevocably beyond repair as a result of enemy action. ‘Unified architectural treatment would be introduced. A new central area road system was decided. One monumental feature was provided: a garden parkway from the station to the Hoe constructing a backbone to the whole of central Plymouth.’ It was, Abercrombie himself insisted, the only possible way ‘out of the disasters of war to snatch a victory for the city of the future’. There was little or no local consultation, with all objections overruled.
¹⁵

In one blitzed city, even more than Plymouth, the man and the hour came together. ‘Every town should have in its architect’s department a group of town planners . . . Building science is advancing so rapidly that we have no right to build for a thousand years . . . A house should be regarded as permanent only for about thirty years and should then be replaced by an up-to-date one . . . For the good of the community private interests must be subordinated to public ones.’ The speaker was Donald Gibson, City Architect of Coventry, addressing the Royal Society of Arts in early December 1940, less than three weeks after a night’s intense bombardment had destroyed or seriously damaged most of the medieval city centre. Since his appointment a year before the war, he had been working on radical, more or less modernist plans for the city’s future, culminating in May 1940 in a MARS-influenced exhibition on the ‘Coventry of Tomorrow’; but the devastation only six months later created a wholly new opportunity.