Concretopia
Page 7
‘I think most people would agree that the new town concept has worked by and large,’ said David Devine when I interviewed him. ‘I think it’s been absolutely brilliant.’ In 1977, in an attempt to assess the quality of life in Harlow, The Times analysed statistics covering crime rates, population density and so on. ‘On balance,’ they concluded, ‘its inhabitants have pleasanter surroundings, better living conditions, social services and recreational facilities … than in most towns of comparable population in most parts of London and in the deprived inner areas of our major cities.’39 Despite this, there’s little love for the new towns beyond their boundaries.
‘I went to Letchworth about a month ago,’ said David as we wandered among the exhibits in the Museum. ‘They were putting a big show on to celebrate the garden city, and they invited other towns – pre-new town places – to visit and put an exhibition on. So they had one from Port Sunlight, Saltaire, Hampstead Garden Suburb, one or two others. And we were there representing the new town. And people were coming into the tent, looking at the wonderful panels that the civics had put up and saying, Oh, Harlow, well, we’re not going to bother with that, that’s really boring. Oh! Wretched! And it’s just this idea that people have in their heads.’ Yet for Frederick Gibberd and many other new town planners, builders and residents, they were missing something much bigger. ‘The spirit of those years was elevating,’ Gibberd wrote in 1980. ‘There was a determination to make Britain a better place to live in.’40 In an era when so much more seemed possible, it was easy for the critics of the day to overlook the achievements around them, pushing on as they were for ever more radical solutions. But the early new towns were undoubtedly an incredible achievement of organisation, planning and sheer bloody mindedness. They sit alongside the creation of the welfare state, the NHS and the postwar revolution in education as monuments to a nation’s desire to move on, not just from the destruction of the war years, but from the inequalities and squalour inherited from the Industrial Revolution. For the political rulers of a bankrupted nation to push ahead with such schemes in an age of rationing and shortages must have taken guts. To this day, in an era of faux austerity where political will is such that widening inequality is seen as inevitable, and grand schemes unimaginable, the spirit of these pioneering souls and their projects should still strike even the most curmudgeonly of us as visionary and inspirational.
Notes
1 Ena Elliot, secretary, in Frederick Gibberd, Ben Hyde Harvey and Len White, Harlow: The Story of a New Town, Publications for Companies, 1980, p30
2 Harlow Journal, 1/5/53, p7
3 Frederick Gibberd in Gibberd, Hyde Harvey and White, p11
4 Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, Dodo Press, Second Edition, 1902, pvi
5 Frederic Osborn in Gibberd, Hyde Harvey and White, p5
6 Silkin in Frank Schaffer, The New Town Story, Paladin, Second Edition, 1972, p11
7 Norman Mackenzie, Harlow Citizen, 1/5/1953, p6
8 Silkin in Frank Schaffer, p12
9 Public meeting in Frank Schaffer, p47
10 E. M. Forster in David Kynaston, Austerity Britain: A World to Build, Bloomsbury, 2008, p163
11 Godfrey Arkwright, letter to Eric Adams, Sept 53, in Gibberd, Hyde Harvey and White, p31
12 Frederick Gibberd in Gibberd, Hyde Harvey and White, p43
13 Roger Berthoud, The Times, 16/12/77, p14
14 Frederick Gibberd in Gibberd, Hyde Harvey and White, p32
15 Gordon Logie, The Urban Scene, Faber, 1954, p142
16 Frederick Gibberd, The Design of Harlow, Harlow Council, 1980, p18
17 Frederick Gibberd in Gibberd, Hyde Harvey and White, 1980, p22
18 Frederick Gibberd in Gibberd, Hyde Harvey and White, p107
19 Observer, 22/7/51, p7
20 Lewis Silkin, The New Towns Act 1946, (annotated), Sweet and Maxwell, 1947, Foreword
21 Manchester Guardian, 16/5/57, p5
22 Jim Cattle in Steve Humphries and John Taylor, The Making of Modern London, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1986, p149
23 Frederick Gibberd in Gibberd, Hyde Harvey and White, p69
24 Harlow Citizen, 1/2/57, p17
25 The Times, 5/5/71, p2
26 Guardian, 23/10/59, p2
27 Derek Senior, Manchester Guardian, 4/6/57, p18
28 Frederick Gibberd in Gibberd, Hyde Harvey and White, p210
29 Marriott, p79
30 Roger Berthoud, The Times, 16/12/77, p14
31 Gordon Cullen, ‘Prairie Planning in the New Towns’, Architectural Review, July 1953, p34
32 J. M. Richards, ‘Failure of the New Towns’, Architectural Review, July 1953, p31
33 Gordon Cullen, ‘Prairie Planning in the New Towns’, Architectural Review, July 1953, p36
34 J. M. Richards, ‘Failure of the New Towns’, Architectural Review, July 1953, p32
35 Peter and Alison Smithson, Ordinariness and Light, Faber, 1970, p25
36 Peter and Alison Smithson, Ordinariness and Light, Faber, 1970, p26
37 Lewis Mumford in David Kynaston, Family Britain, Bloomsbury, 2010, p345
38 Frederick Gibberd in Gibberd, Hyde Harvey and White, p112
39 Roger Berthoud, The Times, 16/12/77, p14
40 Frederick Gibberd in Gibberd, Hyde Harvey and White, p6
i A decade later when the Gulbenkian Foundation bestowed a £3,000 grant for the town to commission a sculpture, The Times remarked on the modernist tone of the existing examples that ‘so far there is no one on horseback’. (The Times, 6/2/62, p14)
3. ‘A Real Effort to be Jolly’
THE FESTIVAL OF BRITAIN ON LONDON’S SOUTH BANK (1951)
Just before I set off round the country, a friend presented me with a gift: a copy of the Festival of Britain Guide for the South Bank Exhibition. Grubby, tatty, with mould creeping across the cover, the booklet, with the bunting-clad festival logo across the cover, turned out to be an absolute joy to read. And that was before I’d even got as far as the exhibition blurb and map. It was full of glorious painterly colour adverts for the Standard Vanguard car, Coalite smokeless coal, Craven A cigarettes and British Electricity’s new power stations. As I leafed through it, two loose photographs fell from within its pages. My friend had bought the booklet on eBay, and the original owner had stowed inside a couple of small souvenirs of days out. The first wasn’t recognisable – a vista flanked by bandstands and ornamental ponds, leading to a large fountain marked with the letters E.R., suggesting it was taken some years later, after the Queen’s Coronation in 1952. But the next looked like a blurry still from The Day the Earth Stood Still, depicting queues snaking for hundreds of yards to the entrance of a great flying saucer. It was unmistakably the Festival of Britain, and that alien visitor the Dome of Discovery. Both photos showed crowds of early-fifties revellers: men in drab overcoats or tweedy suits, boys in long shorts and sensible shirts, women in the fitted waists and full skirts of Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’. In many ways these clean-cut, formal and buttoned-up citizens looked as alien as the Dome to me.
Queues for the Dome of Discovery, in a snap that fell from my programme for the Festival.
I first encountered John Gyford, a retired planner from the London County Council, at an event at the Festival Hall as part of its sixtieth birthday celebrations in 2011. An eminent panel were explaining the background to the event, and during the Q&A a man next to me stood up and offered first a terrifically vivid recollection of visiting the festival as a child, and then an account of the indomitable attitude within the LCC’s planning department when he’d joined it a decade later. We chatted afterwards, and met up a few months later back at the Festival Hall. He’d visited the Festival of Britain twice, once in May when it had just opened, and once in late August when it was soon to close. With school-boy-like enthusiasm, he explained to me how he’d felt:
‘There was a book that was published some time early in the sixties called The Age of Austerity. And one of the chapters, I think it was by
Michael Frayn, said that the best thing about the Festival of Britain was simply being there. And in some ways that quite well summed up what I felt at the time – just what a marvellous place this exhibition was. It just contained so many things.’
Today, the Festival of Britain is the sort of thing we are primed to be cynical about. It’s easy to imagine snarky Twitter comments on the do-gooding exhibits or damning Instagrams of the wilfully quirky designs. And as it happens, it was easy to be cynical then, too. ‘We know we’re caught but must support this patriotic prank/and though we’d rather have shot ourselves we’ve got ourselves to thank,’ was Noël Coward’s acerbic verdict in his satirical song ‘Don’t Make Fun of the Fair’. ‘The size is petty,’ reported a Daily Express not over-burdened with good will just before the festival opened. The paper criticised everything from the cost to the socialist vulgarity of it all. ‘The theatre can’t house either the show or the audience’, it complained, dubbing the architecture ‘a muddle of styles’.1
Of course cynicism can be a useful corrective, but it can also be a great inhibitor of new ideas. And after the destruction, pain and misery of the Second World War, Britain was in dire need of a shot of optimism. Surely the key to the national recovery would be to turn the mighty organisational capacities of the armed forces to more positive peacetime purposes.
Several top military figures were appointed to head up the new town development corporations, but one of the most exciting positions was taken by Winston Churchill’s chief military assistant, General Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay (known to his friends as ‘Pug’). In 1948, this formidable public figure was appointed chairman of a whimsical-sounding civilian affair called the Festival of Britain. ‘By continuing to press on,’ he told the Daily Mirror, ‘we proclaim to ourselves and to the world that we are determined to take up our lives, and move forward again after the hideous waste of the war years.’ The paper greeted the news with a screaming front-page headline: ‘Britain to Go Gay For Year’.2
The idea for a festival to mark the centenary of the Great Exhibition that would also reward the British people for their fortitude during the war, and point the way to a brighter, happier, more modern way of life, had been knocking around since 1943. The cause was taken up by two dynamic figures: Herbert Morrison, who’d been deputy prime minister since the Labour party’s victory in 1945; and Gerald Barry, former editor of the News Chronicle. In the century since the pioneering Great Exhibition at Hyde Park, international fairs and ‘expos’ had become big business. The daringly modernist Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 had made a huge impact in the world of architecture; Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1933 showcased the latest in new technology; and the highly charged 1937 Paris Expo became a political face-off between the Nazi German swastika-topped tower and the Soviet Union’s gigantic steel sculpture: workers wielding a hammer and sickle.
A more modest industrial showcase, ‘Britain Can Make It’, had been the inaugural exhibition when the Victoria and Albert Museum re-opened in 1948. Aimed not at Britons but at boosting exports of British-made goods (and thus universally known as ‘Britain Can’t Have It’) it had been designed by a dandyish young Edinburgh architect, Basil Spence. It hadn’t set the order books alight. Morrison’s triumph was to overcome the grave reluctance of his fellow MPs, stoked by the failure of ‘Britain Can Make It’. Yet financial constraints soon began to loom large, with a politically disastrous devaluation of the pound in 1948, and the festival had to shrink from an international extravaganza in the Great Exhibition mould to a smaller, more domestic affair. There were other harsh realities to be faced – not least the punishingly short schedule. Even its location was a tough call. Celebrations would be held across the country, but the focus was to be an exhibition in London. A shortlist of sites was drawn up: Hyde Park, home of the Great Exhibition, was deemed too nice – it hadn’t been dug up for war, and digging it up for peace was reckoned intolerable vandalism; the south bank of the Thames was too squalid, with its industrial relics and notorious slums; but the grounds of the Earl of Jersey’s stately home in Osterley Park, west London, was just right – until ruinous infrastructure costs came through. The committee was stumped.
Meanwhile, playing no part at all in frivolous festival planning, the London County Council was setting about the serious task of reconstruction. The County of London Plan of 1943 had been commissioned by Lord Reith, wartime Minister of Works and Buildings, and written by eminent planner Patrick Abercrombie and the LCC’s own Chief Architect John Henry Forshaw. They hoped to remedy four major defects of London: traffic congestion, depressed housing, inadequacy of open spaces, and the untidy mixing of industrial buildings and houses all over the city. The plan focused heavily on the West End, East End and the south bank of the Thames, which Abercrombie described as having ‘a depressing, semi-derelict appearance, lacking any sense of that dignity and order of appearance to its location at the centre of London’. Furthermore, ‘this gloomy aspect is intensified to-day by war damage.’3
The Plan addressed these shortcomings with an ambitious redrawing of the map of south London, beginning with ‘a riverside embankment, a series of buildings of various character, starting, perhaps, with a great cultural centre, followed by theatres, concert halls and assembly halls; with offices at the new Waterloo Bridge head, terminating at the eastern extremity in commercial and other buildings’.4 One of the most notable casualties of the London Blitz had been the city’s greatest concert auditorium, the Queen’s Hall in Langham Place, near Regent Street. Abercrombie and Forshaw suggested that a replacement might be built on this largely derelict, unfashionable and post-industrial site. The Ministry of Works was also keen that the area should accommodate civil service sprawl as Whitehall expanded across the river. Charles Holden, the architect most famous for his London Underground station designs, was initially engaged by the LCC to flesh out this plan. He envisaged a waterfront rebuilt in monumentally formal fashion, as in the plans for Plymouth and his own thirties Senate House building for the University of Londoni. But before he could even file his report, Holden’s plan was challenged from within the LCC by a dashing young star of the modern movement.
Robert Matthew was a former Edinburgh College of Art classmate of ‘Britain Can Make It’ designer Basil Spence, and very much the outsider for the post of LCC Chief Architect and Planner. John Henry Forshaw had quit in 1946 following a bout of spectacular Machiavellian internal politics. Matthew, keen to make his mark, moved in to ensure it was his department, not freelancer Holden, that would be responsible for this major chunk of South Bank reconstruction. A new auditorium on the South Bank was exactly the opportunity he needed to rebuild the esteem of a demoralised team, although he noted that even within the depressed staff he inherited, ‘the aura of Abercrombie was strong down the corridors, and enthusiasm for postwar planning was tremendous’.5
However, it was clear that a project of this scale would allow him to bring in some fresh blood, and transform it from a shadow of its thirties heyday to a beacon of modern design and planning ideas. The replacement for the Queen’s Hall was to be built on the site of the derelict Lion Brewery, between Sir John Hawkshaw’s wrought-iron Hungerford Bridge of 1864 and a brick tower, built in 1826, which had been used in the manufacture of lead shot. It was the perfect opportunity for Matthew to create London’s first strikingly modernist postwar public building.
It was at this point that the two great plans for London’s postwar civic revival crashed headlong into each other. On 21 July 1948 the festival council also settled on the 27 acres of the South Bank site as the ideal location for their exhibition, under the government proviso that the LCC invested in building a proper embankment. The government put further pressure on the county council when Herbert Morrison insisted that they get the proposed new concert hall ready in time for the festival. There was little choice in the matter, and so they pushed ahead as fast as they were able, draining the famously marshy land on the South Bank and erecting a new river wall. Condit
ions on this wetland were tough, with workmen mired in claustrophobic holes 20 feet down, while water from the Thames constantly flooded in.