Concretopia

by Grindrod, John

  Yet given all the work that was being done, it was little wonder that Sir Frank Price, the chairman of the city’s public works committee, was in no doubt that they were watching the construction of ‘one of the finest city centres in Europe’.48

  The hardened professionalism of shopping centre specialists such as Arndale contrasted with the overweening optimism of less experienced developers. Croydon, like many other towns, features the fruits of both approaches. On one side of the town centre was St George’s Walk, a 2,000 square foot shopping arcade and 4,000 square foot office block scheme developed in the mid-sixties by a couple of local businessmen who bought the land from the church. Meanwhile, shopping centre experts Ravenseft bought the lease on an adjacent 12-acre plot of land, home to the Trinity School of John Whitgift. The school were happy to sell up their prestigious town-centre site and make a killing, relocating to the less expensive suburbs. The Whitgift Centre, which opened in 1970, contained over double the square footage of shops and half as much office space again as its rival. St George’s Walk buckled under the competition, becoming a desolate wind tunnel, while the vast sprawl of the Whitgift Centre kept pace with the changing fashions in retail design, becoming enclosed and reclad in the eighties to resemble a grand Victorian conservatory. On a recent trip through the semi-deserted arcade of St George’s Walk, the strange echoing atmosphere of a dying mall, with its barren planters and stained hexagonal paving stones, was heightened by the grandiose pop nostalgia of Nik Kershaw as it boomed from the doorway of a pound shop. Wouldn’t it be good to be in your shoes, he sang, even if it was for just one day.

  The Whitgift Centre, 1971: Croydon’s ‘showpiece’. © Ian Steel

  In Portsmouth, the architect Rodney Gordon, working for Owen Luder, tore up the rulebook for shopping centre design. Following a failed entry in the Elephant and Castle competition, here he took the default luxury of Arndale and the cool efficiency of Ravenseft and re-imagined it as something altogether more spectacular. Alec Coleman Investments had bought a site away from the town centre, and Gordon designed something that more closely resembled an avant-garde sculpture than a building. The Tricorn Centre, initially known as the Casbah, opened in 1966. Its heavy geometric shell was cast in rough concrete. Gordon had chosen this as his medium because of the cost savings it afforded over other building materials, but soon realised that ‘the shuttered concrete was not going to be up to the quality of the South Bank.’ The odd geometries of his design were partly an attempt to hide the relative lack of skill and experience of the construction team. ‘I learned that the more convoluted you made the shape,’ he told historian John Gold, ‘the less the inaccuracies of the pourer of the concrete are going to be noticed.’49

  Unfortunately, despite the daring ingenuity of Gordon’s design, a bad site chosen by an inexperienced developer failed to attract big names, and it ended up home to a rag-bag of small shops and struggled for decades to earn its keep. ‘The first rule was that a new shopping project had to be built as an extension to an existing successful shopping street,’ Rodney Gordon later wrote. ‘Yet at Portsmouth we were given a site for a major shopping and multi-use scheme that was the shape of a huge rugby ball, bounded on one curved side by Charlotte Street, a very narrow secondary shopping alley containing market stalls, and on the other side by an impenetrable dual carriageway.’ As the architect rather than planner or developer, Gordon just got down to work. ‘My job was to design the scheme and not ask questions.’50 Another project by the same team, this time in Gateshead, opened a year later. Trinity Square, made internationally famous in the ultra-violent crime film Get Carter, was a 15-storey giant with seven tiers of car parking. Rodney Gordon and the director Mike Hodges were friends, and Hodges always denied that the pair of effete, cynical architects featured in the film were based on Gordon and Luder, which seems fair enough given Gordon’s description of Luder as ‘an amiable bloke who spoke developer language in a cockney accent’.51 Filmed a year after Trinity Square had opened, the ‘architects’ appeared in a memorable scene on the roof of the car park, in the empty shell of a restaurant – a unit designed by Gordon which remained unlet for the life of the building.

  Just as the relaxation of hire purchase rules and the end of rationing had transformed shopping in the fifties, decimalisation, pushed through by the technocratic Heath government in 1971, saw the old, complex system of pounds, shillings and pence swept away by cool metric European efficiency. Yet the ongoing economic crises of the early seventies ushered in an age of bust rather than boom. By 1977 the Guardian were writing that the new Arndale in Wellingborough was ‘likely to be one of the last shopping centres of its kind to be opened in Britain for a few years … Although this is lovely for the shoppers, it is increasingly difficult for developers to afford to build these days.’52

  In March 1965 a tarpaulin printed with the legend ‘Shops Now Open’ in letters almost a storey in height flapped above the entrance to the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre. In token acknowledgement of the 40-acre site’s history, the Minister for Labour Ray Gunter unveiled a bronze statue of an elephant carrying a castle on its back, removed from the top of the old hotel. The smooth concrete façade of the centre, dashed with narrow ‘arrow slit’ windows, resembled the Festival Hall’s temporary back wall that had so stirred the architects of 1951. Shoppers, drooling in consumerist anticipation, could climb a long walkway to the first floor to enter, or sneak in via the much-heralded underpasses below. Willetts had done well to attract some big retailers to the ground level – Woolworths, Burtons, Boots, Tesco and W. H. Smith were all present – but 36 of its 40 top floor shop units were empty. ‘The Jeremiahs are being effectively silenced,’ ran a typically bullish headline in the South London Press, a year after the centre had opened. In fact, a dangerously low 65 percent of the shops had been let.

  After all the planning and reconstruction, the shopping centre found itself as stranded as the Elephant and Castle Hotel had been at the turn of the century. Budget restrictions imposed by the Ministry of Transport had reduced the promised spacious and elegant pedestrian subway system to a warren of poky tunnels less than nine feet wide. ‘Have you, by any chance, been to the Elephant and Castle on foot?’ asked Concrete Quarterly’s editor in 1970. ‘It is not to be recommended. … There is nothing except swirling traffic and a labyrinth of underground passages into which the poor pedestrian is forced.’53

  Isolated by traffic: the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre in 2013.

  Sam Chippindale was fond of contrasting the dull, research-led approach of ‘planners’ with the instinctive knack of the real experts: ‘We rely on experience. You’ve got to have a flair.’54 In reality, Arndale planned meticulously and knew their market well, but plenty of less experienced developers were rebuilding city centres and making a hash of it. The success of the Elephant and Castle scheme had rested on the flimsiest of premises: that the centre would draw people from a wide catchment area, including affluent Westminster and Victoria across the Thames. As planning nous goes, it reminds me of the episode of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin where our bored hero defines two market research areas not through careful analysis, but simply by plonking a waste paper bin and a handbag onto a map without looking and drawing round them. So careless was he that one of these areas turns out to be in the North Sea. The shopping centre was built at the height of the supposed age of ‘white heat’, an era that championed the scientific necessity of research. Yet it’s hard not to conclude that in establishing the need for the centre at the Elephant and Castle, the LCC had pretty much given up on rational decision making and pulled a Reggie. Windswept and largely inaccessible, for all but the most determined it may as well have been built out on the North Sea.

  The Bull Ring’s launch was equally shambolic. It had been postponed by almost a year while reps from Laing desperately ran round the head offices of various major chain stores offering them ever cheaper leases, to the point where they were making a loss on many. ‘What price
a great big bubble of hot air?’ asked Diana Rowntree, reviewing the centre for the Guardian. While being full of praise for the open-air market, ‘the minute you enter the building on foot,’ she wrote, ‘you lose all sense of direction.’ And she was in no doubt of the root of the problem. ‘The emptiness – the sense of no place – stems from a shiftiness of purpose. The architect is building shops but he doesn’t know for whom.’55

  The eminent travel writer Jan Morris, who had spent her life visiting the wonders of the world, from Mount Everest to ticker-taped Manhattan, was less sniffy. ‘There is the genuine brawn and gusto of Birmingham’s Bull Ring,’ she wrote, praising the new shopping centres as ‘beautiful, exciting, useful’.56 The council was delighted to have replaced the old romantic but redundant central area with a more functional space, increasing the shopping space by 30 percent. Borough Engineer Neville Borg was convinced that if they hadn’t, a silent majority would have judged the city ‘on a lack of modernisation of retail shopping conditions’, and taken their custom elsewhere.57 But four years after praising the Bull Ring as a ‘considerable achievement’, eminent planner Colin Buchanan echoed the opinions of many when he wrote that it had become ‘a sordid, ugly, brutal place, where wind eddies muck and paper and cardboard into corners’.58

  The Bull Ring Shopping Centre in the early 1970s: ‘beautiful, exciting, useful’. © Co-op Historian

  The sixties consumer boom was visible far from the new shopping centres. By 1963 there were 12 million vehicles on Britain’s roads, 7 million of which were private cars. Professor Colin Buchanan, reporting for the government, announced that those figures were likely to double within a decade. By 2010, he predicted, there would be a staggering 40 million vehicles on the road, 30 million of them cars.i ‘The problems of traffic are crowding in upon us with desperate urgency,’ he wrote in his remarkably plain-spoken and somewhat frightening report.59 The increase in traffic would have disturbing consequences for the nation unless action was taken.

  In response, the government announced ever more massive increases in spending on urban roads, but some were sceptical as to what this could achieve. ‘Makeshift schemes like the Elephant and Castle roundabouts and the Birmingham Ring Road continue to be pushed forward,’ reported the Observer in 1960, ‘although they are out of date before they have been built.’60 The blunt instrument of a ring road or bypass could only ever hope to have a minor effect on the complex reality of drivers’ journeys. Something more sophisticated was required – and that may not have needed roads at all.

  New forms of transport such as monorail, hovercraft, helicopter, Rotodyne, and vertical take-off aircraft were being championed, with the Observer speculating that ‘if we were bold enough, we might knock down great wedges of our sprawling industrial cities,’ which it considered to be dead in parts and in need of severe pruning, and instead ‘concentrate new development along fast lines of communication connecting one centre to another’.61 This was almost a return to the ideas of suburban ribbon development from the twenties, although this time around monorail stops rather than main roads. Earnest town planning journals were full of essays such as J. W. Dark’s 1963 Why not the monorail?, and there were rumours that a futuristic new town in Buckinghamshire, to be called Milton Keynes, might become the British standard-bearer for such a project. ‘In the city centre,’ wrote Leicester’s planning consultant W. Konrad Smigielski, ‘the priority should be given to pedestrians and full use be made of modern technology capable of providing more efficient means than motor cars of moving people in the concentrated areas.’62 His recommendations were for a network of travelators, high pedestrian walkways and a monorail.

  Air travel was also very much on the agenda. Indeed, most of the original plans for postwar redevelopments I looked through at some stage had a heliport mooted for a quiet corner. Even Buchanan was moved to speculate that ‘perhaps some kind of individual jet-propulsion unit will eventually be developed’ though, practical as ever, he was one of the first to think through the issues around jet packs: ‘The problems of weather, navigation, air space and traffic control appear so formidable that it may be questioned whether such a device would ever be practical for mass use.’63 The Smithsons, naturally, were less cautious, writing in 1970 that ‘we may find that a revolutionised railway system, or the use of helicopters for local high speed passenger services, will make our proposed 120 foot wide “ring roads” ridiculous.’64

  So what would Britain look like by the impossibly distant year 2000? Sixties planners did their best to imagine. One of the most ambitious schemes was the superhuman speculative shopping megastructure named High Market. It had been sponsored by the glass manufacturers Pilkington Brothers, and drawn up by yet another husband and wife team, Gordon and Eleanor Michell (who had advised Colin Buchanan while he was writing Traffic in Towns). The Michells imagined an artificial ridge stretching between two hills in the countryside near Dudley in the Midlands, creating what was effectively a dam of shops. ‘It would be approached by helicopter or high-speed monorail, as well as by high-speed roads,’ wrote Wilfred Burns. A glazed slab, 2,000 feet long and 400 feet wide, would join the two hills, under which would be car parks, a bus garage, and mechanised services such as parcel pick-ups, while above would stand the more ‘intimate’ shopping courts – all one million square feet of them. It would even come equipped with a revolving periscope, so that images from the surrounding countryside could be flashed up on a large screen inside. ‘It is the kind of scheme which many will dismiss as a pipe-dream,’ Wilfred concluded, not unreasonably.65

  Reasonable or otherwise, Pilkington Brothers had funded a lot of speculative research and development for their cutting-edge Glass Age Development Committee. The landscape architect Geoffrey Jellicoe went so far as to design an entirely new template for towns for the committee, which he called Motopia. This project combined ideas from the age of John Nash (‘when landscape architects were doing everything in their power to reduce by illusion all dreary matters such as drives and approach roads from their conception of the landscape’) with those of Le Corbusier.66 The resulting book resembled less a sober reflection on the state of town planning and more a megalomaniac’s Pinterest page. Here was a vast city in a park: five-storey terraces built in a continuous grid, with green space in the big squares within, and roads built on the roofs of the terraces. ‘The ideal town,’ wrote Jellicoe, ‘would seem to be one in which the traffic circulation were piped like drainage and water; out of sight and out of mind, to go as fast as it likes, to smell as it wants, and to make noises.’67 The designs and models he produced looked like a cross between postwar Plymouth’s town centre and Tron. What was the best thing about it? ‘It can be extended indefinitely,’ enthused Jellicoe.68

  The countryside may not have become home to High Market-style megastructures, but American-style out-of-town malls and European-style hypermarkets did begin to appear. Sadly lacking space-age transport infrastructure, these malls would instead continue to rely heavily on the car. The early sixties planners would no doubt be shocked that their futuristic plans for city centres never came to pass, and by the ongoing ad hoc sprawl of car-dependent trading estates. A few years ago I visited New York and explored Rochester’s huge Midtown Plaza, the inspiration for the Elephant and Castle’s shopping centre. This jauntily designed trinket box of a scheme was eerily deserted. Almost all the shops had closed and it was scheduled for demolition, the optimistic early sixties vision of urban renewal overtaken by out-of-town developments and the long arm of the internet.

  On 7 April 1971, the Queen opened Birmingham’s completed inner ring road, an idea that had been gestating since 1917. The local dignitaries who gathered that spring day to see their ambitious project given the royal blessing, less than a decade after Buchanan’s Traffic in Towns was published, could not have known that, apart from the odd project, the age of the grand urban road scheme was over. They would have been shocked that of the Bull Ring, the Elephant and Castle, Trinity Square and Tricorn
shopping centres, all but one would be demolished within 40 years, with only a lack of money keeping the final one standing. Unlike the Bull Ring, glitzily redeveloped in 2003, south London’s white elephant clings on to its sixties roots. Walkways, escalators, floor tiles and in some cases shop frontages, hark back to its opening day in 1965. Yet apart from the odd original tenant, such as Boots, the centre now is occupied by a vast array of more colourful local shops than had ever been envisaged by the LCC. There are small supermarkets dotted about the floors selling produce from around the world, appealing to Walworth’s diverse population. A vibrant street market has sprung up between the underpasses and the ground floor entrance. For a long time it had the air of a large house with one elderly tenant, where the décor is dingy, most rooms have been abandoned for years and everything could do with a good scrub and a lick of paint. Yet these days it’s coming back to life, in an unplanned, scruffy, organic way. Cheap rents have let in entrepreneurial businesses, and visited on a weekday the place is buzzing, full of chatty shoppers and canny traders. It may be eccentric and ramshackle but it has also become a friendly place. It certainly has character. But then, despite the efforts of planners and architects to start anew and bring on the space age, both the Elephant and the Bull Ring have never been short of that.