Concretopia

by Grindrod, John

  Yet as with many of the buildings in this book, a new regime scuppered all of Lasdun’s plans. In 1966 the new Labour government axed the Opera House, although funding for a new National Theatre building for Olivier’s company, still playing at the Old Vic, remained in place. Suddenly half of the building Denys Lasdun had designed was redundant. I spoke to Paul Jozefowski, who joined the National Theatre in the early eighties, and who had been researching the history of the building. Paul was now head of NT Futures, the project to adapt the building to a new millennium.

  ‘The building was originally designed as a theatre and an opera house together,’ he said, ‘as a symmetrical building. When the opera house fell away it was more or less cut down the middle, moved along and attached to Waterloo Bridge.’ This new site, known as Prince’s Meadow, was offered to Olivier by the new Greater London Council. For Lasdun, Waterloo Bridge was ‘the umbilical cord’, tethering the theatre to the rest of London. ‘It was hoped most people would come down from the bridge that way onto the terraces,’ said Paul, ‘but I remember when I first used to come here I used to get frustrated trying to find my way in or around.’

  The balconies of the National Theatre: ‘public places, public domains … an extension of the city’.

  As with the Festival Hall, the builders and engineers had a hell of a time trying to turn marshland into habitable space. ‘The theatre is built on a series of concrete rafts and sits on marsh land. And you can, if you look down the foyer just there,’ he said, pointing into the shadows as we sit near the ticket booths, ‘you can see some expansion joints. There are bits where the building has to be allowed to move. We’re constantly pumping out water from underneath because of the water table. But at certain points there are pressure release valves in the car park. If the water level goes so high they will spurt out and flood the car park to stop the whole thing lifting up. If the river really rose up – and hopefully we’ll never test it – but technically if the water table really rose the building would just float.’ Which is a good tip for Londoners, in case of a sudden catastrophic flooding.

  It was no mean feat to get projects of the scale of the National Theatre or the Barbican up and running. For Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, chatting up the City Corporation was a key element of the Barbican job, and the partners took it very seriously. ‘During the gestation period, Chamberlin took several members of the Court of Common council on a tour of Europe,’ explained John Honer. ‘They went to see, for example, some of the German concert halls and German theatres that were being built. But they also went to Venice. It may sound fanciful, but Venice provides an excellent example of a city with segregated traffic and pedestrians. The traffic, which is all on water, is at one level, and the pedestrians are all at another level. So it provided a ready-made example of what we were exploring in terms of pedestrian/traffic segregation in the Barbican.’

  I wondered whether there was also a more recent inspiration for the design: Le Corbusier. ‘I think there was,’ agreed John. ‘Almost every architect of that period was influenced by Le Corbusier … Where I think we are indebted to Le Corbusier is firstly in the use of concrete, but also in the planning of some of the flats. The sort of open planning, the abandonment of the usual circulation spaces within a flat which are wasteful – an entrance hall, staircases and so on. Both in Golden Lane and in the Barbican, several of the staircases connect the living room with the upper levels. Now, this was something that Le Corbusier had explored and we were fully aware of all that. Yes we did owe a lot to him, but then we did owe a lot to the other pioneers of the modern movement.’

  It was industrial action, more than Venetian waterways or Le Corbusier’s circulation plans, that preoccupied those who were actually building the Barbican. In September 1965 when three carpenters refused to attend the mass meeting of a union to which they were not affiliated, 380 men walked out on strike. The resulting violence between the strikers and the non-strikers became known in the press as the Battle of the Barbican. Journalists made much of a possible racial element to the violence. Many of the builders were either Irish or West Indian, and according to a Financial Times report ‘the air is thick with Irish voices making remarks like: “this thing started from nothing and bombshelled into a snowball”.’ The journalist clearly relished a national stereotype: ‘It seemed quite in character when two men began their speeches to an afternoon strike meeting by apologising for having drunk too much at lunchtime.’8

  I’d asked builder Danny Gill about what the teams of builders were actually like on those big schemes. ‘It would be about 55 percent Irish,’ he said. ‘The shuttering carpenters, they were mainly Irish. You had the London lads. Then you had about five percent Scottish. Then you had about three–to–five percent black people.’ He was remembering the early seventies, when a climate of race hate was growing across Britain. ‘In those days racial prejudice was bad,’ was Danny’s recollection of site work. ‘The black people was kept down.’ And if they weren’t, as in the case of a Jamaican friend on the Heygate being promoted to site agent, many of the white men were outraged. ‘At that time it was unheard of, you know. And I thought it was good.’

  At the Barbican, it seemed that as soon as one strike ended, another began. In 1967 the construction firm Myton attempted to reopen work on a site there that had been closed by industrial action for almost a year. Their attempt to get work going again ended in running battles between the police and strikers, with one unfortunate builder telling the press, ‘I ran down Aldersgate Street after an inspector had shouted “grab him” … they threw me on the floor and started to kick me. In the process they fractured my arm.’ It wasn’t just pay and conditions that the workers were angry about. Roger Raikes, the contracts manager of beleagured Myton sent a letter to Chamberlin, Powell and Bon in August 1966, claiming that their labour relations problem ‘had been greatly aggravated both by the complicated and non-repetitive nature of the design and also by the repeated changes and alterations … these factors had affected both the earnings and morale of the operatives.’

  By 1972 the situation had escalated to the point where there was a national building strike. Danny Gill, working on subsidised housing in the Elephant and Castle, remembered it well.

  ‘Most jobs in London were actually picketed,’ he told me. ‘And that was something similar to 1974 when you had the three-day working week. You had pickets on the gate, with flying pickets or whatever you want to call them, and they had pickaxe handles. They made it quite plain that if you were going on a job you’d be getting battered … I was between the North Peckham and the Heygate and I was ducking and diving. One of the strikes I went on, and the pickets said: “Right, if you cross this picket line we’re gonna attack you.” I said: “Hold on boys, all I’m doing is picking my tool bag up to level up and then I’m coming home” – and I went off to Glasgow for a month’s holiday. So I done that, and I always remember the site agent saying to me as I crossed the picket line to get my tools, he said: “You’re not going to let a few pickets frighten you, are you?” I said: “Too bloody right I am!” In the building trade strike, I forget what it was they were striking for, I think it was £1 an hour, £1.50 an hour, something like that. They never got it. Some of the jobs stayed open ’cos some of the subcontractors were giving the strikers a backhander.’

  Architect John Honer remembered working with the heads of these great building firms. ‘We talk about building contractors,’ he told me, ‘we don’t generally talk about builders. And there’s a vast difference. And I don’t know enough about the history of the building industry to know when the contractor was first introduced. But the contractor is like a speculator. He’s a money man. He doesn’t necessarily know a lot about building … And that is a very unsatisfactory situation.’

  Experiments at the Barbican with different finishes to the concrete.

  When judging the Barbican or the National Theatre, the method by which they were constructed is as important as the design. Louder than any ot
her buildings I visited, they shout concrete. Inside and out, the surfaces that make up the National Theatre hold the crisply cast impression of wooden shuttering – the planks that formed the moulds for the concrete. And the Barbican’s rugged pick-hammered surface is in its way as rare and handmade as the gold leaf on the frames of portraits in the National Gallery.

  ‘As you know,’ said John Honer wryly, ‘architects of that period were all grouped under that silly label “brutalist”, but we were all in our different ways experimenting with the different uses of concrete. Lasdun frequently used the shutter board to give some character to the surface. Others went for the pure sheen; others were painted. In fact the corporation began to paint the surfaces of the Golden Lane concrete to disguise some of the rust stains, which I don’t think is a very suitable or appropriate finish to concrete.’

  But – a key question – why concrete? When materials such as marble and Portland stone were available for these big-budget projects, why did the architects go instead for the raw, uncompromising roughness of concrete? For Denys Lasdun, the National Theatre he’d designed ‘could only be made in reinforced concrete. It is a very difficult material concrete, very intractable, not always loved. But I wanted the theatre not to be a flossie affair … When it is lit up, carpeted, softened, it can be very beautiful, rather like stone. I didn’t want to cover it with anything. That is what it is and that is what is shown. It will weather, it will streak, it will become part of nature. It will probably get lichen from the river.’9

  ‘We were more inclined to build in reinforced concrete than we were in steel,’ John Honer told me. ‘There were one or two steel schemes, but steel was in short supply, so it seemed natural to work in reinforced concrete. We therefore tried to develop a way of using concrete without cladding. In other words, concrete was the exposed face. And initially we were using ordinary gravel aggregate within the concrete, and then we began to tickle the surface with this pick or bush hammer, to give a kind of rugged feel, but it wasn’t entirely satisfactory. The gravel didn’t respond too well to that sort of treatment. And, even though it’s river gravel, there are iron particles in it which cause the rust staining. That is not staining from the reinforcement, it’s from iron pyrites. So eventually, and throughout the Barbican, we used a granite aggregate, so we’re really building in cement and stone, and a stone which is long, long lasting. Although it stains in the weather, I think that gives it a bit of character – though that may just be self-justification.’

  This bush hammering didn’t come cheap. But then neither did Lasdun’s obsession with displaying the board marks at the National Theatre. It was by no means easy to achieve the quality needed to show the wood grain to its best effect. ‘We paid great attention to the quality of the concrete,’ Lasdun told The Times. ‘There are special mixes. The men who actually handled it for McAlpine’s have done a superb job, absolutely wonderful. A lot of one’s reaction to concrete is prejudice, because it is often used or made very badly. Here it is used with poetry and made with great feeling … The grain of wood that is used for doors and panels is not unlike the grain from the shuttering against which the concrete is formed, so there is a great sympathy between wood and concrete.’10

  The board marks of the rough shuttering used as the concrete moulds for the National Theatre’s structure: ‘Here it is used with poetry and made with great feeling’.

  Even the colour of the concrete used was selected to go with the tone of Waterloo Bridge. It was made from coarse aggregate of marine dredged ballast with fine aggregate of Leighton Buzzard sand, and two types of waterproof cement – essential both due to the climate and to the theatre’s marshy setting. All the rough stone texture gives the theatre the feeling of something archaic, in contrast to the machine-age slickness so popular in the glass and steel boxes being designed for corporate clients the world over.

  Yet in the case of the National Theatre, even concrete’s greatest advocate, Concrete Quarterly, was in two minds about whether Lasdun had overdone it. ‘Boardmarked concrete can look superb inside a building, as in the National Theatre,’ wrote George Perkin, reviewing it for the magazine. ‘Outside it is surely, to say the least, questionable, particularly in our damp grey climate.’ Still, Perkin had nothing but praise for the interior. ‘Concrete is a hard, grey, matt, rather primitive material. To show it off at its best it needs the contrast of soft, colourful, sparkling, rather sophisticated materials.’11 And that’s what the National Theatre got. There were those, however, who found concrete interiors a little disconcerting. ‘Imagine a beautiful woman in evening dress with bare shoulders leaning against a concrete wall,’ said Peter Shepheard, President of RIBA. His point was that concrete might look impressive when used well, but it was uncomfortable to the touch.12

  For Paul Jozefowski, working to update the theatre, anti-concrete feeling was not necessarily rational. ‘Some people just don’t like concrete,’ he told me. ‘When we were doing the presentations for NT Future, people kept saying: Can you get rid of the concrete?’

  The extraordinarily sophisticated silhouettes of the Barbican and the National Theatre were made possible by the decision to use concrete. Even John Betjeman, that dogged critic of postwar modernism, was moved to write to Denys Lasdun, full of praise for his South Bank building as it neared completion. ‘I gasped with delight at the cube of your theatre in the pale blue sky and a glimpse of St Paul’s to the south of it,’ he wrote. ‘It is a lovely work and so good outside, which is what matters most. Your theatre looks so good from so many angles … It has that inevitable and finished look that great work does.’13 When it opened in 1976, the Guardian’s redoubtable theatre critic Michael Billington was similarly enthusiastic. ‘A superb piece of sculpture,’ he wrote, ‘inside which it is possible to watch a play or walk and talk in the lobbies without feeling dwarfed by one’s surroundings’.14 A feeling of friendliness and intimacy within the huge building were very much part of the idea. Peter Hall, director of the National Theatre, told The Times in 1974: ‘I do want it to be a place where anyone would enjoy being, whatever their mood, whatever their age and interests, whatever their income. They can come in dinner jackets or jeans; they can call in at the National at any time just for a stroll around for free, or to have coffee, a sandwich or a meal.’15

  In 1977 John Langley was one of the first wave of staff to join the building, while he was still a student. Shy, a little self-conscious and in possession of some delightful old-school manners, John told me how he had started coming to the National partly because it was a good place to read the Evening Standard’s small ads while he was flat-hunting. ‘I thought two things,’ he said, of his first impressions. ‘One was, this was an amazingly civilised place for a theatre, and the idea that it was open from half past ten in the morning and you could buy a coffee and sit here, or even if you didn’t buy a coffee you could simply sit here and read a newspaper … It just seemed like an incredibly pleasant place to come. I was also struck by the hideous complexity of the booking system. The scheme was intended to be democratic, but it was also intended to get people here early. So you never bought a seat, you bought a voucher, and that voucher was exchangeable two hours before curtain up … I just couldn’t get my head around it.’

  Paul, who had joined the lighting department in 1982, had similarly warm feelings about the building from the start. ‘I always loved the building,’ he told me. ‘I live in central London, just down the river, and I watched it being built. I used to come down here and get excited, and I always thought it was a wonderful space, a wonderful structure. Always liked it. Always fascinated by it.’ After beginning to work there, he soon realised that what you could see from the outside in the public spaces was only the half of it. ‘What was wonderful about working backstage is that you got to see so much more of it. And it’s a labyrinth backstage. It’s not particularly pretty, but it’s quite an exciting space. There was no money expended, I’m not even sure how much he was interested in the look of the back a
reas. It’s such a complex building. I appreciate that now working on the refurbishment. I don’t know how they managed to visualise it without computer-generated plans. It was all drawn by hand. It’s fascinating, the level of detail and the complexity.’

  ‘An incredibly pleasant place to come.’

  ‘It’s very confusing,’ confirmed John. ‘I think by the time I started it was already notoriously confusing. So you went in with the preconception that it was confusing and actually if you found your way round that was something of a triumph. There were all sorts of stories about actors ending up on the wrong stage. Apparently Beryl Reid made an entrance in completely the wrong show one night. The point is, I didn’t really know any different.’

  Yet plenty of people who had transferred from the National’s previous home at the Old Vic did know different, and there was no consensus on whether it was an improvement or not. ‘There were two schools, really,’ said John. ‘There was the school of the dressers and costume people who were close to the actors, who, my memory is, really loved it, because they were all in the same building for one thing, and there were wonderful new facilities. And then there were all the stage crew and the backstage staff who were having to get used to completely different working conditions, and completely different requirements, including the pay structure, which is why there was so much industrial unrest.’

  I took a trip backstage, and even though I’d been visiting the building for 20-odd years I was greatly surprised by what went on behind the rough-shuttered walls. To say that this was a no-frills, ultra-functional and startlingly unromantic environment might be to glamorise it. The spaces feel more like a factory floor than a theatre – except that where in a traditional factory there might have been crates of mass-produced products, here there were severed heads, fake ham sandwiches and Roman costumes. Beyond the immediate backstage areas there are huge workshops which house a paint shop, and wood- and metal-working units. A forklift truck was gliding below the skylights, carrying a pallet onto which was strapped great chunks of a kitchen. The exposed brick walls, single-glazed glass roof, metal hangar-doors and bare concrete floor of the workshops make them notoriously cold in winter. The aesthetic was that of an art classroom on an industrial scale.