Concretopia

by Grindrod, John

  Grenville’s tone was more defensive as he recalled the impossibility of looking after the thousands of residents and the gigantic estate towards the end. ‘That was the way things were with caretaking – you took care! When they decided they didn’t want resident caretakers we had to move off. We could have stayed there, but people would still have come and knocked on your door. I were the last one to move off …’

  And so sprawling, vandalised and put-upon Park Hill had to fend for itself.

  After Park Hill, streets in the sky quickly became a ubiquitous feature of urban life. I travelled to a place I’d lived in the noughties, the Elephant and Castle in south London, to speak to people who’d lived and worked there in the sixties and seventies while these offspring of Park Hill were built. Danny Gill, the Glaswegian brickie who’d talked to me about growing up in the Gorbals, later helped build many of these estates in south London, such as the Heygate. Like Grenville, he answered the door on sticks, and had prepared for my visit by pulling together his collection of photocopied newspaper articles and poems he’d written about the estates. Perhaps there was something about the streets in the sky that inspired poetry.

  Walkways at the Heygate, planned to connect up three miles of south London estates with streets in the sky.

  He remembered the scale of the Greater London Council’s streets in the sky plan with awe. ‘The initial architects’ thinking was build North Peckham, link it up with the Heygate, link it up with the Aylesbury,’ he said, of three of the vast estates he’d helped build. ‘All linked together on the walkways which meant you didn’t have to go down to ground level. You could walk on first floor level all the way from North Peckham down to Elephant. And I think that’s brilliant! That’s got to be three miles without ever touching the ground.’ But Danny’s memories of the estates he helped build were conflicted. ‘It was super-duper for about the first 10 years, and then you had a few undesirables, and then mugging came in. So … it was something the architects tried – and they were wrong.’

  The Heygate Estate and its streets in the sky, due for demolition in the summer of 2013.

  After the police had left Park Hill with their forensics evidence and crime-scene tape, I wandered around the top end of the estate, the part that was mostly still occupied. There were window boxes. Two women of a certain age were leaning on the balustrade of a ground floor flat, having a classic over-the-garden-fence gossip. At this end of the estate, people had gone to great lengths to personalise their flats, with shiny new paint, satellite dishes and creepers growing up trellises. It was hard to see how this could be done in the gaudy new Urban Splash zone.

  As the evening sun hit the façade, the whole of Park Hill, refurbished, derelict or inhabited, turned a warm gold. The colours on the renovated section glowed like a bank of LCD screens, and from the city centre the estate blazed bright on the hilltop, rising above the city like a man-made Vesuvius. In its scale and ambition, Park Hill seems less a run-of-the-mill housing estate than an experiment with nature. Perhaps Jack Lynn had it right. ‘Walking in the city,’ he wrote, ‘has acquired some of the quality previously found only on the fells or on cliff tops by the sea.’17

  Notes

  1 Geoffrey Moorhouse, The Other England, Penguin, 1964, p158

  2 Jack Lynn, Sheffield, p58

  3 John Partridge in Elain Harwood and Alan Powers (ed) Housing the Twentieth Century Nation, The Twentieth Century Society, 2008, p116

  4 Frederic Osborn at CIAM 8 in David Kynaston, Family Britain, Bloomsbury, 2009, p12

  5 Jack Lynn, Sheffield, p61

  6 Geoffrey Moorhouse, The Other England, Penguin, 1964, p158

  7 The Times, 15/9/61, p19

  8 The Times, 10/11/69, pVI

  9 David Kynaston, Family Britain, Bloomsbury, 2010, p344

  10 Alison and Peter Smithson in Architectural Design, June 1955, p185

  11 Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘Team 10 Primer’ in Charles Jencks and Karl Kropf (ed), Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture, Wiley, Second Edition 2008, p219

  12 Peter and Alison Smithson, Ordinariness and Light, Faber, 1970, p52

  13 Denys Lasdun in John Gold, The Practice of Modernism, Routledge, 2007, p209

  14 Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London, Pelican, Revised Edition, 1962, p198

  15 The Times, 8/9/80, p17

  16 David Kynaston, Family Britain, Bloomsbury, 2010, p344

  17 Jack Lynn, Sheffield, p69

  3. ‘A Wild and Romantic Place’

  SHOPPING AND DRIVING IN BIRMINGHAM AND THE ELEPHANT AND CASTLE (1959–65)

  This is the tale of the Bull and the Elephant. In the midst of England’s two biggest cities, these two beasts had lived stoically through centuries of tumult and change. The Bull had thrived in Birmingham for nearly a thousand years, while the Elephant arrived in mysterious circumstances in south London during the reign of George III. Over the centuries they had taken many forms, as great events overtook them. By the age of the Victorians both had gained something of a reputation for wildness and mischief. Then, during the Second World War, they found themselves engulfed in the chaos of the Blitz, and afterwards the people of the two great cities didn’t quite know what to do with them. The Bull and the Elephant, creatures of national legend and local folklore, were about to be magically transformed once again …

  New shopping centres, ambitious civic schemes and bold urban road plans hit the centre of Britain’s towns in the sixties. Drivers could belt across new flyovers in their Minis in search of multi-storey car parks, while beneath them mini-skirted shoppers walked through mosaic-tiled underpasses on their way to huge indoor malls. The councillors of the era were ostentatiously busy, keen to be seen working for local businesses and pumping new blood into the heart of their communities.

  ‘It was very futuristic,’ said John Mulrenan, a mordantly humourous former shop steward I’d interviewed about the Elephant and Castle, where he’d grown up. ‘Particularly the shopping centre. The thing about having a shopping centre with escalators going from one floor to another was pretty amazing … There was such a contrast … I hesitate to call it the shock of the new, but it did look futuristic … I think that electrical substation thing’ – the Faraday Memorial, the reflective metal box built on one of the Elephant and Castle’s roundabouts – ‘was almost like something out of the space programme. It was futuristic and it was stunning.’ And of course, it was the space age. In the mid-fifties the Soviets had shocked the world by sending a man into orbit. By the end of the sixties a couple of Americans had bounced around on the surface of the moon. Britain, meanwhile, had had a rocket put up it by its property developers. As the Guardian put it, ‘it’s said that as the Apollo astronauts swept over England, they couldn’t see the north-west for builders’ dust.’1 As John reflected: ‘All of these things would have influenced the way people thought about these things, whether consciously or subconsciously.’

  In the Elephant and Castle and the city of Birmingham, the legacy of space-age optimism has lived on barely altered until today in many of the buildings and road schemes. The ‘can do’ attitude of postwar politicians, builders and planners spearheaded a massive transformation of city centres up and down the country, with an optimism more reminiscent of dynamic America than conservative Britain.

  Writing in the local paper in 1959, Birmingham councillor Frank Price explained how two massive projects he was helping to push through – the city’s inner ring road and a shopping centre – were connected. ‘Although primarily designed to cure our central area traffic problem,’ he wrote of the plan as a whole, ‘it will also be instrumental in curing our shopping cramp.’2 With a town centre grandly rebuilt by Victorian industrialists less than a century before, Birmingham was hardly cramped, but it did have fewer shops than, say, Manchester – and the council had ambitions for it to become a great world city. Of major junctions like the Elephant and Castle, Sir Patrick Abercrombie had written during the war th
at ‘the necessities of traffic-weaving will dominate their design’.3

  It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of transport in the development of British towns and cities. After all, it was the steam engine that made the Industrial Revolution possible. But by the late fifties the railway network, still reliant on antiquated steam technology, was hopelessly out of date. Cars were the new thing. But the automobile revolution brought with it extraordinary risks. Sir Patrick revealed that in England alone over 68,000 people had been killed on the roads in the 10 years leading up to 1943.4 This is double the number who died in the Blitz across the whole country; and twice as many as those who lost their lives on the roads across all of Britain in the decade following 1998. And then there were a further two million road users injured too. Even taking into account wartime blackouts, which caused a spike in road traffic accidents, in the days before standardied road markings, traffic rules, signage and other safety features, Britain’s roads were as lawless and deadly as the Wild West.

  Safety wasn’t the only conundrum the car presented town planners. There was also the traffic jam. For centuries the street layouts of Britain’s towns had carried nothing more mighty than the horse and cart. Now they were being asked to cope with the onslaught of thousands of motorcars, lorries, trams and double-decker buses. Enter Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Herbert Alker Tripp. The Commissioner took the traffic part of his brief very seriously, devoting much of his time to puzzling over a solution to the problem. He even wrote a book on the subject – 1942’s Town Planning and Road Traffic – envisaging a network of fast pedestrian-free ‘arterial’ roads, leading to ‘distributor’ roads, from which you could reach a ‘precinct’ of local roads. Initially ignored, Alker Tripp’s book would eventually influence a generation of planners, including Sir Patrick, who found Tripp’s work an invaluable reference when writing his many city redevelopment plans. For London he trumped Birmingham’s long-planned ring road scheme, envisaging not one but four of Tripp’s mighty ‘arterial’ roads, from a squeezed inner ring out to a distant orbital expressway.

  Britain’s first modest stretch of motorway, the Preston bypass, was opened by Harold Macmillan in 1958. The splendid commemorative brochure produced for the occasion dubbed it, with some accuracy, ‘the beginning of a new era of motoring in Britain’.5 Decades after the German autobahns and American freeways had been constructed, here was the first link in what would soon be a countrywide motorway network. A year later the first section of the M1 opened.

  Nevertheless, Britain’s cities remained choked with traffic. By the mid-fifties the average journey speed in Glasgow had slowed to a dawdling 8.2 mph – below that of a horse-drawn carriage. The first section of the city’s inner ring road opened in 1960, elevated on huge concrete legs and busting through street lines at tenement rooftop level. Within two decades the average traffic speed in Glasgow centre had shot up to a pulse-quickening 50 miles per hour.6

  Not everybody was delighted with these developments. ‘Parked and moving vehicles obscure the scene day and night,’ wrote Professor Colin Buchanan, a traffic planning specialist, in The Times.7 ‘A generally hideous array of signals, beacons, signs, railings, petrol stations, sales depots and advertisements has come into being.’ His report for the government, Traffic in Towns, became a bestseller in 1963. At a town planning conference in 1966 he described the negative effects of the car with a bleak Reggie Perrin-like howl of despair: ‘confusion and congestion, delays, lack of parking space, inadequate facilities for loading and unloading goods, and the same sad story of death and injury, anxiety, noise, fumes, and the large-scale intrusion of the motor vehicle into the visual scene’.8

  Yet if the nation’s roads were a mess, there was at least one development that injected a dose of elegance, coherence and practicality into the motoring scene. Graphic artists Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, fresh from working on the signage at Gatwick Airport, had been commissioned by the government in 1957 to produce standardised signage for Britain’s fast-expanding road and motorway system. Their familiar symbols – red-framed speed limits, hurrying school children and motorway road ‘trees’ – were first tested on the Preston bypass and by the mid-sixties had become one of the most conspicuous symbols of modernity across the country.

  Even before Buchanan had presented his report, ideas to save our dangerous, congested streets from the car were circulating. Wilfred Burns, planning officer for Coventry, favoured the pedestrian precinct theory, which had been used to great effect in the Blitzed city centre. The precinct was ‘clearly the norm of the future’, he wrote: ‘it satisfies the pedestrian, it provides reasonable conditions for the motorist and for the shopkeeper, it has great architectural possibilities.’9 In his timely 1959 book, British Shopping Centres, he went so far as to declare that the pedestrian precinct was ‘the only sensible plan on which to base designs for shopping centres in the future, whether they be town centres or major suburban centres’. As if to prove that he wasn’t against all four-wheeled vehicles, he pointed out that precincts were ‘also ideal for pram traffic’.10

  Other planners were thinking on another level altogether. ‘If the city is large enough, the pedestrians must be on a level above that of traffic,’ announced Percy Johnson-Marshall, brother of Stirrat and another former Coventry planner. ‘This will give the pedestrians freedom of movement.’11 Percy was not alone. Buchanan, in impatient table-thumping form, defended the notion in The Times in 1961: ‘It is not a matter of aerial gangways or frightening catwalks, nor is it open to the feeble criticism that “you cannot make people go up”. It is a new way of arranging buildings, with city life literally on a new plane.’12 However, as Wilfred Burns couldn’t help pointing out, ‘such a system has the drawback, from the pedestrian point of view, of canalising them along the walkways and making it impossible for them to flit from one side to the other.’13

  Taken together, the rise of both pedestrian precincts and streets in the sky might even combine to hasten the end of the street, that ribbon lined with overlooking buildings, as we knew it. ‘The “corridor street” – façades up to street lines – is obsolete,’ wrote the Observer’s architecture critic in 1956 with great confidence.14 With so many new buildings placed at angles facing away from roads, or pedestrian decks built to replace the old street pattern altogether, no longer would shops, offices or houses necessarily abut those increasingly busy traffic arteries.

  Into the new world of pedestrian precincts and multi-level streets envisaged by the public planners marched armies of private developers to provide for the post-austerity boom. Specialist companies such as Ravenseft and Arndale sprang up, with all the skills necessary to plan and construct giant new shopping centres – and whose particular expertise lay in maximising the profit from any given project. Since the fifties, local authorities had been encouraged by the government to work in partnership with private developers on their large redevelopment schemes. Lionel Brett, a planner who’d worked on many such city centre projects, described the effect the government was aiming for: ‘The result would normally be a brand-new inner relief-road feeding multi-storey car parks, a pedestrian shopping mall and lettable office slabs that paid for it all.’15

  For some years after the war Ravenseft, trading on their knack for not only negotiating land deals with councils and private owners, but attracting big-name retailers into their new builds, were the undisputed masters of the shopping centre. The rise of their straight-talking Bradford-based rivals Arnold Hagenbach and Sam Chippindale – who amalgamated the first and last of their names to create Arndale – was swift and dramatic. Their first shopping centre was begun in Jarrow in 1958, and within two decades they had built 24 across Britain, from Aberdeen to Poole. ‘When we started the very name of Jarrow made the multiples shudder,’ recalled Chippindale of the chain store clients he came to woo so successfully. A new shopping centre could do wonders for a town – and even more for the bottom line of a company like Arndale, whose reputation was
sealed by their early successes in Jarrow and Bradford. ‘What was decisive was getting Woolworths to come in, and that’s something the local authority couldn’t have done,’ ex-estate agent Chippindale bragged. ‘They came in because they have learnt from experience to trust my judgment.’ In Accrington he simply ‘persuaded the local authority to do a deal; we promised to get in Marks & Spencer if they would let us do a shopping centre.’16 Easy.

  Shopping had been transformed since the war, partly by the arrival of American-style supermarkets. According to figures gathered by Dominic Sandbrook in his book White Heat, in 1947 there were estimated to be 10 self-service grocery stores in the country; 3,000 by 1956; 12,000 by 1962; and double that figure just five years later – 3,000 of which were supermarkets, the rest corner shops and the like.17 Rationing finally came to an end in July 1954, and in the same month, the relaxation of hire purchase regulations, governing everything from televisions to fridges, vacuum cleaners to cars, helped ignite a high street boom.