Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (95 page)

Within months, the Birmingham and Five Counties Architectural Association was advocating that multistorey flats should henceforth be built on a significantly larger scale, while even the Birmingham Civic Society argued much the same. By the summer of 1951 the City Council’s House Building Committee had announced that flats would comprise at least a fifth of its 1952 programme, mainly in the central areas but also in the suburbs. Among those inner-city areas were the five publicly acquired redevelopment areas that were going to be cleared of their slums. Across most of the country, slum clearance did not start before the mid-1950s, but in Birmingham the bulldozers were already by 1950 laying waste to the courts and back-to-backs of Duddeston and Nechells, where soon afterwards five lumpy, brick-clad twelve-storey tower blocks began to be constructed. All this in a city where as recently as the late 1940s it had been the unquestioned conventional wisdom that Brummies were not flat-minded, and where, as one observer noted in June 1951, they remained ‘understandably suspicious due to ignorance’.
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The debate was already over in Sheffield. There, in October 1949, the Housing Committee adopted a plan for flats development (likely to be between four- and six-storey blocks) in the city, with the first scheme to include shops, schools, restaurants, a communal laundry, garages and pram sheds, as well as central heating for the flats themselves. ‘Many of the committee’s recommendations on design,’ reported the local press, ‘arose from its recent London and Scandinavian visits.’ And the chairman, Alderman Albert Smith (Labour), was quoted: ‘Communal restaurants are suggested for the bigger flats, as this form of eating is a very popular social feature in Scandinavia.’ The plan then went to the City Council, with the badly rundown Park area (overlooking the railway station) being recommended as the site for the start of this ambitious new policy. One Labour councillor, Alderman C. W. Gascoigne, was unhappy, stating that ‘plebiscites up and down the country showed almost 90 per cent in favour of houses as against flats’ and that ‘houses were infinitely preferable’. But the proposal was approved, and even Gascoigne apparently accepted that it would be uneconomical to build houses in the centre of the city.
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Such were the beginnings of the Park Hill story – one of the most emblematic in twentieth-century British public housing. During these beginnings, the element of public consultation or involvement seems to have been conspicuous by its absence. Perhaps there was an assumption that the scheme would never actually happen – which, given that nothing did happen for several years, was understandable.

The capital was already on a fast track. ‘Everyone who travels about London must have noticed how many new housing schemes are in course of construction,’ observed a young architect, Peter Shepheard, in a talk on the Third Programme in December 1950:

Mainly these are blocks of flats: it is part of London’s housing policy to build large blocks of flats first, at a high density of dwellings per acre, in order to house large numbers of families and make room for the houses which will come later . . .

One of these developments, more conspicuous than some others, lies on the north bank of the Thames at Pimlico, between Vauxhall Bridge and Chelsea Bridge. Several tall nine-storey blocks in yellow brick with gaily painted balconies are under construction, and one is finished and occupied. At the river end of the site is a vast round glass tower, 130 feet high, which has puzzled many people, and which in fact encases a huge hot water tank.

He was describing Churchill Gardens. The work of two other young architects, Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya, this was a vast housing scheme (eventually more than 1,600 dwellings) that largely succeeded in being simultaneously modernist and humane, reflecting their respect for Le Corbusier yet their aversion to monumentality.

Churchill Gardens immediately won a high reputation, not least for the way in which it employed a mixed-development approach to get away from the monotony that beset so many other flats developments. Thus there were the nine-storey blocks of flats but also four-storey maisonettes and even some three-storey terraced houses for large families. It proved a major inspiration. ‘For honesty of expression and care in detail there is a lot to be learned from these flats,’ declared yet another young architect, Oliver Cox, in the spring of 1951. ‘Here, one feels, imagination is based on common sense rather than on a poetic seizure.’ He added his hope that the future lay with ‘mixed development’, which was ‘sociologically much better and architecturally more interesting’ than the tendency hitherto ‘towards the concentration of large flat blocks in central areas and so-called “cottage estates” outside’.
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Even as Churchill Gardens triumphed, a new housing era was taking shape at the London County Council.
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After the sustained attack by architects and their friends on the mediocre quality of most of the London housing being produced by the Valuer’s Department, and in the context of continuing criticism of the slow rate of completions, the LCC’s Housing Committee decided in December 1949 to return responsibility for housing layout and design to the Architect’s Department under Robert Matthew. Brought up in Edinburgh, Matthew much admired that city’s tenements and had also been greatly influenced by the modernist teachings of Walter Gropius (founder of the Bauhaus) in favour of high-rise blocks – of about ten storeys – as the best way of combining space, sunlight and greenery on the one hand with an urban, ‘townscape’ character on the other. In order to achieve social as well as architectural variety, these blocks would (as at Pimlico) be part of mixed-development schemes. With such precepts in mind, Matthew and his deputy Leslie Martin rapidly built up their department during 1950, recruiting many gifted, serious, socially concerned young architects and starting work on several exciting projects. Altogether, it had been a remarkable coup by and on behalf of the architectural profession.

The new balance of power was vividly demonstrated in the autumn of 1950 as the Housing Committee decided what to do about sites available near Putney Heath – sites which two years earlier had been part of the Valuer’s undeniably monolithic Putney-Roehampton model, much disparaged (including by local residents) and subsequently put into temporary abeyance. Two competing papers were submitted: by Matthew and by Cyril Walker, the Valuer. Advocating a mixture of four-storey maisonette blocks and much taller point blocks, Matthew put forward two central arguments: ‘the monotonous effect of parallel rows of five-storey blocks which would otherwise be necessary to achieve the same density can then be avoided’; and ‘the complete vertical standardisation of the point block enables full advantage to be taken of modern reinforced concrete technique’. Walker for his part was adamant that high-rise point blocks, as opposed to the customary ‘flatted’ four- or five-storey blocks, raised a whole series of practical problems: mothers with small children did not like living at higher levels (as they had already made clear at the eight-storey Woodberry Down estate in Stoke Newington); lifts were vulnerable to power cuts;

there was the extra expense of cleaning staircases and windows; upper floors were colder; and all the flats in a point block would be of an inflexibly uniform size. ‘The Committee will appreciate,’ declared the defiant Valuer, ‘that the erection of 11-storey blocks of the kind proposed is an experiment. Until experience has been gained of the problems of erection and maintenance and of the tenants’ reactions it would be unwise to make more than a very limited use of this type.’ He lost the vote, and a new estate – to be called Ackroydon, with building due to start in 1952 – went ahead according to Matthew’s vision.
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It was in a sense an extraordinary situation. By comparison with 20 or 30 years earlier, British modernism was clearly on the retreat, most notably in literature and music; in architecture, however, with its obviously greater potential for social purpose and even social engineering, the reverse was true. At the mid-century point, nevertheless, it was predominantly a
soft
, relatively humanist modernism that (in Coventry as well as in London) held sway. Much turned on attitudes to the definitely non-soft Le Corbusier, whose landmark and intensely polarising block of flats, the Unité d’Habitation, was by this time rising from the ground in Marseilles. Lionel Brett (consultant architect and planner for Hatfield New Town) in late 1949 called the block ‘inhumane’ and ‘frightening’, while in the spring of 1950 a major article, ‘The Next Step?’, by probably the most influential of architectural commentators, J. M. Richards, implicitly rejected Le Corbusier as a relevant figure and instead looked mainly to the example of Scandinavian architects to re-establish ‘the human appeal of architecture so that it can perform its traditional cultural role’.

A year later, Matthew’s department at the LCC convened a fascinating colloquium to ponder the implications of the most-discussed building since the war. ‘Most people with families of any size prefer houses with gardens,’ conceded Philip Powell in his formal presentation. ‘But the possibility of 20- or 30-storey blocks suggested by the Unité (yet reserved for smaller families), mixed with two- or three-storey compact house-with-garden development, seems to be the only rational approach to high-density planning.’ In the ensuing discussion, Oliver Cox (who had joined the department in the autumn of 1950) and others not only argued that Le Corbusier’s approach had been needlessly arbitrary, abstract and monumental but also stated flatly that he was ‘at fault when he suggests that it is the task of architecture to create a new way of life’. Crucially, however, the meeting as a whole refuted the idea that the Unité was an essay in the monumental; indeed, many speakers testified to the ‘humanity’ of the scale.
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In sum, the aesthetically challenged Valuer may have been seen off by the modernists – but among those modernists, the battle of the softs and the hards was only just beginning.

For Frederic Osborn, doughty champion of planned dispersal from the big cities and of low-density, low-level living, it was a battle between two evils. In February 1950 his riposte to the Lutyens vision of ‘a 40-storey block of flats in one of the new towns’ was typically robust:

Seeing that a small percentage of people do prefer flats, and, being childless, can afford higher rents for less space, there is much to be said for building the few flats required in tall towers to diversify the skyline, as in religious ages we built church spires. If that keeps the architects in good heart to do the necessary job of designing functional earth-bound houses for the great majority, both parties may be pleased. On a small scale we may be able to afford imaginative luxuries, but that is the name for them.

The robustness, though, concealed a growing pessimism. ‘Here the Modernists stand for multi-storey flats and the Mummyfiers for terrace houses and closed vistas,’ Osborn lamented soon afterwards to Lewis Mumford. ‘The speculative builder’s name is mud; but he stands far nearer to the ordinary man.’ Not unpoignantly, he added: ‘My dilemma is that I will not join in the popular criticism of planning, with which I greatly sympathise.’

A year later, in April 1951, Osborn found himself countering a savage attack on the planners by the
Economist
. All too conscious that planning’s golden hour (roughly 1940–45) had come and gone, he soberly refuted that magazine’s central accusation (in effect that the planners had become control freaks) before pinning his hopes for planning’s future on greater public involvement. ‘Public controversy, especially on issues that genuinely concern the ordinary man and woman, will strengthen planning even if it modifies some of the plans,’ he declared. ‘The quietest existence, after all, is that of the grave.’
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But if he really thought that many of his colleagues in the entwined, increasingly professionalised worlds of reconstruction, planning and architecture were going to rally enthusiastically to such a democratic, participative cry, he was – uncharacteristically – deceiving himself.

If there was an apotheosis of 1940s planning, it was Sir Patrick Abercrombie’s Clyde Valley Regional Plan, published at full length in late 1949 and enthusiastically greeted by Osborn as a ‘superb report – the masterpiece of the Abercrombie series’. It called for almost half of Glasgow’s appallingly housed population to be moved outside the city to live instead in healthy, carefully designed, self-supporting new towns beyond the city’s green belt. This, for Osborn, was how it was always meant to be.