Family Britain, 1951-1957 (66 page)

There was another high-profile first term in September 1954. ‘The controversial school at Hunstanton today opens its doors to 450 children from all over West Norfolk,’ noted the
Lynn News & Advertiser
about a week before Kidbrooke began. ‘This building of unusual design, which has many critics and as many supporters, is now completed and equipped to take children in the secondary modern channel of the educational system.’ The architects were the young, iconoclastic Alison and Peter Smithson, and apparently some county councillors had already publicly called it – on the resort’s outskirts, just off the High Road to King’s Lynn – ‘an eyesore’. It was undeniably eye-catching. A steel and glass creation, inspired directly by Mies van der Rohe’s Illinois Institute of Technology, it was, in the admiring words of Peter Smithson’s
Times
obituary, ‘a brilliant planning solution of classrooms and staircases over two storeys and around a succession of small courtyards that eliminated all corridors’. Bryan Appleyard has referred to ‘the brutally exposed surfaces and the sheer frankness of the entire fabric’, while according to Dan Cruickshank, ‘the clarity and simplicity of its design, the ruthless logic of its planning, the way materials and methods of construction are honestly displayed, the elegant integration of the services and the suave minimalism of the fully glazed elevations make the school, in its way, a masterpiece’. From the start it was associated with the emerging term ‘New Brutalism’, and the Smithsons themselves allowed it to be photographed only on condition that there were neither children nor furniture and fittings to spoil the effect.

The
Architectural Review
ran a laudatory piece, but not everyone admired this flagship of hard modernism. ‘In that this building seems often to ignore the children for which it is built, it is hard to define it as architecture at all,’ grumbled the
Architects’ Journal
. ‘It is a formalist structure which will please only the architects, and a small coterie concerned more with satisfying their personal design sense than with achieving a humanist functional architecture.’ Even the
Architectural Review
, generally sympathetic to the unyieldingly unsentimental urbanism of the Smithsons, published dissenting letters. ‘I should hate to go to school there,’ declared Peter Beresford. ‘All the rooms look hard and clattery. The stairs give a grim promise of canings and theoretical physics on the first floor. Even outside the place looks windswept and offers no shelter.’ The most resonant critique came from a Greek architect. ‘The inhuman brutality with which it strikes one is so violent that there is no doubt that it must have shaken even the most die-hard “pseudo-modernist”,’ wrote E. D. Vassiliadis. ‘I have studied architecture in England and have come to love the warm, human quality of its architecture. I consider the Hunstanton School not only a bad piece of architecture but also utterly un-English.’

Nor did the locals learn to love it. ‘Will boys and girls who misbehave themselves in Hunstanton be sent to the glasshouse?’ was within weeks overheard in the town’s court, while after Peter Smithson’s death in 2003 a former teacher at the school, J.T.A. Shorten, stated bluntly that ‘his reputation in the Hunstanton area is such that the decision to award him and his wife the prize for the winning design for the secondary school there has for ever been regretted’. Informed by Shorten’s 37 years of personal experience, starting in 1955, there followed a detailed, devastating catalogue of how appallingly badly the pioneering building had functioned in day-to-day practice: the leaking concrete roof, cracks in the glass sounding like rifle shots during lessons, dangerous glass panels at both ends of the gymnasium, excessive heat in the summer and cold in the winter, dreadful noise and congestion at lesson change because of the absence of corridors, non-soundproofed classrooms, no available places for displays of pupils’ work, unpainted classrooms (specifically decreed by the Smithsons), no way of blacking out the assembly hall in order to show films – altogether, ‘it was probably more suited to being a prison than a school’. And, he justly added, ‘it illustrates the folly of allowing architects’ whims to flourish without consulting the people who will work in the resulting buildings’.
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The Hunstanton statement came at a particularly pregnant moment in the complex, interrelated worlds of architecture, planning and housing. Cumulatively, four underlying trends in 1954–5 would do much to destroy the ‘1945’ dream.

‘We discussed the problem of the Local Authority programmes,’ noted Harold Macmillan in September 1954, shortly before handing over the housing and local government portfolio to Duncan Sandys, Churchill’s son-in-law. ‘As we hope to see some 150,000 private enterprise (unsubsidised) houses completed in 1956, it becomes necessary to curtail the allocation for L.A. [local authority] building. This is not an easy operation, and will lead to political trouble. All the same, it is certainly right . . .’ Building controls were ended in November, enabling private house-building to go full steam ahead, already encouraged by Macmillan having reduced mortgage requirements, and Sandys the following spring introduced legislation intended to end subsidies for ‘general needs’ building by local authorities, which instead were to concentrate on the new slum-clearance programmes. The annual figures for permanent dwellings built in England and Wales reflected the start of a fundamental shift:

1952

176,897

  32,078

1953

218,703

  60,528

1954

220,924

  88,028

1955

173,392

109,934

New homes increasingly to be built by private enterprise, new homes increasingly to be lived in by owner-occupiers – the political, Tory-benefiting implications were obvious enough at the time, as in retrospect is the fact that this was the beginning of the long, painful process of ‘residualisation’, by which those living in local-authority housing would sink ever further below the average income and status of the population as a whole.
¹⁵
Plenty of new public housing still lay ahead – not least in the context of slum clearance – but the terms of trade were changing.

The second trend was also pro-private – namely, the declining prestige of town planners, mostly employed by local authorities, and bureaucrats generally. To a degree this reflected the Conservative government’s post-1951 dismantling of the state planning apparatus of the 1940s, typified by the revoking of the 100-per-cent ‘betterment’ tax on property development that had been such an emblematic part of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. The profession of town planning itself was growing rapidly – its numbers rising tenfold between 1940 and 1957 – but at the same time becoming markedly introverted: not only were planners increasingly remote in a day-to-day sense from the general public, but they were also bitterly resented by architects, especially when they had the temerity to turn down out-of-the-ordinary designs. ‘Many town planners are apt to fashion their schemes in the image of too abstract or incomplete a picture of human society,’ reflected in 1954 the not unsympathetic William Ashworth, historian of town planning, and he added that ‘the danger is the greater because they remain unaware of the nature of this error’.

The planners’ cause was only partially helped by the continuing chequered progress – and reputation – of the best-known ‘reconstruction’ cities. Profiling Plymouth’s new city centre in May 1954, Trevor Philpott conceded that it was ‘supremely efficient’, with free-flowing traffic and plenty of room on the pavements, but personally found it to have ‘as much cosiness and charm as an average stretch of the Great West Road between Hammersmith and Slough’. Or in the words of a local man: ‘Before the war it was a picturesque town. Now it’s a draughty barracks. We call that place [nodding towards Armada Way] Pneumonia Corner. On a winter’s day it’s cold as charity.’ It was no better in Bristol, with the journalist Cynthia Judah observing later that month that the ‘bold and dominating’ new Council House, housing the local authority, was ‘violently disapproved of by most Bristolians’. There was also the wretched Broadmead shopping-centre development, on which work had begun in 1949 (in defiance of the wishes of most Bristolians, who had wanted their new centre to be on the site of the old, blitzed one) and was at last taking sterile, unimaginative shape. As for Coventry, the local paper in January 1955, not long after the opening of the huge, slab-like Owen Owen department store on the north side of Broadgate, quoted a couple of elderly reactions to the city-centre redevelopment. ‘I had not seen the new buildings before,’ said one. ‘I must admit I was a bit awed by what I saw.’ And the other: ‘I’d rather remember Coventry as it was.’ About the same time, the visionary principally responsible for that redevelopment, Donald Gibson, abruptly resigned as City Architect, apparently on the grounds that he and his staff were being poorly treated by some of the councillors. It was Gibson who in 1940 had seen the Luftwaffe’s destruction of the city as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and his departure arguably marked the end of glad, confident morning in the Coventry story.

Two episodes both revealed and consolidated the hardening public mood. In July 1954 the Minister of Agriculture, Sir Thomas Dugdale, resigned in the wake of an official inquiry (by Sir Andrew Clark QC) that had been strongly critical of the refusal of his civil servants to sell back to its original owners some 725 acres of farmland at Crichel Down, Dorset, which had been compulsorily purchased for an airfield before the war. Clark’s report, declared
The Times
, was ‘almost unbelievable in its catalogue of errors of judgement and misleading advice and in the arrogant temper which it discloses among those who are meant to be public servants’, while the
Daily Mirror
agreed that Dugdale had no alternative but to ‘carry the can for his arrogant bureaucrats’. That autumn there was almost as great a storm after the tragic suicide of Ted Pilgrim, a middle-aged toolmaker living in Collier Row, Essex. Four years earlier he had taken out a £400 mortgage to buy a half-acre plot of land next to his bungalow – mainly to stop noisy children using it as an unofficial playground – but now it was under a compulsory purchase order, for housing purposes, with Romford Borough Council offering only £65. ‘Surely the greatest possible indictment against an age gone mad with a rigmarole of rubber stamps, restrictions, and baffling red-tape,’ was the verdict of the
Romford Times
, and the
Daily Express
led a national campaign to vilify the Romford bureaucrats and, behind them, the Ministry of Housing officials. ‘Why have you done this man to death – you and your minions?’ Churchill angrily asked Macmillan, while a last, poignant word went to the widow: ‘Ted and I were so happy in our little bungalow in Marlborough Road. My husband was a quiet sort of man and liked nothing better than to potter about in the garden he loved so much.’
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Dispersal – moving people out of the overcrowded, unhealthy, rundown Victorian cities – had been a key strain of 1940s planning, and a third trend clearly visible by the mid-1950s was the reaction against this. ‘We Are MURDERING Our Countryside’ was the stark title of Trevor Philpott’s
Picture Post
article in July 1954. Noting that a farm of 150 acres was vanishing every day, with potentially grave implications for security of food supply, he went on: ‘After the war we thought our Planners would save our countryside. But the bulldozers move over the farmland as relentlessly as ever. The new “estates” spread, like a rash, over the meadows . . .’ There was a predictable riposte from the Town and Country Planning Association’s tireless Frederic Osborn – plenty of land was still available for growing food, and ‘the excellent object of countryside preservation must not be turned into a space blockade of our less fortunate fellow citizens now living in slums, narrow streets, and treeless and gardenless surroundings’ – but his side of the argument no longer had the momentum. ‘OCTOPUS’ declared the
Birmingham Gazette
in February 1955. ‘Where will it all end – this creeping red rash that is pushing the countryside further and further from our doors? While there’s still time – stop it!’ The new Housing Minister, Sandys, was sympathetic, announcing two months later that ‘for the well-being of our people and for the preservation of the countryside, we have a clear duty to do all we can to prevent the further unrestricted sprawl of the great cities’. There followed in August his ‘Green Belt’ circular, intended to create ‘rural zones’ round built-up areas and prevent their further development. Dame Evelyn Sharp, his formidable Deputy Permanent Secretary at the ministry, was careful to emphasise that some dispersal of population was still envisaged
beyond
the green belts, but it was still a fundamental shift of emphasis.

It was a shift that owed something to Nimbyism, something to the instinctive desire of those living in attractive out-of-town environments to keep the proles firmly in those towns – and something also to a visceral, largely intelligentsia-led dislike, even hatred, of suburbia. These haters included, for all his humanity, Ian Nairn. This remarkable, passionate young man, fresh from National Service and still wearing a dyed RAF overcoat, spent much of 1954 hanging around the
Architectural Review
’s offices in Queen Anne’s Gate until at last he was given a job. His first signed piece appeared in March 1955 – ‘the more the English plan, and the more tenderly they feel towards ancient monuments, the faster they seem to put the wrong thing in the wrong place with the best of intentions’ – and then three months later he wrote the magazine’s special ‘Outrage’ issue: