Family Britain, 1951-1957 (44 page)

In October 1952, more than eleven years after the worst of the German bombing, Gladys Langford walked tearfully around Homerton, where she had grown up:

Everywhere seemed so small, the streets so narrow, the devastation so great. The whole place almost unrecognisable . . . Many tombstones in Hackney Churchyard have been blitzed – a keeper told me it is planned to clear away the tombs. The lovely old Eagle House (once a doss house) is badly blitzed & derelict. St Barnabas Church is a shell. Brooksby’s Walk has lost almost all the houses near the church & ‘prefabs’ with nice little gardens cover the spot where the pock-marked cobbler wielded his knife & nails . . .

In London as in most of Britain’s badly blitzed cities, the pace of physical reconstruction continued to be painfully slow. A series in the
Architects’ Journal
in 1952/3 was generally dismayed by the lack of vim and vigour on the part of local authorities, typified by ‘extraordinarily dilatory’ Bristol and the ‘niggardly’ fulfilment of promises in Portsmouth. Or, as a Southampton MP explained to the Commons in March 1953 about his city, ‘very few of the shops, offices and business premises have been reconstructed’, while ‘one sees a large number of bare and desolate patches of ground which are covered by willow herb and other wild flowers’. A partial exception was Plymouth – where by 1953 work was well under way on Armada Way, the great north–south avenue (pedestrian in character, with sunken gardens) running from the railway station to the Hoe – but even there, Macmillan during a visit the previous autumn noted how he ‘cd give out no news about reconstruction’, adding that ‘this “Capital Investment Programme” is really intolerable’. Given that, when it came to physical reconstruction, all the local authorities were operating under severe financial constraints imposed by the Treasury, this was undoubtedly true not just in Plymouth.

There was, though, another general influence at work: the sheer lack by the early 1950s of any popular appetite for planning and reconstruction. ‘Why don’t they build some dwellings on that bombsite?’ was the recurrent refrain, according to a 1951 report on London. ‘The town planning says it’s to be open space. What’s the use of open space? Isn’t there the doorstep and the street? What we want is homes.’ Two years later the Labour MP for Coatbridge, near Glasgow, noted that whereas her constituents viewed housing as ‘an acute election issue’, they saw town planning as ‘a fanatic’s dream’. There was, moreover, a deep-rooted element of cultural conservatism. In Canterbury the
Architects’ Journal
regretfully recorded ‘a strong blend of emotionalism present which is reflected in two fears – vandalism and modernity’, a blend perhaps even more powerful in Exeter, with its ‘general feeling on the part of the public that redeveloped portions of the city should literally resemble the best in the old’.
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How different was it in Coventry, national flagship of reconstruction? Certainly there was plenty to be done: in February 1952 a well-disposed observer, Basil Davidson, characterised the city as an ‘ugly and half-painted backcloth to huge and clamorous factories, and, for the moment little more’. Four months later, marking the start of work on the Woolworths building in what would become the Upper Precinct, the
Coventry Evening Telegraph
paid tribute to the perseverance shown by the planners of the emerging city centre: ‘They have kept Coventry in the lead among blitzed cities in the work of reconstruction, and the public are becoming increasingly pleased with what is being done.’ The contemporary evidence for that cosy assumption was, however, only patchy – and the unsentimental historian of Coventry’s reconstruction, Nick Tiratsoo, makes it unambiguously clear that by this time, even more than in the late 1940s, private consumption engendered far more enthusiasm than public reconstruction, with zeal for the latter declining to ‘little more than a flicker’. This essentially passive acceptance – mixed with some grumbling – was well shown during the public inquiry that began in February 1953 into the city’s Development Plan, which among many other things proposed a ground-level Inner Ring Road. More than 540 individual objections were raised, but the Inspector’s overall conclusion was that ‘considering the positive nature of the Plan, the objections of weight were not many’.

By this time the more immediate focus was on the imminent completion of the six-storey block of shops and offices at the top of the proposed shopping precinct: Broadgate House, designed in the City Architect’s department under Donald Gibson. ‘Such a monstrosity, darkening half Broadgate, and obstructing the view and traffic from Broadgate down Hertford Street, could never have been conceived by a Coventrian who loved Coventry,’ declared ‘Old Boy’ in the local evening paper, while the paper itself tactfully sat on the fence, noting that ‘to many people its massive proportions are a symbol of Coventry’s recovery, to others they are looked upon as municipal intrusion into a sphere of business activity which might well have been left to other agencies’. A relieved council was able to announce that the building was 85 per cent let, and a former Labour Planning Minister, Lord Silkin, was invited to perform the official opening on the first Saturday in May.
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No city was in greater need of a physical upgrade than Glasgow, especially with its desperately overcrowded housing conditions. ‘This is a very sordid town,’ Joyce Grenfell on tour wrote to a friend in 1952, ‘and one sees so many spivs, toughs and undersized cripples, tarts, pansies and flotsam and jetsam that it tends to get a girl down.’ In the early 1950s the main housing initiative was directed towards huge peripheral estates, just inside the city’s boundaries and mainly comprising three- or four-storey tenements. ‘Pollok has suffered from growing pains,’ the
Glasgow Herald
noted shortly before Grenfell’s lament about the scheme to the south-west that was nearing completion, with a projected population of about 45,000. ‘The building of houses has outpaced the provision of community services, particularly schools.’ By this time plans had been approved for the Drumchapel scheme to the north-west, projected as a self-contained township of ultimately almost 30,000 residents. ‘Conforming in its lay-out to the modern conceptions of community planning,’ the
Glasgow Herald
’s municipal correspondent wrote hopefully, ‘it is intended to be, not a “suburban sprawl”, but a place with recognised boundaries, in which a sense of community may be fostered . . .’ Soon afterwards, in November 1952, plans went through for Castlemilk, on a hilly site to the south-east and again for about 30,000 people, with work beginning in 1953. ‘The architecture and street layouts were monotonous in the extreme,’ notes the estate’s historian, ‘and the large backland areas between houses were like a wilderness enclosed by brick boxes.’ He adds that there was ‘certainly no consultation with potential tenants over the planning of Castlemilk’ and quotes Glasgow Corporation’s unashamed – and politically wholly understandable – mission statement: ‘To build the maximum number of houses in the shortest possible time’.

The creation of large peripheral estates, for good or ill, was in itself no solution to the age-old problem of inner-city slums. ‘Keep it up and drive it home,’ was a stockbroker’s enthusiastic response to a hard-hitting documentary,
Slums
, broadcast on the Scottish Home Service in April 1953. ‘This is the most important subject in Scotland.’ A Glasgow housewife agreed: ‘We also have had rats; we have no wash-house, no drying green, not even a proper place for the rubbish bins. We know how true this programme is.’
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The emerging consensus, certainly on the part of activators, was that the solution lay – once financial resources permitted – in major slum-clearance programmes followed by comprehensive redevelopment.

Some cities (like Liverpool, where the City Architect, Ronald Bradbury, was a vigorous proponent of slum clearance) were ahead of the curve, others still somewhat behind it. In Tory-run Newcastle, for instance, the council was petitioned in November 1952 by 458 ‘residents of dilapidated and insanitary property’ who protested ‘in the strongest of terms at the complete failure of the Housing Committee to deal adequately with the city’s housing needs, and at their entirely negative attitude with regard to slum clearance’. During the ensuing council debate, a newish Labour councillor, T. Dan Smith, objected to the way in which a previous speaker, a Tory councillor, had apparently blamed the condition of Newcastle’s slums on the people who lived in them, people who would turn ‘the best house’ into another slum:

In my view slum property is more likely to keep people in a state of mind that is not conducive to helping them to develop a sense of pride in their homes, rather than the fact that, if given better houses, they would wreck those houses. Whether we like it or not, there are thousands of houses in this city without baths and water. When they were built a hundred years ago they were built in the belief that that was all the ordinary people were worth. With rat-ridden houses, houses without water, people living four and five in a room and conditions in which people suffer from tuberculosis, we, as public representatives, cannot be complacent. We say we want a plan and must get on speedily.

In short: ‘There is not a single problem facing us today, whether in Newcastle or the country, that is not linked up with the social problems of the slums.’
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On the question of what exactly would replace these slums, though, Smith for the moment was silent.

Architecturally speaking, the force in the early 1950s apparently lay with the ‘soft’ Modernists, also called the ‘New Humanists’. While their most acclaimed work was the Royal Festival Hall, they were also responsible for an increasing number of new school buildings (typified by the bright, airy and generally Scandinavian-style St Crispin’s Secondary Modern at Wokingham), Geoffrey Powell’s winning entry (admired for its village-like qualities) in the 1952 competition for the Golden Lane housing scheme on the edge of the City of London, and the Alton East (originally called Portsmouth Road) Estate in Roehampton. The Roehampton development was a showcase for the LCC’s Architect’s Department and attracted much attention when the Alton East plans and models were revealed in November 1951. Across 28 acres there were to be 744 dwellings, 60 per cent of which were in the form of nine 11-storey point blocks, all with central heating; the other 40 per cent were to be, along increasingly fashionable mixed-development lines, a combination of maisonettes and houses. ‘An interesting and architecturally exciting scheme,’ was the verdict of the
Architects’ Journal
, and over the years Alton East, built between 1952 and 1955, would win much praise, not least for its overall composition. Back in 1951, though, not everyone was so delighted by the picturesque possibilities. That December the
Wandsworth Borough News
reported the views of the Labour chairman of the LCC’s Housing Committee, which two months earlier had approved the plans. He could offer ‘no reprieve’ to existing Roehampton residents; accepted that ‘we shall be cursed for this in future, for families should live in intimate houses’; but added that ‘we have no alternative if we are to solve the housing problem’.
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For the mainly youthful British followers of Le Corbusier, the problem with the generally acceptable, soft Modernism of Alton East – and before it the South Bank – was that it did not go nearly far enough. ‘The style of the Festival of Britain seemed at best sentimental, at worst effete,’ recalled the architect Robert Maxwell. ‘It lacked seriousness. It was bland, and it was parochial. Modern architecture had been sold short in Britain.’ The great showpiece building by Le Corbusier himself, the Unité d’Habitation near Marseilles, was completed in 1952 – an aggressively modern 20-storey block on free-standing columns, housing 1,600 shipyard workers and their families. It was a building that exercised an almost mesmeric fascination over the up-and-coming generation of architects. By 1951 work was under way on an LCC site on Bentham Road, Hackney to build a large maisonette block along Unité-style ‘slab block’ lines. One of its architects was Colin St John Wilson (future architect of the British Library), who in an
Observer
article in July 1952 laid into the recently acclaimed Lansbury Estate in Poplar, with its ‘pitched roofs, peephole windows and “folksy” details of the current Swedish revival’, all of which were in lamentable, hidebound contrast to the Unité’s exemplar of ‘the grand scale of city life’. Unsurprisingly, Frederic Osborn, doyen of the town-planning movement, had noted shortly before how the fashion for Le Corbusier was ‘raging in the Architectural Association School in London now’, with ‘the young men under his influence completely impervious to economic or human considerations’.

In June 1952 the LCC’s Housing Committee accepted in principle the development plans for what would become the ‘hard’ Modernism of the explicitly Le Corbusierite Alton West Estate in Roehampton, and the following month the nod was given for the similarly influenced Loughborough Road development near Brixton. Le Corbusier himself visited London in March 1953 to be presented with the Royal Gold Medal at the Royal Institute of British Architects. After speeches by the architectural great and good, Colin Glennie, a student at the AA, spoke for the younger generation: