Concretopia

by Grindrod, John

  With customer demand and retail practices changing so rapidly, the pressure to modernise shopping environments escalated. Arndale and Ravenseft led the way. It was in the late fifties that town councils for the first time sought to use their new powers for comprehensive redevelopment. There was the chance to remake and remodel densely crowded, derelict and neglected town centres, and Arndale and its rivals seemed to offer nervous councils the expertise that would ensure these vast projects were a success. It was capitalism at its most transformative. ‘We are confident we can make a considerable contribution to the planning of a better Britain,’ said Arnold Hagenbach at the company AGM in 1964, cranking up the public service rhetoric lest anyone should accuse them of money-grubbing opportunism. ‘Today all political parties are pledged to promote schemes for social betterment. This must include the modernisation of town centres all over the country, where people can do their shopping and conduct their business under pleasant conditions of safety and comfort.’18 It was a nice philanthropic spin on the £3 million of building work they had in progress, the £5 million ready to go, and the further £15 million-worth in the pipeline. They were keen, too, to dispel any fears that what they were doing was frighteningly modern in any way. ‘We are not keen on “contemporary” architecture,’ said Sam Chippindale to the Architects’ Journal, unable to resist the thrill of dissing the entire architectural establishment on their home turf. ‘We feel that approach is unsuitable in some of our locations, but in a completely new town the idea might appeal.’19 His message was clear: the ‘establishment’ planners and architects could play with their little new towns if they liked, but entrepreneurial firms such as Arndale were getting on with the serious business of redeveloping the country’s big city centres.

  The first Arndale projects were simple, functional developments, such as the Headingley arcade in Leeds. Yet, as the company grew it began to go upmarket, specialising in elegant surroundings built to high standards – especially when compared to their cost-conscious out-of-town rivals, the hypermarkets, which began to spring up in the late sixties. When the Guardian visited Bolton they found that the Arndale, ‘with its air-conditioned walkways, and wheelchair ramps, and predictably surprising fountains and budgerigars, is the hub of the trading area’.20 Exotic wildlife came as standard, and pavements were carpeted. The centres were becoming social spaces as much as retail experience, and advances in the psychology of ‘hidden persuaders’ promised ever more subtle manipulation of shoppers’ desires.

  Initially, shopping centre designers tailored their designs to appeal to women, on the assumption that they controlled household spending. This meant they were social spaces. ‘For a housewife the natural and most insistent social centre of a modern town is the local shop, the pavement, the bus queue, or any place where she may run into a neighbour without pre-arrangement,’ wrote the landscape architect Geoffrey Jellicoe in 1961.21 Though less sanguine in tone, Wilfred Burns echoed this view, observing that ‘to the hard-working housewife, shopping is not just a necessity: it is one of the few occasions she can mix with other people.’22

  As they sought to increase footfall and spending, shopping centres attempted to attract men too, with the addition of that traditionally male-friendly space, the pub. Husbands ‘can slip into the centre’s pub for a quick beer when wives are in the dress shops’ was the Guardian’s none-too-enlightened take.23 By the late sixties Arnold and Sam had sold Arndale off to conglomerate Town and City, and returned to their earlier businesses as surveyors and property consultants. The new company swiftly overturned Chippindale’s much vaunted preference for instinct over analysis. ‘The company has undertaken some interesting research into shoppers’ attitudes,’ it was reported. ‘Research has always been a Town and City strongpoint.’24

  One of the accusations Arndale and the local authorities who had worked with them found hard to shake off was that amidst all this ‘just-add-water’ instant redevelopment, British high streets were losing their personality. But Robert Ogden, Bolton’s planning officer, was ‘not remotely disturbed by the old cry that “it’s just like everywhere else”, which he readily accepts it is’, went a report in 1973. Instead, he stressed that the complex ‘served only to complement the “real Bolton” around it’.25

  Arndale and Ravenseft were keen on shopping centres, but they tended to avoid larger town centre redevelopment schemes, with their ring roads, bus stations and covered markets. Many councils, though, were dead set on just such integrated projects, and it was held against the developers that ‘they picked up all the plums of urban renewal, leaving the local authorities to do the unremunerative chores.’26

  In the late fifties at the Elephant and Castle – the great, tangled road junction forming the gateway to south London, and at the heart of a large working class community – just such a complex scheme was underway. The sheer scale of the development there – whether of the big roads with their roundabouts and underpasses, or of the massive multi-level flats, offices, college, cinema and shopping centre – was awe-inspiring. South London had seen nothing like it.

  For several years I lived round the corner from the Elephant, and despite the promise (or threat) of numerous regeneration schemes, it remains to this day a monument to that postwar moment when the planners took control. The only visible change to most of these buildings since they were erected is owing to the ravages of pollution. I’ve seen many pictures of the area before the bombing, but it remains hard to reconcile the two Elephants: one a jumble of Victorian squalor and gentility, the other a towering modernist metropolis. From time immemorial a large, bawdy pub, the Elephant and Castle Hotel, had been the fulcrum, the thumb on the knot at the centre of a string of roads that fed five Thames bridges: Lambeth, Westminster, Blackfriars, London and Waterloo. The largest cinema in Europe, a great department store and many shops and drinking dens had faced onto the junction, which became known, not entirely ironically, as the Piccadilly Circus of south London. Yet by the thirties the towering hotel stood alone, isolated on a roundabout that had once been circled by horse and carriage, but as time went on was increasingly cut off from the rest of the buildings by speeding – or snarled up – motor cars.

  The London County Council had failed time and again to solve the transport mess at the Elephant and Castle. The Edwardians’ attempt to remove the pub from its island site had been scuppered by the Great War; a 1930 plan was thrown out for being too expensive; and a further proposal in 1937 was trounced by the Blitz, which devastated the entire area. After the war the district lay in ruins for many years. Visiting in 1949 for Picture Post, the writer A. L. Lloyd painted a vivid image of a place whose population had been almost halved since the bombing, from 172,000 to just 94,000. ‘The backstreet bricks are sooted by the wash and drift railways smoke; and in the centre, in that inferno of trams, drays, trucks, lorries all debouch on to the doorstep of the Elephant and Castle public house … it is hard to escape the feeling of being in a metal prison.’27 But it was the notorious slums of the area that affected him most strongly: ‘Even the dead windows of the burnt-out rows are not so sad as the living windows of some streets that would be better gone.’28

  Over a coffee, John and Patrick Mulrenan, brothers who’d grown up in an overcrowded Victorian terrace in the sixties, helped me bridge the two eras with their memories of the long period the Elephant lay in ruins. ‘We used to spend most of our time as kids playing on the bombsites,’ said John. ‘I think we were told not to play on the bombsites, but the reality was there wasn’t anywhere else. The bomb shelters were still around. The funny thing is that there was no conscious link in my mind as a kid between the words bombsite and bomb. It was just something that had a name.’

  In the mid-fifties the London County Council approved a comprehensive development area covering a massive 40 acres. Their leader, Sir Isaac Hayward, made an inspiring speech when the CDA was launched: ‘By imaginative and realistic planning and with goodwill and cooperation between the council and business an
d trading interests, the Elephant and Castle can, I am sure, become one of the main shopping and entertainment centres of south London.’29 The scheme featured two large roundabouts to siphon off traffic into the many distributor roads. ‘The committee are giving further consideration to the design of the subways around the larger roundabout,’ announced an LCC press release, ‘because they think it would be desirable for users to be able to pass from one section to another without ascending to a higher level.’30 Only a decade earlier, Southwark council had poured scorn on the notion of pedestrian underpasses for the Elephant: ‘The first question is how to deal with pedestrians,’ a planner had announced, ‘and this council does not consider subways a satisfactory method of dealing with the problem.’31 But subways won the day, with the planned new underpasses promised to be ‘a complete departure from the drab and noisy subway atmosphere’ with ‘modern lamps … and mosaic tiling on the walls and bright green granite chips on the walls of the ramps’.32

  As the pedestrian underpasses were hollowed out beneath the ground, a dramatic silhouette of offices and shops rose into the sky. ‘Not only will they make the Elephant and Castle an effective landmark in south London,’ wrote another press officer in 1958 of the modern designs the LCC hoped to create, ‘but with the combination of tall and horizontal elements, they are of the size and scale needed for the large areas of land created by the road improvement.’33 Big name architects were at work to create this space-age landscape. The Hungarian emigré Ernő Goldfinger won the competition to design a new Odeon cinema and Alexander Fleming House, a suite of offices for the Ministry of Health. The clash of cultures created by this mini-Whitehall was a godsend to journalists eager for a piece of topical wit in the class-obsessed era of Macmillan’s toff government and the satire boom. ‘More men from the Ministry with bowlers and white collars will rub shoulders with the “wide boys” of the Elephant and Castle next week,’ wrote one trainee wag at the South London Press. ‘A local layabout said, “Things ain’t been the same since they started knocking the place about. Now we get all of these Civil Service geezers breathing down our necks. Still, if they come from Savile Row they must know that we ain’t exactly scruffy”.’34

  The shopping centre seen from the pedestrian underpasses at Elephant and Castle.

  Yet another married team of architects, Paul Boissevain and Barbara Osmond, won the 1959 competition to design the shopping centre and office complex at the heart of the redevelopment. Like many of the pioneer modernists, Paul’s background was as much product design as architecture. A Bauhaus-inspired table lamp he’d designed for his family’s company, Merchant Adventurers, was exhibited at the Festival of Britain, and he had taught at the Architectural Association. Barbara had studied at the fashionable Regent Street Polytechnic, which had turned out many of the LCC’s own architects. By the late fifties they’d had a run of high profile competition entries, winning some and just missing out on two – luckily for them, as it happened, for these would turn out to be poisoned chalices for the winners: the National Gallery extension and Sydney Opera House. The Elephant and Castle scheme was a chance to design something excitingly modern. ‘The shopping centre is one of the few new building types created in our time,’ wrote Boissevain.35 And as they were to discover, new building types obeyed new rules.

  Boissevain and Osmond’s project was soon compared to such American malls as the award-winning Midtown Plaza in Rochester, New York: a huge civic project designed to breathe new life into the downtown area of the city. Boissevain had carried out research in the US and was keen to explain the merits of malls to a potentially bewildered British public. ‘It is hoped that the comprehensive facilities of the shopping centre will help satisfy the varied needs of the housewife. She can shop with her children without worry, meet her friends at the cafés, purchase her daily, weekly or monthly needs all under one roof.’36 The centre was to house supermarkets, department stores, banks, restaurants, a car park, a petrol station, two pubs and that most American of features, a 28-lane bowling alley. It was, as the promotional brochure explained, ‘an entirely new approach to retailing, setting standards for the sixties that will revolutionise shopping concepts throughout Britain’.37 Willets, the developers, were convinced that it would ‘become the ideal place to break a journey and often the goal of the journey itself’. In fact, it would become – why not? – ‘the most convenient and congenial place to meet one’s friends in the whole of south London’.38 The Guardian ran a feature in which they quoted the architects’ hopes that it would ‘combine Oxford Street’s glamour with Petticoat Lane’s versatility’.39 Built on three floors, this mall had one ingenious trick to suit the British climate: a vast retractable glass roof. On fine days it would become an open-air shopping centre, bathed in sunlight, and in bad weather it would close itself off from the elements, allowing shoppers and shopkeepers to remain warm and dry. The local press loved the thought of this ‘glass-topped sunshine roof that will slide back in summer’ and the ‘blend of Italian and American styling, the Italian influence providing the sweep and panache and the American the comfort’.40

  Construction began in 1962. Danny Gill, a builder who’d worked on many of the big housing schemes in the area, reminded me of the feats of human endeavour it took to bring such projects to realisation, and what a dangerous place vast building sites such as the shopping centre had been in those pre-health-and-safety days. ‘I have a couple of mates who worked on it,’ he told me, ‘that’s how I know that three tower crane erectors died on the one day.’ Nothing about building projects on this scale in the sixties was easy for the teams of labourers and skilled workers on site, forced to adjust rapidly to new ways of working, new materials and new designs.

  It was also an eye-opener for the people who were watching their neighbourhood change around them. One of the locals watching the whole district redevelop on a colossal scale was John Mulrenan:

  ‘I remember the Elephant and Castle shopping centre being built because it was a huge, huge thing. I’m not sure there was a lot of demolition that had to be done for the shopping centre to be built, because it was just open bombsite land opposite the Tabernacle. I remember us being terribly excited by the concept of a huge shopping centre.’

  ‘It was the biggest one in London at the time,’ chipped in his brother Patrick.

  ‘Though it would be fair to say,’ said John, putting his finger on one of the questions that would haunt the centre throughout its life, ‘we were never short of shops. Down the bottom of our road you could get anything. There was a bakers, a grocers, a newsagent, a pub, an egg shop, a dress shop, an electrical shop. You could get anything you wanted.’

  Every town wanted a shopping centre as a magnet to attract business and increase their regional influence. In Birmingham, the new ring road scheme was growing up next to the ‘draughty and mucky’ Bull Ring market hall, a Victorian building hit by an air raid in 1940.41 As in the Elephant and Castle, a competition was launched in 1959 for designs to transform what was described as ‘at times a wild and romantic place’.42 The council had a nightmarishly demanding wish list: they wanted 140 shops, market stalls, a car park and office block, a bus station, a ballroom and a link to a rebuilt New Street railway station. This list of prerequisites was enough to scare off the likes of shopping-centre specialists Arndale and Ravenseft, and in the event the contract was won by construction giants Laing. ‘The market will be the most up-to-date in Britain and will be an added attraction leading into an improved Bull Ring,’ wrote Labour councillor Frank Price proudly. 43

  The promotional brochure featured beautiful illustrations of the centre’s calm, liberating environment, alongside a myriad of stats: the bus station would handle 18 million passengers a year; a whopping 350.000 square feet of retail space would be squeezed into a four-acre site; the largest Woolworths in Europe; 19 escalators able to cope with 128,000 people an hour. The centre was to be completely enclosed, so there would be an air conditioning system; and to encourage the p
ram-pushing mothers, a crèche would be provided. ‘Music by Muzak is to be installed in all the public areas of the centre to create a warm, gay and welcoming atmosphere,’ went the blurb. Claims for the dark magic of the cutting-edge piped music system were extravagant. ‘Customers are relaxed and encouraged to linger, shopping is made a pleasure. Muzak is also designed for the benefit of staff, easing the strains brought on by fatigue and boredom, reducing errors and making service truly a pleasure.’44 Laing described their futuristic project as ‘a new concept in city centre shopping … probably the most comprehensive multi-level trading centre in the world’.45 Even the public service planners, like Colin Buchanan, were effusive: ‘Great progress has been made with an inner ring road system and associated with it is the Bull Ring shopping centre. This last, which might be described as an in-town shopping centre (as opposed to the American pattern of out-of-town centres) provides traffic-free shopping conditions … close to the centre of a major city, and on any count, this is a considerable achievement.’46

  The journalist Geoffrey Moorhouse toured regional England in 1963 to research his impressionistic state of the nation book The Other England. He described the vast changes being wrought in Birmingham in awe-struck prose, making comparisons with the work being carried out in Germany and Holland: ‘Nowhere else in England is there more excitement in the air … No other major city has yet identified its problems, tackled them and made more progress towards solving them than Birmingham.’47 The great construction ventures, such as James Roberts’ cylindrical Rotunda, the pedestrian underpasses that allowed ‘women pushing prams’ to cross busy roads without needlessly slowing the traffic, and the ring road were all enthusiastically endorsed. But nothing attracted more praise than the Bull Ring itself, at the centre of it all. ‘The sky is cut with a great horizontal slab of concrete, embellished at one end with a fierce symbolic taurus in metal,’ observed Moorhouse wonderingly. Over the past two decades the council had taken back into public ownership double the acreage of the city centre they’d owned in 1950, and by the early sixties they had embarked upon a huge number of public-private partnerships, with 59 major new building projects underway. There was even to be a collaboration between two of the most powerful British developers, Jack Cotton, and Charles Clore, and modernist Walter Gropius, on a vast new scheme of shops and offices at Cannon Street. ‘I’m very much impressed,’ a cigar-smoking, bow-tied and grizzled Gropius told an ATV news interviewer in 1960 when asked about the plans Birmingham had in place, ‘because it’s an extremely rare case that a big city can collect sufficient land to do a wholesale new affair which gives a new face to the city. With the additional problem of a ring road, which is a deeply progressive idea to relieve the inner city today, it is really possible to make something really extraordinary out of Birmingham.’ Sadly his own plans for the city came to nothing.