by Andrew Marr
The authorities’ initial reaction was superbly British. The Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) brought hot drinks, and the police, rather than trying to evict the families, supplied tea and coffee from Kensington Barracks. The press was sympathetic and so, it seemed, was much of the public. As the squatting continued, crowds gathered outside and formed human chains to pass food and drink through windows. In some streets, the police picked up the food parcels and brought them to the squatters themselves. Blankets, money, food, chocolates and cigarettes were collected for the families. Students from London University marched through the streets with banners declaring ‘Homes for Everybody before Luxury for the Rich’. Some squatted properties soon had too much food to cope with. But as the rebellion went on, the official mood hardened. Electricity supplies were cut to some of the seized properties, local authorities were warned not to help them and mounted police were used to disperse sympathetic crowds. Squatters in Buckingham Palace Road wrote to the King to protest. A deputation went to Number Ten but was met by the Prime Minister’s housekeeper, who told them Attlee was too busy to see them. The cabinet had decided the revolt had to be stopped. Nye Bevan, in charge of housing, announced that this was now a confrontation to defend social justice and led the government response against ‘organized lawlessness’. The Communist leader Harry Pollitt retorted that ‘If the Government wants reprisals, they will get them. The working class is in a fighting mood.’ In the end, the squatting revolt fizzled out and the Communists led the retreat. The clinching argument seems to have been a threat that people who squatted would lose their position in the queue for new council homes.
Housing was the most critical single post-war issue, and would remain near the top of the national agenda through the early fifties. Half a million homes had been destroyed or made uninhabitable by German air-raids, a further 3 million badly damaged and overall, a quarter of Britain’s 12.5 million homes were damaged in some way. London was the biggest single example. Films of the post-war years, such as the Ealing comedies Hue and Cry and Passport to Pimlico, show vividly a capital background of wrecked streets, a cityscape of ruins, inhabited by feral urchins. But the problem was nationwide. Southampton lost so many buildings that during the war officials reported that the population felt the city was finished and ‘broken in spirit’. Coventry lost a third of her houses in a single night. Over two nights, the shipbuilding town of Clydebank, which had 12,000 houses, was left with just seven undamaged. Birmingham had lost 12,000 homes completely, with another 25,000 badly damaged. By the time people began to pour out of the armed forces to marry or return to their families, the government reckoned that 750,000 new houses were needed quickly. This was far more than a country short of steel, wood and skilled labour could possibly manage, at least by ordinary building. Worse, though there had been slum clearances, the old industrial cities, including London as well as Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle, still contained hideous slums, blackened grimy terraces lacking proper sanitation, and in some cases lacking any gas or electric power supply too.
This was about a lot more than bricks and mortar. The war had separated husbands and wives, deprived children of their parents and in general shaken the family fabric of the country. Some 38 million civilians had changed address, a total of 60 million times. Many marriages had broken up under the strain of the war. Yet people wanted a return to the warmth and security family life can offer. There were more than 400,000 weddings in 1947 and 881,000 babies born; the beginning of the ‘boom’ that would reshape British life in the decades ahead.
With both marriages and births, these were really big increases on the pre-war years, a million extra children in the five years after the war. There were not nearly enough individual homes to go round, so hundreds of thousands of people found themselves living with their in-laws, deprived of privacy and locked in inter-generational rows. It was, admittedly, a time when people were prepared to live more communally, more elbow-to-elbow, than they would be later. Wartime queuing had revived a kind of street culture, as women spent hour upon hour standing together, inching forward, sharing their grumbles as they waited for the shutters to snap up. Cinemas and dance-halls were crammed with people trying to escape the cold and monotony of their homes. Without television, or central heating, and severely short of lighting, people were in it together. It was the least private time of all. With wartime requisitioning, evacuation and the direction of labour, many were lodging in unfamiliar rooms. So the sharing of toilets and squeezing past each other in small kitchens that so many new families had to put up with in the late forties, was not a shock. It was just a disappointment, like the dreary and meagre food, and the ugly, threadbare clothing. Some believe the popularity of the mother-in-law joke in British variety and television comedy, well into the seventies, was forged in the cramped family homes of the immediate post-war period. Public support for the squatters was perhaps not so surprising. What could ministers do?
The most dramatic response was factory-made instant housing, the ‘prefabs’. They were designed for a few years’ use, though a few of them were still being lived in sixty years later. Between 1945 and 1949, under the Temporary Housing Programme, a total of 156,623 prefabs went up, far fewer than the total of new homes needed, but a welcome start. They were a lot more than mere huts; the prototype ‘Portal’ bungalow, shown outside the Tate Gallery and in Edinburgh in 1944, came with a cooker, sink, fridge, bath, boiler and fitted cupboards too. Though, at £550, it cost fractionally more than a traditional brick-built terraced house, it used a fraction of the resources – it weighed, for example, just under two tons, as compared to about 125 tons for a brick house. The houses were typically built in hastily converted aircraft factories – the Bristol Aeroplane Company made many – and then loaded onto lorries, with bags of numbered screws, pipes and other fittings. When they arrived at cleared sites, ready-painted, they would be unloaded and screwed together on a concrete plinth, often by German or Italian prisoners of war. Within a couple of days, they could be ready for moving into. The thirteen designs, such as Arcons, Spooners and Phoenixes, had subtly different features – some had larger windows, some had porches, some had curved roofs, some looked almost rustic – but they were all weatherproof, warm and well lit. People did complain about rabbit hutches or tin boxes but for many they were hugely welcome. The future Labour leader Neil Kinnock lived in one, an Arcon V, from 1947 until 1961, and remembered the fitted fridge and bathroom causing much jealousy: ‘Friends and family came to view the wonders. It seemed like living in a spaceship.’ As they spread around the country, in almost all the big cities and many smaller ones too, they came to be regarded as better than bog-standard council housing. Communities developed in prefab estates which survived cheerfully well into the seventies.
20
Dirty Stubs to Rich Spikes
The great grey stubs of the tower-block boom which ran from the fifties to the late sixties litter most of urban Britain. Never has newness turned dark so quickly. Rarely has revolutionary optimism been so quickly and abjectly confounded. This revolution was born, like others, on the European continent and imported to Britain a generation after the prophets of concrete modernism had spoken. Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Auguste Perret and Walter Gropius were idealists of the twenties and thirties who dreamed a new world of light, tall, glass-covered buildings springing up to free humanity. This was about more than architecture. It was to be social revolution accomplished with concrete and prefabricated steel, bringing hygiene and sunlight to the masses who had lived and worked in the dark, grimy and above all messy streets of industrial Europe. With the arrival of the Nazis many of the idealists fled, particularly to the United States, where their towers would glorify not socialism but American capitalism in its age of triumph. Some, however, came to Britain. Berthold Lubetkin designed beautiful white modernist structures for London, early multi-storey concrete flats, a famous health centre and the Penguin Pool and Gorilla House at London Zoo. Erno Goldfinger
on the other hand went for vast towers to house human gorillas and managed to offend Ian Fleming sufficiently to be used as a Bond villain’s name.
In other circumstances, avant-garde artists from Germany, Russia, France and Switzerland might have had limited impact in Britain, a country whose architecture had see-sawed between classicism and revivalism, and where the prefix ‘mock’ was not a term of mockery. But from the end of the Second World War through to the seventies, the shortage and foul quality of much older working-class housing meant a desperation for speed and short-cuts. Scotland alone had 400,000 homes without indoor toilets in the mid-fifties. Glasgow’s slums were so bad they had been formally denounced by the Roman Catholic church as inhuman. The great industrial cities of the Midlands and the North of England were in almost as bad a way. Politician after politician promised more new houses, ever faster. Britain would end up building a higher proportion of state-subsidized houses than almost any comparable country – beating, in fact, most of the Communist-run countries of Eastern Europe. The idealist architects offered scale and speed – huge streets in the sky, thrown up fast. The local bosses of British cities seized these foreign dreams with both hands. There is a photograph from the late fifties and sixties endlessly reproduced. Actually, it is many photographs, taken in different cities at different times. But they all show the same thing: eager, powerful men in suits staring down, or pointing, at a small-scale model with cardboard blocks set across it.
The architectural visionaries and the scores of ambitious, modern-thinking British architects who worshipped them, drew their towers set against rolling fields, surrounded by trees, on sunny spring days. In Britain’s cities, the municipal bosses were generally hostile to decanting populations out beyond their borders to entirely new settlements where they might have more space. People would want to stay in their own communities, they reasoned. Also, they wanted to keep the tax base and the votes. So instead, the towers tended to go up right in the middle of towns, on waste ground, or where old Victorian terraces had just been bulldozed. From 1958 councils got a central government subsidy for every layer over five storeys, a straightforward bribe to build up, not out. The new towers, which were only ever a minority of the total new housing, offered working-class families real benefits, though – fitted kitchens, underfloor heating, proper bathrooms, enough space for children to be able to stop sharing beds. The more ambitious and refined tower-block plans rarely got built: shortage of money and haste, plus a lot of local corruption, favoured quick-build thrown up by local companies.
Once, the different regions, counties and countries of Britain had boasted their own architectural traditions. Glasgow had her red sandstone tenements, London her ornate dark crimson brick apartments, Manchester her back-to-backs. Now, under the influence of a single modern aesthetic, identical-looking towers appeared, often bought off-the-peg from builders. The architect Sheppard Fidler recalled a boozy day out with Birmingham’s Labour boss, the ‘little Caesar’ Harry Watton, when they went to inspect a prototype tower-block by the builder Bryant. It gives a flavour of the time: ‘in order to get to the block we passed through a marquee which was rolling in whisky, brandy and so on, so by the time they got to the block they thought it was marvellous…As we were leaving, at the exit, Harry Watton suddenly said, “Right! We’ll take five blocks” – just as if he was buying bags of sweets! “We’ll have five of them…and stick them on X” – some site he’d remembered…’ Watton was a right-wing, anti-immigrant, pro-hanging Labour boss (not lord mayor, but chairman of the key committee in Birmingham). He was not corrupt but he was autocratic and self-righteous. There were Wattons everywhere. Some, like Newcastle’s T. Dan Smith, working with the massive architectural practice Poulsons, were corrupt. Others, like the puritanical socialist Bailie David Gibson of Glasgow, were certainly not. One of Gibson’s colleagues remembered him as frightening: ‘white-faced, intense, driving idealist, absolutely fanatical and sincere…He saw only one thing, as far as we could see: how to get as many houses up as possible, how to get as many of his beloved fellow working-class citizens decently housed as possible.’
Scotland and the North of England saw the most dramatic examples of the prefabricated mania. On the outskirts of Dundee, under the city’s controversial Bailie J.L. Stewart, more new housing was thrown up per head than anywhere in Europe, including the vast hexagonal nightmare of the Whitfield estate, built by Crudens. Under Gibson in Glasgow, the huge thirty-one-storey Red Road flats went up, the tallest in Europe, and at astonishing speed. As time went on, lessons were learned and more dispersed, varied and decorated concrete developments appeared. Newcastle had a late example, the giant wriggle of the Byker Wall, as if the emperor Hadrian had turned residential developer. Mostly, though, the stubby blocks were much the same everywhere. West Ham or Kidderminster, Blackburn or Edinburgh – who could tell? And everywhere the same problems quickly began to crop up. Dispersed local communities did not easily reform when stuck vertically in the air. The entrance halls and lifts, so elegantly displayed in architects’ watercolours, were vandalized and colonized by the young and the bored. Asbestos, it was discovered too late, was dangerous. Hideous condensation problems appeared. Walls were too thin for decent privacy. Shops were too far away.
In many cases, blocks were popular and well run in the early days, when people were proud of their new homes. The deterioration was human as well as concrete. A single drunken, fighting family could spread misery throughout many floors of a block. Two or three could wreck it. Councils who simply crowded tenants in, without considering problems such as those caused by having large numbers of children high up in the blocks, were at least as much to blame as Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe. It is true that some of the prefabricated, hurriedly flung-up blocks were dangerous. In May 1968 part of the Ronan Point tower block in east London, built with concrete panels, simply collapsed. Since the four deaths then, nobody else has been killed by a collapsing tower block and the craze to condemn them as inherently unstable matches the original craze to throw them up everywhere. Just as the slimy brick slums of the forties and fifties were blamed for producing hooliganism, so the new vertical slums were blamed for the vandalism of the sixties and seventies – even though some were being vandalized well before they were finished and open. Perhaps the bleakly uncompromising shadows they cast did have a demoralizing effect. You would have to be a very naive rimless-glassed modernist to love those dully repetitive lines.
Opinion began to turn against the towers, even among architects. Smaller-scale projects came into fashion during the seventies except in a few isolated and well-managed cities, such as Aberdeen. Tower blocks began to be blown up. Rochester destroyed all of its blocks to improve the look of the town. Later, Birmingham promised to do the same. Even Glasgow’s Red Road flats were being discussed for demolition. In other places, such as Wandsworth in London, the blocks were repackaged, covered with brightly coloured panels and given a more decorative silhouette. Left-wing councils, which in the sixties had championed the blocks, began to champion cottage-style housing instead. Council house sales meant blocks in the most favoured areas began to be improved from the inside, by their new owners. Many were sold to housing associations, others were left to house asylum seekers, drug addicts and the most desperate of the poor. Through her history, Britain has seen many building crazes, most notably the vast sprawl of brick terraces during the industrial revolution and then the ribbon-development suburbia of the interwar years. Yet not even they have marked so much of the look of Britain as quickly and nastily as the tower block revolution. The concrete jungles have become the most easily despised, most universally rejected aspect of the British experiment in modern living.
So it is worth remembering that some survived with contented tenants. It is worth recalling that even some graffiti-stained tower blocks, if they have heating, hot water and working lifts, may be better places to live than the leaking, rat-infested terraces, with outside toilets and small gas fires that they repla
ced. We can add to the small credit side that had Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester and London not built high then much less of the countryside within fifty miles of these cities, and others, would exist today. The new homes had to go somewhere. Tower blocks were said to be good because they prevented ‘sprawl’ – the very shabby-Tudor ugliness deplored in the thirties. And some sprawl certainly was stopped. Today, it seems, we are wiser. Architects are as keen on high density as ever but now want to devise street patterns, squares and low-rise homes on a human scale. By the early eighties Britain’s housing shortage was, in general terms, solved by the concrete boom: some 440,000 homes were created in tower blocks alone. But migration and the break-up of families since then have created a new housing crisis and once again skyscrapers are coming back in fashion. They are different now. From Manchester’s new forty-seven-storey Beetham Tower, with its queasy-making overhang, to plans for a 66-storey shard-shaped London Bridge Tower, these are chic palaces for the urban rich, not upended slums. They are as close to Harry Watton’s off-the-peg blocks as the drug habits of supermodels are to the ravages of heroin in prison. Architecture matters; but it does not matter as much as class.
21
Rebellion: No to Snoek!
Back in the forties, Labour’s idea of Britain was beginning to take shape. This would be a well-disciplined, austere country, organized from London by dedicated public servants, who in turn directed a citizenry which was dignified and restrained. Sanitation, reason, officialdom and fairness; it was a Roundhead vision, without the compulsory psalms and military dictatorship. Unfortunately for Labour, the real country was nothing like this. It was (and is) a more disordered, self-pleasuring, individualistic place. Labour’s ethic was about restraint and fair shares. Ministers viewed consumerism with disdain, a personality defect of Americans. Yet consumerism would soon erupt with a strength never known before. People were pleased with the free spectacles and the more generous insurance arrangements, and they took to the prefabricated houses, and accepted Indian and Pakistani independence without much problem. It was just that they loathed the restrictions, the queues and the shortages, and disliked being lectured about Dunkirk seven or eight years later. And so the British did what they always do, in their way. They rebelled. They did this not in the French fashion, violently, with flying cobblestones and wild manifestos, but quietly and stubbornly. As we have seen, they rebelled over housing shortages. They refused to wear the clothes they were told they should. And they would not eat what was put in front of them, either.