While Eldon Square was being mauled in Newcastle, Arndale were building their massive flagship centre in Manchester. For this major scheme they had taken what was for them the unusual step of appointing a firm of big name architects – Wilson and Wolmersley, comprising the once great local authority talents of Hugh Wilson, Cumbernauld’s original chief planner, and Lewis Wolmersley, the futuristic brain behind Sheffield’s postwar transformation. Almost a decade in the building, the mall, covering acres of the city centre – and clad with thousands of beige and brown ceramic tiles – was instantly dubbed by locals as the largest public lavatory in England, and the developers and architects found their names had become dirty words.
Kenneth Shone, one of the job architects, did not take their criticism lying down. ‘I’ll readily accept the comment that to take 13 acres of land out of commission for five years is rather inhuman,’ he told the Guardian in 1978. ‘Right – but it was an inhuman scale problem that people gave us to solve … I think it’s a bit rough now for people to start knocking Chippindale or us because in the meantime the tide has turned. Conservation has become the in-thing, as if conservatism and redevelopment were mutually exclusive.’32
However, there was one group conspicuously loving the huge new mall, with its heating and seating. Journalist Gillian Linscott found that elderly people were ‘sat in the arcade all day because it was warmer and more companionable than being at home.’ The mall had become a winter garden. ‘“It’s warm, and you meet a lot of people,” said one woman by the miniature waterfall.’33
The crises of 1973 brought an end to these huge developments more effectively than any protest could. After a face-off between the Arab oil-producing states and the west, the taps to supply Europe and the USA were turned off. As energy prices soared, inflation boomed and the UK economy slipped into recession: ‘stagflation’ was born. Things were already looking bad, but when a disastrous round of pay negotiations between Edward Heath and the National Union of Mineworkers broke down, Britain’s domestic production of fuel was also cut. A three day week was introduced, where commercial consumption of electricity was confined to just three consecutive days each week until the energy crisis had passed. The modern British way of life had not looked so shaky since the dark days of the Blitz.
The Arndales, like the rest of Britain, were forced to keep strange hours, without light or heat for four days out of seven. Robert Waterhouse, a Guardian journalist channeling the dystopian writers of the day, speculated on the role of these huge new shopping centres in the coming social apocalypse. ‘If the worst does happen,’ he wrote, ‘and the social economy of the nation breaks down, these centres will be part only of a much wider disintegration of urban services.’ But he saw instead a more likely ‘slow war of attrition experienced by all the developed countries’. If that was the upshot, it wouldn’t necessarily mean the end for these giant shopping malls. After all, ‘hundreds of thousands of square feet of glass and concrete are not going to be wished away merely because they are no longer profitable. The challenge will be to see how they can be brought back into productive use.’34
In the context of these wider economic catastrophes, the ideals of developers, planners and protesters became somewhat moot. The simple truth was that Britain couldn’t afford to maintain the pace of redevelopment of the previous two decades, even if it had wanted to. Geologists can pinpoint global extinctions and climactic events by pointing to lines in the strata of rock, where the geological record abruptly changes; an analogous hiatus occurred in our town centres, between the frenetic activity of the fifties and sixties, and the mid-eighties, when widespread building began again. By that time styles had changed so much that the edifices of the postwar period seemed like relics from a distant age – a foreign country where they did things differently, where plans to demolish Covent Garden, put Newcastle on stilts or plough urban motorways through London’s most desirable districts seem like alien curiosities, at which we can only scratch our heads in wonder.
Notes
1 Evelyn Sharp, The Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Allen and Unwin, 1969, p11
2 Gavin Stamp in Elain Harwood and Alan Powers (ed.), The Sixties, The Twentieth Century Society, 2002, p135
3 Colin Amery and Dan Cruikshank, The Rape of Britain, Elek, 1975, p10
4 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Vintage, 1961 (Vintage Edition 1992), p15
5 Robert Matthew in Miles Glendinning, Modern Architect, RIBA Publishing, 2008, p461
6 Robert Matthew in Miles Glendinning, Modern Architect, RIBA Publishing, 2008, p476
7 Norman Dennis, People and Planning, Faber and Faber, 1970, p297
8 Norman Dennis, People and Planning, Faber and Faber, 1970, p346
9 Norman Dennis, People and Planning, Faber and Faber, 1970, p330
10 John R. Gold, The Experience of Modernism, Spon, 1997, px
11 Robert Matthew, Johnson-Marshall and Partners, New Life in Old Towns, HMSO, 1971, p66
12 Robert Matthew, Johnson-Marshall and Partners, New Life in Old Towns, HMSO, 1971, p74
13 DHLG 1967 survey in Robert Matthew, Johnson-Marshall and Partners, New Life in Old Towns, HMSO, 1971, p57
14 Joe Levy, AJ, 19/1/61, p100
15 William Holford, The Times, 13/1/66, p5
16 The Times, 5/8/66, p10
17 Peter Hall, London 2000, Faber, Second Edition, 1969, p210
18 Ian Nairn, Observer, 7/7/68, p25
19 Evelyn Sharp, The Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Allen and Unwin, 1969, p183
20 Concrete Quarterly, October–December 68, p33
21 New Society, 1/8/68 in www.cbrd.co.uk
22 Evening Chronicle, 3/6/71, p14
23 David Durman, The Journal, 3/6/72, p11
24 Journal, 11/12/70, p9
25 Illustrated London News, 28/11/70, p16
26 Editorial, Journal, 22/1/70, p8
27 Alan H Brown [letter] Evening Chronicle, 31/10/69
28 Evening Chronicle, 29/10/70 p3
29 Journal, 14/3/72, p4
30 Evelyn Sharp, The Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Allen and Unwin, 1969, p184
31 Guardian, 5/3/76, p6
32 Guardian 16/10/78, p8
33 Gillian Linscott, Guardian, 2/1/73, p6
34 Robert Waterhouse, Guardian, 22/12/73, p9
3. ‘As Corrupt a City as You’ll Find’
UNCOVERING THE LIES AT THE HEART OF THE BOOM (1966–77)
‘We have the best police force in the world. We have the greatest local government. We have the most wonderful press. Whatever it was it was inviolate, it was achieving great things, it ran perfectly.’
If Britain at Christmas 1973 was facing meltdown, 1974 would prove to be nothing short of apocalyptic for the established order. Two general elections in eight months kicked out Edward Heath’s troubled government and replaced it with one led by an increasingly doddery Harold Wilson. In November two IRA bombs exploded in pubs in Birmingham, including The Mulberry Bush at the foot of James Roberts’ new Rotunda, and killed 21 people. In a wave of terrorist attacks, a coach was blown up on the M62, killing 12, and there was an explosion in the Tower of London, where one person died.
The other big story of the year was corruption. In America, Richard Nixon finally left the White House on 8 August. In Britain a crooked trail of corruption led from an architect’s office in west Yorkshire all the way up to Heath’s Home Secretary. Its exposure laid bare a network of unscrupulous businessmen, dishonest officials and immoral politicians, and discredited an entire generation of public figures. On the back of the collapse of Ronan Point and widespread popular protests against many new development schemes, this very public unmasking of the corruption at the heart of Britain’s architecture and planning community completed a perfect storm from which the professions have never quite recovered.
At Leeds Crown Court in February 1974, John Poulson, who had been quietly running Europe’s largest architectural practic
e from the West Riding town of Pontefract, was convicted of fraud. In April, ‘Mr Newcastle’, T. Dan Smith, was found guilty of corruption in the same courtroom. Both men, along with sundry accomplices from civil servants to local councillors, were jailed, as the law finally exposed a pervasive web of illegal deals, dodgy contracts and widespread bribery. This was the system and these were the people who had rebuilt British cities, especially those in the north of England, motivated not by the high ideals they often professed, but by a greed for profit and personal gain that trumped all other considerations. For their sensational unmasking we have one man to thank, a dogged young journalist who in the late sixties was working for the Bradford Telegraph and Argus: in this All the Architect’s Men tale, both Woodward and Bernstein are played by a man called Raymond Fitzwalter.
When I visited him just before Christmas 2012, Ray was living in a cosy stone cottage on a hill overlooking Manchester, as though he were still policing the north. The trimmings of a successful life in journalism surrounded him. Two BAFTAs sat on a sideboard, surrounded by shelves of books covering all aspects of news and current affairs, from the sixties to the present. Still remarkably boyish in his steel-rimmed glasses and black v-neck, he answered questions with the fiery and incisive spirit you’d expect from a man who’d been one of the country’s most respected journalists.
It hadn’t been an easy ride for a young journalist on a small local paper, trying to investigate a whole strata of society: the people who ran Britain. He described a complacent world of long lunches, jollies and conferences in grand hotels, where pompous folk in local government and business met to slap each other on the back. Police, politicians, press, business: it was the crème de la crème.
‘The Masonic influence was strong,’ Ray told me in his rich, narrator’s voice. ‘Much stronger than now.’ I knew that John Poulson had been a big Mason, and his trial had helped to drag much of that secretive world out into the open too. Yet by the time details of the corruption infesting this world of privilege and power began to surface, in many cases it was too late for the police to prosecute. ‘They described it as cutting the top off the pyramid,’ said Ray. ‘It’d gone on for so long, so much, some of them had died before we could get at them.’
John Poulson, the founder of a huge and corrupt architecture empire. © Bridget Howard
Although many successfully evaded discovery, the number rooted out as a consequence of Raymond Fitzwalter’s investigation and Poulson’s bankruptcy hearing was still breathtaking. A snapshot of some key figures reveals the insidious nature of Poulson’s network. There was Graham Tonbridge at British Rail, who helped him get contracts such as the rebuilding of Cannon Street Station in London, while in return one of Poulson’s staff drew £25 from the bank for him each Saturday morning. There was Billy Sales of the National Coal Board, for whom Poulson designed their £1 million northern HQ, Coal House in Doncaster, while paying the mortgage for Sales’s large house in Doncaster and sending him on a number of luxurious holidays. Sir Bernard Kenyon, the influential clerk of West Riding council sat on the board of Poulson’s construction company, Open Systems Building, among others. And while he was never dragged through the courts like so many of Poulson’s other contacts, the former local government cabinet minister Richard Crossman was at his most waspish while claiming to be surprised to read that Keynon ‘for the last three years before his retirement managed a number of Poulson companies although Mr Poulson had contracts with the council.’ He remarked with heavy irony: ‘I suppose it is possible to believe in the Immaculate Conception of county clerks.’1
And there was Bill Shee, who as secretary of the Leeds Hospital Board fiercely championed Poulson’s tenders for hospital projects in the city, and who immediately on retirement became a consultant for Poulson, claiming sizeable commission on fees the architect received for winning two large Manchester hospital contracts. The architect generously paid for renovations to the house of south-west region Metropolitan Hospital board secretary George Braithwaite, who in turn ensured three lucrative hospital contracts in the district went Poulson’s way. Andrew Cunningham was helpful to the architect for his many contacts, not only as a Durham Alderman and chairman of the local Labour party, but also as chairman of the Newcastle airport, police and river authorities. Cunningham pushed a £2 million housing scheme Poulson’s way, a job that never even went out for tender, as well as three schools and a technical college. Both he and his wife had been kept on retainer by Poulson as consultants.
Then there was William Pottinger, an ambitious Scottish civil servant, who worked on Poulson’s giant Aviemore tourist centre and received free holidays for his trouble. A typical letter from Pottinger to Poulson read: ‘Thank you for your letter about the Italian holiday. I need not say again that we are quite overwhelmed by your kindness. Having said that, I have set out a note of what we would really like.’2 This was typical of the way Poulson operated. Ray recalled that upon meeting the mayor of Bradford, the property tycoon had remarked: “I think you look a bit peaky. You need a good holiday, lad.” A few days later tickets arrived for a foreign break for the mayor and his wife. Of these figures, Pottinger, Braithwaite, the Cunninghams and Tonbridge were all arrested and charged with conspiracy by the police, and all were sent to prison, except Mrs Cunningham and Mr Tonbrige, who served suspended sentences.
Yet in his heyday, with all these contacts and many more eager to shove lucrative contracts his way in return for favours, Poulson’s business had expanded from a turnover of £20 million in 1958 to five times that within a decade. Jo Meredith, the ebullient ex-planner I interviewed in Sheffield, remembered the growth of this unusual practice well.
‘Poulson’s main British office was in Pontefract, of all unlikely places! And it was the largest employer of architects in Europe in the sixties. I was in Leeds then doing my planning degree, and he was notorious for employing all the foreign architecture students to do their architecture there. We’re talking sixties, and we’re still talking a lot of discrimination. And he would employ all of the Asian and African architects that came to study, at really cheap rates. It was amazing, because there in Pontefract was this multi-storey office block full of architects working for Poulson, with huge racial mix, which you just didn’t get in West Riding towns in those days!’
This was no utopia, however: ‘He ran the place like a bully,’ Ray told me, ‘and he was a very, very difficult man to deal with.’
The Pontefract office churned out a huge amount of work. For Arndale, Poulson designed the Crossgates shopping centre in Leeds, and his busy practice also designed the notorious Leeds International Pool, whose ‘Olympic-sized’ baths came in a few inches short of the required 50 metres, causing a fuss of ‘wobbly bridge’ proportions. No matter, because he moved swiftly on to specialise in hospitals. At least, his talented staffer Paul James did, designing among others Airedale Hospital near Keighley, St Luke’s in Huddersfield and St James in Leeds.
Poulson’s staff, photographed in the grounds of his house, Manasseh, in the 1960s. © Bridget Howard
James Dunnett, architect and stout defender of Richard Seifert, hemmed and hawed over Poulson when I mentioned him. ‘I think that even Poulson wasn’t totally devoid of merit,’ he said. ‘I was just reading a thing about hospitals. His firm designed the first of a new kind of hospital built up there. But I’ve never seen anything that had real architectural distinction that came out of his practice … There was this euphoria at the time, so a lot got built that wasn’t very good.’
Whether his buildings were good or not, the service Poulson offered certainly sounded impressive, as Building magazine gushed at the height of his success in 1967: ‘Quantity surveying, planning, interior design, structural engineering, electrical, heating and ventilating engineering, he has them all.’3 Some of his work even won awards from the government. The contracts may have been generated through nefarious means, and some of the constructions may have been of dubious quality, but by the end of the decade J
ohn Poulson’s business was a huge success.
Poulson’s unravelling began in Bradford in 1969, where a young Ray Fitzwalter was working as deputy news editor on the Telegraph and Argus. The paper had reported a local corruption scandal in the town hall, where four of the city architect’s staff were sent to jail and the architect, W. Clifford Brown, was fired for passing on building contracts to local businessmen who had bribed them. Ray’s editor, Peter Harland, was convinced there was more to the story, and in his spare time the rookie reporter began to investigate.
‘It was seemingly quite straightforward,’ Ray explained, ‘because what the police had done in their prosecutions was they had got the man who had given the bribes to turn Queen’s evidence. He was a local contractor, mainly electrical – fairly small stuff. And he was gabby. I managed to persuade him to meet me, which he did – at midnight, in a room with no lights on!’ He laughed at the absurdity of it. ‘It was his offices. He was very forthcoming. “Look, you don’t understand,” he said. “These kind of rackets operate on three levels. There’s small fish like me bribing junior engineers and whatever. There’s a middle ranking sphere of bribery that operates on a regional level, not a city level, where larger firms take the big contracts worth quite a lot of money. And there’s a top level where jobs into the millions are ripped off.” Then he asked: “Have you ever looked at that man Poulson?” And I said: “Who the hell are you talking about? Never heard of him.” Poulson was not from Bradford, he was from Pontefract. And that was outside our circulation area. But my editor encouraged me to go further. Normally you were lucky if you got your bus fare anywhere.’
It soon became clear that Ray’s investigation would require resources far beyond the means of a small local paper, even one prepared to pay for unlimited bus fares.
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