It wasn’t an easy dream to maintain. The twenty-first century had a way of intruding. Oliver gestured towards the large black television sitting incongruously in the corner of his sitting room.
‘The awful thing is that if you want to be in 1957 little things like tellies and fridges get in the way. If I could afford it I would have a reconditioned little fifties fridge.’ His kitchen was a work in progress. After eight years the mismatched furniture had yet to settle into a state of vintage bliss. ‘I won’t have a toaster because they’re new,’ said Oliver. ‘It’s hard to find the balance between literally trying to be in 1957, as I am, and …’ He didn’t have a chance to finish the thought, because we were distracted by a stack of old books on the floor; they turned out to be the minutes from the earliest residents’ meetings in Parkleys, which Oliver and his wife Lisa had rescued from a clear-out of the neighbourhood office. They told the story of a thousand local disputes stretching right back to the beginning. ‘Milton Court, at the back, was the last to be landscaped,’ he explained as I browsed through the yellowing pages, ‘’cos all the stuff from this end of the estate was just dumped at Milton. For about a year the arguments went on – when will we get some grass, when will we get turf. And Eric Lyons chaired the meetings, just trying to calm everyone down.’ The rapid spread of new technology in the fifties was another contentious issue. ‘In the early days there was one aerial on the estate for telly, and the arguments about people not getting the right reception! And so they decided in the end to go with individual aerials. The idea that they just put one aerial in that everyone plugged into! But that goes back to the social aspect of the era, because it was television for a start, in 1954, and there were a lot of people getting tellies – certainly a couple of years later.’ Eric Lyons wasn’t above designing the odd stick of furniture himself. He’d exhibited two chairs and a table at ‘Britain Can Make It’ in 1948, and Oliver was as much fascinated by Lyons’ furniture design as by his architecture. ‘We bought this chair here when it was still thought to be Eric Lyons,’ he said, indicating a beautiful blond wood armchair, ‘and we’ve since found out that it’s not.’ (Some months later, scanning Oliver’s rantings on Twitter at the Antiques Roadshow expert misidentifying one of these as Lyons’ work brightened up an otherwise quiet show.) ‘I have got an Eric Lyons chair in the study,’ he continued. ‘This is quite aesthetically pleasing; Eric Lyons’ is quite clunky. He did quite a few products – he did heaters and radios – and it wasn’t very fine design, it was quite logical, in the same way that Span wasn’t refined. It’s quite a simple idea: lots of light in a box.’
Glimpses of Parkleys reminded me of an opulent version of Fieldway, the sixties estate in my home town of New Addington. It was that Span tile, hanging on the frontages of modern, part-prefabricated houses. It was what I’d felt in Welwyn Garden City when looking at those red-brick Arts and Crafts cottages: a rush of ‘here’s what you could have won!’ Much as interwar house builders had aped the garden city style, so huge building contractors such as Laing or Wates developed mass-produced systems that brought elements of Span’s instantly recognisable language to much wider attention. ‘There’s no doubt he inspired me,’ Neil Wates once remarked of Eric Lyons.17
‘These were built by Wates,’ explained Oliver at Parkleys. And he’d noticed how the building contractor, like so many others, had gone on to be much inspired by Span. ‘In Ham there’s a massive Wates estate, which basically looks like these, only they’re town houses. You can see in the detail that it’s not as well thought out as Span, there’s a bit more clunkiness to them. But essentially Wates 10 years later tried to do their own version.’ It wasn’t only the middle classes that private developers targeted with their designs. Cheaper, smaller versions of Eric Lyons cropped up all over the country too, in council estates and sixties infill. Where Parkleys was well maintained by a gardener and workmen – for a fee – and at ease with its pretty middle-class take on modernism, Fieldway, designed and built by Laing, had always looked cramped. Like so much of New Addington, it felt abandoned by the council. The green space between the homes had been done away with, and the meanly proportioned houses were crammed together, separated only by the width of an alleyway. Here was a version of Span that had shrunk in the wash.
‘Happiness is an adopted frog,’ announced an advert in The Times in June 1969, a month before Apollo 11 landed on the moon. ‘Come home to New Ash Green.’ The blurb was persuasive – invasive, almost. ‘Span is building a village with your children in mind.’18 The advert campaign was pure Mad Men, slick and shameless. ‘A complete village, entire in itself, with a choice of 18 brilliantly designed “homes for all seasons”’ went another. ‘You’ll come home to a warm, cosy, bright and airy, centrally-heated “place in the country”, with every mod con, and then some.’19 The cons may have been mod, but they were nothing less than the executive class being wooed to the Kent countryside would expect. The social and self-improvement aspects of this space-age village were also trumpeted. ‘One mother told the researchers that she now realised that the village offered more than a detached house,’ reported The Times. ‘It is part of a healthy trend to be rid of the standoffishness of the suburban Englishman’s semi-detached castle, and accept that people, especially mothers with young children, need each other.’20
‘We seemed to be doing all the right things at that moment in our social history,’ said Patrick Ellard, thinking back to the early days of New Ash Green. ‘All of those baby boomers had been given the chance to go to university for the first time. There was a whole pop explosion – youthquake – new fashions, new music, new attitudes to life, and I think New Ash Green encapsulated that. You weren’t just moving to a new place, you were moving to a new lifestyle. It quickly became a delightful, friendly, welcoming place to be.’ As in the new towns, forming social groups was essential at the beginning. ‘Dad was a founder of the cricket club, rugby club. Mum was a member of the amateur dramatic society. I think I even appeared in some of those productions as a munchkin or an elf or something like that!’ But life in New Ash Green was a mixture of these traditional pursuits and a more modern, almost spiritual vision of society – a step towards utopia.
‘All the publicity was talking about providing an environment for a new forward-thinking community. The vast majority of people came here because they wanted to participate in this roly-poly 1960s experience. And because you were coming to the middle of nowhere it was a concerted decision. I don’t want to live in the suburbs or whatever, I want to try out this new lifestyle. I even met one of the managing directors, Geoff Townsend, and he said it was about what we saw as creating a new society. I suppose in the 1960s there were a lot of things that went wrong. This idea of imposing an architecture style, which later became known as the deterministic approach, dictating this is how you will live, you will adopt the high-rise, you will use the streets in the sky – it never felt like that in New Ash Green. Clearly there was a strong sort of aesthetic to the place, but I don’t think it was deterministic. I think people embraced it and created their own lifestyle. Undoubtedly the physical arrangement of the place encouraged that, but at no time did we think we were having an alien lifestyle imposed upon us. It was great times. People were amenable to new things, whatever it might be – mind-altering drugs, men growing their hair, outlandish fashions.’
The would-be residents were so keen, that even before they had moved in they were creating a record of the place.
‘I’ve collected photographs taken by residents who came to watch their houses being built,’ said Patrick. ‘Walking through the shells of their houses before the first fix. I’ve got all these fantastic photos taken by people who would later go on to become our friends, walking round these half-built houses. But people wanted to get in.’ The village was officially opened in 1967 by Sir Keith Joseph, former Minister for Housing and part-time building magnate. It was reported that ‘10 percent of the houses for sale were intended as first homes for couples
, where the husband was still in his twenties. The aim was to achieve a balanced community, including older or retired people and newly married couples as well as established and prospering families’.21 Fears of creating a ‘pram village’ were clearly on Span’s mind, yet in other ways, Span’s ambitions were remarkably close to those of the new town planners, even to the extent that they invited the Greater London Council to buy a quarter of the village’s proposed 2,000 houses. It was a canny deal, ensuring both a hefty pay cheque from the council and an easy rejoinder to folk who accused Span of building yet another exclusive estate for executives.
‘Essentially those early Span developments were very middle class,’ said Patrick. ‘But with New Ash Green the original concept was to be more of a social mix. The GLC at the time had a policy of encouraging people to move out to the country, whether it was to Essex or to Kent. So we did have people from south London coming to New Ash Green who weren’t necessarily architects, designers or teachers, so I think we did have that social mix, and there was a variety of accents.’ I must have looked sceptical, because all of a sudden he sounded slightly defensive. ‘I wouldn’t say there was an air of snobbery or elitism at all,’ he said.
What Patrick had said about New Ash Green reminded me of Jo Griffith’s half-remembered antipathy. In Coed Eva, the neighbourhood Jo and her husband Jim had lived on in the new town of Cwmbran near Cardiff, the social mix had been encouraged by the development corporation, who’d built houses for both council tenants and private buyers. ‘Below the school field it was development corporation,’ remembered Jo, ‘and above that it was private.’
‘In the end you want your social mix,’ explained Jim. Before the development of Coed Eva in the late sixties, the new town had embodied a much more traditional postwar socialist model of building, with little or no private ownership. ‘There was an awful lot of public housing. It’s mixed now, but it wasn’t then. It was all housing for rent.’ But then among the thousands of council houses landed smaller estates of private housing: by 1978 over a fifth of all Cwmbran’s houses were privately owned. ‘They were worried then about creating a different sort of ghetto. It was a mixed social experiment. They were nervous about having lots and lots of large council estates,’ said Jim. He sat back, attempting to conjure up some kind of context for me. ‘By the end of the sixties Jane Jacobs had written her book in America’ – he was referring to the unlikely bestseller, The Death and Life of Great American Cities – ‘and there were lots of texts about “social engineering” it was called, steering people into these places. The town planning world was getting nervous about endlessly building council houses.’
‘It’s funny, when you come from renting somewhere in London to renting somewhere here it didn’t seem like a big issue to me,’ Jo recalled with a shrug. ‘But a lot of people wanted to buy. They were desperate.’
‘A lot of people came with mortgages and they wanted to buy into the market,’ confirmed Jim. ‘Some rented for one year and then went into private sector.’
‘But they ended up just there,’ said Jo, shaking her head at the thought that the difference between the private and council houses in Cwmbran was often only as narrow as the width of a hedge. ‘Their kids were at the same school, and they went to the same shops.’
Jim took me on a drive out to Coed Eva in Cwmbran to see the house they’d moved to from London in 1969. Jo had found the idea of New Ash Green funny, but I think Jim was aware just how close Coed Eva had become to Span’s modern village. Sure, in many ways it was a classic new town neighbourhood unit, houses clustered near their communal car parks and surrounded by wide child-friendly lawns. But the houses themselves weren’t the sort I’d seen in the early estates in Harlow or Cwmbran. They had big picture windows, flashy mono-pitch roofs, and black timber panelling front and back. There were small rows of terraces, pairs of semis, as well as the odd detached house, all grouped inventively around greens that were planted with large trees and shrubs. On the bigger houses the windows were dotted playfully around the façade, breaking up the shape from the outside, and the brickwork was a warm yellow on the gable ends – although Jim was quick to point out that on the later, privately owned houses the brickwork was paler and cheaper. The gardens still had their original fencing of horizontal planks too. The paths and clusters of houses were plotted on curved lines and irregular patterns, conforming to the hilly landscape all around. ‘Efforts have been made to avoid the monotonous street enclosed by continuous façades of houses,’ was the verdict of Frederic Osborn’s opus New Towns in 1977, which praised the ‘siting of houses so that they often appear at different angles and unusual groups in relation to roads, paths and surrounding spaces.’22 A stream wound its way through Coed Eva and old hedgerows from the farmers fields broke up the lines of houses. Here was a new town development corporation adapting the newly fashionable idiom of Span – modern Scandinavian-style design, large windows, timber or tile cladding, mono-pitched roofs – to the gently irregular language of new town layout that had existed since Frederick Gibberd had planned Mark Hall North in Harlow in the late forties.
Jim’s verdict on New Ash Green – very expensive and very small – neatly summed up the reasons for the spectacular collapse of Span’s grand project at the end of the sixties. 1968 had seen a national financial crisis, resulting in a devaluation of the pound and Harold Wilson’s empty promise to the electorate that the ‘pound in their pocket’ would not be affected. By May 1969 the GLC were mired in a huge financial crisis of their own – partly because they had been lumbered with the unforeseen £3 million cost of strengthening their estate of multi-storey system-built flats following the partial collapse of Ronan Point in Newham (of which more in the first chapter of the last section of the book). Faced with a huge bill from Span for their 450 houses in New Ash Green, the council made their excuses and left without paying, and the developers found themselves perilously exposed. ‘The decision was forced upon the housing committee by the parlous state that the GLC finds itself in,’ said Horace Cutler, their beleaguered chairman.23
‘They lost about £1 million in income,’ explained Patrick, ‘and that contributed towards their demise.’ The attitude of Britain’s building societies hadn’t helped either. Because of the experimental steel ‘A’-frame used in the construction of the houses, the lenders refused to ratify mortgages in the village. Some 226 people were turned away by building societies after putting up deposits for New Ash Green homes.24 Struggling with £2 million of debt, Lyons decided that the game was up, and left Span in December 1969, with developers Bilsbury and Townsend following soon after. It was headline news. ‘It’s a wrench of course,’ said Lyons to The Times. ‘There have obviously been differences of policy, and difficulties, but I feel that in the end I’d reached the end of the line. It comes too from my own unrest. I feel I’ve got a lot more to give. I want to find myself expanding into new fields.’25 He remained much in demand, designing the Shawbridge neighbourhood for Harlow development corporation, and Worlds End on the Chelsea waterfront, with its surprising mixture of brick tower blocks and low rise flats. And there was also work at the more executive end of his portfolio. Back in the sixties he’d been one of the designers working on developments at Weybridge – ‘the Beverley Hills of England’ as historian Elain Harwood has it – and such exclusive schemes continued to crop up.26
Patrick Ellard still feels the effect of the collapse of Span’s New Ash Green dream keenly. ‘I’ve seen some of the drawings of the architecture still on the drawing board,’ he told me, ‘and there was some fabulous architecture still to come.’ These new designs had been borne out of close collaboration with the residents’ society as well as Lyons’ own team of designers. Yet this process of ‘continual evolution’ that Lyons so prided himself on was brought to a premature end. In 1971 Bovis paid £3 million for the development rights to New Ash Green.
Patrick had followed the ensuing saga between New Ash Green’s hippy-yuppies and their new masters thro
ugh the residents’ association magazine. ‘The early issues were dominated by the conflict between the Span pioneers and Bovis,’ he explained. ‘It was warfare. What Bovis did was bring in a more conventional style, just going to brick cavity walls instead of prefabricated panels and steel frames, and they cut down on the size of the greens, how much they were prepared to spend on the planting. There were various wooded areas that would have been retained by Span which Bovis tore down, and built in much higher density. And built more houses than Span had intended. The irony was, that brought the community together.’ But ultimately, they saw it atomised too. The 1971 study by the Centre for Environmental Studies on New Ash Green held that ‘10 years later, when their children are older and more independent [the residents] may welcome the prospect of a detached or semi-detached house with walled garden or private back and front, to insulate them from the incursions of another generation’s small children. They may want to opt out of that community because, now more mobile, they have other recreational and social interests.’27 This turned out to be an uncannily accurate forecast of the shift that occurred in the eighties, not just in New Ash Green, but across Britain, a place where Margaret Thatcher felt that there were individual men and women, but there was no such thing as society. And in New Ash Green the Bovis estates, soon to become four fifths of the housing in the village, accelerated that switch from community to privacy.
In New Ash Green Patrick lives in the fragment of the village built as Span and Eric Lyons had wanted, and lives with the encroachment of a less generous developer’s will on the environment. In Parkleys, Oliver has looked on as some of the other residents attempt to transform the listed estate with all manner of unsympathetic modernisations. ‘If you go round there’s a lot of really bad things that have occurred,’ he declared darkly. For example? ‘A woman over there has got a lion doorknocker on her door.’ It might not sound much, but such incongruous details rankled with Oliver. ‘In theory the doors are listed as well. Luckily the doors themselves have never been changed.’ He told me the story of a former neighbour who’d rebelled against the restrictions placed on Parkleys’ residents by English Heritage. ‘He decided to get the estate de-listed so we could put plastic windows in. And the amount of people who were with him! We came home from that meeting and I literally opened a bottle of wine and I could have cried. Luckily not enough people were, but the fact that there were people whooping at the idea of getting plastic windows in… When he failed to get it de-listed he sold up and moved. Luckily the estate was listed before anything major happened.’ These might sound like relatively minor, if depressing incidents, but Oliver affirmed that things have occasionally taken a more worrying turn at Parkleys. ‘I nearly got run over by a resident the other day,’ he said, ‘because she genuinely hates me. She was on the pavement, driving along, and I was chatting to a friend of ours, and she beeped, and I just gestured where the road was, and she put her foot down. And that’s when it gets a bit Midsomer.’
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