Concretopia
Page 13
This blend of the old and the new was one of the things that most attracted me to the cathedral. Back in the nineties, on the way home from boring business trips for meetings with the head office of Barclays Bank, I used to nip in for a quick fix of art, beauty and mortality – before getting the train back to Croydon. My favourite part of the cathedral is the Chapel of Unity. It’s the plainest by far of the chapels, and the vertical slit windows are ordinary clear glass, looking out onto the more recent university buildings. But after all the drama, excitement and beauty of the cathedral, gazing through the windows onto the rather bathetic scene is a powerful reminder that the everyday world outside, so recently destroyed, is what all the great art inside – the Elizabeth Frinks, Graham Sutherlands, John Pipers and Jacob Epsteins – is about. For a soul as unspiritual as mine, that’s as close to an epiphany as I’m likely to come in any church.
Still, as I sat chatting with Bob and Irene in the cathedral, it was hard not to be moved by their attachment to the place. Our interview nearing the end, we were preparing to leave when Irene took a moment to reflect on the enormity of it all.
‘It’s been an experience all our lives, really,’ she said, with great understatement.
It began to sink in how extraordinary it was that they both used to attend the old cathedral, that they survived the Blitz, that they worshipped here while it was still being built – and that they were still here now, chatting to nosy strangers.
‘Nothing stands still, does it?’ said Irene. As if to prove her point, their bus drew up at the stop.
Notes
1 Coventry Standard, 30/11/40
2 Percy Johnson-Marshall in Keith D. Lilley, ‘Urban futures in early postwar Britain’, in Iain Boyd White (ed), Man-Made Future, Routledge, 2007, p147
3 Jock Colville, secretary accompanying Winston Churchill, 2/5/1941, in Juliet Gardiner, Wartime Britain, Review, 2005, p421
4 Viscount Astor, Lord Mayor of Plymouth, in Patrick Abercrombie and James Paton Watson, A Plan for Plymouth, Underhill, 1943, pv
5 Picture Post, 15/5/54, p44
6 Percy Johnson-Marshall in Nicholas Bullock, Building the Post-War World, Routledge, 2002, p268
7 Percy Johnson-Marshall in Louise Campbell, ‘Paper dream city’, in Iain Boyd White (ed), p126
8 Donald Gibson, Midlands Daily Telegraph, 5/12/40
9 Donald Gibson in Louise Campbell, ‘Paper dream city’, in Iain Boyd White (ed), Man-Made Future, Routledge, 2007, p126
10 Manchester Guardian, 22/11/40, p4
11 Donald Gibson, Midlands Daily Telegraph, 5/12/40 (talk on Wednesday of that week, report is from Thursday)
12 Nicholas Bullock, p276
13 Wilfred Burns, British Shopping Centres, Leonard Hill, 1959, p73
14 Unnamed interviewee in Keith D. Lilley, ‘Urban futures in early postwar Britain’, in Iain Boyd White (ed), p155
15 Patrick Abercrombie and James Paton Watson, p28
16 John G. Winant, US Ambassador to Britain, in Patrick Abercrombie and James Paton Watson, piii
17 Patrick Abercrombie and James Paton Watson, p9
18 Patrick Abercrombie and James Paton Watson, p66
19 Patrick Abercrombie and James Paton Watson, p11
20 Patrick Abercrombie and James Paton Watson, p87
21 Patrick Abercrombie in Jill Craigie (dir), The Way We Live, 1946
22 The Times, 6/7/46, p7
23 Observer, 1/6/47, p5
24 Observer, 22/6/47, p6
25 Giles Scott of his Coventry Cathedral plan in The Times, 9/2/44, p2
26 Coventry Cathedral Architectural Competition, October 1950, p17
27 Basil Spence, p5
28 Basil Spence, p6
29 Basil Spence, p14
30 Basil Spence, p12
31 Basil Spence, p16
32 Basil Spence, p19-20
33 Basil Spence, p25
34 The Times, 16/9/52, p8
35 The New Coventry Cathedral (from 2 articles in Coventry Evening Telegraph), Baynard Bress, 1944, p11
36 Evening Herald, 11/1/51, p4
37 Evening Herald, 9/1/51, p2
38 Observer, 2/9/51, p5
39 Observer, 2/9/51, p5
40 Harold Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries (1950-57), Pan, 2004, p185, 24/9/52
41 The Times, 13/7/54, p9
42 The Times Supplement on Coventry Cathedral, 25/5/62, pii
43 The Times Supplement on Coventry Cathedral, 25/5/62, pii
44 Coventry Evening Telegraph, 5/7/56
45 Coventry Evening Telegraph, 31/12/58, p1
46 The Times, 7/11/61, p6
47 Jean, in Keith D. Lilley, ‘Urban futures in early postwar Britain’, in Iain Boyd White (ed), Man-Made Future, Routledge, 2007, p154
48 Picture Post, 15/5/54, p45
49 Picture Post, 15/5/54, p45
50 Picture Post, 15/5/54, p46
51 The Times, 26/5/62, p6
52 Spectator, 22/6/62
53 Coventry Evening Telegraph, 26/5/62
54 Coventry Evening Telegraph, 26/5/62
55 Spectator, 22/6/62
5. ‘A Touch of Genius’
HERTS, MINDS AND BRUTALISM (1949–54)
At first glance, John Betjeman Goes By Train, the extraordinary British Transport Films feature following the future Poet Laureate’s journey from Kings Lynn to Hunstanton looks like it was made before the war. The train is a lumbering steam giant, the film is faded black and white, and Betjeman’s demeanour is pure Wodehouse. This was the anachronistic world of Britain in 1962: Richard Beeching’s drastic slashing of Britain’s railway network was just around the corner, and the country was on the brink of the tumultuous changes a left-out Philip Larkin would glumly describe in Annus Mirabilis as taking place ‘Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban/And the Beatles’ first LP’. Aside from Betjeman’s dismissive wave at a ‘concrete lamp standard’ that spoiled his view of the village green, the film gives no hint that back in the late forties the sleepy Norfolk seaside town of Hunstanton had been the cradle of Britain’s most shocking architectural craze – new brutalism.
The Kings Lynn–Hunstanton branch line has long since closed, so I took a coach through the flatlands of Norfolk with a bunch of folk from the Twentieth Century Society. Our destination was the world’s very first new brutalist building, Hunstanton Secondary Modern School, designed by two of the most controversial figures in modern British architecture, Peter and Alison Smithson. As I would soon discover, the story of the postwar education building boom was defined by the fierce rivalry between the era’s two dominant schools of thought, embodied by two extraordinary married couples: the Smithsons, out to stamp their intense conceptual vision on the world; and David and Mary Medd, a pair of resourceful problem-solvers. It was a battle between theoretical rigour and practical nous.
Secondary moderns, like the one at Hunstanton, were the result of another of those radical wartime government reports: this time the 1944 Butler Act. While Percy Johnson-Marshall worked on the rebuilding of Coventry, his younger brother Stirrat dedicated himself to the cause of education architecture. ‘All children should have an equal educational opportunity,’ was his take on Rab Butler’s reforms. ‘Secondary education was to be free for all.’1 Equally significantly, he raised the school leaving age to 15 and created three types of high school: grammar, technical and secondary modern. They were conceived as equals, although by the late forties, Labour’s education minister George Tomlinson had imposed a more traditional hierarchy on the system, with grammar schools seen as the most prestigious of the three, while the technical school programme languished.2
School building was a mammoth task, and about to be made a whole lot tougher by an unforeseen national baby boom: 325,000 new primary and secondary school places were soon required across England and Wales. This swarm of babies afflicted some counties more than others. In Hertfordshire, local authority architect Charles Herbert Aslin faced a veritable population explosion, fuelled by
the construction of several huge London County Council estates to help relieve inner-city overcrowding, as well as its four official new towns. Herbert wrote that ‘apart from questions of brief and design, the first problem after the war was the physical one of building anything.’3
He began to put together a team who would get things done. The first architect to make her mark was Mary Crowley, who’d had a classic Quaker garden city upbringing in both Letchworth and Welwyn. She’d spent the war experimenting with nursery prefabrication, becoming Hertfordshire’s pioneering local authority architect. She produced their first prefabricated school, Burleigh Infants, Cheshunt, in 1946. Then Stirrat Johnson-Marshall was appointed Aslin’s deputy. A later colleague described his approach as ‘highly analytical’, and ‘mechanistic’: ‘Stirrat wrote, or designed, virtually nothing. He’d always say, “I draw through other people’s pencils – I speak through other people!”’4 In postwar Hertfordshire, Stirrat saw at once ‘that there was not enough site labour to build the many new schools needed by conventional means’.5
The unconventional means would be prefabrication. As he cast around for a solution to a seemingly intractable situation, Aslin experienced the truth of the adage – necessity did indeed prove the mother of invention: ‘A search for new materials, or new ways of using old ones was commenced in 1945 and resulted in frames either of light steel or pre-stressed concrete, and a variety of methods of walling and roofing.’6 Hills, a company that had manufactured prefabricated steel-framed huts during the war, were contracted to produce and build these hurriedly conceived and ingeniously planned schools.
By this time Mary had teamed up with the ‘puckish and terrier-like’ David Medd, who had been brought in to adapt the Hills system.7 While Mary had been devising huts for school dinners in Hertfordshire during the war, David Medd had worked with Stirrat at the extraordinary Camouflage Development and Training Centre in Surrey, manufacturing the inflatable tanks with which the army was to perpetrate many a cunning wartime deception.
Rather than high-handedly imposing the design of schools on their teachers and pupils, Mary Medd worked with the education officers to observe the behaviour of the kids for whom they were building. The whole team, Stirratt wrote, were clear that this new Butler-inspired spirit in education ‘would require buildings quite different in shape and spirit from even the most advanced prewar designs’.8 Out went the familiar Dickensian classrooms with their rows of desks facing a blackboard, to be replaced by experimental new layouts, including moving teachers away from the front of the room and placing them at the centre.
These pioneering schools quickly drew national, then international attention. An admiring article in the Observer in 1950, by which time Hertfordshire had already constructed 31 of these new schools, noted that ‘no two schools are alike. Mr Aslin’s young team spend happy hours fitting the parts into an infinite variety of shapes.’ Remarking that the tarmac playgrounds were sensibly placed away from the largely glass-walled buildings, the reporter Cyril Dunn spotted a wall built in the midst of the open playground. ‘An isolated playground naturally has no wall for bouncing a ball. So the council built one for this and no other reason.’ Interviews with the staff were equally surprising. One female teacher (‘she was not one of those self-conscious progressives,’ he observed, ‘but an ordinary painstaking and devoted schoolmarm’) gave her passionate verdict: ‘This,’ she said, ‘is the school I have always dreamed about.’9 By January 1955 the Minster for Education, David Eccles, was opening the hundredth postwar school in Hertfordshire, now having to cope with a pupil population that in less than a decade had expanded from 56,000 in 1946 to a ‘pram town’-busting 95,000.
A month after this milestone, another Observer journalist surveyed the educational architecture scene, noting that ‘the broad fabric of the welfare state – with all its blemishes – does, even in architectural terms, slowly emerge.’10 He was perhaps being generous towards the welfare state as a whole. Virtually no new hospitals were built between 1939 and 1955, the year in which the Ministry of Health unveiled their new plans for a building programme. In fact, the Vale of Leven Hospital, built to serve Dunbartonshire and Argyll in Scotand, was the only postwar general hospital completed by the time Hertfordshire had built its hundredth prefabricated school.
Hertfordshire’s friendly use of colourful tiles and textiles, and lightweight modern furniture was rapidly imitated across the country. As far away as Sheffield, secondary moderns were being built using the southern county’s cunningly flexible modular kit. ‘Children, architecture and, presumably, education were all “modern”,’ wrote the Observer, ‘and it seemed not a bad world, if much maligned.’11 So who were the naysayers and what was their problem with the progress education authorities like Hertfordshire had made? The education debate at the 1954 Conservative party conference in Blackpool gave some clues. Attendants from Hertfordshire were scathing about the schools programme. The Manchester Guardian reported that Lieutenant P. W. T. Kine ‘condemned the wasteful and extravagant new school buildings’, and Miss A. Mackie ‘also condemned the “totally unnecessary extravagance” of local education authorities in commissioning works of art to decorate schools’.12 Minister of Education, Florence Horsbrugh, reminded them that these schools ‘were planned and built by the Socialists’, but then did little to allay their fears about the amount of money being pumped into school building, declaring ‘we want to build more schools. We want as many as we can get.’ An announcement that the Tories were spending £392 million on education, more than Labour, was greeted by gasps from the crowd.
No doubt Peter and Alison Smithson would have been just as scathing as the Conservative faithful about David and Mary Medd’s colourful Meccano Hertfordshire schools, though on aesthetic rather than financial grounds. The fuss surrounding the Herts programme was as nothing to the enduring controversy that has dogged Hunstanton Secondary Modern School in Norfolk and its pair of iconoclastic architects. As the Twentieth Century Society coach took its final turn in the dainty suburban streets of Hunstanton, the school suddenly revealed itself: a long, low, black monolith sprawling along the edge of an enormous playing field. It was a stretch limo of a building, the most serious-looking school I had ever seen, more CIA silo than Secondary Modern.
Two storeys high, the walls were a combination of glazing and stealthy black panelling. Even the exposed steel frame was painted black. The only colour was from the doors, painted a shocking cardinal red, and the walls at either end, the buff yellow of the local gault bricks. At the front, a number of small single-storey brick buildings sat in perfect symmetry to the front door: workshops to the left, boiler rooms to the right. The only features from the original building to break the regularity of the pattern were the gym, which sat off to the right, the boiler’s brick chimney and the school water tank, built on tall struts like a grain silo from Paris Texas. In stark contrast to the friendly, open Hertfordshire schools, Hunstanton glinted in the spring sunshine like a particularly dangerous-looking beetle. It looked amazing.
Hunstanton Secondary Modern: more CIA silo than school.
Inside, the rigorous brutalist integrity of the exterior gave way to the visual rag-bag of a busy secondary school, and we were forcibly reminded that we were not walking around a museum. The first thing we saw was an incongruous wall of roughly hewn rock: this was for a school production of The Wizard of Oz. Later on our tour, the swooning visage of Robert Pattinson stared down from classroom walls, and I spotted a number of Stonewall posters declaring that Some People Are Gay. Get Over It.
Hunstanton is now a very modern, fully functioning school, but the Smithsons’ style was as removed from the Medds’ pragmatic approach in Hertfordshire as could be imagined. Far from spending hours carefully observing children and consulting with teachers, Peter and Alison didn’t even visit the site before they designed the school. When it was completed, they insisted that it was photographed without a shred of evidence of children or furniture to clutter their mas
terpiece.
The Wizard of Oz set was being assembled in the main hall: a flexible central space that sits between two symmetrical wings of classrooms, an area also used as the school’s lobby, dining room and assembly hall. Elain Harwood, one of our lecturers for the day, told us that the jaunty Mondrian-inspired décor was a recent addition designed to help kids and staff make the connection between modern art and architecture.
In the course of my research I discovered that Daniel Weir, a friend I’d made via Twitter, had been a pupil at Hunstanton in the early eighties. We chatted over email about his recollections of this most peculiar school. ‘I remember one afternoon a teacher mentioning that some architects had visited at the weekend,’ he wrote. ‘Seemed odd at the time. He also mentioned something about brutalism which seemed even odder, especially as it went largely unexplained. At no point in all my time at the school was the building celebrated or even talked about.’ As a kid, Daniel wasn’t particularly impressed: ‘I think when I was there I was largely indifferent to it, although to be honest, given I was largely indifferent to schooling generally that’s perhaps not a surprise. However, over time, my increased knowledge of the building and the opportunity to pass by it on a regular basis means I’ve grown to be enormously proud of it.’ These days Daniel is a modern architecture buff, and I wondered if that interest had been fostered by attending such an extraordinarily designed school. ‘I’d never thought about this until you asked but I think there may very well be a link. To be honest, this part of Norfolk is bereft of buildings of significance built in the twentieth century. I can’t really think of another. So for me to have gone to school at Smithdon [the school’s modern name] must have registered somewhere along the line.’
The Smithsons based their school design on a Mies van der Rohe building for IIT.