‘Stanley Miller were very innovative and brought in Honeywell to give them a computer system, a costing system, which was quite unheard of in construction in those days. This was 1969–1970. The computer room was the size of this café, it was huge, a bit like Joe 90, with the disks going round, you know? The invoice came in and then a punching slip had to be created. That would be sent to punch card operators – we had three of those – who would then transfer that information from the form into the digital format on a card which would then be put into the computer.’
It was like the paperless office in reverse, the computer not just generating paper but ingesting it too. I was reminded of the punch-cards Alan Turing’s crypto-analysts were using for their proto-computers at Bletchley Park in their efforts to decode Enigma over two decades earlier.
Not all of Stanley Miller’s experimental systems worked smoothly. The timber-framed windows were a weakness on the MWM blocks. ‘A window on a two-storey house is subject to wind-driven rain at a fairly low level,’ John explained. ‘Stick the same window 28 storeys up and the same window doesn’t perform very well at all. And it’s not the window itself, it’s the seals. So they had to experiment with lots of different seals. There was a period of going back to refit seals into windows which had leaked.’ One particular memory, of his sister-in-law’s family, turned John a little sheepish. ‘When her father died they moved her mother to Harlow Green, Allerdine, which was another Stanley Miller development, and every time I saw her she would complain: “Can’t you have another word with the people at your place, ’cos it pours through the window?”’ He was actually blushing at this point. ‘But they also had problems with the panels below the window, which tended to be an aggregate panel or a glass panel or whatever, again, with the mastic that was used. Again you’re talking about cutting edge technology.’
Sometimes the innovations could have unforeseen tragic consequences. John recalled a sad story related to him by a former colleague, John Gunning.
‘John was actually standing on one of the floor panels, the tables – and we don’t know whether there were some chocks underneath the front edge, or whether someone had lowered the little jacks. But anyway, there’s two of them stepped to one edge of it – and in those days although health and safety was important to the company, you didn’t have any lanyards to tie you onto anything. Anyway, to cut a long story short, two of them slipped off. The table went with them. John managed to hold onto the table and swing himself into the floor below, but the guy he was with went off and he was killed. As far as I know that was the only fatality that they ever had.’
I thought back to the building site photograph we had been looking at – those tiny figures clambering about with ease all over the concrete frame of a tower block. Later I thought of Ken Denholm, climbing out of a fifteenth floor window to clean it. People had put so much trust in the safety of those experimental towers.
The tallest residential tower in the whole of Newcastle is Jesmond Vale, an MWM block built by Stanley Miller in 1966. The process of examining the Stanley Miller files in preparation for our chat had inspired John to do some investigations of his own. ‘I actually went to Jesmond Vale,’ he said. ‘I’d never been round till you contacted me.’ He showed me a local newspaper clipping from 1969 which quoted a letter written by a Jesmond Vale resident to the council: I am writing to thank you for the beautiful castle you have built me. In all my dreams of castles in the air I never imagined one like this … This is my castle and I love it. John became animated once again. ‘I thought, I should go and look at these places and see what they’re like now. I happened to meet this delightful lady, Brenda – she’s part of the residents’ association. I explained my interest and I said, “I’m just keen because I have a letter written to the council about castles in the air, etc, and I just wanted to know, all this time later, what do the residents feel about the building?” And I was greatly surprised how much they love it. Because you get so much negativity about blocks.’
Jesmond Vale, in a 1966 publicity shot, showing off the MWM system. © Stanley Miller c/o John Matthews
At the eastern end of Cruddas Park four of the towers have been completely renovated and re-clad as part of a regeneration scheme for the area. Now covered in matt white render with cobalt blue accents, they are unrecognisable. Jaunty balconies and windows jut at irregular angles and intervals from the fascias in a complete departure from the regularity of the original buildings. The stairwell windows are now vertical slits, the glass tinted deep red. Each building also has a large private car park at its base where once was Dan Smith’s ‘concept of open space’. It is hard not to be impressed at how luxurious they now appear, and how comprehensive the transformation. One block is entirely devoted to flats for old people; the others are for private buyers. The original idea had been to do all of the estate, but the state of the economy has seen to that plan, and now five of the blocks are facing demolition, including Margaret and Ken’s former home, Haughton Court. They didn’t seem too sad about the prospect, being much more excited by the transformation of the regenerated towers. When their grandson Mark mentioned he was moving to one of the swanky new blocks Margaret was incredulous.
‘I said, “you’re going back to Cruddas Park?” I said, “I can’t believe that!” I said, “that’s four generations had a connection with it, you know.” Really, really weird. Our Leslie, he was born here, and now his stepson has moved back in.’
It’s no longer called Cruddas Park, of course. The stigma of what eventually became a rough, run-down and neglected council estate was too much for the developers to bear. They put forward three alternative names, with locals voting to rebrand the area as Riverside Dene. I remembered Shirley Meehan’s comment in 1972 – ‘the view, if you avoid looking at the riverbanks, is beautiful’ – and reflected how fast cities and attitudes can change, and how alien recent history can seem. A new generation of residents is now moving into Scotswood Road. Some, like Margaret and Ken’s grandson, are descendants of former council tenants made good; others have little or no connection to the area, or knowledge of its past.
Notes
1 Dan Smith in Chris Foote Wood, T. Dan Smith, Northern Writers, 2010, p56
2 Kenneth Galley in John Holliday, ed, City Centre Redevelopment, Charles Knight, 1973, p228
3 T. Dan Smith, October 1958, quoted in Evening Chronicle 21/10/86, p8
4 Guardian, 4/4/62, p8
5 Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block, Yale University Press, 1994, p166
6 Liberal Alderman William McKeag in Chris Foote Wood, T. Dan Smith, Northern Writers, 2010, p56
7 Observer Magazine, 21/2/65, p14
8 T. Dan Smith, An Autobiography, Oriel Press, 1970, p62
9 Kenneth Ford, NE Arts Review, 1962, p18
10 P. S. Rowson (curator from the Gulbenkian Museum of Oriental Art and Archaeology, NE Arts Review, 1962, p16
11 Smith, p65
12 Smith, p62
13 Newcastle Evening Chronicle 15/9/72, p17
14 Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 19/9/69, p3
15 June Hulbert, Northern Life, 18/8/77, p52
16 Newcastle Journal, 2/8/77
17 Concrete Quarterly, July-September 1963, p37
18 Concrete Quarterly, April-June 1965, p1
19 Keith Joseph, Journal of the Town Planning Institute, March 1964, p91
20 Cleeve Barr, Chief architect NBA, The Times Supplement on Industrialised Building, 21/3/66, piii
21 George Bowie, in Glendinning and Muthesius, p203
22 Kenneth Campbell, Principal Housing Officer of the LCC, on system building, in Glendinning and Muthesius, p203
23 Dan Smith in Foote Wood, p75
24 Concrete Quarterly, April-June 1959, p1
5. ‘A Contemporary Canaletto’
COLONEL SEIFERT’S OFFICE BLOCKS AND THE POST OFFICE TOWER (1956–75)
Arguably the biggest impact on the British skyline in the whole postwar period was mad
e by a controversial, art-loving, Swiss-born architect who hid behind his round-framed spectacles – a tirelessly mercurial figure who even changed his name and nationality along the way. Not Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, who famously moved to France and reinvented himself as Le Corbusier, but instead, a curious figure, born Reubin Seifert, who fearlessly took our skyline and inserted into it some of our most notable, ambitious and controversial buildings.
When he moved to England almost a century ago, the young Reubin changed his name to Richard, but as his reputation grew he became widely known to his profession and to readers of Private Eye simply as ‘The Colonel’. Colonel Seifert was the man behind literally hundreds of office blocks around the United Kingdom. His particular gift was his unequalled mastery of the manifold building controls the government and local authority planners sought to impose upon the developers who were buying up vast tracts of land all over the country. No one was more appreciative of the Colonel’s skill than the startlingly young entrepreneur known rather incongruously as the ‘daddy of all developers’ – Harry Hyams. A shadowy, intensely secretive man, goatee-bearded, dapper, and with a taste for fast cars and luxury, Harry Hyams comes across in the few existing accounts of him as somewhere between Howard Hughes and the Roger Delgado version of the Master from Doctor Who. As the Daily Express wrote when profiling him in 2006, following an audacious multi-million pound robbery at his stately home in Wiltshire: ‘Hyams never gives interviews, no recent newspaper photograph of him exists and the BBC admits that he is the only famous living person whose voice is not in their sound archive. You won’t even find his name in Who’s Who.’1 Harry and the Colonel by no means worked exclusively together, but when they did collaborate, they produced spectacular results.
This chapter tells the story of postwar developers in the Harry Hyams mould, a breed of alpha-spivs whose careers were born out of the chaos of the war, and of the commercial architects they worked with, with their dogged pursuit of the sharpest deal and slimmest loophole. It reveals the impact of new communications and computing technology on what was built. Most of all, it traces how the arrival of big money, and a number of simultaneous major breakthroughs in science, radically affected the skyline of our island between the late fifties until the early seventies, whether in big cities, ambitious suburbs, or on remote wilds of heath, moor and down.
The developers ran riot in London. At its centre, marking the boundary between studious Bloomsbury and boozy Fitzrovia, runs Tottenham Court Road. Three striking structures near this road radically reshaped the city’s skyline in the late sixties. At the south end stands Harry and the Colonel’s most famous collaboration, and what was once the most controversial office block in the country: Centre Point, a tall, slender wafer with its distinctive, ‘egg-box’ concrete structure. To the north, across the hectic rush of the Euston Road, a massive cluster of squat blue-green mirrored glass boxes form the blank face of the Euston Centre. This was masterminded by developer Joe Levy, who had been Hyams’ boss back in the fifties. And one street over to the west, in the heart of Fitzrovia, high above both of these gigantic office blocks, rises the cylindrical splendour of the BT Tower like a high-tech Nelson’s Column, showing us just what the public sector could achieve when it came to planting a stake in our skyline.
Designing office blocks such as Centre Point or Euston Tower was not considered prestigious work by those architects who aspired to become the Le Corbusiers of Britain. Yes, Basil Spence’s practice deigned to produce Thorn House near Seven Dials in London, a classic late fifties office slab perched on top of a low rise podium block, presenting the tower like a giant sculpture. And at around the same time Robert Matthew and Stirratt Johnson-Marshall consummated their architectural partnership with the design of New Zealand House, an embassy down the road in Haymarket, which also adopted the podium-and-tower approach. Even those daring iconoclasts, Peter and Alison Smithson, had a go with their early sixties offices for the Economist in smart St James’s. The innovative brutalist design naturally rejected the mainstream craze for towers on podiums and instead created three small blocks with a plaza between them, a modern nod to the alleyways of old London from this history-obsessed couple. Yet on the whole, few of the MARS or CIAM elite in Britain troubled themselves with working for developers, the men usually behind the construction of the big office or shopping schemes that went up in the fifties and sixties. Generally they showed more interest in public sector projects such as housing or civic centre redevelopment, and tended to work within local authorities rather than private practices.
An exception was the Hungarian émigré Ernő Goldfinger, whose work at the Elephant and Castle I knew well. The multi-faceted offices he designed there, once home to the Ministry of Health, are now a luxury apartment block complex, rejoicing in the name of Metro Central Heights. I met one of Ernő’s former colleagues, James Dunnett, who’d begun his career at the practice in the seventies. In the somewhat chaotic office in his beautiful Georgian home in north London, James fluctuated between pensiveness and bouts of nervous energy. He evoked the snobberies that lay behind the decisions of the big-name designers of the postwar period:
‘Goldfinger was one of the few respected architects who was willing to work for developers. In those days the award-winning architects tended to work on universities or housing or possibly health buildings, but hardly any of them did any city centre development. It was thought to be practically demeaning working for developers in those days. The scene has completely changed now. Nowadays the top architects fall over each other to work for developers.’
For their part, the developers of the day were happy to ignore the highfalutin, unworldy – and more to the point, expensive – establishment architects. Instead they built up a sympathetic coterie who understood just what they were after – which tended to be a healthy return on their investments rather than philosophical correctness. One such successful commercial architect, Michael Rosenauer, in his 1955 book Modern Office Buildings, laid out the designer’s two main challenges: ‘one is the search for maximum economy in structural methods, the other is our growing awareness of the importance of healthy environment’ – for the workers, he meant, rather than the planet.2
When the Conservative government scrapped a whole layer of regulations and red tape around building in the mid-fifties, a third, rather more basic consideration came to dominate these new boom developments: how to pack the largest possible floor space into the area the developers had bought, without blocking light from the surrounding streets. The eminent planner William Holford developed a calculation for the London County Council, known as the plot ratio, to determine the maximum square footage permissible on a given site. Developers were keen to exploit the plot ratio of their land as fully as possible, and their architects would become experts in playing the system to ensure that the greatest possible floor area was achieved, often well over what the LCC had originally intended. Loopholes were vigorously sought, inside information from the local authorities eagerly obtained. ‘Although plot ratios were stated to be a maxima,’ reported Holford wearily, ‘in practice they have come to be regarded as a minima.’3 By 1960, with the building boom in full swing, he was still convinced that Britain could avoid building town centres dominated by office buildings, even if he wasn’t quite sure how that would be achieved. ‘The fact that office rents bring the highest return (except perhaps for illuminated advertisements) is bound to mean an increase of tall, functional, cellular slabs and towers,’ he told the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in his inaugural address as their president. ‘What I imagine we shall not allow is their displacement of all other buildings of smaller bulk and greater individuality … But to do this will require some hard thinking.’4 Holford’s own work, creating detailed plans for the rebuilding of the City of London, was not without controversy. His 1956 proposed layout for the Blitzed area around St Paul’s Cathedral, for example, ran into a concerted press campaign to protect one of the country’s greatest buildings fro
m towering office blocks, a campaign that did not abate until said towers were demolished some 40 years later.
The relationship between planners, developers and their architects tended to operate at two extremes – cosy and collaborative, or hostile and suspicious. John Gyford, the avuncular former LCC planner I met in the Festival Hall café, recalled the battles they regularly faced with developers determined to maximise their floor space. ‘On one occasion I attended one of these meetings between one of the senior officers and a developer’s architect,’ he said as we sipped our tea. ‘They were dealing with a site at the very far end of Shaftesbury Avenue where it comes into New Oxford Street. And it was a slightly awkwardly shaped site, but the developer’s architect had been as ingenious as he could to try to squeeze the maximum floor space out of it. The senior officer who was interrogating the architect was really not convinced that this scheme was going to meet the planning standards. And eventually the architect, in responding to this criticism produced what he may have thought was his clincher. He said, “But without what we’re getting in this plan, the scheme won’t be economic!” To which my senior officer replied, in his broad Yorkshire accent, “Well, it’ll bloody well have to be unecononomic!”.’
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