Concretopia
Page 25
Interviewed by the BBC in 1977, Seifert reflected on his impact on the character of our cities. ‘I lived in a time when monumentality was something which was considered to be something exiting and exhilarating and necessary. Canaletto painted the scenes of London with Wren’s spires … We are taking [it] a few layers higher and we are creating almost a contemporary Canaletto, a skyline which has a remarkable effect on me personally, and I have no reason but to be very proud of it – at least, proud of our limited contribution.’13
One place that was changed beyond all measure by the postwar office boom, with the help of the Colonel, was my hometown of Croydon – so much so it inspired a new word: Croydonisation. The comprehensive development area legislation was all very well for the coventrated cities, but the process was too slow and bureaucratic for the ‘managing director of Croydon’ Sir James Marshall MP.14 When his original postwar development plan was rejected by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Marshall realised that the official centralised route was never going to work for him. Accordingly, in 1956 he pushed the Croydon Corporation Act through parliament, which allowed local authorities to compulsorily purchase land for redevelopment without the slow and interfering approval of central government. If the CDAs represented a socialist urge to bring great swathes of land back under central ownership and set them to work for the good of the people, the Croydon Corporation Act was an expression of pure capitalism, designed to encourage the rigorous commercial exploitation of land that was currently occupied by inconvenient schools and houses.
Croydon’s status as the capitalists’ dream town was in part an unwitting side effect of one of the most socialistic creations in British politics. Soon after sweeping to power in 1964, Harold Wilson’s Labour party created a Department of Economic Affairs to sit alongside the Treasury. Its colourful head, George Brown, was tasked with creating an integrated Soviet-style National Plan for the economy. One of his first actions was to ban the construction of more offices in central London, where there were acres of unoccupied floor space, in the hope that it would boost the regions. The Brown ban took effect in November 1964. In The Property Boom, Financial Times journalist Oliver Marriott described how developers and architects invited LCC and corporation of London officials to last-minute parties in a venal scramble to get as many office developments signed off before the midnight deadline as possible.15
The main effect of the ban was to send office development out into the suburbs. In the south, towns like Woking, Swindon, Surbiton, Basingstoke, Slough and Reading all added acres of office floorspace to attract overspill business from London. Croydon outpaced them all.
The passing of the Croydon Corporation Act had enabled Sir James Marshall’s plan, with its 45 acres of town centre redevelopment to go ahead without fear of public enquiry. ‘Having engendered the office boom,’ wrote the academic Peter Saunders in his book on Croydon, ‘Sir James and his colleagues sat back and watched with some amazement as their infant grew swiftly to elephantine proportions.’16 The first office block to appear was Norfolk House, a rather tame 11-storey brick tower, in 1959. Within a decade a staggering 45 office blocks had been built in central Croydon – almost all wrapped in glass curtain walls. They were packed so closely together that, rather than reflecting the outside world as intended, they merely reflected each other in an infinite ‘hall of mirrors’ style regress.
Croydon highlighted the risks of doing without a comprehensive development plan. A panel of architects considered developers’ applications in isolation, and were unable to judge the overall effect. ‘Something more might have been done to encourage architects to work together in their respective schemes so as to integrate and develop the whole,’ wrote the Guardian when visiting the town in 1962, at the start of the boom.17 If they had been impressed with the ambition of the borough’s plans, they were less keen on the reality: ‘Unfortunately Croydon is getting a number of buildings where the chief design consideration has been the provision of the maximum lettable floor space.’
Borough Engineer Allan Holt’s spurious desire for a landmark in the centre of Croydon twice the height of Norfolk House epitomises the ad hoc, unplanned nature of the area’s development. This wasn’t a plan, it was a craving, and it was fed by Ronald Ward and Partners with a 23-storey slab of chocolate: St George’s Tower. When the mayor opened this imperious block in 1965 he remarked that Nestlé ‘could be excused for believing they own Croydon.’18 Almost 50 years later, in post-riots 2013, with the company about to vacate their famous tower, it feels rather as if they have sold the town off.
St George’s Tower under construction in 1964. © Ian Steel
By the mid-sixties, after an ‘everything must go’ feeding frenzy, developers had bought up the whole of the town centre. On the site of Croydon Girls’ School, Harry Hyams built Lunar House and Apollo House, soon to become twin homes to the Home Office’s passport HQ. Richard Seifert’s practice designed two quite different office towers near East Croydon station – delicate curtain-walled Corinthian House in the early sixties, and the chunky Jenga-like Noble Lowndes Tower, completed in 1970.
The Noble Lowndes Tower, known as the Threepenny Bit building: Seifert’s landmark for Croydon.
Noble Lowndes Tower is Croydon’s star building: 24 storeys of elongated octagons, covered in millions of the inevitable white micro-mosaic tiles, and placed crossways to the floor below to create a jerky, jagged, multi-faceted tower, known to generations as the Threepenny Bit or 50p building. Like Centre Point, it is built on an inaccessible traffic island, with car parking hidden beneath. Also, like Centre Point, its construction was not without hitches. In this case a resident of East Bridge House, which stood on one part of the Threepenny Bit’s site, refused to move off when construction began. Here was the inevitable fallout from the gift James Marshall had given the town – redevelopment without consultation. It gave local authorities the power to kick intransigent residents out of their homes. Even when the tower was opened in 1970, East Bridge House was clinging to the site (it was eventually demolished three years later). Yet such hitches were glossed over by this most forward-thinking of councils. ‘In sunlight the new centre appears as a glittering mass of white concrete and reflecting glass rising above the surrounding townscape,’ enthused the Borough’s official guide in 1971, adding, ‘at close quarters it is equally impressive.’19
A trip to the top of the NLA Tower in 2010 gave me a skyscraper’s eye view of the centre. The town made much more sense from that perspective. Seen from the ground, the blocks stood out like lanky boys dancing self-consciously at a disco. From up there their glass walls shimmered majestically like glitterballs in the autumnal gloom. It was a different, more glamorous sort of town centre up there – one still waiting for Jetsons-style aerocars to be invented to make use of its fantastic skyscape.
‘Even a Londoner without a head for heights might be persuaded to visit Croydon to see on the ground the kind of city all this commercial growth can make possible,’ The Times reported in 1970. ‘If there are faults of scale or design in the office towers, Croydon walkers follow the English habit of rarely raising their eyes at all. For those that do, there are unsuspected glimpses of strange and lofty angles of concrete and glass.’20 Yet still the council wanted more. ‘The demand for office accommodation in this large and forward-looking Borough has been beyond expectation,’ reported the 1969 edition of Croydon’s official guide excitedly.21 With a staggering five million square feet of office space already either completed or under construction, it seemed incredible that another million square feet should be approved by the Greater London Council. Yet approved they were, and despite pockets of deprivation, such as New Addington, Croydon’s council remained determined to favour business over social needs. In the spring of 1973 the council reduced projected expenditure on health, education and social services, while allocating a further £500,000 to the construction of a sixth car park.22 The reason? The town chiefs were determined to have more multi-storey c
ar parks than Birmingham. For all the talk of a more rational, scientific world, it was these heated inter-city rivalries that were often the basis for shaping the rebuilding of postwar Britain.
In 1974, with the economy in the grip of stagflation, Greater London Council announced that no further office development would be allowed in Croydon, even where a government permit to built had been granted. A decade after the Brown ban came its thundering echo, bringing the borough’s boom to an abrupt and ugly halt.
Meanwhile, Birmingham had found a quite different use for its new skyscrapers: in 1973 the extraordinary Cliff Richard musical Take Me High was filmed around the Seifert-designed Alpha Tower. Cliff played a young corporate executive who thought he was being sent to New York but ended up in Birmingham, before embarking on a You’ve Got Mail-style romance with family café boss Debbie Watling. The film featured Cliff in Cuban heels and a grey suit singing upbeat songs with titles such as It’s Only Money and Winning while driving round Spaghetti Junction, running enthusiastically across overpasses or staring up at newly built office blocks (Concrete city / It can’t slam the door in my face). Sadly Take Me High bombed at the box office and became Cliff’s final foray into film. It seemed that a musical about corporate rivalry in Birmingham lacked the appeal of, say, a romantic road trip across Europe in a converted double decker. Who knew?
Alpha Tower, Cliff’s co-star in Take Me High, was built for ATV, the Midlands ITV franchise run by Lew Grade. By the late sixties office space was being reconfigured to accommodate not only humans but the latest in computer equipment. Here the Colonel’s task was to create new studios fit for the colour television age. The site, formerly one of Birmingham’s most famous wharves, had originally been earmarked for an exhibition centre to be designed by James Roberts, but this project was shoved aside to make room for Seifert’s master plan. He envisaged a whole new cultural complex for the city: not just television studios and offices, but a hotel, two cinemas, a theatre and exhibition centre.
As the financial climate worsened after the devaluation of the pound in 1968, ambitions for the centre were scaled down. The theatre and cinemas were ditched, and the exhibition centre ended up somewhat squeezed by the office tower and studios, but still the most technically advanced studios of the day were opened by Princess Alexandra in 1970. Footage of the ceremony, captured in the brilliant documentary, ATV Land in Colour, shows rows of the great and the good – balding men, basically – sitting down to a celebratory lunch in the hangar-like Studio One. The vibe is more early seventies general election count than glamorous media launch.
ATV were soon broadcasting in colour, producing everything from Crossroads and The Golden Shot to Tiswas and Spitting Image. The design of the studio block was typical George Marsh, its flashy, irregular angles playing with the concept of the functional box. Construction of the offices, Alpha Tower, had lagged a couple of years behind the studios, and by the time they were finished ATV (not for nothing known as ‘All Tory Values’) had decided to rent them out in the midst of the Heath property boom rather than move in.
One of the advantages of the location of the new ATV studios was that they were very near Birmingham’s new Post Office Tower, the gawky 31-storey telecommunications centre completed in 1966. This was just one node in a network of relay stations across Britain using the new technology of microwaves to beam television and radio signals around the country. The 1,000-foot high tower built at Emley Moor in Yorkshire in 1971 was another, and it remains Britain’s tallest man-made structure, overshadowing even the Shard. Why did these structures have to be so high? Such were the limitations of microwaves as a telecoms technology that an uninterrupted ‘line of sight’ between towers was needed to send and receive information – hence the Birmingham tower’s impressive 499-foot height, tall enough to see over the surrounding buildings and hills to the network of stations beyond. The developers who’d been granted permission for the construction of a tall new residential tower next door found it swiftly revoked when it looked as if this ‘line of sight’ was to be compromised – and so plans for yet another James Roberts landmark bit the dust.
The new relay stations were designed by the Ministry of Works, who had taken over a new office block above the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre in London. The first one had been planned in 1956 and was slated to occupy the site of the Museum Telephone Exchange just west of Tottenham Court Road. The Museum Radio Tower, as it was initially known, was designed by Eric Bedford, the Ministry’s chief architect. To Anthony Wedgwood Benn, Postmaster General in Harold Wilson’s sixties cabinet, this project said everything about the ‘white heat’ of modernity their government stood for. ‘Big Ben represents the fussy grandeur of the Gothic revival,’ the Daily Express quoted him as saying in 1965. ‘The Post Office Tower, lean, practical and futuristic, symbolises the technical and architectural skill of this new age.’23
Less than a year later, Benn announced the limited testing of colour television signals from the tower, starting towards the end of 1967 with a giddying four hours of colour a week on BBC2. When Geoffrey Moorhouse ascended the unfinished tower in a crane in 1964, he reported that ‘at the moment it is bare concrete with a fringe of steel tubing. Then open air.’ The weather was so bad that by the time the intrepid journalist reached the top, he couldn’t see the ground below. ‘At street level the air barely moves,’ he wrote. ‘Up here vicious gusts tug at coat tails and drizzle slashes at the scaffolding. In gales of 90 mph the tower will twang like a tuning fork through 15 inches. On a still, cloudless day a movement of up to two inches will be induced by the heat of the sun.’24
The Post Office Tower: ‘lean, practical and futuristic’.
This predicted sway had caused huge headaches for Eric Bedford and his team. In order to serve its purpose, the tower had to remain relatively rigid: if it deviated from the vertical by more than a third of a degree the microwaves that it fired out over miles of country would miss their targets. After various models were tested in the Teddington Wind Tunnel at the National Physical Laboratories, the slim, circular shape was finally chosen as the one that would most effectively minimise wind resistance.
A few months after Geoffrey Moorhouse’s trip, Frank Goldsmith became the first member of the public to visit the tower. He’d escaped from nearby University College Hospital, where he was a patient, then evaded builders to enter the tower and climbed an astonishing 440 feet to reach the ledge of the aerial platform, from where fell to his death.
BT’s records show how the opening of the tower was dogged with farce as much as tragedy, with more than a hint of Sir Humphrey Appleby and Jim Hacker. As I waded through boxes of fuzzy carbon copies, Roneos or fountain pen-written notes in the BT archive, I came across hundreds of letters and memos buzzing back and forth between Downing Street, Balmoral and the General Post Office (GPO). In 1963 Reginald Bevins, the Conservative Postmaster General, had written to the Director General of the GPO that ‘I do not think we ought to delay the formal opening until the thing is completed both structurally and internally, but should do so as soon as the shell has been completed.’25 The GPO’s Public Relations Officer T. A. O’Brien took a dim view of this half-baked scheme: ‘We would only make ourselves look silly if we tried to organise a ceremony which would have no meaning whatsoever.’26 But by July 1964 others were beginning to understand the great PR opportunities afforded by the still unfinished Tower. ‘Lord Mackintosh would like to arrange some special ceremony for the start of the Premium Savings Bond draw for November,’ went an internal GPO memo. ‘Lord Mackintosh would like to start the draw by someone pressing an appropriate button from the top of the Post Office Tower.’27 To which, the reply was ‘we are already receiving numerous enquiries from people anxious to hold parties on “top of the tower”. A ceremony for [Premium Bonds] would only provide yet more enquiries. And every such enquirer must be told the Tower will not be open to the public until the end of 1965.’28
As the completion date for the building neared,
the minutes of the Post Office Tower’s project team from November reported on the key decisions taken: Muzak had been vetoed, coin-operated telescopes for the viewing platform were agreed, and Mr S. Horrox, the Chairman, expressed a desire that the public-facing staff should wear uniforms, perhaps of a striking red.29 The name had posed a particularly thorny problem. In April 1962 the Post Office Magazine had run a Skylon-style naming competition, offering a generous £10 prize. The winner was announced as ‘Telspire’. In the end, however, such florid pretensions were dropped and it came to be known as the Post Office Tower.
At first T. A. O’Brien was keen to enlist technophile Prince Philip to open the Tower, but this plan was derailed because of doubts about whether enough equipment to impress His Highness would have been installed by the July opening date. O’Brien’s next suggestion was that Mrs Wedgwood Benn, the Post Master General’s wife, should open it, but her husband had different ideas. He wrote to Harold Wilson in December to invite him to open the Post Office Tower, adding that ‘it might furnish you with an opportunity for speaking about the scientific revolution in practice, and the part public enterprise plays in the process.’30 As details of the opening were being thrashed out, O’Brien reported that ‘PMG is most emphatic that the operational nature of the ceremony should be emphasised and not the sight seeing one.’31 The date was finally set for 8 October. There followed a further panic about whether any links would be working in time for Wilson to demonstrate them to the world’s media. It transpired that three transmitters would be working, but that only one, connected to Birmingham’s Post Office Tower, would be using the new ‘broadband’ analogue channel. Also, only one lift would be functional by October. All in all, it seemed a very good thing that the royal visit had been postponed.