Concretopia

by Grindrod, John

  Notes

  1 Guardian, 13/10/72, p20

  2 Frank Price, The New Birmingham, West Midlands Press, 1959, p9

  3 Patrick Abercrombie and J. H. Forshaw, County of London Plan, Macmillan, 1943, p11

  4 Patrick Abercrombie and J. H. Forshaw, County of London Plan, Macmillan, 1943, p48

  5 Preston By-Pass official opening brochure, 5/12/58, Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation, p7

  6 Figures from James P. McCafferty in Miles Glendinning (ed), Rebuilding Scotland, Tuckwell Press, 1997, p76-83

  7 Colin Buchanan, The Times ‘Survey of the Architect in Britain Today’ supplement, 3/7/1961, px

  8 Professor Colin Buchanan, The Times, 19/9/66, p9

  9 Wilfred Burns, British Shopping Centres, Leonard Hill, 1959, p74

  10 Wilfred Burns, British Shopping Centres, Leonard Hill, 1959, p73

  11 Guardian, 22/10/59, p4

  12 Colin Buchanan, The Times ‘Survey of the Architect in Britain Today’ supplement, 3/7/1961, px

  13 Wilfred Burns, British Shopping Centres, Leonard Hill, 1959, p74-75

  14 R Furneaux Jordan, Observer, 5/2/56, p9

  15 Lionel Esher, A Broken Wave, Pelican, 1983, p55

  16 Sam Chippindale, Architects’ Journal, 19/1/61, p97

  17 Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat, Abacus, 2006, p118

  18 Arnold Hagenbach, addressing the AGM of Arndale Property Trust Limited, July 8, Bradford, Guardian, 9/7/64, p12

  19 Sam Chippindale, Architects’ Journal, 19/1/61, p97

  20 Guardian, 8/6/73, p25

  21 G. A. Jellicoe, Motopia, Studio Books, 1961, p95

  22 Wilfred Burns, British Shopping Centres, Leonard Hill, 1959, p74-75

  23 Guardian, 20/4/72, p21

  24 Guardian, 20/4/72, p21

  25 Guardian, 8/6/73, p25

  26 Lionel Esher, A Broken Wave, Pelican, 1983, p54

  27 A. L. Lloyd, Picture Post, 8/1/49, p10

  28 A. L. Lloyd, Picture Post, 8/1/49, p13

  29 Sir Isaac Hayward, Feb 1956, in Oliver Marriott, The Property Boom, Pan Piper, 1969, p248

  30 ‘Elephant and Castle – Redevelopment and Road Improvement’, LCC Press Release, 2/2/56, p2

  31 South London Press, 13/12/46

  32 South London Press, 8/5/59

  33 LCC Press Bureau press release, 19/10/58, p3

  34 South London Press, 23/11/62

  35 Guardian, 9/9/64, p19

  36 Guardian, 9/9/64, p19

  37 ‘The Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre: A Willett Development’ brochure, p6

  38 ‘The Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre: A Willett Development’ brochure, p10

  39 Guardian, 9/9/64, p21

  40 South London Press, 15/7/60

  41 Graham Shaylor, Developing Birmingham: 1889–1989, Birmingham City Council, 1989, p90

  42 Neville Borg, Birmingham Chief Engineer in John Holliday, ed, City Centre Redevelopment, Charles Knight, 1973, p49

  43 Frank Price, The New Birmingham, West Midlands Press, 1959, p9

  44 Bull Ring, 1961 brochure promoting the Bull Ring to businesses, Laing, p25

  45 Bull Ring, 1960 brochure promoting the Bull Ring to businesses from John D. Wood and Company (London) and Chesshire, Gibson and Company (Birmingham)

  46 Professor Colin Buchanan, The Times, 19/9/66, p9

  47 Geoffrey Moorhouse, The Other England, Penguin, 1964, p93

  48 Joseph Minogue, Guardian, 27/3/62, p8

  49 Rodney Gordon in John Gold, The Practice of Modernism, Routledge, 2007, p115

  50 Rodney Gordon in Elain Harwood and Alan Powers, The Sixties, The Twentieth Century Society, 2002, p78

  51 Rodney Gordon in Elain Harwood and Alan Powers, The Sixties, The Twentieth Century Society, 2002, p75

  52 Guardian 3/11/77, p18

  53 George Perkin, Concrete Quarterly, October-December 1970, p40

  54 Sam Chippindale, Architects’ Journal, 19/1/61, p97

  55 Diana Rowntree, Guardian, 29/5/64, p10

  56 Jan Morris, The Times, 15/1/76, p13

  57 Neville Borg, Birmingham Chief Engineer in John Holliday, ed, City Centre Redevelopment, Charles Knight, 1973, p49

  58 Colin Buchanan, Guardian, 28/9/70, p7

  59 Colin Buchanan, Traffic in Towns, Penguin, 1964, p37

  60 ‘Must Britain be a Mess?’ 4, Observer 19/6/60, p19

  61 ‘Must Britain be a Mess?’ 4, Observer 19/6/60, p19

  62 W. Konrad Smigielski in John Holliday, ed, City Centre Redevelopment, Charles Knight, 1973, p154

  63 Colin Buchanan, Traffic in Towns, Penguin, 1964, p32

  64 Peter and Alison Smithson, Ordinariness and Light, Faber, 1970, p66

  65 Wilfred Burns, British Shopping Centres, Leonard Hill, 1959, p105-6

  66 G. A. Jellicoe, Motopia, Studio Books, 1961, p12

  67 G. A. Jellicoe, Motopia, Studio Books, 1961, p11

  68 G. A. Jellicoe, Motopia, Studio Books, 1961, p143

  i RAC figures released in 2011 showed how grimly realistic they were being 50 years ago, as the 2010 number was 34 million vehicles in total, of which 28.4 million were cars.

  4. ‘A Natural Evolution of Living Conditions’

  NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE AND SYSTEM BUILDING (1959–69)

  The advance party for the swinging sixties arrived in Britain in 1956. It came from America, with media reports of cinemas being ripped up by frustrated teenagers jiving their way through the film Rock Around the Clock, and Elvis Presley corrupting the nation’s youth with his filthy gyrations to ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. The frustrations of a young postwar generation were captured by John Osborne in his play Look Back in Anger, which premiered at the Royal Court in London; and the frustrations of an ageing postwar Empire were played out for all to see in Britain’s disastrous intervention that triggered the Suez crisis.

  Then the following year the Soviet Union’s ‘man-made moon’, the Sputnik, was sent into orbit and the space age began in earnest, infiltrating everything from B-movies to newsreels. Closer to earth, the new Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan articulated the results of a consumer boom he’d inherited with the deathless remark that ‘most of our people have never had it so good.’

  But while the rockers and rollers, the beatniks and angry young men, communists and consumer boomers seemed to be infusing the late fifties with colour, energy and dynamism, progressives in the fields of planning and architecture were becoming increasingly frustrated by the slow pace of material change. It wasn’t just that a modernist future of the sort that had been advocated in the thirties had yet to appear, but rather that more basic considerations – the rebuilding of Blitzed cites and the clearing of bomb sites and slums – were largely still on the drawing board. More was needed – more political will, more technical innovation and more visionary chutzpah.

  It was from this stagnant world of local government prevarication that a new generation of politicians began to emerge, determined to make good their campaign-trail promises of slum clearance and a better future for all. One such was a 43-year-old painting-and-decorating contractor, who, following local council elections in 1958, was given responsibility for the housing needs of one of the great cities of the north of England. Not only would he inject exactly the kind of dynamic energy needed to reinvigorate the postwar crusade for decent homes for all, but he would go on to become a national symbol of both the triumphs and the excesses of the era. Round-faced, twinkly-eyed and always ready with an earthy quip from his famously runaway mouth, T. Dan Smith was a charismatic and outspoken politician, the Brian Clough of local government. The son of a miner, his rise through the Newcastle Labour party to the position of Chairman of the Housing Committee, and later Leader of the Council, was achieved through sheer force of personality.

  Right from the off Dan Smith dismissed not only the work of the opposition but of his own party, presenting himself as an entirely new breed of politician. ‘I don’t feel that Newcastle City Council has much to be proud of,’ he said
in his maiden speech as a councillor in 1950, ‘it is a hundred years since it did anything, and I mean to change that.’1 No timid consensus politician, this was a man later described by a colleague as ‘a politician with a vision of the sort of city he wanted’2 – and a man who would do his utmost to realise it. This vision would turn out to be so compelling that over the next decade, Smith would pull the entire council with him in his attempts to transform Newcastle.

  In Peril in the City, Dan Smith set out how he would rebuild a city fit for the people who lived there. He had rapidly concluded that high density urban rebuilding was the only possible way they could reach their target of 2,000 new homes a year. As in Glasgow, they would have to build upwards. ‘The erection of tower blocks is a natural evolution of living conditions,’ he said in 1958 with characteristic boldness, simultaneously painting the proposed high-rise structures as a great leap forward in human development, and a simple certainty.3

  The Scotswood Road, whose long, straight course runs parallel to the Tyne from the city centre out to Blaydon, would be the testing ground for Smith’s vision. The Guardian reported in 1962 that ‘the desolation of the Scotswood Road and the area behind it matches the worst that Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester or Leeds can show in the way of slums’4 and Dan Smith recalled visiting a house there where rats swarmed continually up from the broken drains and over the kitchen table. Clearly change was urgently needed.

  I met two former residents of the area, Ken and Margaret Denholm, to learn more about the changes T. Dan Smith had brought to Newcastle. Four generations of Margaret’s family have lived at Cruddas Park, one of the estates that replaced the slums on Scotswood Road (‘It was Mam and Dad, and then us, then our Leslie and now his stepson’). A sprightly and talkative elderly couple, they frequently finished, repeated or contradicted each other’s anecdotes. They had both dressed up for the occasion: Margaret was immaculate with her coiffed silver hair and dainty court shoes; Ken affably stylish in a light, summer jacket. As we trudged around the sodden and muddy estate, I suspected they regretted not having opted for boots and cagoules.

  ‘This was all houses,’ said Margaret, with a sweeping gesture. We had left their car for a walk around the derelict hulks of Cruddas Park, the sixties tower blocks rising from a landscape of lumpy lawns and car parks. Once rows of tightly packed terraced houses had led down the hill to the main road, now a busy dual carriageway. But it hadn’t just been houses: ‘There was a pub on every corner. There was hundreds of pubs right the way along, and of course all that side’ – Margaret gestured towards the industrial estate turning its back on us across the road – ‘was Armstrong’s factory, and they made munitions and things.’ In fact, the estate was named after the director of the Vickers Armstrong armaments works, George Cruddas. It must have seemed an unpromising place to start an exciting housing revolution.

  ‘Rough area,’ confirmed Ken.

  ‘Notorious,’ agreed Margaret. ‘Like the Gorbals in Glasgow.’

  Yet it was here in 1959, with the progressive demolition of the slums of Scotswood Road, that Dan Smith’s vision began to be realised, with the construction of Haughton Court and King’s Meadows, the first two modest 12-storey point blocks built by the Bovis subsidiary Leslie and Co. Along with the buildings rose an enduring cult of personality. One LCC architect who had moved north at this time commented that ‘the most prominent councillors were just blustering, coarse, heavy men who were extremely ambitious – 60 percent proof personal ambition, to get knighthoods or hold the Mayor’s mace!’5 Dan Smith was ambitious too, but on a much grander scale than mere mayoralty. And he had the talent to match. Even his political rivals were in awe of his abilities, and it was generally held that ‘he stood head and shoulders above the rest of the Labour group.’6

  Soon Dan Smith had become a key player in Harold Wilson’s great national plan, as chairman of the Northern Economic Planning Council. Over the years his renown steadily grew. By 1965 the Observer magazine was profiling him in the most gushing terms: ‘It was his clearing of Scotswood, the decaying slum jungle at the west end of the city, that won him the name of “Mr Newcastle”. One of the swiftest and most imaginative rehousing schemes in the country, it brought Dan Smith the leadership of the council itself.’7 It had certainly been swift, but in fact there was nothing particularly imaginative about the housing scheme at Cruddas Park. The point blocks were exactly the sort of thing the ‘soft’ communist faction of the London County Council Architects’ Department had long approved of, and had recently completed in the internationally famous Alton East development on the edge of Richmond Park.

  After the first two 12-storey blocks, Dan Smith had promptly ordered a further eight, this time built by Laing and Wimpey. These would be three storeys higher than the originals, with electric rather than gas heating, and under-floor heating in the lounge. ‘We had to use multi-storey blocks that had been on the stocks for years and had not been built,’ said Smith, ‘but we were able to create around them the concept of open space.’8 It was with these additional eight blocks that Dan Smith’s plan for Cruddas Park began to diverge wildly from the LCC’s Alton East estate. There were no plans for any modern low-rise housing to break up these high blocks, no effort here to create a ‘mixed development’. Towers would have to do all the job of rehousing. Low-rise blocks and houses were being built around the estate and further along the Scotswood Road, but Cruddas Park itself was to be entirely a landscape of giants.

  Ken and Margaret Denholm were there on the day the first of the 15-storey Cruddas Park blocks, The Willows, was officially opened.

  ‘This was mother’s house,’ explained Margaret, as we trudged around to the front of the abandoned tower in search of her parents’ old home. ‘This was the first block which was occupied. Her and me dad were the first to move into the whole estate.’ Margaret’s father had been the caretaker.

  ‘9 June 1962,’ said Ken.

  Five of the Cruddas Park blocks. © Jim Pickett

  ‘Hundredth year anniversary of the Blaydon Races,’ remembered Margaret. ‘Her house was here.’ She pointed to the boarded-up windows on the ground-floor corner of one of the towers, ‘and this over here’ – she gestured to where a number of other towers to the east of us now stood – ‘was just big mounds of soil. There was nothing done with it. And then right in the middle, about where them seats are, was this monstrosity of a sculpture thing, you know.’ (This ‘monstrosity’ was described by its creator Kenneth Ford as a ‘powerful and satisfying image, transcending our frailties’,9, though a local art critic remarked on its unveiling: ‘One hesitates to imagine what the inhabitants of the flats will think of it.’10) ‘You couldn’t make head nor tail of it, it was a modern thing, you know,’ said Margaret.

  Ken stepped in to clarify: ‘It had a hole in the middle and it was the rebirth of Scotswood Road.’

  ‘And it was Hugh Gaitskell that unveiled it and that opened the estate, and he even had a cup of tea at me mam’s, as it was the only house occupied. And then they came out and stood just outside here and watched the parade go along Scotswood Road to Blaydon. And there was the Lord Mayor and everybody were all decked up in their garb of a hundred years ago, you know, on coaches and things, it was really good. And we had a bird’s eye view, you know!’

  The leader of the Labour party had been similarly impressed with this mixture of pageantry and progress, a classic Dan Smith PR coup. ‘How Hugh Gaitskell enjoyed that day,’ recalled the wily Newcastle councillor in his memoir. ‘But the four-year housing slog which preceded this event was a trying period.’11 Gaitskell was no stranger to launching major modern housing schemes – two years previously he’d been in Sheffield to declare the Park Hill flats open.

  There were 980 flats in all when Cruddas Park was finished, with the 15-storey blocks given sylvan names suitable for the imagined ‘city in the park’ that was being built here: The Poplars, The Willows, The Beeches, The Hawthorns, The Larches, The Sycamores, The Pines and The C
edars. The towers follow a rather basic design, a mixture of concrete frame, red-brick walls and prefabricated steel frames holding what were, by the time I saw them, tangerine-coloured infill panels beneath generous windows. ‘They were well-fitted, good flats,’ said Dan Smith. ‘They were a credit to their designers, and they were low in cost.’12 The panels were now corroded, each one warped and stained, some bleached to pale yellow, some to lurid pink. Many of the lower flats had been boarded up, though the higher ones still displayed some faded relics of former inhabitants: ragged curtains, skewed blinds or sheets of yellowing newspaper at the windows.

  Despite their shabby and slightly flimsy appearance, there was something plain and handsome about these towers, their simple forms and unfussy silhouettes a mild expression of their Swedish heritage. As in Park Hill, the sloping site gave the residents spectacular views over the city, the hill itself injecting a dose of rugged character to the estate. Clearing the terraces had allowed the landscape to show through. This was what Dan Smith meant by his ‘concept of open space’. The landscape was supposed to be the ‘hero’ element of the estate, given the simplistic nature of the blocks themselves, yet ‘park’ was a generous term for the terrain on which the flats are situated. Once a free-flowing space between blocks, the area has long since been fenced off into a series of small bland hollows and uneven lawns where no ball games were allowed, with scrawny trees scattered in the voids between towers. This was no lushly planted garden city landscape. Even the sculpture had long-since vanished. And there had never never been enough parking spaces, with bays for five or six cars per block at the most. After all, this was an estate built not for the independent motorist but for the bus user, member of a socialist community bursting with the ‘all in this together’ spirit of the welfare state age.