Concretopia
Page 32
9 Tony Aldous, ‘Scotland’s New Towns Come Down to Earth’, The Times, 26 August 1972, p12
10 Ian Nairn, ‘Half Term at Cumbernauld’, Observer, 23 April 1967, p36
11 Schaffer, p142
12 Oliver Cox in John R. Gold, The Practice of Modernism, Routledge, 2007, p152
13 Oliver Cox in John R. Gold, p154
14 The Planning of a New Town, LCC, 1965 fifth impression, p16
15 The Planning of a New Town, p84
16 The Planning of a New Town, p86
17 The Planning of a New Town, p89
18 Edward Carter, The Future of London, Penguin, 1962, p56
19 The Planning of a New Town, p29
20 Oliver Cox in John R. Gold, p155
21 ‘New Town a “Standard for All the World”’, Guardian, 20/6/67, p3
22 ‘Congratulations to Cumbernauld’, Financial Times, Wednesday, 24/5/67; Edition 24, p241
23 Nicholas Taylor, The Village in the City, Temple Smith, 1973, p17
24 Rebuilding Scotland edited by Miles Glendinning, Tuckwell Press, 1997, p172
25 ‘Traffic Segregated Town Safest’, The Times, 3/8/67, p3
26 The Planning of a New Town, p45
27 Geoffrey Copcutt in Glendinning, p89
28 Glendinning, p171
29 Lionel Esher, A Broken Wave, Pelican, 1983, p58
30 Crossman, p158
31 Sir Robert Grieve in John R. Gold, The Practice of Modernism, Routledge, 2007, p150
32 Janice Scott Lodge, ‘The Gum Boot Society’, Guardian, 8/12/65, p8
33 Sheila Black, ‘Happiness Comes Only Slowly’, Financial Times, Wednesday, 29/11/67; p12; Edition 24,401
34 ‘Life is Friendly in Cumbernauld’, The Times, Tuesday, 10/9/68; p3
35 Lodge, Guardian, 8/12/65, p8
36 Housewife, Carbrain, in Peter Wilmott, ‘Housing in Cumbernauld’, Journal of the Town Planning Institute, May 1964, p199
37 Housewife, Kildrum, in Peter Wilmott, ‘Housing in Cumbernauld’, Journal of the Town Planning Institute, May 1964, p200
38 Ian Nairn, ‘Half Term at Cumbernauld’, Observer, 23/4/67, p36
i The fixation with ‘decks’ was a hangover from the early modernist mania for ocean liners – though in its rugged grey masculinity Cumbernauld Central Area resembled less the Queen Mary than HMS Ark Royal.
ii Copcutt himself had never used the term ‘megastructure’ to describe Cumbernauld’s central area.
iii My own copy is stamped University of Wisconsin.
Part 3
NO FUTURE
1. ‘A Pack of Cards’
TOWER BLOCK HIGHS AND LOWS (1968–74)
The news from 1968 records a world in turmoil. A year had passed since the summer of love, and student and hippy protests against the Vietnam War had spread from the US to London’s Grosvenor Square, outside Eero Saarinen’s monumental sixties American Embassy. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, and the medallists of the 200 metre race at the Mexico City Olympics had displayed the Black Power salute. Meanwhile, in Birmingham Enoch Powell raged against the tide with his infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech. In the Soviet bloc, moves towards reform and democratisation in Prague had been crushed by an invasion by Warsaw Pact troops. A million students marched in protest against De Gaulle’s government in France. Civil rights demonstrators in Londonderry were violently repressed by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, sparking a new era of ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. And 1968 was also the year that the decade-long boom in high-rise flat building across Britain came to an abrupt and tragic end.
Welcome to Balfron Tower, Ernő Goldfinger’s baby.
Yet the year had started on such an upbeat note for the high-rise. In February one of its most redoubtable champions, Ernő Goldfinger, moved into a flat on the twenty-fifth floor of a 27-storey slab block he’d designed in Poplar, east London. Balfron Tower had been completed the previous year, a distinctive building whose main slab of flats was connected to the separate lift shaft tower by a series of walkways. Built in rough concrete poured on site rather than with a system of pre-cast panels, there was something hyper-masculine and provocative, almost warlike, about it. The lift tower was topped with a series of concrete ventilation pipes that gave it the look of battlements; the concrete had a gritty, stubbly feel to it; and its strange asymmetrical silhouette, with the ladder of walkways dividing the flats from the service spine, was designed to create maximum impact on the skyline. ‘I want to experience at first hand,’ said Ernő when he moved into flat 130 Balfron Tower, ‘the size of the rooms, the amenities provided, the time it takes to obtain a lift, the amount of wind whistling around the tower, and any problems which might arise from my designs, so I can correct them in the future.’1 He was thinking of the future because he planned to build more towers in this form. ‘All architects should live in a home they have designed for themselves,’ he told the Guardian in 1969.2 Although he did live for two months in his East End landmark, Ernő quickly retreated to his real home, a large detached pad he’d designed in leafy Hampstead. Ursula, his wife, told the press when they left Balfron after their brief stay that ‘we aren’t eligible tenants for this one and there isn’t a private one built by my husband.’3 There would, however, be a bigger one. Trellick Tower, commissioned by the Greater London Council in 1966 for a site in west London, would be four storeys taller than Balfron when it opened six years later.
Architect James Dunnett worked for Goldfinger in the seventies and well remembered the fallout from these two huge social housing projects. ‘I went to work for him when I left Cambridge,’ he told me as we sat in his office in north London. ‘I was thought to be a lunatic really. And anyway I was told I wouldn’t survive days because he was famous for sacking people and so on.’ New recruits were known to have resigned by lunchtime on their first day, or else sent packing for the most minor of infractions. Ernő was even reported to have sacked someone who didn’t work for him, a man who had happened to be waiting in reception when the arch-modernist had been in one of his rages. ‘Of course he was a volcanic man, and he was dangerous and difficult to work for,’ conceded James. ‘But then I didn’t expect anything less. I thought that anyone who designed buildings with that amount of punch in them is not going to be a sop.’ James joined Ernő’s team in 1973. ‘Trellick had just been finished. The second phase was still being built. He’d moved his office to the tower by that stage, and it was brilliant. It was brand new, it was superb. It still seems to have power over people despite its mutilated, ill-maintained state,’ he remarked pointedly.
Ernő and Ursula Goldfinger lived for two months in flat 130.
James continued on the theme of Ernő’s personality. ‘He was never cold, but he was volcanic. I think he got on best with people like [architect] John Winter or [critic] Gavin Stamp, people who were quite big, pugnacious people themselves. I think he was a bit of a bully, I think I have to say that. If you were nervous he would exploit that really. But beneath that he was discerning and kind … He was riveting company. Because there was a sense of danger. You never thought you knew what was going to happen. He’d leap several points ahead of you in an argument then turn around and berate you for not having caught up with him.’ Goldfinger’s attitude to women was another controversial point. Jane Drew, one of the early modern movement’s stars, who’d worked with Le Corbusier in Chandigarh, India, wrote that ‘he was always pawing you. And if you didn’t like having your bum pinched and slapped, it was rather off-putting.’4 Yet the architect was no more popular with the men he employed. As his biographer reported darkly: ‘One site agent was heard to mutter, “One day he will fall off a roof.”’5
‘I only worked for him for a year and a half,’ James told me, ‘because they had no work. The whole thing was deflating. He’d never had a big practice. He was totally unknown really. Insofar as he was known, it was only about his personality really. He had a heyday when he was thought to be fashionable, around 1960–63. But thin
gs were moving away from the kind of work he was doing even then.’
If Ernő’s heyday was brief, the work he produced in it was remarkable. As well as the designs for Balfron, there were the buildings in the Elephant and Castle – cinema, health service offices, flats – that had added a touch of flair to the otherwise flawed scheme. For the flats in Draper Street, he explained to the Observer the rational basis behind his work. ‘Two feet nine,’ he said, ‘is the width of a door and its jamb. It is also the width of a man standing comfortably with his hands on his hips. Make a square out of this dimension and multiply it by six and you have a grid 16 feet 6 inches either way that I lay down on my site before I even start designing. Into this grid fits the building. Its guidance gives me a complete integration of structural proportional control of all the outside and inside spaces.’6 He was echoing Le Corbusier, whose rational scheme of human proportions, the ‘Modulor’ – on which he’d based his Unité – had influenced a generation of architects. And as in Park Hill, the shadow of Le Corbusier’s great design fell across Goldfinger’s most famous buildings, from the access balconies that led off to three floors to the rough concrete used to mould the form.
I’ve visited Balfron Tower a couple of times. The first was as part of Open House Weekend, where one of the top flats was open to the public and was exhibiting the work of local artists, many of whom were based in the building. I remember pushing open a kitchen window and leaning out over the sheer drop, finding it both thrilling and terrifying. The second time was to visit Katharine Hibbert, author of Free: Adventures on the Margins of a Wasteful Society, who was one of the beneficiaries of the housing association Poplar HARC A’s decision to rent out unlet flats in the tower to writers and artists. Well spoken, sunnily disposed, well informed and distinctly bohemian, Katharine talked about Balfron Tower life from both a political and personal perspective.
‘I’ve rarely lived anywhere I’ve liked as much,’ she said as we sipped tea and ate homemade cake in her sparsely decorated flat. From her front room the view was truly spectacular. London was spread out before us: the shiny towers of Canary Wharf to our left; the bristling spires and skyscrapers of the city centre ahead of us; a scattering of point blocks and slabs to our right. ‘I love the views,’ she said. ‘I love how spacious it is. I mean, we’re lucky being just two people in a two bedroom flat.’ At the time Katharine lived there with her boyfriend and a cat called Awol. But what was spacious for them would have felt cramped to many of the families living round and about. ‘It’s not so popular with council tenants because, almost by definition, they’re gonna have a family. And if you’ve got a family then you’ve almost certainly got more than one child. So you’re looking at four people minimum in a flat like this, probably more. So you’re going to be really crowded, aren’t you?’
The bridges of Balfron Tower connects the lift shaft and ‘services’ to the main body of the flats.
But for two, it was luxuriously large, especially by comparison with the mean proportions of more modern builds. To enter Katharine’s flat I’d taken the macho industrial steel lift up to her balcony level. The lift landings in the service tower were a little grim: buzzing circular flourescent light fittings illuminated a rather unsavoury, mouth-like space lined with yellowing, stained and cracked enamel. The tiled floors were patched with black where the linoleum had been trashed, and the concrete walls unevenly painted. But the trip across the bridge from service tower to residential block, high above the city, was exhilarating, with all of London laid out behind sturdy net glass. Then, once in the main building, the run of front doors was busy, friendly and humanising. ‘I think that the arrangement of corridors works really well,’ said Katharine, ‘because you’ve got three floors of flats feeding onto each corridor. So it’s far more likely that there’s going to be someone there. And there’s a lot more people who are your neighbours, as it were. So I know Jules, who lives upstairs, and I know Simon, who lives above that, and various other people all along the corridor. Jules and Simon were people I’d have never met if we were all on our own corridors.’
We went through the door to Katharine’s flat and immediately descended a terracotta-tiled staircase to reach the living space, which gave it an incongruous, subterranean feel, even though we were almost 100 feet above the busy east London streets below. ‘Although there are lots of things you might not like about the area,’ said Katharine, making reference to the poverty that still pervades the East End, ‘the fact that it’s mostly council flats means that people are here for the long term. Unlike other bits of town I’ve lived, you don’t get the sense of people just moving through. Everyone is remarkably friendly in the lift and stuff, and it shouldn’t be surprising. But it’s really noticeable how much people, for instance, hold the door for you when they see that you’re coming, or check that your button is pressed in the lift. Of course you should expect it, but people are pretty polite and pretty friendly.’
It isn’t just the area, the people and the atmosphere Katharine likes about the tower. ‘I like it as a building,’ she asserted. ‘My mum always said about Harlow that when you were at school, everyone lived in the same houses. There was no issue about what kind of house you lived in, everyone was just the same. Some people had slightly nicer than others, but basically everyone’s really just the same. And I like the feeling that you get here, that it was made to be good houses, as good as you need.’ Katharine may have grown up in Oxford, but her mum was raised in Harlow, among other folk who’d been cleared out of the East End as part of Patrick Abercrombie’s plan for London. This was an added attraction of Balfron for Katharine. ‘It feels a bit more like Essex than most of London. Like, there’s two pie and mash shops in the Chrisp Street Market. And there’s also a seafood stall where you can get your cockles and your whelks at the weekend. Those were the things we used to get when I was a child. And I like the fact that it’s got a town centre.’
I asked Katharine how her friends and family had reacted to her moving to the tower. She was quick to contrast her friends’ reactions with what her grandma, who had grown up in the area but moved away before the redevelopment, was likely to say when she visited. ‘All my friends are like, “how cool, how exciting.” My grandma will be like, “this is exactly what we left the East End to get out of! Another bloomin’ concrete tower block.” I think when you’re living it the first time, and people reappropriate it, that’s a little bit weird.’ She pauses for a moment to consider not just her grandma’s situation, but that of all the council tenants still dotted about the tower. ‘Having your own self reappropriated is a bit weird.’
Ernő Goldfinger moved out of the flat in Balfron Tower on the 16 May 1968. The very next morning, a mile and half to the east of Balfron, a story broke that would completely change the fortunes of Britain’s postwar rebuilding programme, and would become one of the biggest stories of this big news year. At 5:50am, in a system-built high-rise of the sort Ernő was contemptuous, Ivy Hodge, a 57-year-old cake decorator, got up to make a cup of tea. ‘I remember filling the kettle but the next moment I was on the floor,’ she told a reporter. ‘I remember coming to and staggering to the landing door and shouting for help. I can’t remember anything after that.’7 She was lucky to be alive. Gas had leaked into her eighteenth floor flat in Ronan Point and, as she lit the hob, her kitchen had exploded.
The morning of 16 May 1968: the Ronan Point flats in Canning Town, walls blown out by a gas leak. © The Telegraph Group
Night watchman George McArthur was in a hut 15 yards away from Ronan Point when the explosion occurred. ‘I heard cracking and banging and I saw concrete flying around. I ran like hell,’ he told the Daily Mirror. ‘A whole wing of the building came down like a pack of cards.’8 Ivy’s neighbours on the eighteenth floor, John and Jean Bruns and baby Samantha, were faced with a frightening scene. ‘Our front door and front wall had gone and I had to remove rubble with my hands to get to the staircase so we could escape.’9 A man on the fifteenth floor had imp
robably slid all the way to the ground on a slab of concrete as the floor collapsed beneath him, escaping relatively unscathed. Lower down the block on the seventh floor, James and Beatrice Chambers told reporters that their ‘bedroom wall fell away with a terrible ripping sound. We found ourselves staring out over London, our heads only a matter of two feet away from an 80-foot drop. Furniture plunged past us. Suddenly we heard screams. I grabbed my wife and we got out quickly. I had to put my leg on first.’10 Brenda Maughan, in flat 65 on the thirteenth floor, was widely thought to have had an even more miraculous escape. Asleep in a chair in her living room, she had a violent awakening as she was thrown from her seat. ‘Virtually the whole of the living room floor had fallen away,’ noted the report of the public inquiry, ‘and Mrs Maughan was standing on a narrow ledge, her feet and legs covered in rubble, clinging on to the upright of the door frame.’11 Her husband who’d been asleep in the bedroom managed to grab hold of her through the door and clear away the rubble so she could escape, albeit with broken bones and teeth. Amid the chaos, rescue teams still found time to arrest a first-floor resident, who’d been tooled up for house-breaking. Tragically, four people died as a result of the explosion and collapse. Amazingly, Ivy Hodge, whose flat had exploded, suffered only minor burns and shock.
What exactly had caused such devastation at Ronan Point that spring morning? The gas explosion had been of such magnitude that it had lifted the top four floors from the rest of the tower. Not only that, the blast from Ivy Hodge’s kitchen had travelled outwards to the living room next door, which stood at the corner of the tower. When the top four storeys fell back in place, the load-bearing walls in the corner of the sitting room began crashing down onto those below, all the way to the ground. Ivy’s early morning routine had undoubtedly saved lives – if the explosion had occurred any later in the day many more people would have been up and about in their living rooms directly below hers; as it was, most were still in bed. The report into the collapse, following a public enquiry, showed pictures of the wreckage inside the block. One photograph presented a scene of almost abstract devastation: a room of rubble and shapes heaped up on each other, labelled with the most sardonic of captions: ‘Miss Hodge’s gas cooker showing the flexible hose,’ it read.12 It takes some moments to connect the caption to the photo.