Concretopia

by Grindrod, John

  Even the warring parties who had worked to design and build the Festival of Britain and the Festival Hall agreed on one thing. ‘Harmless jollification’,50 was Gerald Barry’s description of these life-changing events on the South Bank; and even the usually earnest Leslie Martin recalled that ‘we did make a real effort to be jolly.’51 The pair might be surprised by the growing regard in which their jolly, hastily conceived schemes are held – symbols of a moment where, even in the midst of austerity, efforts to bring the country together to celebrate the best of the past and look ahead with excited eyes were not brought low by the cynicism of markets or media.

  Notes

  1 Daily Express, 18/4/51, p3

  2 Daily Mirror, 15/10/48, p1

  3 Patrick Abercrombie and J. H. Forshaw, County of London Plan, Macmillan, 1943, p130

  4 Patrick Abercrombie and J. H. Forshaw, p12

  5 Robert Matthew in Miles Glendinning, Robert Matthew, RIBA Publishing, p86

  6 Stuart Matthew, in Miles Glendinning, p93

  7 Leslie Martin in Nicholas Bullock, Building the Post-War World, Routledge, 2002, p62

  8 Hugh Casson in Nicholas Bullock, p70

  9 Basil Spence, Phoenix at Coventry, Geoffrey Bles, 1962, p13

  10 Basil Spence, p13

  11 Hugh Casson in Nicholas Bullock, p70

  12 H. T. Cadbury-Brown in Charlotte Mullins, A Festival on the River, Penguin, 2007, p48

  13 Laurie Lee in Barbara Hooper, Cider with Laurie, Peter Owen Publishers, 1999

  14 Jean Symons, Royal Festival Hall: Concert Hall Notebook, Festival Hall, 2000, p4

  15 Jean Symons, February 1950, p7

  16 Jean Symons, Royal Festival Hall: Concert Hall Notebook, Festival Hall, 2000, p4

  17 Miles Glendinning, p106

  18 Jean Symons, July 1950, p11

  19 Hugh Casson in Charlotte Mullins, p49

  20 Philip Powell in Kenneth Powell, Powell & Moya, RIBA Publishing, 2009, p33

  21 Jacko Moya in Kenneth Powell, p34

  22 Margaret Sheppard Fidler in Kenneth Powell, p36

  23 Barry Evans in Barry Turner, pxx

  24 Jean Symons, p4

  25 Jean Symons, p12, July 1950

  26 Le Corbusier in Miles Glendinning, p108

  27 Le Corbusier in John McKean, Royal Festival Hall, Phaidon, Second Edition 2001, p10

  28 John McKean, p61

  29 Picture Post, 5/5/51, p11

  30 Clough Williams-Ellis in Miles Glendinning, p107

  31 Jack Godfrey-Gilbert in Barry Turner, p170

  32 Patrick Abercrombie and J. H. Forshaw, p4

  33 Patrick Abercrombie and J. H. Forshaw, p9

  34 Frederick Gibberd, in Barry Turner, p174

  35 Robert Matthew in Miles Glendinning, p117

  36 Barry Turner, p53

  37 Frederick Gibberd in Barry Turner, p172

  38 Basil Spence, Phoenix at Coventry, Geoffrey Bles, 1962, p3

  39 Daily Mirror, 26/6/51, p2

  40 Daily Express, 18/4/51, p3

  41 Vere Hodgson in David Kynaston, Family Britain, Bloomsbury, 2009, p7

  42 Picture Post, 5/5/51, p13

  43 Picture Post, 5/5/51, p15

  44 Dylan Thomas in Charlotte Mullins, p63

  45 Architectural Review, November 1951, p283

  46 Manchester Guardian, 1/10/51, p7

  47 Daily Express, 8/12/51, p3

  48 Observer, 6/6/52, p4

  49 The Times, 23/7/74, p9

  50 Gerald Barry in David Kynaston, p8

  51 Leslie Martin in John McKean, p61

  i The following year Holden’s colossal 19-storey university building would form the inspiration for the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  ii Morley went on to monetise his Come Dancing format through a lucrative deal with Mecca dancehalls, ironically spearheading their demise as halls of dance, and conversion into temples of bingo.

  iii See Chapter 5

  4. ‘An Architect’s Dream!’

  REBUILDING BLITZED PLYMOUTH AND COVENTRY (1940–62)

  ‘I was only a couple of hundred yards away from here the night the Blitz started.’ Bob Chaney, a garrulous 92-year-old dressed in an airforce-blue blazer, his tie emblazoned with the Red Arrows and Concorde, met me in the Chapel of Unity at Coventry Cathedral. Alongside him, beaming beatifically at me, sat 89-year-old Irene, his wife. They made a great double act, Bob hamming up a pomposity he didn’t really have, Irene deflating it at every turn. Within minutes of sitting down he was recounting, in his rich, gravelly voice, the story of the night of 14 November 1940. ‘I was posting a letter to my brother, who was waiting to go on board ship out to the Middle East with the Army Service Corps. Sirens went, you see, and within five minutes I was encircled in flame all round the roofs of the centre of Broadgate.’ He was alone in the street apart from a few fire-watchers posted on the buildings of the city centre. ‘I thought the best was to high-tail it out of it!’ He turned to Irene. ‘I got up to where you were eventually.’

  ‘He was coming up to take me to a dance,’ said Irene.

  ‘But we never got there.’

  ‘Sat under our table instead,’ she said. ‘There were too many of us to get under our stairs.’ They relay all this in a light, matter-of-fact tone (‘You can’t live your life being afraid. You’ve just got to get on with it,’ Irene had told me) but Bob’s escape from the city centre was little short of miraculous. In fact, so unprecedented were the events of that night that they spawned a new word: to Coventrate, from the German Koventrieren, described the effects of a firestorm caused by aerial bombing. The Luftwaffe raid, codename ‘Moonlight Sonata’, killed 568 and injured over 1,000, leaving the industrial powerhouse, as one eyewitness described, ‘a city of the dead, utterly devastated’.

  Amazingly, the bombed-out local paper was able to get an edition printed within days, reporting what was to become one of the great emblematic acts of the Blitz:

  ‘The provost of Coventry (the very Rev. R. T. Howard) who, with a volunteer squad of three besides himself put out incendiary after incendiary at the Cathedral until sand and water were exhausted, said to a Coventry Standard reporter: “The Cathedral will rise again. It will be rebuilt and will be as great a pride to the generations of the future as to the generations of the past.”’1

  St Michael’s Cathedral, Coventry, in ruins after the Blitz of 14 November 1940. © Coventry Heritage & Arts Trust

  Bob and Irene felt the loss keenly – they’d both been regulars in the congregation since before the war. But the cathedral was just a small part of a much bigger story that unfolded that night, one that affected the entire population. I craned to hear Irene’s delicate whisper as she recounted her experiences:

  ‘There was a girl I worked with, Eva, and Bob knew the boyfriend. They went to the cinema in Primrose Hill Street, not far from here, and the sirens went in the middle of the film. And you had to make your mind up whether you were going to stay there or whether you were going to a shelter. If they’d have stayed in the theatre they’d have been safe. They came out and got killed, just like that. You’d go to work the next day and there’d be people missing, it was awful.’

  Bob, it transpired, still works part time for the Blitz Museum, situated in the crypt of the ruined cathedral next door: he is so involved that they both refer to it as ‘the Bob Chaney experience’. ‘When I talk about it to people who come to the museum,’ he tells me, ‘I say, unless you’ve actually lived through air raids you can never have any conception as to what it’s like.’ But he has a good go at conveying it.

  ‘A shredded bus here’ – aftermath of the Coventry Blitz, 1940. © Coventry Heritage & Arts Trust

  The aftermath too was terrible to endure. The following day Coventry City Council’s young deputy architect Percy Johnson-Marshall was at the spot Bob Chaney had been standing when the Blitz began. ‘In the morning, I walked up over piles of smouldering rubble to Broadgate.’ He saw ‘a shredded bus here, a c
ar balanced crazily on the roof of a ruined building there, and the cathedral, the library and nearly everything one could see was still burning and smouldering in great masses of devastation.’2 This wasteland was all that remained of the medieval streets that had been at the heart of the city: 60,000 buildings were either razed or damaged by the raid; 4,000 homes were utterly destroyed.

  ‘The centre of the city that night was wiped out,’ Irene told me, the awe still there in her voice. ‘The big stores and the whole of the market were flattened.’

  The reason for the raid was clear. ‘Taking the cathedral as a centre, within about a mile radius all round you had about 20 factories,’ said Bob. ‘So you see, Coventry was an obvious target.’

  The historic naval port of Plymouth held a similar attraction for the Luftwaffe. The first bombs fell on the Devon city on 6 July 1940 and the bombardment continued on and off until the end of April 1944. On 2 May 1941, after a series of heavy raids, Winston Churchill visited the city, newsreels capturing the naval-capped prime minister waving from an open-top car with a look of shock upon his face. His secretary Jock Colville recorded in his diary that ‘scarcely a house seems to be habitable.’ Over 4,000 houses were destroyed in the Plymouth Blitz, with a further 18,000 damaged. Churchill’s party were greeted by scenes similar to those seen by Percy Johnson-Marshall in Coventry: ‘I saw a bus which had been carried bodily by the force of the explosion, onto the roof of a building some 150 yards away from where it had been standing.’ As for the military efficacy of the bombing, Colville noted that ‘the whole city is wrecked except, characteristically, the important part of the naval establishment.’3

  Plymouth would end up the most intensely bombed British city in relation to its size: over 1,000 residents were killed in the Blitz and its population almost halved over the course of the war, as the raids made life intolerable. ‘The fabric of the city was shattered,’ recorded the official planning report. ‘Plymouth, bragged the Germans, had been wrecked beyond repair.’4 Thousands fled from the city in fear, never to return, but the legend of the plucky Brit in wartime was cemented by stories such as the one printed in Picture Post some years later, which reported that ‘after the raids people gathered on the Hoe, looked back on the tracery of blackened roofs, struck up the military band – and danced.’5 The wartime press, too, had played up this ‘bulldog spirit’ and passed silently over the terror and despair felt by many.

  Many British towns and cities were devastated by bombing. The London Blitz lasted 76 consecutive nights. Industrial cities such as Manchester, Glasgow, Belfast and Birmingham suffered raids, as did the ports of Cardiff, Hull, Liverpool and Bristol. The clear-up operation would be immense and severely limited until the war was over, but that didn’t stop plans being drawn up to inspire thoughts of a peaceful and brightly modern future. In fact, many of these cities had already had great plans for rebuilding well before the war started, and none were more advanced than those for Coventry.

  Donald Gibson wasn’t yet 30 when he was appointed city architect in 1938. He was part of a young generation who were keen to stress the link between town planning and architecture, and his background, working for the experimental, government-funded Building Research Station, put him at the forefront of the latest thinking in the field. Gibson appointed a dynamic new team, and Percy Johnson-Marshall became his assistant the same year: ‘A few of us went to help start the new office, and we went bursting with ideas; ideas about prefabrication in building, about new kinds of housing layout, about carrying good design into every detail of the townscape, and about making the whole city a collective work of art.’6

  Such cutting-edge attitudes might have seemed extraordinary for a council running a city with a historic medieval fabric, but that fabric had seriously frayed. At the start of the twentieth century, Coventry’s population was under 70,000. By 1941 it was approaching 200,000, an increase of 279 percent in just 40 years, more than any other town in the country over the same period. The main reason was the invention of the motorcar. Coventry had become Britain’s Detroit, the centre for the car manufacturing industry.

  Bob and Irene, who have observed the city change around them over the last nine decades, recalled how the war effort triggered a further population explosion. ‘It was at that time that Coventry completely changed,’ said Bob.

  ‘Up until then we had all the motorcar factories, well, anything that could be made was made in Coventry. Towards the end of ’38 and ’39 we had a terrific influx into the city. We had all the car workers on to assembling parts for aircraft and tanks and whatnot. Alvis wanted to do their tanks, and all the same with the Daimler. All round they were swapping over to aircraft. And so there was a terrific influx into Coventry. Coventry changed at that point, because we had different people coming in. Where we lived we hadn’t got a road, we’d got a cart track, and we were more or less at the edge of Coventry. Now Coventry goes way beyond.’

  Gibson and team were charged with rescuing the medieval streets from strangulation by traffic; in Percy Johnson-Marshall’s words, the prewar city had ‘some very fine buildings which very few people care about,’ and ‘streets designed for a fraction of the traffic which now clogs them’.7 In the immediate aftermath of the Blitz, Gibson spoke to the Midlands Daily Telegraph about his already advanced plans for the city. ‘Over a year and a half ago I prepared a civic centre scheme which, grouped round the two noble medieval churches, embodied all the public buildings in one ordered conception, at the same time suggesting a central park space, which is so badly needed.’8 Gibson’s plan was the radical architectural embodiment of the social changes that had hit the city in the last few decades. In place of the medieval streets, Gibson planned a new rationalised network of roads that would leave a few historic buildings isolated within a landscaped park or ‘pedestrian gardenway’.9

  The scheme brought together a variety of influences: most notably the gentle form of Scandinavian modernism that had so captivated the new town planners, and the beaux arts tradition, whose formality had influenced the grid layouts in cities as diverse as Paris and Welwyn Garden. In June 1940, five months before the Blitz, Gibson and Johnson-Marshall had staged an exhibition of their plan. It featured new buildings such as a daring pedestrianised shopping centre, and civic amenities including a library, art gallery, swimming baths, police station and town hall. It also factored new green spaces into the densely built-up centre, and surrounded it all with a ring road to ease the motor city’s congestion.

  ‘There is a great opportunity here for the rebuilding of Britain to begin,’ the Manchester Guardian declared, resurrecting Gibson’s plan a mere week after the Blitz. The exhibition model of Gibson’s new civic centre was described as ‘a plan for a hundred years instead of tomorrow,’ with the architect quoted as remarking that the opportunity the Blitz afforded was ‘an architect’s dream’.10 A couple of weeks later Gibson gave a talk, reprinted in the Midlands Daily Telegraph, where he expanded on this theme. ‘In one night the entire site is cleared ready for this regeneration, and it rests with the fortunes of war and the desires of a great people to see it accomplished.’11

  In 1941 John Reith was still in his post as First Commissioner of Works for the government, and he encouraged Coventry’s city reconstruction committee to ‘plan boldly and comprehensively’.12 The Labour council were smitten with Gibson’s bold vision. Yet there was an alternative. City engineer Ernest Ford prepared a far less drastic plan that left many more of the buildings and roads intact. Businesses, notably the shopkeepers, were keen. The prospect of a pedestrianised shopping precinct seemed alien and threatening, and they were reassured by Ford’s more conventional plan. ‘Shopkeepers, generally, have fought the introduction of precinct planning in Great Britain,’ wrote Coventry’s planning officer, Wilfred Burns, some years later, ‘but this has been largely due to the inevitable reluctance to accept change.’13

  Just months after V. E. Day, in October 1945, Gibson held another public exhibition of his plans, c
alled ‘Coventry of the Future’. It was estimated that one in four Coventrians saw the exhibition; one recalled that ‘whatever they proposed to do in the rebuilding you just went along with it in a zombie-like fashion’.14 The new Labour government in Westminster were less enamoured of Gibson’s plans, due to spending restrictions and a national shortage of materials. They demanded cuts, and in 1949 finally approved a much scaled-down plan – but one nevertheless that saw the creation of three comprehensive development areas, like those in the East End where the Festival of Britain’s Live Architecture Exhibition was held: there was the central area; the district of Spon End, to be cleared for the inner ring road and homes for a projected 1,790 residents; and Hillfields, another residential estate.

  If the business community had been wary of Gibson’s huge plan, they were won over by his scheme to double the square footage of shops in the centre. Owen Owen, the Co-op, Woolworths, Marks & Spencer and British Home Stores were among the first slated to move in, just as soon as the new structures could get off the ground.

  ‘The city should be the focal point for the diffused rays of the many separate beams of life; it should be the centre of culture and learning, of entertainment and the market,’ was how Patrick Abercrombie, arguably the most influential and respected town planner in Britain during the twentieth century, saw it. Along with many of his generation, he felt the Industrial Revolution had turned the city ‘into something more like a labour pool for the large industrial works – soulless and meaningless’.15 It was his job to change that. Documentary maker Jill Craigie’s 1946 film The Way We Live, followed him as he worked out his plan for Plymouth. She showed a tall, slim, immaculately dressed and inscrutable man stiffly stalking through the Victorian remains and rubble-strewn wreckage with the cool detachment of a spy scouring a war zone, his spotty bow tie the one incongruous detail. He looked like William Burroughs with a monocle. A professor, first in Liverpool, then at London University, he was invited by cities as diverse as London, Bath, Glasgow, Hull, Edinburgh and Bournemouth to produce plans for their reconstruction. Abercrombie drew his inspiration from the beaux arts movement, which had influenced the monumental grids not just of Paris, but American cities such as Chicago. These newly laid-out cities, along with New York and its skyscrapers, had left the old world of Europe behind. ‘We in America are more used to new building and radical planning,’ wrote the U. S. Ambassador John G. Winant in the introduction to Abercrombie’s plan for Plymouth. ‘Our greater spaces, our shorter traditions make it less painful and less difficult to construct and reconstruct.’16 A recurring theme of The Way We Live was the envy felt by some locals towards the New World and its greater possibilities for innovation.