Such a plan was evolved from many years of continuous objective analysis of the structures created by man and the changes which take place in them in an attempt ‘to uncover a pattern of reality which includes human aspirations.’
This analysis has also led to the formation of a series of 15 Criteria for Mass Housing, criteria which have that sort of simplicity which makes them appear obvious until it is remembered that no single dwelling in the country measures up to them:
1) Does the housing liberate the inhabitants from old restrictions or straitjacket them into new ones?
2) Can the individual add identity to his house or is the architecture packaging him?
3) Will the lampshades on the ceilings, the curtains, the china dogs take away from the meaning of the architecture?
4) Is the means of construction of the same order as the standard of living envisaged in the house?
5) Are the spaces moulded exactly to their purpose or are they by-products of structural tidiness or plastic whim?
6) Is there a decently large open-air sunlit space opening directly from the house?
7) Can the weather be enjoyed? (‘The English climate is characterised by changeability: therefore a house should be capable of grasping what fine weather it can get: south windows in all rooms and easy access to sheltered patios, roof gardens or terraces which can be arranged in a moment to catch the pleasures of our climate and then closed up in a moment so that we can ignore it.’)
8) Can the extension of the dwelling (garden, patio, and so on) be appreciated from inside?
9) Is there a place in the open air where a baby can be left?
10) Where do 3–5 year olds play?
11) Can the houses be put together in such a way as to contribute something to each other?
12) Is the house as comfortable as a car of the same year?
13) Is there a place where you can clean or wash things without making a mess of the whole house?
14) Is there enough vital storage: that is, storage not of a purely residual nature like lofts, built-in fittings, and so on?
15) Is there a place for the belongings peculiar to the class of the occupant: poodles, ferrets, motorbikes, geraniums, and so on?
That these reasonable criteria are not those of every form of housing erected in Britain is a condemnation of every responsible authority or private builder.
Only in painting, sculpture and (to a lesser extent) music have the pioneers of the Modern Movement become the establishment in their respective arts. In literature and in architecture the reactionaries who use the techniques of Dickens and put up Shell Centres are still not only in the majority but even represent these arts to many people. Thus Alison and Peter Smithson are faced with a multiple problem: not only to overcome the opposition of reactionaries to a previous generation, but also to have ideas accepted which are an extension and development of those of that generation. Just to come by the requisite experience is difficult enough:
‘Really, if you talk about it strategically, dealing with London as it now exists and thinking what’s going to happen between now and 1980, say, then you speak of something we’ve simply not had any experience of. No one can say much about it because you have to be given the responsibility before you can think about it meaningfully, that is, you have to say, what is it that you could actually do?’
With so much theoretical work of obvious validity and importance done over the decade and more since their manifesto, and with one practical example of it built showing what could be done with London, is it not time that the solutions to urban renewal and mass housing put forward by the Smithsons were given urgent, even desperate, consideration? It may not be so disastrous that advances in literature fail to be consolidated: but those in architecture involve more serious and fundamental elements determining the basic quality of living, and we simply cannot afford to ignore anyone who has anything to say as practical and original as Alison and Peter Smithson.
[On football]
Unpublished article for Sunday Times Magazine, World Cup Issue. Typescript dated 8 February 1966
The first organised soccer team I played for was formed by a youth club, when I was about eleven or twelve. This club was a church one, and after playing other youth club teams on Saturday afternoons we were morally bound to go to church the next morning. Few of the team did, however, being interested only in the club for the opportunity it provided to play football with a real ball on grass pitches. The Vicar resented this, and one Monday clubnight summoned the team into this little office he had, called us all a lot of little heathens quaintly, and said there would be no more football unless we went to his church: for good measure, and partly for other reasons, he also expelled three of us. But such was the loyalty the team had built up, playing together for over a year, that the rest left, too, and we played friendlies for the rest of that season until we could enter a junior league. We called ourselves Little Heathens F.C.
But it is difficult to remember a time before this when I did not play improvised football of some kind or another. As soon as we were through the school doors at break or lunchtime, someone would say ‘Out with the pill!’, and a tennis ball would be unsocketed from a trouser pocket and we would then pass and dribble our way across the playground until we came to our goal: which might be between a window and a downpipe, or one section of the bicycle sheds, or just two discarded jackets: such goal being the focal point of just one of many such areas laid claim to by three or four kids who habitually played together.
A tennis ball would fit remarkably neatly into a trousers pocket: perhaps such pockets were thoughtfully designed with this in mind, but in any case those which were not were quickly distended to accommodate the ball, the result being perhaps a quarter of the school was apparently afflicted by a great wens on their thighs: all except Strickmore, I remember, a brilliant natural footballer, on whose body a tennis ball would disappear as though he had an appropriately-sized hole in him.
Playing with a tennis ball on asphalt taught one good ball control, as it was so small compared with a proper ball (and indeed with the fullsize plastic balls schoolboys use in playgrounds now), and it bounced on asphalt with a higher degree of accuracy than a football on grass. But it did not help with dead-ball kicking, as a tennis ball on the ground always had to be kicked with the toecap rather than with the instep. Thus it was that later, playing on grass or mud with an uneven surface and probably a slope as well, with a much larger ball and what looked like a prairie of open space, organised football seemed almost a different game.
We played as Little Heathens in a junior league until we were all about eighteen, when the team broke up: some took jobs which involved working on Saturday afternoons, one or two became so disheartened by their own failure to improve that they took to the vicarious satisfaction of watching professional games regularly, and yet others became involved with girls who resented the competition from anything as interesting as we found soccer. For the team was for many years our passionate interest, a complete, self-sufficient interest: the week was one long irrelevance from Saturday night to Saturday morning, the summer hardly bearable with no match play and only desultory, overheated practice to be had.
For all this dedication, however, we never won anything, did not finish higher than third in our league and never reached even the semi-finals of our cup. Not that but we wanted to win, for we did: there was none of this guff about the important thing being to compete, or to be a sportsman, for us: we just liked winning, however we did it.
Football so dominated our lives that we could not play enough of it: four games in a weekend was not unusual for some of us, and three games quite common. Several of us would play for the school on Saturday mornings, Little Heathens in the afternoons, and one or two of the scratch Sunday teams the next day.
The Sunday league teams were the weirdest, were made up of the most bizarre combinations of players: a thirteen year-old winger might find himself up against a fullback of fifty-odd,
wing halves would be playing in goal, centre halves on the wing, all given a game at the last minute to make the side up. The play was equally unorthodox: top goalscorers would be defensive inside forwards, goalkeepers would be brought up to take penalties against their opposite numbers, and centreforwards would often be found heading off their own goal line. As far as results went, form simply did not exist: and matches would finish with comic scores like 10–1, 8–7, or, on one disastrous occasion, 22–0.
Some of the players were, or seemed, of epic, even supernatural stature: the great hairy centreforward I once had to mark, called Beetlecrusher by his team-mates on account of his studded Army boots and who had not, it was said, washed since Dunkirk, who battered his way past me to score four times that afternoon; and the unbelievable speed of recovery of one player, perhaps a pro anonymously enjoying a Sunday game, who just once I beat in a tackle in midfield to then hit the ball immediately high down the centre where, incredibly, there he was to head it away again.
Looking back, some of my most enjoyable football was played in those Sunday matches, on pitches which invariably sloped, or were bald of turf and thick with mud, or had great clumps of something like esparto grass growing here and there: all or any of which turned football into more a game of chance than it could be. But most of all there was the piquancy of knowing that if the FA came to hear about you playing on Sundays, then you could be banned for life from ever taking part in organised soccer again.
My father had supported Chelsea for years, standing out in all weathers on that great high banking, the Popular Terrace, which has only just this year been converted into a covered stand: indeed, it was on that terrace that I first learnt those swearwords most beneficially applicable to soccer, from hearing him and others effing and beeing at the way Chelsea played, for years the most infuriatingly talented and inept team in London to support. So it was to Chelsea that I applied when I considered that I ought to have a trial for a professional team: more to confirm that I was not missing anything I could possibly obtain than from any real desire to live the life of a professional footballer. I travelled on the top deck of a trolleybus all the long way up the straight length of the Edgware Road to the Welsh Harp at Hendon, where I changed in the pub and then played badly and dispiritedly on Chelsea’s practice pitch at the back. They talked to one or two of the better players, and told the rest of us we would be hearing if they wanted us. I never heard.
Some sixteen years after this, however, I still support Chelsea, still try to go to Stamford Bridge whenever I can. This lays me open to the often-levelled charge of following the fashionable interest intellectuals now have in soccer, but in my case what amounts to a love of football came years before I was elevated to the rank of intellectual, and so I think it must have done with many others of my generation: the 1944 Education Act may in fact be responsible for this apparent change in the choice of relaxation of those whose occupations qualify them as intellectuals. As one university lecturer who taught me said, in a perhaps unguarded moment, ‘No work of art has ever moved me so much as a good football match.’
In any case, I never know whether I ought to consider myself an intellectual or not: I write novels which for want of better terms are called ‘experimental’ and ‘avantgarde’ (I call their techniques organic, solving each writing problem in the best way I can find: which may sometimes be a way no one else, or few others, have tried), if that is an intellectual activity. But my wife laughs at my being called an intellectual, says I am far too instinctive for that: which probably involves another definition.
But simply, I am a writer and I enjoy watching football: combining the two, I saw soccer reporting as an opportunity to be paid for watching matches from the best seats. And I enjoyed it, too, both the soccer and the writing: it was what appeared in print that was usually such a pain. I would take great trouble to try to make my copy as good a piece of writing as anything else I might do, as good as a poem written under the same conditions, even (imagining anyone would want to write a poem in half an hour in a cold, windswept football stadium), and the sub-editors would almost invariably ruin it not only by cutting it, but also by re-writing to some faceless substandard of their own: I would go to great lengths to avoid the use of clichés, and the subs would go to equal trouble to put them back in again. And they won in the end, of course: all I could do was resign.
There is no valid reason why the sports pages should be any less well written than the rest of a newspaper: but all of them noticeably are. One of the chief reasons for this is that heresy believed in by even the posh papers as well: that because a man played a game well, he must therefore be able to write about it equally outstandingly. Nothing could be less true: the evidence is that few of them can write at all, let alone professionally, and one of the sadder sights of the press box is one of these players of yesterday haltingly speaking his thoughts to a young lad who puts them into English for him.
But there are a few soccer reporters one can read without feeling insulted. Easily the best of these is the Times Association Football Correspondent, Geoffrey Green: he alone provides what I want from a soccer report, which is something of the feeling of what it was like to be there, the nearest possible substitute for not actually having been watching, and not just who scored from whose pass in which minute. Green’s erudition, his wit, his really skilful (as if poetic) use of imagery, are always a pleasure: even his frequent overreachings are themselves delightful in their preposterousness. Hugh McIlvanney of the Observer writes with a kind of sinuous intelligence about the game, sparing of imagery but exact of effect. Brian Glanville (Sunday Times) has great fluency, but his reports read like written-down talk rather than worked-out writing: interesting, well-informed talk, to be sure, but not writing.
Apart from these three, there are really only the sportswriting stars of the popular papers, the so-called Heavy Mob, who can sometimes be seen moving down Fleet Street as a solid phalanx in their heavy mohair overcoats and heavier jokes, their fur hats and ludicrous images, short arms swinging and shorter parts hanging, red of face and ‘colour’ at the ready. What kind of a hell of a mess they are going to make of writing about the World Cup makes me despondent, almost as much as do the recent performances of the England team itself.
After all, the World Cup is not likely to be held again in England this century.
A Hard Glance at the Poetry Business
Published in London Life, 16 April 1966
If the state of poetry is to be judged by the quantity actually being written now, then it must be said to be flourishing. Never, it seems, have so many people written what they call poetry, but which others might think worthy only to be called verse, and far more of which is just. . . not even prose. And they submit it, too: the editors of those journals and magazines which publish poetry (and those which don’t, as well, for that matter: there is a considerable body of enthusiasts who imagine they will be the first poet to publish an epic in the Daily Mirror) receive upwards of two hundred poems every week.
And never before has it been so easy for a poet to achieve publication of some sort or another. The number of ‘little’ magazines has increased enormously over the last five years, and there now seem to be far more publishers willing to take the risk of a small loss on a hardback volume of poetry in return for the prestige such publishing apparently brings.
The public reading of poetry, usually by the poets themselves, has also gained noticeable ground over the last few years with groups all over the country holding regular meetings. The best of these in London is held not in Chelsea, or Soho, or Hampstead, but in SE22 by the Dulwich Group. The meetings take place in the upstairs room of an enormous, friendly pub, and audiences of over a hundred (on one sweltering occasion, three hundred) are common. It is no doubt the fact of being held in a pub, where the atmosphere is informal and where the audience can meet the poets down in the bar afterwards, that accounts for the success of the Dulwich meetings compared with all other poetry readings in Lond
on. Those held by the Contemporary Poetry and Music Circle in Kensington, for instance, are very disappointingly attended, and those organized by the literary magazine Ambit and the weekly Tribune, usually in public libraries, attract nothing like the Dulwich crowds: and Dulwich is far from being the easiest place in London to reach by public transport.
These readings are certainly a welcome development: there is no poetry which does not gain something from being heard read by the poet himself. Poor readers as many poets are, and in spite of the fact that their interpretations may very often not be definitive ones, their own words in their own voices provide a direct experience of poetry unfiltered by the intervention of another sensibility and unmarred by the ‘Poetry Voice’.
But nevertheless poetry is still not primarily a spoken medium, and this to me was the one thing cogently demonstrated by the Albert Hall jamboree organised by the Beats last June.19 The poems spoken there, when read on the page (as they can be in Wholly Communion, a published version of this so-called International Poetry Incarnation), make a far greater impact and indeed seem far better poems than they did heard in the weddingcake architecture of the Albert Hall. It is in fact a myth that poetry demands sound: it has been addressed to the eye since Caxton’s time, and whichever way it is moving (and I think it is indeed moving slowly towards more aural acceptance) print is still by far the most common way in which poetry reaches its audience.
No, to me the International Poetry Incarnation did not seem to herald a new interest in poetry: it was a highly-publicised non-event by a group of performers-in-public, one or two of whom were good poets (Adrian Mitchell, Lawrence Ferlinghetti), which happened to take place at a very favourable moment. It was in many ways a sad, pathetic occasion, too, for I believe it marked the demise of the Beats: the Incarnation was in fact their Wake, their Elegy for a generation passed into middle-age, the Funferall (Joyce’s brilliant neologism describes the occasion exactly) of the Hipsters. Nowhere was this demonstrated more clearly than in the lack of opposition from the audience, for words which have never before been spoken in public in the Albert Hall raised not a murmur, poetry which was patently absolute rubbish was greeted with reverence during and applause after it, and almost the only heckling came as a result of boredom or not being able to hear certain speakers properly. No, this audience was on the side of the Beats: they were not there for the poetry but for what the readers stood for as rebels, outcasts: and which is now so quaintly passé.
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