‘By the end of this century,’ wrote new towns central planner Frank Schaffer in 1972, ‘one out of every seven people in Britain will be living in a new town.’28 This was a large overestimate, certainly, but by 2007 2.5 million people – or four percent of the population – were living in new towns: one in 24 Brits. And a tenth of those were in just one of them: Milton Keynes. In 1976, Labour housing minister Peter Shore took the decision to divert the new towns budget into the failing inner cities; and with that decision this huge postwar project drew to a close. With the completion of Milton Keynes, Britain’s new towns story was over. Since then, some new towns have been used by their councils as giant sink estates in which to dump the poor, while others have seen so many of their houses bought by the tenants that they have become middle-class ghettoes. Milton Keynes was big enough that both things have happened in different areas of the city.
As a whole, the new towns allow us a view of a brief moment in history where planners challenged the way our towns and cities worked, and were given the opportunity to test out new ideas. They are bubbles of optimism, steps towards a future we have long since abandoned. As I was leaving Galley Hill, Peter looked out through his nets at the darkening square and remarked that living in that house had been a form of time travel. At first it had all been young families, and then people grew up, moved away, died. Now the young families were there again, and kids were back playing in the square as they had been in 1972.
Notes
1 The Times, 18/3/70, p11
2 Guardian, 7/1/64, p4
3 Guardian 18/5/65, p3
4 Llewelyn-Davies, Weeks, Forestier-Waker and Bor, The Plan for Milton Keynes, vol 1, Milton Keynes Development Corporation, 1970, p16
5 Judy Hillman, Observer, 2/2/69
6 Llewelyn-Davies, Weeks, Forestier-Waker and Bor, The Plan for Milton Keynes, vol 1, Milton Keynes Development Corporation, 1970, p10
7 Derek Walker, The Architecture and Planning of Milton Keynes, The Architectural Press, 1981, p8
8 Derek Walker, The Architecture and Planning of Milton Keynes, The Architectural Press, 1981, p9
9 The Times, 15/2/67, p3
10 Jane Turner and Bob Jardine, Pioneer Tales, People’s Press of Milton Keynes, 1985, p12
11 Derek Walker, Architectural Design, June 1973, p351
12 Derek Walker, Architectural Design, June 1973, p352
13 Jane Turner and Bob Jardine, Pioneer Tales, People’s Press of Milton Keynes, 1985, p16
14 Jane Turner and Bob Jardine, Pioneer Tales, People’s Press of Milton Keynes, 1985, p16
15 Observer, 26/5/74, p26
16 Llewelyn-Davies, Weeks, Forestier-Waker and Bor, The Plan for Milton Keynes, vol 1, Milton Keynes Development Corporation, 1970, p11
17 Peter Evans, Home Affairs Correspondent, The Times, ‘Milton Keynes – City of the Future supplement’, 24/3/72, pI
18 Jane Turner and Bob Jardine, Pioneer Tales, People’s Press of Milton Keynes, 1985, p29
19 Llewelyn-Davies, Weeks, Forestier-Waker and Bor, The Plan for Milton Keynes, vol 1, Milton Keynes Development Corporation, 1970, p9
20 The Times, 28/8/75, p12
21 The Times, 28/8/75, p12
22 Jane Turner and Bob Jardine, Pioneer Tales, People’s Press of Milton Keynes, 1985, p28
23 Peter Evans, Home Affairs Correspondent, The Times, ‘Milton Keynes – City of the Future supplement’, 24/3/72, pI
24 Robert Maxwell, of UCL – The Times, 28/8/75, p12
25 Architectural Design, June 1973, p363
26 Timothy Boutwood, resident of Walton, The Times, 28/8/75, p12
27 Derek Walker, The Architecture and Planning of Milton Keynes, The Architectural Press, 1981, p73
28 Frank Schaffer, The New Town Story, Paladin, Second Edition, 1972, p15
5. ‘A City within a City’
THE LATE FLOWERING OF THE BARBICAN AND THE NATIONAL THEATRE (1957–81)
It may seem odd to end this book – and this journey – at two places whose origins were much earlier than the late seventies. In the case of the Barbican, I could have placed its story anywhere from 1945 onwards. After all, here is a tale of Blitz reconstruction right in the heart of the burned-out city, with plans drawn up in the fifties, building commenced in the sixties, and residential communities flowering in the seventies. The origins of the National Theatre are even older. A National Shakespeare Theatre was first dreamt of in the mid-nineteenth century, yet it was Patrick Abercrombie’s wartime suggestion that arts centres should be central to the regeneration of the derelict south bank of the Thames that kick-started work in earnest.
So why end up here? Well, the buildings seem to me a last push to create exciting and experimental public spaces, before responsibility for these kind of projects shifted decisively away from public and into private hands. Also, I love both of these places: they feel epic, imaginative and alive. Since my teenage years I’ve spent so many hours hanging around in their concrete foyers and balconies, theatres and bars. I’ve heard people describe both the Barbican and the National Theatre as cold, impersonal, ugly and dystopian. To me they are quite the reverse: comfortable, welcoming – in a non-threatening, low-key way – stunningly beautiful and entirely life-enhancing. So it was very exciting to go behind the scenes of both of these places, to find out how and why they’d come to be built, and what it had been like to create such inspirational and enjoyable environments.
The remains of London Wall in the foreground, and the high-rise towers of the Barbican beyond: an area traditionally ‘best known for its dirt and its squalor’.
These days the Barbican may be famous for its high-rise millionaires and swanky arts centre, but for 1,000 years – until the Blitz razed the place – it was, as Peter Ackroyd wrote, ‘best known for its dirt and its squalor’. This ancient City of London district, with its Roman city walls, was ‘the centre of a thousand different infections, and a miasmal neighbourhood that threatened the whole of London.’1 I’d watched the 1960 documentary short, Barbican Regained, which showed the enormous hole in the City where the Barbican had once stood: churned-up waste ground, overgrown and overshadowed by the steel and glass office blocks of London Wall. By then plans were already well advanced for the resurrection of the neighbourhood. I had the chance to speak to one of the architects, John Honer, who worked for the firm of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon from the fifties to the eighties. I was rather nervous before meeting this eminent figure who’d helped design such a world-famous structure, but this gentle, genial, round-faced and white-haired man couldn’t have been more delightfully friendly and charming. I’d travelled to his home in Cambridge, a stylish modern conversion of an old stone building, where he made us a cafetiere of coffee and produced some posh chocolate biscuits before we got down to business.
Taken from the Golden Lane estate’s tower block, Great Arthur Tower, looking over the derelict site of the Barbican. Office block City Point is shown under construction on the left of the picture. © Janet Gyford
‘I’ve probably become more aware of the history since working on it than during that process,’ he told me in his beautifully modulated tones. ‘Of course, the Barbican site is only a fairly small proportion of the area that was totally destroyed. The destruction went all the way down from Finsbury all the way down to the river.’ For John there was a personal as well as a professional angle. ‘My father was in a volunteer fire brigade, and he was up there during the Blitz. And my grandfather had a business in Golden Lane!’ Three generations of his family, each with connections, however different, to the same place. ‘My grandfather was in the clothing business. He was typical of many working in that area. It was the centre of the cloth trade – the rag trade they used to call it. He produced the sort of children’s clothes with velvet collars and Harris tweed that sold at Harrods. Very upmarket!’
By 1951 there were only 48 people living in the Barbican, eking out a wretched existence amid the ashes, dereliction and opportunistic rats and weeds. Hol
den and Holford were brought in immediately after the war to work out what to do with this devastated district. They envisaged a mighty double decker road snaking from Holborn in the centre to Aldgate in the east. ‘Because of economic and administrative difficulties,’ wrote William Holford, ‘this proposal came to nothing.’ This hadn’t stopped them producing reams of plans, and I was delighted to discover that they hadn’t been able to resist the lure of the helipad, suggesting that the corporation of London should ‘reserve Moorgate Station and its surroundings for a helicopter landing ground and a two-decked car park.’2
The 1944 Greater London Plan demanded that the area be turned over to commercial use. Between 1952 and 1956 numerous proposals along those lines were submitted. In 1954 the hugely ambitious architect Sergei Kadleigh produced a plan which included offices, warehouses, parks, shops and homes, all contained within terraced four-storey maisonettes. At the planning enquiry for New Barbican, Sergei was bullish about his scheme. The new trade hall would become the ‘historic future focus of business activity’ and the area would become ‘in effect, a twentieth century forum on the site of a Roman fortress.’3 According to John Honer, the single advantage of Sergei’s scheme was a spine road that would have helped people orientate themselves in the rebuilt landscape. But it was eventually thrown out, just as Sergei’s plans for High Paddington, a high-rise city in the sky for 8,000 people above the west London station, had bitten the dust in 1952. In fact, none of Kadleigh’s grand schemes were ever built in Britain.
In 1956, Duncan Sandys, the Minister of Housing, kicked off a search for a new plan for ‘a genuine residential neighbourhood, incorporating schools, shops, open spaces and other amenities, even if this means foregoing a more remunerative return on the land’.4 The City desperately needed its own population to bolster its independence: the sheer lack of voter power in the immediate postwar years put them at risk of being absorbed into the mighty bulk of the London County Council. The City corporation’s intention was to build ‘a small new town within an ancient city’.5 Not that there was much ancient city to work with other than a few bits of the old Roman wall and a church, St Giles. John remembered the inspiring sight that greeted them. ‘If you see photographs of that site it’s staggering: it was just a pile of weeds, old railway tracks and so on.’
The architectural practice of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon was formed in 1952, by three lecturers from Kingston Polytechnic. ‘I was a student of theirs at Kingston,’ explained John, ‘and joined them a year after they set up practice.’ The trio had founded the firm on the back of Geoffry Powell’s victory in the Golden Lane competition to build a residential estate just over the border from the City, adjacent to the Barbican site. ‘Competitions were all the rage then, and this was the second major housing competition, the first being Churchill Gardens, won by his namesake Philip Powell – no relation. As students Philip and Geoffry used to share digs, just to confuse everyone. So then I joined the practice, partly qualified, and my first project was Great Arthur House, the 16-storey block of Golden Lane. It was my initiation as it were.’
At this stage John insisted I have coffee, and as he was being so hospitable I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I loathe the stuff, and that this would only be the third cup of coffee I’d had in my life.
‘I should think we were about 15 staff,’ he continued, ‘including partners and secretaries. Quite small. As soon as they gained an international reputation they attracted people from all over the world. There was a great influx from Australia, I seem to remember … New York, India … It was a very, very exciting and cosmopolitan office. It was like a studio. The atelier system, master and apprentice sort of relationship. The great benefit of working with them was that staff were made responsible for buildings from initial design to final account. So one went through the whole stage. It was exciting, particularly for someone like myself, who was brought up in the London suburbs and was not at that stage the least bit urbane. Naïve. Green.’
He had grown up fairly near my home in south London, and I could easily imagine the clash of cultures between the suburban boy and both the sophisticates and artisans he was working with: ‘We were thrown into the deep end. I had to conduct site meetings, and we’d go to a site office, which then were absolutely full of smoke. You were sort of choking away and you were doing your best to either explain the design or administer the contracts. When I think back I don’t know what the builders made of me, because I knew virtually nothing.’
I asked him to describe his bosses, the famous trio of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon. ‘Chamberlin could have been a barrister, he could have been a high flyer in almost any field. He studied PPE – Politics, Philosophy and Economics – at Oxford and he didn’t complete his degree because it was during the war and he was called up, and he was a conscientious objector. I think the war interrupted his studies. Because of his very broad interests he was able to communicate with the businessmen in the City at their own level. He was not at any disadvantage in that respect. He was a brilliant architect. He was a multi-faceted renaissance man. He was immensely interested in the theatre. Theatre, cinema and the visual arts generally was his passion.’ John still sounded a little overawed by him after all these years. ‘Geoffry Powell was an entirely different sort of person. He was a family man, the only family man of the three. He was perhaps less fanatical about architecture but perhaps more intuitive than Chamberlin and Bon. They were both products of the public school system, and that gave them the edge with the City. Geoffry went to Wellington and Chamberlin went to Bedford. Geoffry didn’t go to university, he went to the AA.’
John took a deep breath. ‘And then there was Christoph Bon. Architecture to him was a sort of fanatical cause. He was infuriating, he was almost impossible to work with – well, I found him impossible – but I also recognise that he was highly talented. He wasn’t as mature an adult as the other two … He was extremely dogmatic … He was a bit like The Man Who Came To Dinner – he came and was given a bed in Chamberlin’s flat and never left for 30 years. He lived with them. And, in fact, after Joe Chamberlin died he married Jean Chamberlin.’
This was all a long way from suburban south London, that was for sure. ‘So, they were very different as personalities, but there was a lot of mutual respect. And they complemented each other, that was the thing. I have to say that it is my opinion that although it was on the basis that Geoffry Powell’s winning them Golden Lane that the practice was set up, Chamberlin was the dominant personality. He had more energy and had a broader scope of interests. He just naturally came to the surface. There was some resentment, particularly amongst wives, I think, about that.’
Winning the competition to design the Golden Lane estate, which sat next to the derelict Barbican site but over the border from the City of London, would be the firm’s ticket to success. It was designed to house the people needed to keep the businesses in the City running – not the bankers and the bosses, but the caretakers, nurses and dustmen.i
‘At the time that Golden Lane was being built and extended there was a vast amount of exploratory activity concerning the Barbican site,’ recalled John Honer. ‘There was pressure to provide housing not just for the caretakers and the police and the nurses, but for workers with a wide scale of incomes within the City boundaries. And that was the basis of the Barbican scheme.’ The difference between the subsidised housing of Golden Lane, just outside the City boundary, and the private enterprise scheme for middle class people within the City walls, is striking. But Chamberlin, Powell and Bon were interested in providing more than simply housing in either development. ‘At Golden Lane – subsidized housing – there were all sorts of communal facilities. There’s a community hall. There were sports facilities. There was a pub. There were shops and so on. And the same idea was proposed for the Barbican site, that it should incorporate schools. And then of course gradually the brief for the arts centre evolved.’ This idea had initially come about because the City’s prestigious Guildhall
School of Music and Drama needed to be rehoused in the area. At first it was thought the school’s theatre and concert halls could be shared by the Barbican’s new residents. In the end they became home to much bigger fish – the London Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Meanwhile, across the Thames, a decade after the Festival of Britain had been dismantled, its planner, Sir Hugh Casson, lamented the lack of progress of Abercrombie’s scheme to regenerate the South Bank, with the suggested overspill offices for Whitehall and arts centres to adjoin the lonely Festival Hall still on the drawing board. The area had fallen into decline. ‘The Festival Hall looks as if it has the hump,’ he wrote in the Observer in 1961. ‘The Shot Tower, decapitated and bolted up, clearly knows it is under sentence of death … The pools are cracked and empty, the fountains dismantled, the sculpture removed. Flaking paint, rusting wire, temporary fencing, discouraging notices, twist and wriggle and spout in all directions.’6 That same year, the Chancellor, Selwyn Lloyd, refused funding to build a National Theatre on the South Bank, prompting an impatient Laurence Olivier in 1963 to found the National Theatre instead at the Old Vic, a Victorian-era theatre near Waterloo.
Olivier’s move coincided with a government change of heart. They now looked to build a new National Theatre and Opera House on the site of the long-dismantled Dome of Discovery, next to where the London Eye now stands. Die-hard modernist Denys Lasdun, who had been designing large-scale buildings since before the war, was chosen to plan the scheme, and by 1965 he revealed his idea. The National Theatre and Opera House buildings would face each-other across a plaza, constructed in a style that Lasdun would make his own, with long horizontal balconies, platforms and walkways, from which large almost cubist blocks jut and sprout. He liked to think of his buildings as landscapes: ‘public places, public domains … an extension of the city’.7
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