The housing situation was the most pressing. ‘The housing figures for the country were short of what was promised in 1945,’ thundered Sir Clifford Tozer, leader of the Conservative party in Plymouth city council, who appeared in Jill Craigie’s 1946 documentary sporting an Anthony Eden moustache along with more than a little pomposity. ‘Instead of 500,000 or 600,000 houses a year, something like 200,000 houses were built last year. The Conservatives had promised 300,000 if they returned to power. In western Germany 350,000 had been built in less than a year.’37 This magic number of 300,000 was the vote-winning brainchild of the Tories’ ambitious new housing spokesman, Harold Macmillan. But with materials and skilled workers both short on the ground, it sounded like a fantasy figure rather than one that was actually achievable.
Even so, the building contractors were hard at work. Laing were creating new housing estates using an unconventional method they’d devised called Easiform, where concrete was poured into frames on site to create the walls, to be given a pebble-dashed coating later. By January 1951 they’d used it to complete their thousandth house in Plymouth. Easiform was created in response to George Wimpey’s hugely popular (with councils, at least) ‘No-Fines’ construction technique, where coarse concrete was set in house-shaped moulds. It would become the most ubiquitous modern form of house building in Britain.
When Dingles, the first of the rebuilt shops in Plymouth, opened in 1951, 40,000 shoppers descended on the store on its first day.
In September 1951, Plymouth’s town centre received its biggest boost yet. The first postwar department store, Dingles, designed by Thomas Tait, opened on a prominent corner of Armada Way. Forty thousand shoppers descended on the store on its opening day, 1 September. ‘Plymouth people this week have been mutely testifying to years of frustration by standing six deep to stare at a Dingles’ window full of unremarkable tinned goods,’38 the Observer reported cattily. The article also touched on the Conservative council’s frustrations at having its wings clipped by the Labour government’s building controls. ‘The city points out that it is not now asking for more public money to spend, but simply that private builders should be allowed to spend money of their own.’39 When the Tories won the general election two months later, many expected these controls to be swiftly removed, but when Macmillan, now the minister responsible for housing, inspected Plymouth in 1952 he found a city still chomping at the bit for more freedom. ‘We visited housing sites all the morning; visited the “Blitzed” areas all the afternoon,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I could give out no news about reconstruction … This “Capital Investment Programme” is really intolerable.’40 The Treasury-inspired programme was the cap on local government spending for reconstruction, a limit that threatened to undermine Macmillan’s promised 300,000 houses a year.
Yet despite the frustration felt by many of its citizens, Plymouth was doing relatively well. When in 1954 Architecture Journal published a review of comparative progress in the bombed cities, Plymouth’s quick start put them ahead of the field by a country mile. They’d succeeded in attracting a great deal of skilled builders to the city, with one man in 12 employed in the construction industry (in laggardly Coventry, the figure was less than one man in 50). The city had restored 40 percent of business premises and constructed 46 new dwellings per 1,000 inhabitants.41 This was also the year the ten thousandth council house was completed. In 1954, Plymouth was on a roll.
On 7 March 1955, a group of workmen in Coventry made their way through the unseasonably late driving snow to finally make a start on construction of the cathedral.
‘We watched every stone being laid,’ said Bob.
By this point my imagination was beginning to invest the Chaneys with some form of divine power: a pair of It’s A Wonderful Life-style angels watching over the cathedral’s reconstruction.
‘When Princess Elizabeth laid the foundation stone we were in the congregation,’ said Irene. ‘The only thing we didn’t attend was the unveiling of the St Michael and the Devil, but that was very quiet and that was Lady Epstein. Hadn’t he just died?’ she asked Bob of the sculptor Sir Joseph Epstein. No response. ‘I can’t remember. He never saw it installed. But everything else, yes.’
The contractors, John Laing, were wholly committed to the project: the company had secretly decided to put all of its profit from the job back into a donation for St Michael’s. The eminent engineer Ove Arup had been appointed to turn Basil Spence’s design into something that could be built. His skill transformed aspects of the original plan into something even more exciting. ‘The problem is not just to design an efficient and economical roof spanning 80 feet,’ he wrote in The Times. ‘It is to create a visual impact, to create abstract sculpture, if you like.’42 He spoke of the building’s ‘structural honesty’: a modernist preoccupation with not disguising the inner structure of an edifice, preferring, for example, to expose the steel frame supporting a building to concealing it with brick or stone.
Even so, the cathedral contains many tricks of structural ‘dishonesty’, used to great effect: most notably, perhaps, the concrete pillars that terminate a few inches above the floor to reveal a narrow steel strut inside, connecting earth to pillar like the spark zapping between God and man on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. The struts are there simply for effect, but the effect is beautiful, more than compensating for any ‘dishonesty’.
Spence commissioned a wide range of artworks for the cathedral, from windows to sculpture, engravings to ironwork. One of the most remarkable was the Great West Screen, designed and etched by the New Zealand artist John Hutton; on it, a host of angels appear to hang between the old and new cathedrals. This vast window, encompassing the whole of the west wall of the cathedral, was constructed by Crittall, an Essex company better known for producing modern, steel home and office window frames. Its proud advert ran that it had been ‘eight years in the planning and making, the technical design and construction carried out in its entirety by Crittall’.43 Then there was John Piper’s celebrated Baptistry Window design, depicting a burst of sunlight radiating outwards: it was as colourful and exuberant as John Hutton’s creation was ghostly and pale.
Spence’s zigzagged walls each contained a series of slender floor-to-ceiling stained glass windows completed by a number of artists. Three sections had been finished by the month construction started, March 1955. The following year the windows went on display at the V&A, prompting a visiting Bermondsey housewife to exclaim, ‘they’re different, all right – but they’re beautiful.’44 For a time these windows were housed in the basement, or undercroft – the first section of the new cathedral to be completed. There they created a temporary Chapel of the Cross for the loyal congregation, which included Bob and Irene.
‘As soon as the cathedral had got up to floor level we consecrated the offices underneath,’ said Bob, ‘and we had that as our Chapel of the Cross. We were attending services in here before it had a roof on. It was an absolute building site. They had all the scaffolding up. Once you get the zigzags going up you realise what you can’t see on a drawing: what the windows are going to be like and the effect of the windows. And the effect of the windows is really absolutely wonderful. I mean, now I’ve got nothing but praise for the whole lot. I feel it was a privilege being associated with it while it was being built.’
The undercroft was consecrated at lunchtime on New Year’s Eve, 1958. ‘Workmen’s voices were raised in unison at lunchtime today to sing the first hymn – “All People that on Earth do Dwell” – ever heard in Coventry’s new cathedral,’45 reported the Coventry Evening Telegraph. Later that night a televised service was broadcast by the BBC to a curious nation.
The unrivalled coup de grâce of theatrical flourishes came four years later, when Basil Spence engaged the RAF to lift the flèche, the aerial-like bronze spire, to the top of the finished cathedral. ‘Helicopter experts of No. 38 Group Transport Command believe that it can be done by one of the latest Westland Belvedere Mark 1 twin-engined helicop
ters,’46 reported The Times amidst a flurry of media excitement about payloads, wind-speed and turbulence. In April 1962, Squadron Leader J. R. Dowling, the pilot, failed at his first attempt, because it was too windy, but managed it on his second. Coventry had finally regained its cathedral.
Donald Gibson left Coventry in 1955. He was replaced by ex-London County Council planner Arthur Ling, who’d been Arthur Korn’s chief helper on his fantastical MARS Plan for London. By 1961 Coventry had twice as many cars per head as the national average, and the inner ring road had become a busy urban motorway. Its effect on the centre is most apparent if you walk from Coventry train station to the shopping precinct.
You set out from the beautiful white-tiled, wood-detailed and marble-floored 1962 train station – a tribute to the modernist white villas of the thirties, with flat roofs generously overhanging an expansive glass frontage – and soon you’re crossing under a long, low section of motorway, the civic gardens ahead framed in a letterbox format by the underpass. Suspended above, the busy local and through roads wind and swing, while you climb stairs and descend ramps in a vast non-place created by the tangled motorway loops. It’s a relief to reach the precinct, with its monumental concrete murals and colourful mosaics, its slate and brick-clad squares – and its thorough lack of cars.
The vast, tangled moats of traffic restlessly circling the precinct were perhaps an unavoidable consequence of separating pedestrian and vehicle so thoroughly in the motor city. Many citizens appreciated the tranquillity of the centre. ‘It was always pleasant to go in the precinct and do your shopping,’ recalled one Coventry resident interviewed some years after it was built. ‘You know, there was places where you could sit, there was the trees, there was the flowers, there was the shops, and like I say, there was no traffic. It was great. And it was very modern.’47
Ling added two residential tower blocks to Gibson’s resolutely low-rise city centre, deliberately messing with the beaux arts symmetry in order to create a less formal vista. His freer style wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. ‘I still think that Gibson’s idea would still have been the best here,’ says Bob. ‘Because what he envisaged was to have an open vista right from St James’s Church right up to the cathedral. But now they’ve got all the blocks in between.’
Coventry’s shopping centre was trail-blazing in more ways than one: not only was it pedestrianised but it was built on two levels. This latter development turned out to be rather too ahead of its time. Not enough thought had been given to how shoppers were to be encouraged to visit the upper levels. With no lifts, escalators or ramps, those with prams, heavy shopping or mobility problems were effectively barred from the upper level, and many of the shops there closed until facilities improved.
In Plymouth, the reconstructed city centre had created a consumer boom. By 1954 Dingles reported takings of three times what they needed to break even. The big chains which moved into the shiny new units were a runaway hit, but small businesses suffered. ‘Every new shop in Plymouth is taking business from someone else,’ commented Mr Knight, an out-of-pocket jeweller, to Picture Post, as he looked over the impressive Portland stone façades of Armada Way. ‘Maybe I’ll have to move to a small market town.’48 It was an early indication of the whirlwind that would transform the high street over the following 50 years.
Other problems began to surface. Unemployment in the town was running at twice the national average because of the lack of industry catered for in the reconstruction. Only three postwar factories had been built – for Bush radio, Berketex clothing and toolmakers Tecalemit. Yet for those lucky enough to find employment, the rebuilt centre offered the post-austerity consumer a wide array of treats. And James Paton Watson had certainly seen off the overcrowding of the old Victorian centre. ‘Even on Saturday afternoons there’s plenty of room on the pavements,’ commented one happy local. ‘Even in the rush hours the traffic never jams.’49
It’s remarkable how evident the postwar plan still is in today’s Plymouth. The plastic signs and corporate logos of the shops are still framed by Thomas Tait’s strict rules for cornice lines and block size. The vast boulevard of Armada Way has been pedestriansed, and retains a vestige of a garden running down the centre. The original garden, Jeremy Gould explained on our tour, had been exactly the same width as the central reservations in Welwyn Garden City; this suddenly made sense, because the rebuilding of Plymouth belonged more to the interwar mania for beaux arts planning and stripped classicism than the postwar hankering for informality and asymmetry.
A two-flagpole McDonalds.
The shopping area feels too big for the city; too spread out. As in Welwyn, a surfeit of space saps energy: twice the population are needed to make it work. The abundance of white stone and classical grandeur give the lethargic and empty centre a vaguely Olympian – or post-Olympian – feel. Even the spaces behind buildings, such as the loading bays for shops, are vast. The town that Abercrombie and Paton Watson built was handsome and clean, but also fatally lowenergy, with no bustle. By the late forties a new generation of architects and planners was already emerging to challenge this becalmed and formal way of building towns. ‘“Before the war it was a picturesque town,”’ one resident told Picture Post. ‘“Now it’s a draughty barracks … We call that place,” (nodding to Armada Way) “‘Pneumonia Corner’. On a winter’s day it’s as cold as charity.”’50
Yet I can see what enthuses Jeremy Gould about the city. These grand vistas and handsome classical buildings are a unique monument to a very important moment in recent history. The symmetry is, in its way, beguiling, and the detail and pride taken with the rebuilding is a delight, albeit a faded one. I have never seen so many flagpoles. Every building seems to have at least one. McDonalds has two. Then there are the numerous pretty nautical reliefs carved into the pale stone. The most controversial building of the reconstruction was the last to appear: the multi-storey Civic Centre. This tall 1962 office block, complete with water garden and rooftop restaurant, is a handsome knock-off of the United Nations headquarters. It was designed by Hector Stirling, then city architect. The current council hate it so much that they’ve covered great chunks of it with apparently purposeless scaffolding in some form of futile self-harm. They seem to be hoping for the centre to be razed again, so they can rebuild in the mode of the day once more.
By 1961 preparations for the opening of the cathedral of St Michael at Coventry were well advanced. The midlands regional television station ABC threw a ball at which they announced a £5,000 gift, while Sacha Distel and Ted Heath and his orchestra performed. The BBC donated some television lights and set up a temporary radio studio in the building, soon replaced by a permanent broadcasting studio in the undercroft. A festival of the arts was organised, and the new works commissioned included a new cantata by the master of the Queen’s Music and two new operas. There were productions from the Royal Opera House, the Royal Ballet, Sadler’s Wells, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Royal Shakespeare Company. The Coventry mystery plays were performed. Over 2,000 people squeezed in for the consecration ceremony on 25 May 1962, including the Queen, Lord Snowdon, Princess Margaret, representatives of Lutheran and Reform churches from Germany, and government ministers including Duncan Sandys and John Profumo. Bob took the collection.
‘On consecration day,’ said Bob, ‘someone looked at me, I’ve been told, and they said, “He has come! He is here!”’
‘And then they found out their mistake when he went round with the plate,’ interjected Irene.
‘You see, the Chaney experience…’ Bob shook his head. It must have been an amazing and memorable occasion, I suggested.
Basil Spence’s Coventry Cathedral, in 2011.
‘You couldn’t see anything,’ said Irene. ‘We were on the end of a row with all the bishops. We were on about row four or five. We did see Richard Dimbleby coming round and looking before he went off. And when the Queen came up all the bishops went’ – to demonstrate, she stood up and leant forward, craning her neck. ‘
We didn’t stand a chance! We had a vague feeling of what colour she was wearing.’ Dr Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, declared the new cathedral ‘a house in which all the arts and the craftsmanship of their time had united; stone, wood, glass, metal, tapestry; the designer, the builder, the painter, the sculptor, a generation had made its offering of beauty in the service of God’.51 By 11 June, 300,000 visitors had flocked to the cathedral, with up to 20,000 in a single evening. Irene was still overwhelmed by the response from the public. The cathedral was mobbed.
‘Five deep right up to Broadgate,’ she said. ‘Five deep! And nobody asked for money and everybody gave. And they paid off the bill for the cathedral just like that.’
Contemporary reactions remained mixed, though rather more enthusiastic than when the plans had been unveiled. ‘Although the cathedral may look like a jam factory outside,’ wrote Susanne Hughes from Loughborough, ‘there is much to commend inside.’52 P. D. Patel, a worker at GEC in Coventry, found it ‘a very nice building … I have seen temples in Delhi, and I would compare it with them.’53 ‘I think this cathedral is wonderful,’ said retired commercial traveller, Mr J. Williams, reflecting the go-ahead spirit of the age with the provocative thought that ‘the old cathedrals are outdated, in my opinion.’54
For some, however, Basil Spence hadn’t been radical enough. ‘The trouble with Coventry Cathedral is not that it is modern,’ wrote Nevill Francis from Ipswich. ‘The trouble is that it is extremely old fashioned.’55 Many architectural critics, and a new wave of architects, led by competition losers Alison and Peter Smithson, agreed. There were many elements of the gothic here, mingled with a more modern sensibility. Basil Spence was well aware of this. In fact, it had been one of the central tenets behind his design: ‘I felt,’ he wrote, ‘there must be continuity and unity with the old.’
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