Concretopia

by Grindrod, John

  ‘The concept of having everything on site has been hugely successful,’ said Paul. ‘We’re probably one of the last surviving major factories in central London.’

  And then there are the offices, rehearsal rooms and dressing rooms, which are arranged round a courtyard. Laurence Olivier, who was heavily involved with the design of the building, had made sure it was a fit place for his actors to work.

  ‘He had this wonderful company of actors,’ said Paul, ‘and the building was designed around it. It was about the actors when it opened. They’ve got good facilities … In the centre of the building there’s a dressing room block, there’s four floors of dressing rooms for 140 actors. It’s like a mini hotel really. All of them look on a central well, so there’s four floors of windows, and they can all see each other, so it creates a real sense of company. They shout across at each other, throw water bombs, smoke out of the window even though they’re not supposed to. It’s a bit of a school in a way, it’s got that sort of feel. It’s a very friendly space.’

  If backstage is like a budget hotel/factory mash-up, front-of-house is far from cold and institutional. In fact, Lasdun’s interiors have a rather cosy aesthetic. ‘The lighting was very dark,’ recalled Paul. ‘Everyone complained about it. I spoke with Richard Pilbright who did the original lighting. He wanted to make it brighter, but Lasdun didn’t want it. He wanted a cave looking-out effect.’

  I mentioned that I’d always been struck by the number of small, intimate spaces within this huge building. Spaces, perhaps, that you stumble across rather than visit by design.

  ‘That’s probably its biggest failure I would say,’ said Paul, ‘The complexity. It aggravates or annoys or frustrates people who don’t know it or don’t come in very often.’

  ‘Also,’ said John, who was getting quite worked up now, ‘it was the inaccessibility of it. It was a long time before the DA [Disability Act] and the accessibility lobby. But it’s always struck me as odd that an architect learning his trade in postwar London, when there must have been so many disabled people, could have come up with a building that was so inaccessible. How many floors were inaccessible?’ He did a quick count. ‘Two of three on the Lyttelton side are inaccessible, and two of the five on the Olivier.’

  ‘They put a lift in for goods,’ said Paul, ‘but not for the public.’

  I asked them whether they’d ever encountered Denys Lasdun around the building back in the day.

  ‘He regularly came to these guest night things,’ recalled John. ‘He always had notes that he wanted to pass on – he was incredibly observant and proprietorial. Whoever was the house manager on a guest night, Lasdun would come up and say: “Can I just tell you that such and such is wrong in lighting,” or something like that. I remember him having something to say about where the sales desks were and things like that. He had a real eye for detail. And then there were things that we wanted to do to the building that he didn’t always like.’

  But then, the building has subtly evolved since it was conceived, and continues to do so. One aspect it initially shrank from emphasising was its location.

  ‘It doesn’t make the best use of the river that it really should,’ said John.

  ‘When it was designed I suppose the river wasn’t a destination place,’ said Paul. ‘There was a road that went all the way round the building. So you could stand outside the building and not see the river.’ In the late nineties they did away with the road and created a plaza at the front of the building for outdoor theatre events in the summer. By the noughties the National’s ‘Watch This Space’ festival had become a staple London tourist attraction.

  I thought back to Cruddas Park, and how the early residents had turned their gaze away from the Tyne because of its unsightliness. Across Britain new marina developments are springing up and waterfront flats have tempted ‘urban professionals’ to move back into the heart of their home towns. I’d seen on my journey how, from Glasgow to Plymouth, cities have begun to fall back in love with their once neglected riversides. Regeneration of the waterfront has undoubtedly been one of the major changes to our cities.

  By 1966, the National’s big sister, the Barbican, was taking shape on the skyline. Colin Buchanan, scourge of the motorcar, described the place as ‘a revolutionary reconstruction. Already the pedestrians are circulating on walkways and platforms 20 feet above the level of the traffic, and at this level the shops, banks and restaurants are appearing.’ Never one to pass up an opportunity to expound his theories on the separation of people and cars, he continued: ‘This is only the beginning. In a few years time it will seem incredible that this simple, obvious principle for gaining circulation space and for solving the bitter conflict between pedestrians and vehicles should have taken so long to be applied.’16

  The Barbican flats were designed to bring life back into the heart of the City of London.

  The first flats were completed in 1968. I watched a promotional film shot the following year, Barbican – A Concept for Bringing Life Back into the Heart of a City, at a screening at the London Metropolitan Library. The aim, according to Frank Harvey’s fruity commentary, was ‘to build a city within a city’ in this ‘square mile of cats and caretakers’. The film vividly evoked sixties luxury: flats were filled with white plastic moulded chairs, and G-plan furniture, all resting on the kind of intense red, gold, dark blue heavily patterned carpet we might now associate with Indian restaurants. There were glancing shots of glossy kitchen cabinets, Garchey waste disposal chutes (as at Park Hill) and extractor fans. But there were people too, flesh-and-blood incarnations of those figures on architects drawings: a girl playing with a hoop; a naked woman having a shower, briefly flashing the viewer as she wrapped herself in a towel; a fat, hairy banker speaking on a golden phone from his bath tub. The Barbican of the film was a utopia: both safe and sexy, luxurious and practical. After all, as Frank the commentator put it, ‘a modern home is nothing if it does not set us free to live our lives fully.’ By 1968 there were already 1,000 applicants for the first Barbican flats.’17

  ‘The early residents had a hell of a time,’ said John Honer. ‘They lived on a building site until the arts centre was finished.’ This took 15 years.

  The London County Council, as the planning authority, had the final say over what could or couldn’t be built on the site. And they were quick to cause a fuss over Chamberlin, Powell and Bon’s designs for the Barbican flats.

  ‘There was a stage when they objected to internal kitchens in the residential blocks,’ recalled John, wearily. ‘They weren’t so cut off from natural light or air that they were like closed cells. Although they weren’t given external windows, they had plenty of borrowed light, and of course they were artificially ventilated.’ The council’s objections to these kitchens had held up the scheme for a whole year, to the great frustration of the architects. ‘If the kitchens had not been designed internally we could not have possibly accommodated the required number of flats on that limited site, because the frontages of each one would have had to have been larger.’ One day John happened to pick up an architecture magazine and see that London County Council themselves had designed a housing scheme with internal kitchens. ‘I rushed up to Chamberlin and said: “I know you’re having problems with the LCC – what about these?” He just rocked with laughter and explained to me that of course in the big organisations the left hand never knew what the right hand was doing. And that the left hand, in this case, had realised the benefits of internal kitchens.’

  Shakespeare Tower, one of the three identical skyscrapers built as part of the estate. © Richard de Pesando

  The flats are just the sort described by J. G. Ballard in his darkly brilliant 1975 novel High Rise, the follow-up to Concrete Island. Essentially a Lord of the Flies-type fable set in a luxury block of flats, it depicts a world in which brutalised executives turn on each other in a war of territory and dominance. I’d read it as a teenager, and since then a part of me had always imagined that was what Shak
espeare, Cromwell and Lauderdale, the three Barbican high-rise towers, were really like. It seems, however, that the reality is somewhat less sinister.

  The Barbican: somewhat less sinister than Ballard’s High Rise.

  ‘What the Barbican demonstrated,’ said John, ‘was that if you’re going to pile people up like that they’ve got to be properly managed. You’ve got to have permanent staff at ground level, you’ve got to ensure the lifts are continually working, and if they’re being repaired then you’ve got to provide an alternative.’

  What about crime?

  ‘Actually, from a security point of view, I’m told there are relatively few problems. Now, of course it’s unfair to compare the Barbican with some of the subsidised estates, particularly the current estates, the Barbican owners have established middle class values and there’s very little crime and very little sign of vandalism.’ John went on to mention a crime syndicate who rented a flat for a short time and caused some, but as yet the Barbican has escaped a Ballardian social apocalypse.

  In 1971 the Corporation of London debated one of the biggest departures for the development – creating an arts centre to rival the new one that was agglomerating on the South Bank. The Financial Times reported that voting on the arts centre displayed ‘all of the essentials of a traditional battle between culture and Mammon’. There was senior Alderman Sir Edward Howard, for example, who argued that ‘the City is essentially a business centre and to try to graft in a concert hall and theatre seems to be alien to why it is there.’18 For their part, the residents were keen to see more facilities for recreation. Eventually the corporation gave the go-ahead and the arts centre finally opened in 1981.

  Throughout the process, the corporation had continued to suggest alternative uses for the arts facilities, insisting that they double up as conference venues. ‘The cinema was designed as an experimental cinema,’ recalled John, ‘and in the end that had to be altered so that it could if necessary be used as an extra hall as well as a cinema.’ Initially the designers had planned to place the screen on a diagonal that faced down onto the room, with the projection coming up from the floor, and seats ranging from upright to almost horizontal depending on their position in relation to the screen: ‘That would have been fun to play with, but of course it would have been totally unsuitable for conferences!’ Although what’s not to like about a conference where the speaker dangled on wires above the delegates, many of whom were lying down?

  Unlike so many buildings of its era, the Barbican has always been largely accessible for people with disabilities. My mother was confined to a wheelchair for most of her adult life, so this was important to me. We used to hang out together in the Barbican, watching films and plays, or drinking tea by the ponds. It still feels very calm and quiet there – unlike the South Bank where the crowds are now heaving even on the wettest Wednesday. Even so, by 1973 this huge bush-hammered concrete complex was beginning to look part of the City’s furniture. For H. A. N. Brockman in the Financial Times, it had ‘already achieved the indefinable attraction of a castle which has matured over the centuries’.19

  Not everyone has warmed to the building. ‘The English are a funny bunch … As a piece of architecture it’s not over-enthusiastically received, I don’t think, by the English.’ I asked John whether he liked the Barbican, whether he thought it worked. He took a moment before offering a non-answer. ‘The priorities of our society today are different from those of 25-30 years ago. The Barbican caters for a different world.’ John took a deep breath. ‘So I’m not comfortable about going back there because I don’t understand the twenty-first century and its values. I’m too much of a dinosaur.’

  He sounded like a man battered by decades of dismissive and vicious criticism of people who don’t like concrete, high-rise flats or complex planning. Or perhaps he was just having a bad day. I hope he can see that at the Barbican he had helped create an ambitious, social and skyscrapingly civilised version of what our future could be, an experiment which, decades later, we are only just beginning to appreciate.

  Notes

  1 Peter Ackroyd, Barbican at 25, City of London, 2007, p29

  2 Sir William Holford, Manchester Guardian, 17/09/57, p6

  3 Manchester Guardian, 20/1/56, p7

  4 Barbican at 25, City of London, 2007, p18

  5 Sir William Holford, Manchester Guardian, 17/09/57, p6

  6 Sir Hugh Casson, Observer, 23/10/60, p17

  7 William J. R. Curtis, Denys Lasdun, Phaidon, 1994, p108

  8 Financial Times 8/10/65, p11

  9 The Times, 24/3/75, p10

  10 The Times, 24/3/75, p10

  11 George Perkin, Concrete Quarterly, January-March 1977, p39

  12 Concrete Quarterly, October – December 1969, p1

  13 John Betjeman, letter, 4/10/73, in William J. R. Curtis, Denys Lasdun, Phaidon, 1994, p152

  14 Michael Billington, Guardian, 12/3/76, p10

  15 Peter Hall, The Times, 29/6/74, p9

  16 Colin Buchanan, The Times, 19/9/66, p9

  17 Financial Times, 28/9/68, p11

  18 Financial Times, 8/4/71, p12

  19 H. A. N. Brockman, Financial Times, 4/12/73, p29

  i It wasn’t any old working-class people the corporation wanted in their brand-new estate: in order to keep out large families they demanded that the flats were mostly one bedroom.

  Epilogue

  THE DREAM HAS GONE BUT THE BABY IS REAL

  The sleet was icy and the wind was gusting as I made my way to my brother Ian’s flat in New Addington, in the dead days between Christmas and New Year 2012. I’d recently watched the Channel 4 show The Secret Millionaire, where Indian businessman Bobby Dudani spent eight days in New Addington, ostensibly filming a post-riots documentary, meeting local kids and community workers. Despite the requisite uplifting ending, it painted a bleak picture of life for the young people: teenagers with nothing to do taking over the estate’s streets at night, shouting their mouths off about robbing and drug taking. As Bill, a local youth boxing coach put it: ‘Give them nowhere to go and they will burn down these huts, they will smash our windows, they will draw their names everywhere. They need places to go.’ It was a reminder that not much had changed since I was a kid.

  Walking the half mile from the tram stop, I saw much that reminded me of my journey around Britain and the things I’d learned. There were vast lawns: those early new towns prairies, strange municipal areas of green that people still felt reluctant to colonise. There were the few remaining British Iron and Steel Federation prefab houses from the late forties, their corrugated metal cladding painted bright colours. There was the John Laing estate at the foot of the hill, reminding me of the tile-fronted Span houses I’d seen at Ham Common, only here shunted together tightly with none of the expert landscaping. Further up the hill were the developers’ little red-brick flats, in a variety of styles from modest point blocks to pitch-roofed tenements and flat-roofed slabs, their bright infill panels framed beneath windows in what I now knew was the Scandinavian manner. Like the Laing houses, these flats were packed too tightly together, a reminder that the council had failed in their bid to expand the estate outwards into Patrick Abercrombie’s green belt. And finally, at Ian’s door, here were the red-brick houses and maisonettes I’d grown up with, these poor relations of the handsome Arts and Crafts style cottages in garden cities and villages Welwyn and Rhiwbina.

  As I stood there in the rain I finally felt I understood the estate I’d grown up in – how it had come to be built, and why it had always seemed so baffling to me. The politics were now transparent. Here was a monument to slum clearance and the County of London Plan, bearing the scars of the scramble for numbers between Labour and the Tories. It also reflected commercially canny Croydon Council’s outsourcing to developers, their dogged pursuit of the lowest tender. Unlike the new towns, New Addington wasn’t the story of planning – it was a tale of expediency. The hotchpotch of buildings crammed together was not the result of some kind of u
topian experiment, a study in contrast by great architects to showcase the best in modern thought. Rather, it was a have-a-go attempt at whatever was fashionable to fill in the gaps: a bit of garden village here, some system building there, a muddle of prefabs, point blocks and ‘keep off the grass’ signs, chopped and changed because of lack of funding and loss of nerve. It didn’t have what all of the successful developments I’d visited, from Coventry to Milton Keynes, had: an infrastructure to support it. Isolated on a remote hill, clustered around the weakest of civic centres, there was no attempt to create a new town here. With no development corporation to nurture it, no arts or culture for people to get involved in, few sports facilities for the increasingly rowdy youth, this wasn’t community building, it was a holding camp.

  The centre of Croydon struck me the same way. On that cold winter day, long after the riots had passed, the concrete giants were stained black in the rain and the lights were out in the office blocks. They presented a colossal silhouette between East and West Croydon – giants huddled together in the wind. In central London, Richard Seifert’s towers had long been seen as the poor relation to those designed by more ‘respectable’ architects; the Smithsons, Goldfinger, Spence. Yet in Croydon his two buildings are without doubt the star turns, surrounded by 43 less adept versions of Mies van der Rohe’s glass box: the little black dress of modern architecture. This was what Croydonisation, the private, unplanned attempt at city building, had added up to. Even the town’s attempt at an urban motorway conks out, going nowhere but squeezed back into single lane traffic with little warning. Above the shopping centres, the urban motorway and the office blocks looms the Nestlé building. Like many of its less distinctive kin, it has lost its purpose: the food giant has announced plans to move from the offices it has occupied since the mid-sixties, leaving just the company’s logo rendered in concrete, that suddenly ironic nest with a bird feeding hungry chicks, suspended high above the town. Perhaps the riots had marked an end of an era, a time where Croydon felt confident and showed every affluent sign of growth. By early 2012 over 1,000 business premises, or one in eight, stood empty. Many grand building projects to build ever taller towers had been long abandoned. Were the riots a sign of the managed decline of a town gone awry?