Modernity Britain

by David Kynaston

  Just in case there were any doubters, he emphasised that the two new blocks were ‘rising on a site that not so long ago was occupied by countless mean cottages of uniform drab brick separated by narrow ditches of streets’.

  Even so, when Nickson at the end of September reported on the Housing Committee’s annual inspection of building developments, and set out again its aspirations for new blocks of up to 21 storeys, he was revealingly anxious about working-class families being housed high: ‘They have always been used to the more ordinary type of dwelling, and we shall have to convince them of the advantages of this type of construction. If we can persuade the people to accept this type of building as a reasonable type of home, then we will have achieved something worthwhile.’

  At a City Council meeting in early October, the Tory councillor J. Maxwell Entwistle declared himself as supportive as the Labour group of high-rise blocks, and as opposed to unnecessary future overspill to such places as Skelmersdale, Ellesmere Port or Widnes. ‘Dislike flats as they might, the people of Liverpool would sooner stay, even in multi-storey buildings, than go to outlandish areas where there was little industry and the cost of getting back to the city was great.’ Was that in fact a fair reflection of the wishes of Liverpudlians living in decaying inner-city areas? Easily the best evidence we have is the 1956 survey of residents of the Crown Street district: on the one hand, 61 per cent did indeed want to stay where they were, whether or not they were rehoused; on the other hand, in terms of those specifically living in houses already scheduled for slum-clearance demolition, almost half wished to move away entirely. Or, put another way, the survey’s Liverpool University authors helpfully noted, ‘variety, confusion and conflict prevailed both in the district as a whole and its sub-areas’.22

  Across the Pennines, November 1957 saw the opening of a ten-storey block of flats about three-quarters of a mile from the centre of Leeds. This was the start of the Saxton Gardens development – hailed by the Yorkshire Post as ‘one of the biggest post-war housing schemes of its kind in the Provinces’ – with six further blocks, between five and nine storeys each, to be completed over the next year, altogether housing some 1,460 people on land that had been cleared of slums just before the war. That was when the nearby Quarry Hill estate had been opened, and its office now took on the additional management of Saxton Gardens. Indeed, with almost 4,000 people to be rehoused in due course in the York Road redevelopment scheme, which Saxton Gardens overlooked to the east, and a further 6,000 or so also to be rehoused in the Burmantofts area east of York Road, this meant, declared the Post, that ‘Saxton Gardens will form part of a new central township with a population of more than 15,000 people.’ On the day of the opening ceremony, the Yorkshire Evening News trumpeted loud and hard: ‘With its central heating and domestic hot water in all dwellings, its gas or electric wash boiler with clothes drying cabinet in each flat; its 30 lifts and Garchey system of refuse disposal, Saxton Gardens reaches the heights of modern amenities.’ At the ceremony itself, the major reported speech was given by Alderman F. H. O’Donnell, who had spent his boyhood on the Saxton Gardens site, then known as The Bank. ‘To the people outside, The Bank was a place where policemen walked about in pairs. But, he pointed out, the people there 50 years ago worked hard for long hours and were as industrious, intelligent, and respectable as any in the country.’ And O’Donnell ended by looking ahead: ‘He hoped that the people of Saxton Gardens would be as good as the people of the old Bank, and that there would be not only 448 units of accommodation but 448 homes.’

  Even the politicians of Bognor Regis had their dreams, as this autumn the possibility emerged of an apparently attractive deal with Billy Butlin, by means of which he would be permitted to build a holiday camp close to the town in return for knocking down his tatty funfair on the Esplanade and giving the land to the council. ‘Not often does opportunity knock in so decisive a manner as it does in Bognor Regis today,’ declared its chairman J. C. Earle.

  Facing, as they do, the finest sandy beach on the South Coast, the opportunities for really bold and imaginative architecture are immense. Tall, modern buildings in the style of Basil Spence, Corbusier or the many other gifted architects practising today are what I hope to see. Nothing pseudo, nothing shoddy, we must not tolerate drab brick boxes. This is our chance to have beautiful architecture reflecting our day and age, and we must seize it with firm hands. Fine hotels, luxury flats, a solarium, shops, theatres and conference halls, and civic buildings can and should arise, fronted by a broad, impressive seaway.

  With only one dissenter, who argued that a Butlin’s holiday camp would be disastrous for Bognor’s image, the deal was overwhelmingly approved.23

  Almost everywhere, but above all in the major conurbations, the greatest engine of physical change was of course the slum-clearance programme. Slum clearance in ‘the atomic age’ was the theme of an address by Dr Ronald Bradbury (Liverpool’s City Architect) to a national housing conference in September, which included the estimate that almost two-thirds of the 850,000 unfit dwellings in England and Wales were concentrated in about one hundred industrial towns, headed by Liverpool itself (88,233), followed by Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, London, Hull, Sheffield, Salford, Stoke-on-Trent, Oldham, Bradford and Bristol – ‘all of which’, noted Bradbury, ‘have very considerable slum problems’.

  In third-placed Birmingham, it was around this time that demolition began in the Ladywood district, a process of slum clearance that from the start seems to have been carried out in a horribly flawed way, at least to judge by the subsequent cri de coeur of Canon Norman Power of St John’s, Ladywood – not an opponent of slum clearance in principle. ‘In all this redevelopment, during which I saw a living community torn to pieces by the bulldozers and scattered to the four corners of the city,’ he recalled in 1965 in his short, devastating book The Forgotten People, ‘there was no consultation with the people most affected and concerned. Neither was any opinion sought from local teachers, social workers, organisation-leaders or clergy.’ Crucially, Ladywood’s demolition started not with the worst housing, but instead with some of the better; Power surmised that ‘probably the need to clear a space for the new Inner Circle Road was one motive’. Overall, he went on, ‘The heart of our community was destroyed. A living, corporate personality was crushed by the bulldozers. There were some extraordinary and inexplicable side-effects. The new Waste Land was left waste for seven years. But it was not cleared. It was left a wilderness of brick-ends, tin cans, broken bottles and even half-demolished buildings.’ In short, ‘It was the best school of vandalism I have ever seen.’

  Elsewhere, the Salford City Reporter announced towards the end of 1957 that ‘“HANKY PARK” AREA WILL SOON DISAPPEAR’ – the district which, back in the 1930s, ‘gained notoriety in Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole’ – while in Bristol some 10,000 houses were identified as needing to be cleared in the next five years, including among the steeply sloping Georgian terraces of Kingsdown, thus leading to protests from Betjeman downwards. In London the ongoing development of Notting Hill Gate (already involving considerable demolition ahead of planned road-widening, the replacement of the two existing underground stations on opposite sides of the road by a single station under it, and the construction of two tall slab blocks of flats as well as many new shops and offices) was likewise a source of unhappiness. ‘The Village Behind The “Gate”’ was the title of some verses that J. F. Adams of Bulmer Place sent in November to the local paper:

  Once we were happy the whole day through,

  With neat gardens where our flowers grew;

  There’s not many left, sad to relate,

  In the Village behind the ‘Gate’ . . .

  We’ll dig up our roots and home ties,

  Remember those welcomes and final goodbyes

  Of loved ones passed on early and late

  In the Village behind the ‘Gate’.

  But there will be no friendship in skyscraper flats

  Or leani
ng on garden fence for chats,

  And help your neighbour in this new estate,

  Like we did in the Village behind the ‘Gate’.

  As it happened, it was not so far away, in the Kensington drawing room of the Victorian artist Linley Sambourne, that (a few days earlier) the Countess of Rosse had acted as hostess at a meeting to form the preservationist Victorian Group (later Society). Betjeman was present, as was the leading architectural journalist of the day, that qualified modernist (and suburb-loving, but New Town-hating) J. M. Richards. ‘On the whole,’ Richards suggested in vain soon afterwards, ‘it had better avoid calling itself “Victorian” – the word now has overtones of funniness.’24

  The Victorian era seemed remote enough when in due course the Architects’ Journal ran its feature ‘Buildings of the Year: 1957’. Presenting ‘the uncensored opinions’ of the users of a dozen or more newly completed buildings, the tone was largely positive. ‘Smashing!’ declared James Loft, a 52-year-old worker who had spent ten years in the dust of a cement factory before coming to the Bowater-Scott Tissue Mill, producing Andrex toilet rolls, at Northfleet, Kent. ‘You don’t know what the weather’s like outside: it’s practically always the same temperature in here.’ Generally there,

  The workers, when asked what they like, find it difficult to put in words. Sally Donoghue, the shop steward in the converting department, said the girls liked the press button machinery. ‘It’s very modern, isn’t it?’ she said. Could she suggest any improvements? The answer was a simple, ‘No.’ Beryl Duff, a pretty Irish girl who was packing, said ‘It’s a good place to work in: it’s modern, isn’t it?’ And pressed to say what she means by ‘modern’, she says it’s light, airy and colourful. The very high quality of the toilet accommodation was mentioned by everybody who was interviewed, and Mr Morley [assistant manager] has found that it is appreciated by the staff and properly treated.

  Elsewhere, Sir Vincent Tewson, General Secretary of the TUC, praised its new headquarters in Great Russell Street as ‘a piece of contemporary architecture our eight million members can be proud of’; recently married Daphne Jones on the 14th floor of Great Arthur House, on the Golden Lane estate just north of the City of London, loved the ‘feeling of being out in the open’, with the balcony being ‘like sitting in a garden’, while in Basterfield House, one of the estate’s four maisonette blocks, Angela Hobday, a nurse at Bart’s, found it all ‘exciting, so new and different, and such fun to be living in’; at Dunn’s in Bromley (specialists in selling modern furniture), the managing director Geoffrey Dunn was almost entirely happy with his quasi-brutalist new premises, noting that he had had ‘letters from perfect strangers, and not from such high falutin’ addresses either, congratulating us on adding this shop to the town’; and at a primary school in Amersham, two small boys with caps askew, Geoffrey Magee and Garry Livemore, offered a spontaneous volley of praise – ‘Super!’ ‘Smashing!’ ‘Supersonic!’ – with the magazine reckoning that ‘what appeals to the children most is the colour, the glass, the wallpapers, the lighting, in a word the bright modernity of the interior, as much as the practical arrangements’. The feature, though, did include a couple of grumblers. On the Claremont estate in West Ham, Mrs Nellie Richardson (living with her bus-conductor husband and four small children) was adamant that a flat ‘isn’t really a place for a family’, adding that ‘most of the time you have to say to the children, “keep it down a bit”’. And at the factory-like Churchfields Comprehensive (845 pupils in six completely isolated blocks) in West Bromwich, the headmaster Mr Hobart not only found the use of glass ‘quite excessive’, especially in south-facing rooms like his own study, but called the sound insulation ‘downright disgusting’.

  There were mixed feelings, too, in a vox pop survey late in 1957 of Britain’s most emblematic city of post-war reconstruction. ‘Generally, it is the older Coventrians who are least happy,’ found the Sunday Times. ‘“Horrible ugly boxes!” they rail, as the new blocks go up. But the youngsters, with no nostalgic memories of the old town, are delighted. “The new cathedral,” exclaimed a young typist with real fervour, “is going to be beautiful – lovely and bright, you know, not a gloomy old place like they usually are.”’ Even so, it was probably not all that aged a waitress who, in the Civic Restaurant, ‘gazed wistfully across the new Broadgate at an isolated block of pseudo-Tudor beyond’, and said, ‘I’d have liked little black-and-white buildings really, but the foreign visitors all say this is wonderful.’ The piece’s accompanying photographs (including of the vast, glass-sided Owen Owen’s department store) provoked a cross letter from a reader in the south-east. ‘I see nothing admirable in the new Coventry,’ he asserted. ‘The large buildings illustrated last week might do for a prison or a boot factory, but I don’t think they would do for the patrons of Nash and Wren. The style is ungentlemanly.’ To which John Hewitt, the Ulster poet who had recently become curator of Coventry’s new Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, replied a week later that

  the new centre of Coventry is built to a human scale . . . Coventry is not a capital city with the necessity for State architecture, impressive to visitor and reassuring to citizen. It does not belong either to the age of Wren or Nash. It is an industrial city, where motor-cars and aeroplanes and machine tools are manufactured. Having lived here for six months any other industrial town depresses me with the heavy pomposity and grimy insincerity of its architecture.

  Meanwhile, one footloose, hard-to-please Londoner was finding everything disagreeable. ‘On the whole a dull, disappointing tramp,’ recorded Anthony Heap in November after a Sunday inspection of Denmark Hill, Herne Hill and Camberwell. ‘Pleasantly picturesque this hilly part of South London may have been fifty years ago. Today it’s just a dreary wilderness of uniform blocks of drab new council flats, and dilapidated old Victorian villas. And I’m not sure which look the most depressing.’25

  ‘John went to football,’ noted Judy Haines in Chingford on Saturday, 12 October, the day after the Windscale fire had been put out. ‘I mowed the lawn. So much to do.’ That same day the Tory conference (in Brighton, like Labour’s) ended, with the party’s new chairman, Lord Hailsham, the undoubted star and doing much to boost flagging, mid-term, post-Suez morale. Early each morning he appeared on the seafront in a blue dressing gown, bathing trunks and bedroom slippers, ready to take a chilly dip; his oration one evening to the Conservative Political Centre, containing a fierce, uninhibited attack on the conduct of the trade unions, was, according to Mollie Panter-Downes, ‘rapturously hailed next day, over the conference coffee cups and cocktail glasses, as being “as good as one of Winston’s wartime speeches”’. On the Saturday morning itself, winding up the conference, ‘that stocky, rumpled figure’ with a ‘cherubic, aggressive face’ (as she described Hailsham) found a prop and let himself go. ‘At the end of his speech,’ reported the Sunday Times,

  he stretched out his hand and gripped the large handbell which Mrs Walter Elliot, the chairman, had used during the conference. Holding it above his head and ringing it with enthusiasm he said: ‘Let it ring more loudly. Let it ring for victory.’ As the delegates rose to their feet and cheered and stamped, Lord Hailsham shouted: ‘Let us say to the Labour Party “Seek not to inquire for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”’

  At least one commentator, Francis Williams, was viewing the 50-year-old Hailsham by the end of the week as ‘a potential prime minister’, but Hailsham himself was quick to reassure Macmillan of his ‘unqualified loyalty and support’, adding, ‘I am not quite such an ass as I seem.’ Macmillan himself, just before the conference, had privately pondered his government’s position. ‘At the moment, the whole thing is swinging away from us,’ he readily conceded. ‘If we cannot bring back the traditional strength of the Party to the fold – small shopkeepers, middle class, etc., – we have no chance. But we also need at least three million trade union votes. We have a war on two flanks.’ Over and above such tactical considerations was the increasingly asked question o
f what was to be done about national decline, relative though it may have been. Or, as a youngish Daily Express journalist with misplaced political ambitions, the future historian Maurice Cowling, put it from a particular perspective in a letter to the Listener later in October,

  Many people in Britain – not only tories, not only tories of the right, and not only members of the middle-class – fear that an infernal conjunction of inflation, excessive taxation, trade-union irresponsibility, governmental interference and governmental timidity have in the recent past been undermining Britain’s social stability and may in the future destroy her economic prosperity.26

  It was a different kind of decline that the contributors to Declaration, published the same month, mostly addressed. Edited by an ambitious 24-year-old publisher, Tom Maschler, the book was a gathering-up of those more or less connected with the ‘Angry Young Men’ (AYM) phenomenon, his only two refuseniks being Kingsley Amis and Iris Murdoch. Among the eight essayists, Doris Lessing (at 37 the oldest contributor and only woman) expressed her frustration at the ‘kindly, pleasant, tolerant’ British people, ‘apparently content to sink into ever-greater depths of genteel poverty because of the insistence of our rulers on spending so much of the wealth we produce on preparations for a war against communism’; Colin Wilson went ‘beyond the Outsider’; John Osborne, writing late and furiously, took scattergun aim, including at the Royal Family – ‘the gold filling in a mouthful of decay’; Kenneth Tynan observed that ‘the trouble with most Socialist drama, and with much Socialist thinking, is its joylessness’; and Lindsay Anderson coined the phrase ‘chips with everything’ (about the culinary ordeal of returning to Britain from abroad), called the absence of working-class characters from British films ‘characteristic of a flight from contemporary reality’, and claimed that Amis would ‘rather pose as a Philistine than run the risk of being despised as an intellectual’.