Family Britain, 1951-1957 (55 page)

‘The Institute,’ he added, ‘will have another primary object: to make social science intelligible to the interested layman. Every effort will be made to keep reports free from the deplorable jargon which afflicts so much of sociology.’ Young managed to secure adequate funding (soon coming primarily from the Ford Foundation), and the ICS was duly launched in January 1954.
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From the start, Young’s principal day-to-day colleague there was Peter Willmott, who like him had worked in Labour’s research department and was an impressive, clear-eyed figure, with little of Young’s increasingly emotional attachment to the virtues of the traditional working class.

The architectural zeitgeist was becoming ever more urbanist and Modernist, typified by the experience in 1953 of Ian Davis on his first day at a school of architecture:

I handed my tutor the usual form indicating name, age and home address: Hillside Drive, Edgware, Middlesex. He read my form and gave me a probing stare, followed by: ‘I take it that you live in one of Edgware’s semi-detached houses?’ My affirmative prompted the observation that I should make early plans to move to a more civilised address, such as Camden Town. Later the same morning the First Year were gathered together for an initial briefing on the course and Modern Architecture in general. We were strongly recommended to find out about a Swiss architect called Le Corbusier, ‘the greatest living architect in the world’. We were advised to read his books and visit his buildings as soon as possible. Thus, before our first coffee break, the process of indoctrination was well under way. Architecture in 1953 was to do with great events that happened in Marseilles (or for that matter Camden Town), but very definitely not in Edgware, Middlesex.

Or take the recollections of William Howell, one of the idealistic team in the LCC’s Architect’s Department that was designing the 11-storey Corbusierian slabs for the Alton West Estate. ‘We went to Roehampton thinking we had a certain mission,’ he explained in a radio interview in 1972. ‘We felt this would turn the tide back from the suburban dream . . . A return to the excitement of the city . . . This is what we must do; we don’t want to rush out and live in horrid little suburbs and semi-detached houses.’ Why had they hated the suburban dream so much? ‘Because,’ he replied, ‘we felt that it discarded the positive things from the city and got very little in exchange. We saw this in terms of the fact that we wouldn’t want to go and live there because everything from the bright lights to the art galleries, the continental restaurants, in short “life”, the thing one goes to the city for – it didn’t seem to be happening out in the suburbs.’

Peter and Alison Smithson fully shared these sentiments, but with of course the ‘streets-in-the-sky’ twist that made them an unlikely, ultimately unwelcome ally of Michael Young in the cause of urban ‘community’. ‘It is the idea of the street that is important – the creation of effective group-spaces for filling the vital function of identification and enclosure making the socially vital life-of-the-street possible,’ they declared in 1953’s
Architectural Year Book
. It would take a while for streets in the sky to become a reality, which eventually they most famously did in Sheffield’s Park Hill development. The City Architect there from early 1953 was J. Lewis Womersley, who in September addressed the Town and Country Planning Summer School in Bristol. After asserting that planners of new housing schemes should try to foster ‘the friendliness of the slums’, he continued:

In it lies the essence of the community spirit which we planners talk about so glibly. These people like to talk to one another without dressing up and making special calls. The women like to sit on their doorsteps and chat on warm summer afternoons and their small children like to play together in a common garden outside their houses where they are safe from traffic.

The terrace, the small house group round the square or garden, are ideal for these fundamental requirements. To fence each family in and to separate it from its neighbours is to completely misunderstand the problem by seeking to impose upper-class snob-idealism on the less inhibited members of the population.

The policy for housing which should be pursued has to lie somewhere between that of the advocates of high flats for all city dwellers and the 12-to-the-acre adherents who claim that an area only the size of Devon would be used up if every family had a house and garden.

In Park Hill itself, there was little such compromise. The original idea had been to develop the whole, slum-ridden Park area in such a way that, in the words of Park Hill’s historian, Christopher Bacon, ‘the community and many of its existing buildings [including pubs, corner shops, small businesses, pigeon lofts and places to keep hens and pigs] and roads could be preserved’, but, in a fateful decision, that plan was ‘scrapped’ in late 1953, and ‘the idea now was to clear the whole area completely’. Jack Lynn – a young architect who, in tandem with another young architect, Ivor Smith, was most directly responsible for the ensuing Park Hill design, but always answerable to Womersley – would later rather wistfully recall: ‘There were some misgivings among us that the community structure would be irrevocably upset, as indeed it was.’ By 1954 the design had been completed for four huge blocks overlooking the city centre – blocks which long pedestrian bridges connected into one continuous building, with decks on every third floor.
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A further indication of the ascendancy of this bracing urbanism was the increasingly tarnished reputation of the new towns, hitherto almost sacrosanct flagships for the dispersionists. So linked were they with the ‘New Jerusalem’ aspirations of the Attlee government that the Tories throughout the 1950s were at best lukewarm towards them, authorising only one new one (Cumbernauld in Scotland) and on the whole denying the existing new towns proper financial resources, let alone much in the way of encouragement. ‘What a mad venture,’ Macmillan reflected privately after a visit to Basildon in May 1952. ‘No water; no sewerage; no river to pollute; no industry – and jolly few houses.’ Just over a year later, the leading architectural journalist J. M. Richards launched a devastating attack. ‘It is a sad moment to have reached,’ he declared in the
Architectural Review
, ‘when we have to acknowledge the failure of the new towns. But someone must candidly do so . . .’ Richards’s general tone was regretful rather than vindictive – and his attack was particularly telling given that he was far from an out-and-out ‘hard’ Modernist – but there was a distinct edge as he accused the architects of the new towns of ‘eating up valuable acres of agricultural land’, of ‘scattering houses along either side of draughty expanses of roadway’ and of ‘marooning the unhappy housewife on the distant rim of their sentimental green landscapes so that she has to tramp for miles with her shopping basket and is altogether cut off from the neighbourliness of closely built-up streets’. The usual champions of the new towns, headed by the indefatigable Frederic Osborn, predictably sprang to their defence. But even Osborn’s great American friend, Lewis Mumford, was disobliging enough to observe in the
New Yorker
in October 1953, after a summer visit to Britain, that ‘monotony and suburbanism’ were the result of their rather unimaginative design, adding that ‘where the open spaces gape too widely, and dispersal is too constant, the people lack a stage for their activities and the drama of their daily life lacks sharp focus’. In short: ‘Because the new planners were mainly in revolt against congestion and squalor, rather than in love with urban order and co-operation, the New Towns do not yet adequately reveal what the modern city should be.’
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The actual experience of living in the new towns was inevitably mixed. Oral histories of the early settlers at Harlow have evoked a distinct sense of isolation (in particular, young wives missing Mum), of taking a long time to get used to the open-plan design of the houses, and of dismay at the smallness of the kitchens in terms of fitting cookers, fridges and washing machines. Moreover, in new towns like Hemel Hempstead where there was already an established old town, there tended to be very little integration between the two populations. ‘A town within a town without adequate mixing’, was how a
Daily Telegraph
report in 1952 put it, while one early Stevenage resident recalled how ‘we used to get some terrible looks from the Old Towners when they saw our shoes covered in mud’. As for the original ideal of integration between the social classes, that was proving by the mid-1950s to be increasingly unattainable, not least because of the distinctly sniffy attitude of the middle class. ‘Senior management tended to look for a house outside the new town,’ recalled a member of Stevenage Development Corporation about these early, formative years. ‘If they didn’t want to live in a village, then by and large their wives did.’ The managers, he added, ‘tended not to want to live in what they regarded as council estates’, but ‘preferred to pay a lot more for inferior housing, sometimes outside the town’. And even when a new town like Crawley did, under pressure from central government, allow a higher proportion of private housing, it still proved a hard sell to attract middle-class settlers.

Yet there was a positive side, albeit largely under-publicised. Above all, there continued to be, for the great majority of newcomers, the sheer satisfaction of moving somewhere that had, broadly speaking, adequate domestic facilities and a sense of space outside the home – space that was especially valued in terms of what it offered children. ‘Moving from Lewisham in 1953 was wonderful,’ recalled John Brian about Crawley. ‘I was only nine and we had the River Mole with rainbow trout, horses, rabbits, all manner of wildlife and forests to play in with hectic construction going on all around. It was just amazing . . .’ For young wives, moreover, the sense of isolation could lessen once they had their first baby. ‘Pram Town’ soon became the nickname for Harlow, and one of its historians notes how young women came ‘into contact with each other as they tramped over the mud fields pushing their large prams to the shops and the baby clinics before the roads were made up’. There was also quite strong social cohesion when it came to trying to attain specific, practical, communal objectives. This was particularly the case in Stevenage, including a sustained, widely supported campaign after it seemed that the original plans for an up-to-date pedestrianised town centre were, under pressure from sceptical large traders like Woolworths, being abandoned – without any consultation with the recently established Town Forum, intended to encourage dialogue between the planners and the planned-for. Following appeals to the press and the ministry, a crowded public meeting was held at Stevenage Town Hall in January 1954, resulting in a unanimous, enthusiastic vote for a pedestrian centre, which eventually came to pass.
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What about the LCC’s out-county estates? Was the prevailing atmosphere really as melancholic and lifeless as Young suggested it was at Debden? The largest of these overspill estates – in all of which flats formed only a smallish proportion of the housing stock – was Harold Hill in Essex; among its 25,000 or so inhabitants by late 1953 was the writer Sid Chaplin, still working for the National Coal Board’s
Coal
magazine. ‘Fully centrally heated and controlled by a thermostat which works with uncanny silent efficiency,’ he reported to a friend, while his wife and children enjoyed the large garden. Maureen Kent’s family was also in Harold Hill, having moved from the East End in 1952. Her mother, she recalled, had been ‘convinced that the climate would be healthier for my brother and I, rather than the London street and traffic’. In Harold Hill, where the Coronation celebrations did much to help new neighbours get to know each other, ‘they were, by and large, friendly people whose main concern was their own family and home with a great deal of pride in the appearance of house and garden’; but with ‘only one parade of small shops within walking distance’, her mother ‘missed the street markets so a visit to Romford market once a month was a must’, involving ‘a half-hourly bus some 20 minutes walk away’. Overall, ‘we were very content with life at Harold Hill for the next few years, despite the lack of amenities’ – notwithstanding that Maureen and her brother never quite attained the rosy cheeks that her mother had admired on some children during her first visit there.

Another of the out-county estates was Borehamwood in Hertfordshire, like all the others predominantly single-class, ie skilled working-class. ‘Notes on Life in a London Satellite’ was the title of the journal that an inquisitive, rather puritanical
Observer
journalist, Cyril Dunn, kept while he and his family lived there in 1953–4. A couple of more or less exasperated early entries emphasised the difficulties of an estate still undergoing teething problems:

What we want are the ordinary facilities that make urban life tolerable. This imprecisely identified creation – neither a suburb nor a New Town – has an urban population, administered & serviced as if it were a village. It is governed by a rural district council. Bus service of infuriating inadequacy. No telephones. Assumption that Estate people don’t use telephones. Qs at the kiosk. Stretches of rural blackness, morning & night. Police. Schools. Children left at bus stop. If this is overspill, why not pour some metropolitan resources out with it?

The kiddies have no playgrounds. Odd that in a place where half the population is well under school-leaving age there should be no special provision for children. Every evening at least a dozen children play in the road outside this house. They sound like a hundred. Within a few yards are two vast school playing fields, but from these the Authorities exclude the kiddies. The main playground is the houses in course of construction. A favourite game – to proceed from A to B in follow-my-leader style without touching the ground. As the house-walls grow, the kiddies are frequently well above ground-level and it speaks well for their chamois-like agility that they rarely suffer any really serious injury. But as houses are finished and occupied, the kiddies are squeezed into the streets. They are not allowed to play much in their own gardens: the flowers are not for them to kick. More might be done for them if they had the vote. But they show few signs of minding.