Had the gentrification already begun?
‘The thing is you can’t really tell that easily because there’s a whole lot of artists wandering around who almost by definition sort of are middle class. I know there’s at least one guy on this corridor who bought his flat because it was stylish rather than because it was cheap. So I guess he’s a gentrifier. And there’s a couple of others that are renting flats – I assume they’re renting them from people who used right-to-buy to buy them – but they’re trendier than your average. I’d be really interested keeping an eye on what happens here after they finish doing it all up in 2014. I’d move back in like a shot! Yeah, totally! Absolutely! I really like it!’
What of Ronan Point, the block that in effect ended the sixties high-rise boom? You might have thought it would have been knocked down after the explosion back in 1968, but you’d be wrong. Instead, something unexpected happened. The block was repaired and along with its seven sisters it was strengthened. Gas was removed from the towers, and electric boilers installed in its place. And in 1973 Ronan Point was re-opened.
‘They are lovely flats,’ said Selina McCambridge, one of the original residents, as she moved back into her fourth floor flat. ‘From the day we left we said we would be back.’ She was carrying a card and flowers from councillor Harry Ronan, the building’s namesake, when The Times interviewed her. Sheila Attreed, mother of 20-month-old Amanda, told the press that ‘it was one of those disasters which happens once in a lifetime. You don’t stop going on planes because of an air crash.’ William Watts, chairman of Newham Housing Committee talked the project up. ‘This is a fine building. There has been no pressure on anybody to move here,’ while Patrick Davies, Newham’s director of housing, was even more forthright: ‘Nobody has refused a place in Ronan Point because it is Ronan Point.’32 There were local petitions that disputed that. The reconstructed tower stood for another 13 years, before fatal structural weaknesses led to it finally being demolished: the bolted-together structure had been wrecked by the strong winds that tall towers were liable to attract. Its rubble was used as hardcore for the runway at nearby City Airport.
Yet most strange of all, even Ivy Hodge herself, the very day after the explosion that had left her unconscious and her flat destroyed, had been unexpectedly positive about her experience in the tower. ‘I liked it on the eighteenth,’ she said. ‘I would not mind going back to live there, I was quite happy.’33
Notes
1 Ernő Goldfinger, Guardian, 14/2/68, p5
2 Ernő Goldfinger, Guardian, 8/3/69, p7
3 Ursula Goldfinger, Guardian, 15/5/68, p5
4 Jane Drew in Nigel Warburton, Erno Goldfinger: The Life of an Architect, Routledge, 2004, p136
5 Nigel Warburton, Erno Goldfinger: The Life of an Architect, Routledge, 2004, p132
6 Ernő Goldfinger, Observer, 16/12/62, p25
7 Daily Express, 17/5/68, p1
8 Daily Mirror, 17/5/68, p4
9 Daily Mirror, 17/5/68, p4
10 Daily Express, 17/5/68, p4
11 Hugh Griffiths, Sir Alfred Pugsley, Sir Owen Saunders, Report of the Inquiry into the Collapse of Flats at Ronan Point, Canning Town, HMSO, 1968, p15
12 Hugh Griffiths, Sir Alfred Pugsley, Sir Owen Saunders, Report of the Inquiry into the Collapse of Flats at Ronan Point, Canning Town, HMSO, 1968, plate 7
13 The Times, 11/1/73, p5
14 Daily Express, 17/5/68, p1
15 Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block, Yale University Press, 1993, p219
16 Lynsey Hanley, Estates, Granta, 2007, p109
17 Geoff Scott, Building Disasters and Failures, The Construction Press, 1976, p88
18 Geoff Scott, Building Disasters and Failures, The Construction Press, 1976, p93
19 Geoff Scott, Building Disasters and Failures, The Construction Press, 1976, p19
20 Phil McPhee in Farquar McLay (ed), Workers City: The Real Glasgow Stands Up, Clydeside Press, 1988, p46
21 Phil McPhee in Farquar McLay (ed), Workers City: The Real Glasgow Stands Up, Clydeside Press, 1988, p45
22 Pearl Jephcott, Homes in High Flats, Oliver and Boyd, 1971, p48
23 Herald, 19/11/74, p12
24 Pearl Jephcott, Homes in High Flats, Oliver and Boyd, 1971, p59
25 Pearl Jephcott, Homes in High Flats, Oliver and Boyd, 1971, p61
26 Herald, 27/12/62, p6
27 Journal, 9/9/77, p7
28 Evening Chronicle, 26/7/77, p5
29 Clare McCarren and Brid Fitzpatrick, Evening Chronicle, 21/10/86, p8
30 Ernő Goldfinger, The Times, 8/8/68, p2
31 Lewis Womersley, Guardian, 13/8/68, p4
32 The Times, 18/4/73, p4
33 Daily Express, 17/5/68, p4
2. ‘A Terrible Confession of Defeat’
PROTEST AND PRESERVATION (1969–79)
‘What the Ministry is concerned with is the environment (horrible word)’ Dame Evelyn Sharp.1
In the mid-sixties, architect John Knight had been living the sci-fi life in a penthouse in Britain’s most futuristic building, the megastructure that formed Cumbernauld’s town centre. By the end of the decade he’d fallen out of love with his profession, and drifted to Edinburgh in search of new challenges.
‘In 1970 we had here a major conference on the conservation of Georgian architecture,’ he told me over lunch in Edinburgh’s New Town. ‘Now this was Robert Matthew, who comes into the picture now big time. He obviously had a similar body swerve here, because suddenly, from doing pretty major developments like the Gorbals or whatever, he suddenly starts down this conservation route. And he realised that unless someone picked up the cudgel on behalf of the Georgian New Town here in Edinburgh it was a goner. Because it was really beginning to give out – had been built up to 1860, and 100 years later it was beginning to fail. It was his inspiration to have the conservation conference here. I sat in the back row of the top tier looking at all the great and the good, like John Betjeman and others, talking about how what we had here in Edinburgh was unique. I thought, You’ve got to get into this. This is the future. And I did.’
The drift of modernists to what was known at the time as preservationism had been going on for some time. John Betjeman was an early convert: he was a founder member of the Victorian Society, a group formed to fight for the conservation of nineteenth-century architecture – a wildly unfashionable cause at the time. Gavin Stamp, then both a student and a self-confessed young fogey, was one of a younger generation who joined the society in reaction against the redevelopment that had been ongoing since the war. ‘We need to remember that not only was so much of the architectural production sheer rubbish,’ Stamp wrote, of the sixties boom, ‘but that architectural ambition, when allied to the utopian mania for comprehensive redevelopment, could be arrogant to the point of megalomania. Indeed, by the end of the decade, Modern architecture had become a form of terror, a systematic assault on city after city, which drove many people like me into an uncritical hostility and into conservation.’2
It was fair to say that feelings on the subject were running high. Young architectural historians Dan Cruikshank and Colin Amery, in their short, sharp shock of a book, The Rape of Britain, described the redevelopment of towns such as Worcester, Bath and Hereford as ‘an officially sponsored competition to see how much of Britain’s architectural heritage could be destroyed in 30 years.’3 They were echoing a cry from across the Atlantic. Jane Jacobs’ 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities had become, in its own way, as influential as Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow. In it she railed against the visions of modern life championed by Howard and Le Corbusier, and their ‘dishonest mask of pretend order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served’.4 Instead she advocated a return to the bustle of traditional street life, before comprehensive development schemes and neighbourhood planning had simplified towns to death with their pedestrianised precincts and wholesale disruption of
old street patterns.
Old street patterns had started to preoccupy John Knight too, after his damascene conversion at Robert Matthews’ Edinburgh conference. ‘I moved to Fettes Row,’ he said. This was one of the yellow stone Georgian streets in the New Town, a couple over from the one I’d been staying in as I shuttled to Glasgow and back interviewing former Gorbals residents and exploring the library there. Other than admiring its beauty, I’d not really paid much attention to it, but suddenly this 200-year-old new town seemed to have become central to my postwar story.
After moving to Fettes Row, John could view at close quarters the dangerous dilapidation of the entire area. ‘The east side managed to hang on by its toenails to a little bit of elegance, I think, but the west side was just disappearing. One reason being it was built in very inferior stone, because our famous Craigleith had already run out and was too expensive even for the New Town. So the stone was beginning to sheet off.’ He soon found himself at the forefront of a pioneering conservation scheme. ‘I project managed – we’d now call it – the first project in the New Town: 23-24 Fettes Row. What we had to do was brigade a group of very difficult and quite recalcitrant owners together, who were living in a building that was ripe for demolition.’ Thanks to some quick calculations by Robert Matthew, they were able to provide figures for the cost of repair; it ran to £15 million for the New Town, and they were able to apply for grants to cover it. ‘The stone was done for, but we were able to reface it and keep the buildings in occupation at the same time – the flats were so big that the owners could move to the back. We scoured the front off and put a new stone front on, and it still looks all right today.’
Robert Matthew’s involvement in this project seemed rather baffling to me. I’d encountered him as the big-thinking moderniser behind the Festival Hall and the riverside Gorbals scheme. ‘I am frequently charged with being on the one hand, a dyed-in-the-wool preservationist,’ he said in 1972, ‘and on the other a callous destroyer. I plead guilty to both, for choices have to be made. The world cannot become a vast museum, with the living population relegated to marginal and temporary shanty towns.’5 And so this esteemed modernist managed to secure the Georgian heritage of Edinburgh’s New Town. Here, suddenly, was a viable new model, driven by an alliance between the preservationists and concerned local residents – whose views were now being taken more into account. ‘We have learned one lesson,’ Matthew told a conference in 1974, after being named conservation advisor to the Secretary of State for Scotland. ‘Buildings are infinitely more adaptable than we have hitherto been persuaded to believe … there are many ways of using these solid structures today, or any other day.’6 It was the message that had resonated across the Atlantic from Jane Jacobs and her book on the life of America’s old city streets. Many would call Matthew’s conversion to the conservation movement a betrayal of his earlier modernist principles. But Matthew himself would argue that his vision had never wavered; what he wanted to create and what he wanted to protect were one and the same: buildings of quality.
By the mid-seventies arguments about modern planning and architecture had moved beyond the textbook or special interest groups like the Victorian Society. If you’d happened to tune into a classic 1973 episode of Parkinson, for example, you’d have seen Carry On regular Kenneth Williams deliver a tirade against ‘the dreadfulness of the Elephant and Castle, which used to be a place of humanity and warmth and people, and is now just a concrete desert and a mess and an absolute disgrace’. And there was fellow guest John Betjeman to garnish the outburst with a characteristic ‘Frightful!’
School kids were getting similar instruction. In May 1976, a touring theatre-in-education company took their transit van to the Welsh new town of Cwmbran to perform two plays to the residents. The first was a right-on production called Newtopia, aimed at junior school children. It opened by involving pupils in a town planning roleplay and ended with them singing protest songs against the town they had just planned. Their other play – Confessions of a Town Planner in everything but name – was aimed at young adults. Round the Bend was the tale of Mr Crutch the planner and his dream of imposing on the wretched people a new kind of town, given the delightfully dystopian name of Futurepoint 80.
It seemed that the tension between modernisation and heritage had finally caught up with everyone.
The great divide between modernisation and heritage was felt, at the sharp end, by millions of council tenants around the country. Many had been moved out to new estates and premises, and were delighted (or not) with the improved amenities they found there. But for many more, the thought of leaving beloved homes and communities was a dreadful prospect. ‘If only they’d let us stay. No one wants to go. We are not young and he (the informant’s husband) will only last five years. That’s what he says, “If only they’d let us stay”.’7 In Sunderland, sociologist Norman Dennis aimed to get a snapshot of local opinion on proposed slum demolition and redevelopment in the late sixties. ‘I went to the Town Hall about it,’ said one resident who was set to move because of rebuilding work, ‘but they want it, so that’s the end of it. There’s nothing more we can do. It seems as if they are stuck on it, they said word had come down from London that they had to come down.’8 One local government official in Sunderland Council dealing with the slum clearance programme sounded like a character from Round the Bend: ‘All houses built before 1914 can and ought to be cleared in the next 10 years,’ he told Dennis. ‘We ought to have plastic houses that we can throw away after 20 years. Good God! We will be on the moon in 2000 and these houses were built when Charles Dickens was writing his novels.’9
Funny, feisty former planner Jo Meredith in Sheffield took me through her career, and the challenges she’d faced. ‘I was involved in slum clearance in Manchester, in the early seventies, because there were still huge areas,’ she remembered. ‘And of course this was the seventies – the love affair with tower blocks had gone.’ Despite that, there was still a lot of redevelopment being planned. ‘At that time in the late sixties and early seventies local government was actually doing things. You were building things: you were building housing, you were building sheltered housing for older people, you were building public buildings. Local authority design departments were very fizzy places to be.’ But she also remembered less happily the change that occurred when the tide turned against these redevelopment schemes. ‘It was also the beginning of the conservation period which in a sense I thought totally grew like topsy and got out of hand. So by the time you got to 1980 anything more than 50 years old had got to be kept because it’s wonderful.’ She rolled her eyes at the ‘heritage’ they’d inherited. ‘There were some awfully bad buildings built, you know.’ And she didn’t mean the modern ones.
Jo Meredith’s career straddled the period when, in the fag-end of Wilson’s sixties government, thinking on building and planning suddenly changed. Comprehensive development areas were out, and with it the bold, free-thinking style of planners like Patrick Abercrombie. Instead, the onus would be on local councils to improve existing buildings, as in Edinburgh’s New Town, rather than to redevelop. The accusation was levelled that homes were being mislabeled slums by planners in order for them to push through redevelopments, and that some simple adaptations might have saved these houses from being knocked down in the first place. There was ‘planning blight’ too, that suffocating syndrome caused when a future scheme was unveiled and threatened to put a district to slow death by the creeping poison of compulsory purchase orders. Professor John Gold, in the introduction to the first of his series of books on modernism in Britain, recalled what happened to his home town of Ilford in Essex when a major redevelopment scheme was announced in 1962. ‘Houses were boarded up and the slates removed from their roofs to keep out squatters,’ he wrote. ‘Once they were suitably derelict, they could be cleared piecemeal, leaving islands of uninhabited dwellings surrounded by dereliction masquerading as temporary car parks. Street repairs halted and infestations of mice and other verm
in were experienced.’10 He also recalled how a local councillor had appeared on television and dismissed terraces of late-Victorian houses as slums, to the anger of the residents. John had seen the original plans for the scheme in the local library when they had been first announced, and had loved their futuristic functionalism. In the end Ilford’s plan was abandoned due to lack of funds, and the area was rebuilt in dribs and drabs, losing any sense of coherence and community in the process.
The government began to alter its stance on redevelopment. Robert Matthew’s company RMJM carried out a study in the late sixties as part of the development of the romantically named Central Lancashire New Town. New Life in Old Towns, the resulting book, features interviews with residents of Nelson and Rawtenstall, two towns in north-east Lancashire; the same point is made by the residents over and over again: ‘Keep them standing and improve them. They’ve knocked down far too many good old houses already.’11 Residents, Matthew’s researchers found, ‘overwhelmingly supported the idea that the two study areas be rehabilitated rather than redeveloped.’ Where once RMJM’s employees would have angled for work in a comprehensive development scheme, suddenly they were the preservationists’ friends. ‘The choice for the foreseeable future lies not between rehabilitation and redevelopment,’ wrote their researchers, ‘but between rehabilitation and continuing neglect.’12
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