Concretopia

by Grindrod, John

  This dereliction and abandonment was something I’d seen all over. Since I started writing this book a couple of years ago, Gateshead’s Get Carter Trinity Car Park has been demolished, and the remainder of Cruddas Park flattened, as have a further group of Gorbals slab blocks – along with, perhaps the most dramatically Sauron-like towers of all, Glasgow’s Red Road: shops, pubs, 1,000-seater underground bingo hall and all. The Heygate Estate in the Elephant and Castle is deserted and awaits the bulldozer. Preston’s much-admired brutalist bus station looks set to depart, despite a spirited international campaign to save it. The Excalibur Estate in Catford, where I began my journey, has been condemned; only six of the 187 Uni-Seco prefabs will be preserved. New Ash Green’s Span-designed shopping centre failed to get Portas Pilot money from the government to help regenerate it, so looks set to sink further into dereliction and disrepair. Cumbernauld’s megastructure has been so nibbled-at that it’s now barely a building, and there are even plans to plonk a glass box over the rough concrete of the South Bank Centre, to create a retail park and to evict the skaters from the colourful undercroft. And then there’s that third of Park Hill which has suffered the least sympathetic makeover since Ally Sheedy was tarted up in The Breakfast Club. Even Harlow Museum has been shut, its content merged with a science park, the services of expert curator David Devine no longer required.

  One late surprise I encountered was Elizabeth House. This huge early sixties office development stretches along the southern boundary of the old Festival of Britain site by Waterloo station, and includes a glass- and tile-fronted tower and a long black marble and Portland stone-clad slab. I’d taken for granted that this must be some celebrated post-festival landmark, and I’d always admired it whenever I used the station. For years I’d also watched as sheets of tiles fell in chunks from the front of the office tower, until half the frontage had become exposed mortar. The entire complex is now scheduled for demolition, and another link to that grand Abercrombie-era redevelopment scheme bites the dust. Perhaps its architect would not be too bothered: John Poulson built very little in London, and like his career, his other landmark, Cannon Street Station, has already been torn down. I was amazed to discover that the most corrupt architect of the age had come so close to the site of the Festival of Britain, that very pinnacle of the British modern architectural achievement.

  Today, while the government dismantles the welfare state under the dubious banner of ‘austerity’, Britain has begun to reconnect with its postwar heritage. The Mid-century Modern Show, for example, is a touring fetish club for people into mid-twentieth century furniture and furnishings. Held at Dulwich College, it has become a biannual fixture of the local scene, the busy crowd easily categorised into groups: the wide-eyed enthusiast, gasping with excitement at every sputnik-legged table or anglepoise lamp; the monomaniac, ruthlessly patrolling the rooms like a shark on the trail of prey (It’s fake Eames darling, come away); the kitsch-collector, giggling wildly with delight at hand-painted Midwinter pots, orange globe television sets or Tretchikoff-print coasters; and the bored partner, dragged along under pressure, forcing buggies of grizzling tots violently through every bottleneck, and wishing for a minor earth tremor to wipe out every fat lava pot in the postcode. These shows have become increasingly popular in the last decade, helped hugely by television. Perhaps the trinkety boho chic of Sarah Jessica Parker’s character in Sex in the City helped kick it off, and the retro charms of Life on Mars, Mad Men and The Hour have kept it going. In the early decades of the new millennium the resurrection of mid-century Britain is all around us, from biopics of the early days of Margaret Thatcher, Fanny Cradock and Coronation Street to Amy Winehouse’s beehive, as she recreated mobster funerals and girl-group angst. Not to mention the unstoppable rebranding of second hand as ‘vintage’.

  Yet architecture has been late to the party, or in many cases not invited at all. While a few emblematic structures – Park Hill, Centre Point, the Festival Hall – have been rebuilt from the inside out, many more – the Tricorn Centre, Basil Spence’s Gorbals flats or the Bull Ring – have been erased. While you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who didn’t like London’s lofty Post Office Tower, Liverpool’s glorious Metropolitan Cathedral or the exuberant Toast Rack in Manchester, many of the era’s most famous buildings – hand-faced Trellick Tower, gritty National Theatre, Cumbernauld’s complex central area – are as polarising now as they were when they were built. Ownership of Britain’s buildings has changed utterly since 1979, seen as clearly in former council estates as it is in former municipal town centres. We have moved from the postwar nationalisation of land to build everything from new towns to motorways, into an era where almost everything we think of as public space is actually private land, and where public housing has been sold off for a long-elapsed economic kick.

  For my obsession with the postwar rebuilding of Britain I partly blame Martin Parr’s collection of Boring Postcards, published in 1999. It triggered something in me, a desire to reconnect with something I’d long suppressed: my interest in my home town. I found in it page after page of delight and wonder. Parr’s collection showed pristine new town centres, ‘contemporary’ lift lobbies and gleaming airport lounges – the Britain I recognised from my childhood. Ever since the early days of the twentieth century, photographers have been accused of peddling a deceit about modern architecture, while architects were accused of creating buildings for the photographers rather than the end users; best seen, or snapped, untouched, unpeopled and in black and white. The Smithsons are the classic example of this, demanding their Hunstanton school was photographed with no sign of children. But the Boring Postcards are different: they are gaudily tinted, with shoppers thronging pedestrianised precincts and diners packing out octagonal motorway service station restaurants. They present a friendly image of the modern world, a mild, diluted version of Mad Men-era advertising photography, removed from the dystopian images we’re used to. Perhaps in their own way they’re as unrepresentative of these places as the cool architectural photos, but they offer as intoxicating a vision of our futuristic past as any footage of sputnik, a Concorde fly-past or jet-pack test flight.

  Did the towns and cities I visited live up to these postcard images? Of course not. Sure, Coventry Cathedral and the Barbican have remained as spotless as the days they were opened by the Queen, but they are in the minority. In some cases they were a tired and dingy, but recognisable ghost of the promotional shot; in others the buildings and landscapes had changed beyond all recognition. Above all it was the first-hand testimonies from the people I interviewed that brought these scenes to life. Eddie McGonnell’s enthusiasm for a childhood spent in Basil Spence’s Gorbals flats was infectious, as was ex-caretaker Grenville Squires’ passion for the secret side of Park Hill. There were the four generations of Ken and Margaret Denholm’s remarkable family housed in Cruddas Park, and the three generations of Barbican architect John Honer’s family who’d had connections with that ancient district in the City of London. Then there were the planners: Ken Davie’s fiercely protective attitude to Cumbernauld, Jo Meredith’s insider’s tales from the collapsing discipline in the seventies, and John Gyford’s vivid memories of the Festival of Britain. I’d followed John Knight on his conversion from modernist to conservation expert, and Ray Fitzwalter through his exposure of a network of corruption across the country. Then there were Bob and Irene Chaney, who’d shown their love of Coventry Cathedral from its earliest days. Oliver Childs and Patrick Ellard had both spoken with fierce pride of their Span homes. And there were the many new town pioneers, everywhere from Harlow to Cwmbran, muddling through in lousy conditions until their neighbourhoods were built. Their stories were as bright as the fresh concrete on those postcards, as varied as the patterns on the curtains, and as startling as the models’ clothes.

  These people have given me cause to re-evaluate my difficult relationship with New Addington, and with Croydon too. I now understand them a little more, and condemn them a little less. My
home town wasn’t brilliantly thought out, or, as any visit to New Addington will show, successful in practice either. It’s not the work of big-name planners like Abercrombie or architects like Gibberd. But so what? It was an attempt to make the most of what was at hand in that moment of postwar plenty, often with new materials and new ways of building that would have boggled the minds of those even a generation before. They built for a boom time, and never dreamt of the succession of crises that have wrecked its chances of continued growth and success. The planners and builders in Croydon hadn’t lead the way with innovation by any means, but they were still part of an ambitious experiment to force the future on a country that perhaps always feels more comfortable looking backwards, eulogising an imaginary past.

  Such is the eeyorish nature of our national culture that you might be led to believe that the period between 1945 and 1979 was simply a mess of austerity, financial collapse, strikes, corruption, decay and diminishment. Yet those few decades after the Second World War saw the creation of much that Britain is rightly proud of: a roll call that includes the foundation of a welfare state and National Health Service; breakthroughs in computing and genetic science; daring engineering feats in aero and car design; and an unrivalled explosion in creative talent across art, fashion, film, music, television and theatre.

  The architecture and planning of this period is generally seen to fall on the debit side of the argument: the rise of systems building and the collapse of Ronan Point; the corruption trials of John Poulson and T. Dan Smith; the demolition of Victorian ‘treasures’ and the erection of concrete monstrosities; the perceived inhumanity of high-rise estates and streets in the sky. Many of these criticisms are retrospective and anachronistic. In the fifties very few people would leap to the defence of a Victorian terrace or town hall, while many more were inspired by the visions of the future that architects were offering. By the eighties the thought of visiting parts of Cruddas Park, Park Hill and the Gorbals projects would have filled all but the hardiest of us with dread. But many of their original inhabitants had loved them, not just for their futuristic triumph over the slums they’d replaced, but for the communities they’d created.

  It’s clear to me that any postwar roll of honour should include the achievements of rebuilding. These include the peerless monumentalism of new brutalism, a national style with truly global influence. The demolition of the much-missed and mythologised Festival of Britain, whose Skylon, Dome of Discovery and eccentric pavilions matched our recent Olympics for spectacle and grandeur, has cast a long shadow. Then there was the invention of landscape architecture as a discipline, so that much of what was built in this period – the Span estates, say, or Harlow and Milton Keynes – was not just grey, but also green and blue. Of course the high-rise has had its problems, but it’s easy to forget the success stories, from posh Barbican to working class Trellick Tower, where real communites were created, and pride taken in the shared environment. And towering above them all are those remarkable new towns, built from scratch to house over two million people – an unimaginable achievement in our age of housing shortages and timid NIMBYism.

  I write these words as I sit beside the man-made lakes at the Barbican, listening to the rush of the fountains and surrounded by some of the tallest concrete residential towers in the world. People of all ages are enjoying the late spring sunshine, reading the Sunday papers, amusing their kids, or watching the world go by. It reminds me that I’m not alone, that other people are glad there’s more to urban Britain than endless tudorbethan semis, made-over terraces or poky Playschool houses. There are echoes here: ghosts of the Roman walled city, the bustling medieval markets, the infernal flames of the Blitz, so hot that the very stones of buildings exploded. To me the bricks underfoot and the rough concrete above seem far from hypermodern or jarringly new. Instead they hold the soul of something that connects us to centuries gone by. Perhaps this is true of all the great postwar projects: whatever their original purpose, these futuristic visions all tell us something about our history, our landscape, our climate, our people. In many cases, that message is one of continuity of progress and expression, of a deep pragmatism laced with inspired optimism and innovation.

  Concrete itself is made from our oldest construction materials – sand and rock – and in the structures it was used to create in the twentieth century there are echoes of some of our most ancient building traditions – castles, catacombs, cathedrals, monasteries, walled cities, watch towers. The Barbican feels like all of these things, and older structures too: the three vertical towers and the horizontal slabs remind me of a gigantic concrete henge.

  I am lucky to have seen and scaled and explored some of the most exciting places ever built in Britain, from the Post Office Tower to Coventry Cathedral, New Ash Green to Cumbernauld. I’ve tried to see them on their own terms, not with the baggage of received wisdom and hindsight. I thought I might hate what I saw, and what I found out. In some cases, of course, I did. But on the whole I have returned full of admiration for the people who kick-started this revolution, and the pioneers who gave living and working in these new environments their best shot. And rather to my surprise I find that, far from having become sated and disillusioned, I’m even more in love with the world, this ‘Concretopia’, they tried – and in many cases failed – to build.

  INDEX

  Abercrombie, Sir Patrick, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25

  Aberdeen, 1

  Accrington, 1

  Aldershot, 1

  Alpha Tower, 1, 2

  Amery, Colin, 1

  Anson, Brian, 1

  Apollo House, 1, 2

  Archigram, 1

  Architectural Association, The, 1, 2, 3, 4

  Arndale, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

  Arne Jacobsen, 1

  Arts and Crafts movement, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

  Arup, Ove, 1, 2, 3

  Aslin, Charles Herbert, 1, 2, 3

  Attlee, Clement, 1, 2

  Aylesbury Estate, The, 1

  Balfron Tower, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

  Ballard, J. G., 1, 2, 3

  Banham, Mary, 1, 2

  Banham, Reyner, 1, 2, 3

  Barbican, The, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

  Barr, A. W. Cleeve, 1, 2

  Barry, Gerald, 1, 2, 3

  Barry, Peter, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

  Basildon, 1, 2

  Basingstoke, 1, 2

  Bath, 1, 2

  Battersea, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

  Bauhaus, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

  beaux arts planning, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

  Bedford, Eric, 1, 2, 3

  Benn, Tony, 1

  Bethnal Green, 1

  Betjeman, John, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

  Bewick Court, 1

  Bilsby, Leslie, 1

  Birmingham, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22

  Bison system, 1

  Blitz, The, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19

  Boissevain, Paul, 1

  Bolton, 1

  Bon, Christoph, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

  Boot, Charles, 1, 2

  Borg, Neville, 1

  Boring Postcards, 1

  Bovis, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

  Bracknell,

  Bradford, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

  Braithwaite, George, 1, 2

  Brent Cross shopping centre, 1

  Brett, Lionel, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

  Breuer, Marcel, 1, 2

  Bristol, 1, 2

  ‘Britain Can Make It’, 1, 2, 3, 4

  Brixton, 1, 2, 3

  Brown, George, 1, 2, 3

  Brown, W. Clifford, 1

  Buchanan, Colin, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,

  Bull Ring, The, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

  Bunton, Sam, 1

  Burns, Wilfred, 1, 2, 3, 4

  Butlin, Sir Billy, 1, 2

  Cadbury-Brown, H. T., 1

  Calder Hall, 1

 
Campbell, Kenneth, 1

  Camus system, 1, 2

  Cannon Street station, 1, 2

  Cardiff, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

  Carry On films, 1

  Casson, Sir Hugh 1, 2, 3, 4

  Castlemilk, 1, 2

  Castrol House, 1

  Caswell, Michael, 1, 2

  Caswell, Rosemary, 1

  Central Lancashire New Town, 1

  Centre Point, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

  Chamberlin, Joe, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

  Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

  Chaney, Bob and Irene, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

  Charing Cross, Glasgow, 1

  Childs, Oliver, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

  Chippindale, Sam, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5