Concretopia

by Grindrod, John

  The starkest example I saw of seeing people working against Span rather than with it was not initiated by the residents, but the town council. New Ash Green’s shopping centre had been designed by Lyons and later expanded by Bovis. It might have lacked the charm of Span’s houses, but it still demonstrated that celebrated eye for detail. The design was irregular, with the heights and frontages of the buildings varying along a snaking path. These days, though, the place was desolate: shop units stood empty all the way along. Much of the brickwork on low walls and slopes was missing or had been dislodged. The first floor gallery has been worst hit. Patrick and I came to a halt at an abandoned, grilled-off arcade. He was shocked by the signs of recent vandalism. The grille had been bent and ripped up, all the doors had been jemmied, fresh graffiti was scrawled over the woodwork and broken glass lay deep as snowfall on the walkway. The local authority had long since given up on promoting or protecting the centre, keen to sell it off and see the lot bulldozed.i

  ‘We did have our fair share of celebrity residents,’ Patrick recalled. ‘Whenever there was a Village Dance, where they’d close off the shopping centre and turned it into a huge nightclub, Tim Blackmore’ – a Radio 1 producer – ‘would invite his mates – David Hamilton, Noel Edmonds, Emperor Rosko, Tony Blackburn – they would come down and do the village dance! We had – it seems rather quaint now to mention these names – but Chickory Tip, who did have a big hit in 1973.’ Thin Lizzy’s manager lived a couple of doors down from Patrick and he remembers their big, noisy parties. Elton John’s manager lived in the village too, and Elton himself played the summer party the year Rocket Man came out, arriving in a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, and dressed in a fur coat. As we stood in the shopping centre on a raised brick platform, a kind of modernist bandstand, Patrick remembered how DJ Emperor Rosko had played his set from up there, bringing over 4,000 people to the little village for a party. He recalled the colours, the clothes – the kaftans and Ossie Clark dresses – and the brilliant summers of 1971, 1975 and 1976 that made it feel like they were on holiday all the time. ‘Noel Edmonds so enjoyed his experience of doing the dances he decided to live here. When we had a Village Day there would always be a celebrity to come and open it. 1977 – or ’78 – we had David Prowse – Darth Vader! The Green Cross Code Man! And he arrived by helicopter.’ I told Patrick about the obsession with heliports I’d discerned in the postwar plans. ‘Well, seventies DJs …’ he said, ‘it was the only way to travel. Span did spend a lot of money of helicopters because they brought architects to visit New Ash Green from across the world.’

  After all these years Patrick is still in New Ash Green, still loving it, and occasionally waxing nostalgic about its glorious past. The most emphatic moment of our interview came when he leaned forward to ensure that my phone would catch his words: ‘Most people who lived here between 1967 and 1984 would say this was the greatest time of their lives,’ he said. If that was the case, what happened to them all? Did that generation of long-haired, Ossie Clarke-wearing progressives sell out as the sociologists had predicted, and seek a less communal way of living in the Bovis developments, where their cars were a status symbol and the garden walls ensured that no one could see them going about their lives?

  A village day, New Ash Green, in the early 1970s © Peter Copping Family Archive.

  In Parkleys, Oliver dressed the part as the fifties husband, and rescued fragments of the estate from destruction, while his wife Lisa organised community days in the gardens, as Span had back in the day. Here in New Ash Green, Patrick might have been hiding his tie-dyes and beads under a convincingly sober exterior, but his passion for the dreams of a bygone age was just as strong. Yes, Span’s architecture has endured, and it becomes more desirable by the year. But perhaps more surprisingly, and despite all the changes in Britain over the last few decades, pockets of the Span lifestyle have endured too.

  Notes

  1 Townsend in Barbara Simms (ed), Eric Lyons & Span, RIBA Publishing, 2006, p74

  2 Lyons in Barbara Simms (ed), Eric Lyons & Span, RIBA Publishing, 2006, p73

  3 Observer, 1/12/63, p27

  4 Bilsby in Barbara Simms (ed), Eric Lyons & Span, RIBA Publishing, 2006, p79

  5 Crossman in Barbara Simms (ed), Eric Lyons & Span, RIBA Publishing, 2006, p74

  6 The Times, 21/1/65, p6

  7 Lyons in Barbara Simms (ed), Eric Lyons & Span, RIBA Publishing, 2006, p23

  8 Caroline Moorehead, The Times, 21/7/75, p5

  9 Ian Nairn, Observer, 17/9/67, p26

  10 Lyons in Barbara Simms (ed), Eric Lyons & Span, RIBA Publishing, 2006, p87

  11 Eric Lyons, The Times ‘Survey of the Architect in Britain Today’, 3/7/61, pvi

  12 Eric Lyons, The Times ‘Survey of the Architect in Britain Today’, 3/7/61, pvi

  13 Eric Lyons, The Times ‘Survey of the Architect in Britain Today’, 3/7/61, pvi

  14 Manchester Guardian, 28/5/57, p5

  15 Robert Matthew, The Listener, 23/10/58, p644

  16 Guardian, 8/12/59, p7

  17 Caroline Moorehead, The Times, 21/7/75, p5

  18 Advertisment for New Ash Green, The Times, 13/6/69, p9

  19 Advertisment for New Ash Green, The Times, p8, 7/2/69

  20 Tony Aldus, The Times, 13/4/71, p3

  21 The Times, 22/9/67, p4

  22 Frederic Osborn and Arnold Whittick, New Towns, Third ed, 1977, Leonard Hill, p461

  23 Observer, 15/6/69, p3

  24 Barbara Simms (ed), Eric Lyons & Span, RIBA Publishing, 2006, p92

  25 The Times, 9/1/70, p8

  26 Elain Harwood in Barbara Simms (ed), Eric Lyons & Span, RIBA Publishing, 2006, p60

  27 Tony Aldus, The Times, 13/4/71, p3

  i A year later I heard from Patrick that they had suddenly seen the potential of it – and applied for one of the government’s Mary Portas grants. The application was not successful.

  7. ‘A Veritable Jewel in the Navel of Scotland’

  CUMBERNAULD AND THE SECOND WAVE OF NEW TOWNS (1955–72)

  Fenella Fielding hopped down from her helicopter, resplendent in a coat of shocking pink feathers, to be met by a pair of hit men and a safari-suited professor. Soft disco-funk played.

  ‘Cumbernauld!’ she cried to a group of townsfolk who’d turned up apparently dressed as characters from the board game Guess Who?. ‘Tomorrow already here! A town festooned with awards for community architecture, a veritable jewel in the navel of Scotland.’ She could barely suppress her delight – or her theatrically raised arms – as she announced the real reason for her visit: ‘Ladies and gentlemen – we’re going to hijack Cumbernauld!’

  Of all the new towns, Cumbernauld is the one with the most unassailable pop cultural credentials. To start with, there’s Scotland’s greatest rom-com, Gregory’s Girl. Then, in 1967, the town featured in the very first international live-by-satellite television show, Our World, sandwiched between items from Australia, Canada and Europe, and starring Picasso, Maria Callas, and most famously, The Beatles, giving the first public performance of their latest single, All You Need is Love. There’s also Cumbernauld Hit, an extraordinary low-budget thriller backed by the development corporation, which may not have featured the nation’s favourite romance or the world’s greatest artists and musicians, but still managed to be artistically the most ambitious film shot in the new town. Eschewing the mundane public information documentary format favoured by the likes of Harlow, Cumbernauld Hit instead looked to Dr No and The Italian Job for inspiration. After all, the town boasted the nearest thing to Ken Adam’s brilliant Bond villain lairs built for real people anywhere in the world.

  ‘It was deliberately different,’ said Ken Davie, one of the pioneer architects at Cumbernauld, when I interviewed him at the local golf club. For one thing, the new towns had been an overwhelmingly socialist project. Of the 32 new and expanded towns built under the Act, Cumbernauld was the only one to be designated by a Conservative government, a decade after the pioneers at Cwmbran or Harlow. I
t had been forced upon them by Glasgow’s persistent and acute overcrowding as rebuilding work proceeded slowly in areas such as the Gorbals.

  Ken confirmed how much J. M. Richards’ ‘prairie planning’ critique of the first wave of new towns had shaped the vision of Cumbernauld’s original chief planner, Hugh Wilson. ‘There was a move towards a more compact town,’ he explained. ‘The designated area was the smallest of any new town, at just over 4,000 acres. The site dictated it. It had to be.’ Garden city ideals were out, dense urban planning was in. This unpromising windy ridge to the northeast of Glasgow was expected to house almost three times as many people per acre as fellow new town East Kilbride. Four fifths of the population were due to come from the overcrowded areas of Glasgow, prompting Guardian journalist Mary Stott to comment in 1965 that ‘presumably they will not mind being packed as neatly and carefully into this small space as sardines into their tin.’1

  Yet it wasn’t the housing that bore resemblance to sardine tins; it was the central area megastructure. Condensing all of the activities of a town centre into one huge building suited Hugh Wilson’s super-tight plan just fine. And in addition to its practical advantages, it was seen as a unique opportunity, after the perceived loss of nerve of the first wave of new towns, to implement some of the most daring concepts of the age. Wilson had two highly imaginative deputy architect-planners, Derek Lyddon and Geoffrey Copcutt; one was to take charge of housing, the other to tackle the town centre. According to Copcutt, the two men decided their roles on the toss of a coin. Of the results of that chance outcome Copcutt later ruefully declared: ‘Those to whom it may seem the toss was a poor deal for the centre can be consoled that the rest of the town was spared my attentions.’2

  Geoffrey Copcutt certainly couldn’t be said to have been lacking in vision. In a 1963 article for Architectural Design magazine he described the megastructure as ‘citadel-like’, being ‘half-a-mile long, 200 yards wide and up to eight storeys high.’3 Relatively low-level but sprawling across the A80, the central area was to house ‘most of the commercial, civic, religious, cultural and recreational’ activities for the projected town of 70,000 people, being the ‘largest single employment source, traffic generator and land user’. There would even be a twin row of penthouses on the top deck of the building.i Copcutt put a great deal of himself into the project, later commenting that ‘the paper prototype passed from passion to obsession.’4 His somewhat megalomaniac description of the project might have seemed purple even as part of Fenella Fielding’s dialogue in Cumbernauld Hit: ‘And all the while, like a jeweller fashioning precious metal, I hammered the cross-sections and shaped landscape, to forge an urban morphology.’

  One young architect, fresh from college with a thesis on entertainment provision in new towns, was John Knight, who was interviewed in 1964 to join the growing team at Cumbernauld. I met John in a vegetarian café in Edinburgh, where his anecdotes on life in the development corporation were delivered with the witty turn of phrase of a Ned Sherrin.

  ‘They said, “You’ll obviously want to work in the town centre group,” explained John, ‘and I said, “Yes I did, actually.” I think construction started in about ’62. But of course there was a huge amount of under-building required for the megastructure. I remember my first view of it when I came out in a bus from Glasgow. You saw the hilltop, and there were these three cranes. You couldn’t actually see any construction because it was about the height of this table.’

  It may not have looked impressive, but Copcutt’s vision was in its infancy. With the instinct of a sci-fi writer, Copcutt had suggested in 1963 that ‘in the extreme future, if particular central area functions decline … the centre could become a gigantic vending machine through which the motorised user drives to return revictualled.’5 It’s safe to assume that neither in Harlow nor in Cwmbran had the planners anticipated a future where their town centres would become giant vending machines. The Times speculated that ‘closed-circuit television might be used by the police; and the cleaning of floors might be performed by automatic vacuum cleaning machines’.6 Other architects may have been content to solve the problems of today; Copcutt was anticipating those of tomorrow. It’s something of a surprise that the producers of Cumbernauld Hit settled with ‘spy thriller’ as the genre through which to advertise the town: science fiction might have been more appropriate, especially as, after phase one had been completed, the central area bore a close resemblance to the star destroyers from that other classic 1977 film, Star Wars. ‘I think the thing that finally settled me on trying for Cumbernauld rather than some of the nearer new towns like Skelmersdale,’ said John, ‘was the fact that Architectural Design in May 1963 produced this wonderful edition on Geoff Copcutt’s town centre. When I read that there was no choice, I had to go there. It was a Damascene conversion. I’d spent all my life in London or thereabouts, and I thought, I’ve got to fly away.’

  Another young architect who had his head turned was Tom Reilly, who had accompanied his former boss Ken Davie to the red-brick, varnished wood and brass-fitted function room of the Dullatur Golf Club in Cumbernauld where we met. We were looking at old promotional prints of outline drawings of the central area produced by Mike Evans in the early sixties, well before construction began: drawings showing people busy pushing prams, pulling tartan shoppers or gazing down at the cars gliding through the centre of the structure on the A80. They had that jarring, off-key quality all images of the future from the past have, bizarrely evoking a Blade Runner cityscape peopled by characters from a Gary Larson cartoon.

  ‘These were published in Architectural Review,’ recalled Tom. ‘I was at Strathclyde University at the time and these seemed absolutely fantastic.’ Tom was softly spoken but expansive, some years younger than Ken, but twice his size, and dressed formally in a dark lounge suit. Ken was a wiry old gent, cautious, sharp-eyed and gravel-voiced, who’d arrived in his car coat, clutching a carrier bag full of old documents, brochures and drawings from the CDC. He’d started work for the development corporation straight from university in 1957, and taken the job as chief architect and planner for Cumbernauld in 1970.

  ‘This is a walk down memory lane for me,’ Ken said wistfully at one point. As with almost all of the surviving members of the development corporation, both men lived locally and were active members of the Rotary Club. ‘The first phase was only one fifth of the total concept,’ he pointed out as we examined Copcutt’s plan. ‘But then things changed. Copcutt had in mind that things would “clip on”. Churches, offices, buildings and suchlike. As time went on it wasn’t as easy as that.’ As the town grew, so the needs for the centre kept evolving. As Ken pointed out, the residents ‘were looking for other things,’ undreamt of by Copcutt in his masterplan. And the problem with locating everything in a single structure was that it had to be pretty future-proof, so that great chunks of it wouldn’t be rendered redundant, and large areas wouldn’t continually need to be added.

  ‘I worked with Doug Stonelake, who was group leader on phase two of the town centre,’ explained John Knight. ‘Phase one was in the next room, and I would rather curiously look through the door.’ Copcutt had gone by this time, and John recalled the legend of his departure well.

  ‘He had completely blotted his copybook by that time. Phase one was behind, it was over budget, all those things … The development corporation were getting very frustrated and were saying, “We really have to see something of phase two.” Because his initial concept was along the entire spine of the hilltop. Phase one was just a slice of the cake. And they said, “We need to see what’s going on at either end.” And he just wasn’t interested. It wasn’t happening. As I understand it, he was given a deadline by the development corporation – by Mr McGill, the general manager – and he was told to produce for the next board meeting the plans for phase two. And apparently he’d sketched something out more or less the night before, put them in a dustbin, and the dustbin I believe was carried into the board meeting. He took the lid off and p
roduced the plans. It was just a lot of doodles and sketches.’

  Alone on the crest of the hill rather than surrounded by other large buildings, the central area after its first two phases was both dramatically dominant and painfully exposed. Frank Schaffer, former head of the new towns division of the Ministry for the Environment, associated with the mild early phase of Harlow and Stevenage, was sceptical of the hill-top location, questioning ‘whether mothers will take kindly to pushing prams up the long ramps, with its rough grey concrete and lack of trees and grass … and, above all, whether the high cost of building and maintenance will ever be fully met from the rents.’7 Yet the town had friends in high places. Dame Evelyn Sharp, permanent secretary at the Department of Housing, for example, was contemptuous of the genteel early new towns. ‘She loves Cumbernauld,’ recorded her minister, Richard Crossman, in his diary, as the pair swept through on a flying visit of the sort Fenella would have approved.8