Concretopia

by Grindrod, John

  I went on a tour round the city led by Jeremy Gould, an energetic architecture professor and leading light of the Twentieth Century Society, an organisation which, according to their website, ‘exists to safeguard the heritage of architecture and design in Britain from 1914 onwards’. Plymouth was the second of Abercrombie’s great plans, and Jeremy was in no doubt that it was the most comprehensive of all his schemes. In Plymouth, Abercrombie had the opportunity to design the city he’d been teaching about for decades. First published in 1943, A Plan for Plymouth, was co-written by James Paton Watson, the city architect, and it was he who would be responsible for putting its ideas into practice.

  In The Way We Live, Paton Watson was a striking contrast to the dapper, crisp Abercrombie. His smooth Dundee accent and more down-home manner acted as a bridge between the highfalutin tones of the Professor and the pre-scripted vernacular of the Plymouth townsfolk. The plan was certainly ambitious: the 114 Blitzed acres in the city centre provided a space in which, they declared, ‘man must show what he is capable of in the way of artificial design for purpose and delight.’17 The pair were keen to rise to the challenge. ‘This magnificent opportunity,’ they wrote, echoing the optimism of Donald Gibson in Coventry, ‘should result in the creation of a virile Regional Capital.’18 As with the Midlands city, the plan set out to solve the problems not just of war damage, but various other ills of the modern age – most notably slums, overcrowding and road traffic – ‘to build better not only what has been destroyed, but also parts which, although left intact, are no longer worthy of her glorious past and her present heroism’. Their job was no less than ‘to obtain a maximum of health, safety, convenience, prosperity and enjoyment of everyone’.19

  There were major problems to overcome. ‘Most of the houses in Plymouth were antiquated without the quality of antiquity,’20 was their sniffy view of the mainly Victorian residential areas. Then there was the central junction at St Andrew’s Cross, judged to have the worst congestion of anywhere in the south outside of London. In Craigie’s film, Abercombie dryly refers to this bottleneck as ‘the ideal street for getting knocked over’.21 He and Paton Watson aimed to unknot the tangle by separating the city into different ‘functions’, along the same lines as the new towns.

  Yet they saw their role as going far beyond mere problem-solving: they were also determined to create the kind of huge statement that only someone re-planning a city centre from scratch could make. To this end they envisaged a grand symmetrical city centre, based around a single main road which led from the railway station right down to the Hoe, that historic ground where Sir Francis Drake had been casually playing bowls as the Spanish Armada gathered. The drama of this grand vista would be accentuated by placing the two sides of the street a full 200 yards apart, with gardens planted down the centre for the entire length of the shopping section. Abercrobie and Paton Watson saw the vista as a grand memorial for those who lost their lives in the Blitz. It would be rebuilt in cheerful bright white limestone and concrete, materials that would shine in the seaside sunlight. The Way We Live flashed up their drawings and models in the way Hollywood films dramatically cut to newspaper headlines or animated maps to illustrate the epic scale of their story. The stripped classical style would create an impressive pattern of smooth white surfaces, and the grid pattern had the captivating formality of a topiary maze within a landscaped garden. Even the inner ring road formed a dignified part of the symmetrical whole.

  The Way We Live also showed the town’s reconstruction committee. Perhaps the most telling detail was not what was said, but who said it: elderly bald men slugged it out with older, balder men, like withered bull seals fighting for territory. I spotted one woman in a room of 40 or so councillors. She didn’t speak. The film shows a motion to water down the plan being overwhelmingly rejected by the committee, who were keen to begin work as soon as possible. In July 1946, The Times reported that ‘Plymouth city council has taken what is believed to be the first step of its kind by any blitzed city towards acquiring a large area of the land needed for reconstruction,’ at an estimated cost of £20 million: 178 acres in the centre of the city were to be bought in what the newspaper called ‘the first executive operation prescribed in the mechanism of compulsory purchase’.22

  James Paton Watson was less excited by the rate of progress, and Jill Craigie’s film records the still-existing acres of rubble, rickety and overcrowded houses, as well as that classic emotive forties trope of mop-capped toddlers plonked out to play in bleak cobbled streets. The town planner decided to stir things up a bit, and succeeded in creating a very public spat: ‘After four years we in Plymouth are still looking at ruins,’ he wrote in the Observer. ‘We expected great things not only in our city centre but on our new estates, but so far they have not materialised.’ He complained that ‘we were advised to plan boldly’ but later ‘to narrow our streets, to whittle down our cross-sections, to amend our designs and forget our foresight because the Treasury again controls all things and says that open spaces are of no use unless they can be trodden on’.23 The minister Lewis Silkin hit back, describing local authorities like Plymouth and Coventry as ‘very backward in making up their minds’ despite his having ‘spent months trying to hurry them up’. Litigation in Plymouth appeared to have been one of the biggest problems, with 370 objections from local property owners to be dealt with. As regards the changes he’d proposed to Abercrombie and Paton Watson’s original designs, Silkin remarked acidly that he knew ‘only two people who would say that the plan was perfect and must not be changed’.24

  Progress may have seemed frustratingly slow, but Plymouth was the first of the Blitzed cities to complete its public enquiry into its rebuilding plans. On its release Jill Craigie’s film broke all box office records in the city. The period she spent making it would also change her life, for it was then that she met her future husband, the young firebrand MP Michael Foot.

  One symbol of reconstruction soared above the rest in the national consciousness. The provost of Coventry Cathedral’s defiant cry that it would rise again was almost instantaneously followed by the engagement of the nation’s most celebrated living architect, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. He was a scion of a Victorian architectural dynasty: his grandfather Sir George Gilbert Scott had created such masterpieces as St Pancras Station and the Albert Memorial. Giles himself was the versatile designer not only of Liverpool’s colossal Anglican Cathedral but also Battersea and Bankside power stations, and the ubiquitous K2 red telephone box.

  Yet the problem of what to do with the site at Coventry, particularly with the skeletal remains of the bombed out medieval cathedral with its pencil-thin spire, was not an easy one to solve. Gilbert Scott was keen to place the altar at the centre of a cross-shaped cathedral. ‘It should be centrally placed on the main axis of the new plan so that it stands in the centre of the main approach,’ he wrote in The Times in February 1944, before moving on to discuss the difficulties of achieving this: ‘The present limitations of the site prevent this, and the plans are put forward with the hope that it may be possible to adjust the boundaries of the site.’25 His doubts were confirmed when the Royal Fine Art Commission expressed its dissatisfaction with the scheme two years later, whereupon Scott bowed out, claiming he was too old to supervise such a large project. In fact, he died some fourteen years later, midway through his work on a small Roman Catholic church in the centre of Plymouth.

  In 1947 a competition was launched to design the new cathedral. On the face of it, the brief was wide open: ‘No restrictions are placed upon Competitors as to style or materials to be used in any of the building,’26 went the blurb on the entry booklet. Yet the awkward site and the problem of what to do with the old cathedral had already been enough to see off the most prominent architect of the day.

  Nevertheless, 219 architects and practices were inspired to enter. One flamboyant young man was particularly obsessed with cathedral architecture, and went to visit the site for inspiration in 1950. ‘This first visit
to the ruined cathedral was one of the most deeply stirring and moving days I have ever spent,’27 wrote Basil Spence of his fact-finding trip. Spence’s instinct was that the old cathedral should not be destroyed to make way for the new; rather, the two would have to co-exist, a vast architectural representation of the death and resurrection of Christ. As he looked out from the north end of the ruin to the ground reserved for the new cathedral, Spence ‘got one of those pictures that architects sometimes get. This one, however, was unusually clear – a great nave and an altar that was an invitation to Communion, and a huge picture behind it. … I could not see the altar clearly but through the bodies of the Saints. In those few moments the idea of the design was planted. In essence it never changed.’28

  The competition came at a busy time for Spence. During the winter of 1950 he was hard at work troubleshooting his design piece for the Festival of Britain, the Sea and Ships Pavilion. The cathedral was relegated to an evening project. The stress gave him an abscess, but the drugs he was prescribed induced a dream that further embellished his vision – or at the very least, the myth. ‘I was walking through the cathedral and it looked marvellous,’ he wrote. ‘I could not see windows until I went right in and turned half back – the walls were zigzagged.’30 And zigzagged the walls of his eventual design certainly were. At the last moment Spence had second thoughts about entering his design, but Joan, his wife, gave this idea short shrift. ‘You have sweated all these months,’ she said. ‘You hand in and don’t be such an ass.’31

  All 219 entries were displayed at King Henry VIII School, Coventry in August 1951. One entry was from hardline modernist Arthur Korn, a German émigré and associate of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. Korn had spent much of the war imprisoned as an enemy alien, but when the British authorities released him he became a prominent member of the Modern Architecture Research Group (MARS), working on the MARS plan for London. This extraordinary project reimagined the city as a series of ‘herringbones’ radiating out to the north and south of the Thames ‘spine’. Each herringbone consisted of the sort of buildings advocated by Le Corbusier – namely, high blocks – and between each one was a large strip of parkland. As this plan would have necessitated the demolition of most of London it was a bit of a non-starter, and Korn focused instead on his new and influential job as lecturer at the Architectural Association.

  Perhaps the most ambitious entry of all was from the couple set to become the enfants terribles of British architecture, the newly-married Alison and Peter Smithson. They were keen to prove that modernism could be every bit as spiritual as more traditional forms, and visualised something that was both as high tech as jet planes and as starkly monolithic as Stonehenge: a vast kite-like shelter that soared above a platform containing the open box of the chapel.

  On 15 August 1951, two days after his forty-fourth birthday and while the Festival of Britain was in full swing, Spence was at Associated Electrical Industries drumming up trade when he received a phone call telling him he’d won. The electrical company’s reaction was immediate: drinks all round. ‘I could have done with some strong whisky,’ remarked Spence, ‘but perhaps George Walker was thinking “Cathedral”, for all I got was dry sherry.’32 He was overwhelmed to have won such a major commission, and was soon the recipient of both hearty congratulations and fruity insults from all corners of the press and public.

  ‘We were sold on it because Provost Howard was so keen,’ Irene Chaney, who’d initially been taken aback by the drawings, told me. ‘And when he talked to us, our little nucleus of congregation – he’d got a talk he did with the drawings – we were all sold on it really.’

  ‘We thought it’d be good,’ nodded Bob.

  ‘We weren’t condemning it out of hand,’ explained Irene, ‘because you don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Not all of the people who saw the drawings felt the same. Spence was completely unprepared for the volume of hate mail he received. ‘Some did not even have stamps,’ he wrote, ‘which shocked me as a Scot.’33

  ‘You could imagine that building to be an abattoir, a cinema, anything, but not a church,’ said Bob of the initial reactions.

  ‘Oh, the things that were said …’ Irene shook her head, smiling at the memory of the more colourful insults.

  ‘Everybody took a great dislike to it. Even doing tours of the cathedral as I’ve done in the past 10 years there’s still quite a number of people who couldn’t accept Coventry Cathedral.’

  ‘Because it’s so different,’ said Irene.

  ‘The old was beautiful,’ said Bob, ‘it really was. To see this one, no. Mind you, I did have an accolade one day, when a lady came round at the end of a tour and she says, well, she says, “I’ll be quite honest. I hate modern art. But since I’ve been round with you I can now understand it. Thank you very much.”’ He paused for a moment. ‘I know I’ve got a big head … But everyone we’ve talked to really appreciated what the cathedral means.’

  From the moment of victory on, Basil Spence and his design were public property. The dandyish architect took both fame and notoriety in his stride. He put a model, revised through consultation with the cathedral provost, on display at the 1952 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, a show that featured other major postwar architectural developments: there was a model of Frederick Gibberd’s Festival of Britain Chrisp Street Market in east London, and Alwyn Sheppard-Fidler’s ‘gaily coloured’ drawing of the shopping centre for the new town at Crawley. No sooner had this model been displayed than Spence produced a further major revision. ‘Mr Spence, in announcing the amendments, said that they resulted from impressions he gained while visiting Italy recently,’ wrote The Times. In fact they came at the suggestion of engineer Ove Arup.34 Meanwhile Provost Howard and his flock, including Bob and Irene, made do, using the two crypt chapels in the ruins until the new cathedral was ready.

  The individual, often anonymous objections Basil and Joan Spence received through the post were one thing, but a more tangible and formidable opponent soon began to make its feelings felt. The council were dead set against the scheme from the start, claiming it would take away much-needed money, manpower and resources from the urgent rebuilding of the fabric of the city. ‘Houses must have priority after the war,’ had been the Bishop of Coventry’s entirely reasonable call in 1944.35 The council jumped on this and opposed the cathedral plan all the way, even taking their argument to the House of Commons.

  In the event Coventry Council never had to put a penny towards the cost of the new cathedral. They were wholly immersed in their own mighty challenge: to reconstruct the entire city centre and rehouse its population. One of their first acts was to commission a statue of Coventry’s most famous daughter, Lady Godiva, by Sir William Reid Dick to occupy the devastated Broadgate site. In front of it a new shopping centre began to grow up, on an avenue that lined up beautifully with the cathedral spire in the symmetrical beaux arts manner. By 1953 a dual-level shopping precinct along American lines had been completed. Where cars had once driven on Coventry’s narrow medieval streets, trees were planted on this pedestrianised precinct. The separation of pedestrians and vehicles was meant to cut the shockingly high number of road traffic accidents. In Jill Craigie’s film, Abercrombie points out that the number of wartime casualties on the roads exceeded those of civilian bombing. Coventry’s traffic-free precinct was at the cutting edge: it even preceded those in the new towns of Stevenage and Harlow. Here gentle Scandinavian-influenced red-brick modernism was perked up with the odd playful Festival of Britain-style flourish: a mural here, a sculptural clock there, and concrete planters everywhere.

  The materials shortage that held back construction at Coventry had been, to some extent, avoided in Plymouth, where the rebuilding schemes were quicker off the mark. A snapshot taken in January 1951 shows how busy the city had been with reconstruction: new branches of Woolworths, Dolcis, Norwich Union and three schemes for the Co-op were all nearly complete. Building contractors Bovis were confidently predicting that a new M&S
would be open by Christmas.

  James Paton Watson had employed Thomas Tait, the eminent Scottish architect of Selfridges and Sydney Harbour Bridge, to set the style for the town centre, ensuring that all new development followed some basic rules – such as setting the size of blocks and the height of cornice lines – so that his vision of beaux arts symmetry would be realised.

  Thomas Tait set the rules for the rebuilding of Plymouth’s town centre on Armada Way.

  Steel was often the deciding factor in whether these grand schemes were built or remained forever on the drawing board. In 1951 a spokesman from one of Britain’s leading steel producers was quoted as saying that the steel position was ‘growing exceedingly complex’ and that it was ‘difficult to forecast from one month to another what priorities would be allocated by the government.’36 In this increasingly complex and bureaucratic world, Plymouth council were anxiously pushing on, aware that the brakes could be slammed on at any moment.