Modernity Britain

by David Kynaston

  a large section of the population still lives on a hostile and unmapped planet where the invisible dragons of disease and loneliness and poverty wait outside the light of the camp fire. Conversation is the interchange of ritual, repetitive magic formulas which dull the edge of their fears. Roots not only captures the occasional surface eruptions of humour and anger but also exposes the banked fires beneath the surface.

  He added that, although a left-wing dramatist, Wesker (unlike most such) ‘does not start off with the assumption that the working class are noble victims of a selfish conspiracy’.

  Phyllis Willmott was unconvinced. ‘I hated the points where he seemed to be saying to the audience “Look at the funny, ludicrous ways of these clods!”’ she noted after going to the Royal Court a week or two into the run. ‘And even more the amusement of the audience in response.’ So too Charles Parker, middle-class producer of the Radio Ballads, who in early July complained directly to Wesker that his portrayal of the gracelessly boorish agricultural labourer had all too easily enabled ‘an intellectual Royal Court audience’ to ‘hug to themselves the comfortable feeling that these uncouths did not significantly touch their own humanity at any point’; ‘corrupt and moronic though the common people are seemingly becoming,’ he added, ‘only in the common people can the true work be rooted, the true tradition rediscovered and re-informed.’ Wesker’s unapologetic reply was suggestive of how much his play had been influenced by the challenging, largely pessimistic implications of Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy: ‘I come from the working class and I know all their glories but I know their faults also, and this play was written for them . . . It was aimed at the muck-pushers for pushing the third-rate and at them for receiving it. It must have been obvious that I saw these people as warm and worthwhile.’

  It was a more nuanced, complicated perspective than another playwright’s. ‘Graham [Payn] and I have taken a great shine to the East End,’ recorded Noël Coward shortly before Roots opened, ‘and we drive down and go to different pubs, where we find the exquisite manners of true cockneys, all of whom, men and women, are impeccably dressed and none of whom is in the least “look back in angerish”, merely cheerful and friendly and disinclined to grumble about anything.’10

  During a long, memorable summer, the new world continued, especially in London, to come inexorably into being. In the City, central London’s first new highway since the war, Route 11 (now named London Wall), was formally opened, with a car park beneath for 250 cars, while just to the north the City Corporation was preparing to give the go-ahead to Chamberlin, Powell and Bon’s hugely ambitious Barbican proposals, hailed by the architect-planner Graeme Shankland as ‘Britain’s most imaginative scheme for big-scale central area redevelopment’. In the West End, Basil Spence’s 14-storey Thorn House was completed (‘somehow the human scale of the St Martin’s Lane area has been preserved’, thought the Architects’ Journal), designs appeared for the towering New Zealand House at the foot of Haymarket, and Richard Seifert lodged the formal planning application for Centrepoint, crisply informing the City of Westminster that ‘we shall be glad to discuss any amendments, but it is most important that the bulk of the building should not be reduced’. South of the river, Ernö Goldfinger won the LCC’s competition for office development at Blitz-ravaged Elephant and Castle, for what became the Ministry of Health’s Alexander Fleming House – more popular (concedes even Goldfinger’s biographer) with architects than with occupants and eventually infamous for ‘sick building syndrome’. And in the East End, the LCC announced that Chinatown, in the Pennyfields district of E14, was to be wholly demolished, while officials of the LCC and the British Transport Commission met to discuss a proposed reconstruction of the whole of Euston station, with its famed Doric arch to be moved to Euston Road.11 Elsewhere, Croydon’s first major new office block, Norfolk House, was approaching completion – the start of ‘Croydonisation’; Coventry decided to liven up its new shopping centre by building blocks of residential flats above it; the highest block in the Midlands, 16 storeys in the Lyndhurst estate on the outskirts of Birmingham, was almost finished, giving ‘an unrivalled vista over green-belt Warwickshire’; and in Hull, the new university library was ready by the end of the summer to receive books. ‘Some bits are awful: others are not bad,’ the hard-to-please librarian informed Monica Jones. ‘It is a clumsy, rather graceless building, lacking intelligence at all levels, but not without a certain needless opulence in parts.’12

  Understandably, few if any activators denied the need for pressing on with at least a substantial measure of slum clearance. ‘At Anderston Cross, built in the middle of the last century, I visited the worst slums I have ever seen,’ wrote John Betjeman in June in a Telegraph piece about Glasgow.

  Enter one of the archways to the court-yards which they enclose, and you will see the squalor. Small children with no park or green space for miles play in rubbish bins with dead cats and mutilated artificial flowers for toys. Spiral stone stairs, up which prams and bicycles have to be carried, lead to two-storey tenements with one lavatory for four families. One such tenement I saw housed five children and the parents. The coal and the marmalade and bread were in the same cupboard. There was one sink with a single cold tap. There was a hole in the roof and a hole in the wall, and the only heat was from an old-fashioned kitchen range on which was a gas ring for cooking.

  Yet these people, though they complained, were not bitter and I was told that there were 150,000 such houses in Glasgow . . .

  That city’s housing problems were of course unique, but by 1959 in England and Wales only some 18 per cent of the 850,000 dwellings estimated four years earlier as unfit for human habitation had been demolished or closed. The Housing Minister, Henry Brooke, declared later in June during an inspection of slum clearance in Bethnal Green that ‘many of these mothers and fathers are putting up a splendid fight in the surroundings they have to put up with. It is libellous to dub them slum dwellers. They may have just a tap and a sink in a black hole under the stairs, and a tumble-down closet shared with their neighbours in an open yard at the back, but they are trying to keep decent standards in their homes all the same.’ He added: ‘We are going to win this battle. I am determined to get all slums down.’

  Among architects by this time, if Basil Spence firmly represented the acceptable face of the modernist push – ‘he belongs to the modern school’, noted an Observer profile, ‘yet he and his buildings have a charm well calculated to mollify the feelings of those who are normally affronted by modern architecture’ – then Alison and Peter Smithson were still defiantly uncuddly. ‘The use of traditional forms in traditional ways is sentimentality,’ they bluntly informed students at the Architectural Association. ‘It is possible that a future architecture will be expendable, and that an urban discipline of few fixed points and the pattern of change will be developed. In such an architecture the shortness of life can allow of solutions in which the first process is the last process. There would be no problem of maintenance. At present most buildings are assumed to be permanent.’ Many of those students continued to be bewitched by Le Corbusier, and by this time the high-profile, high-rise, Corb-inspired, hard-modernist estate at Roehampton was finished. Among those making the pilgrimage to it were members of Dundee’s Housing Committee and the young, uber-modernist architect Rodney Gordon (future partner of Owen Luder), profoundly shocked to witness the unreconstructed taste of the early tenants: ‘The windows were covered with dainty net curtains, the walls were covered with pink cut-glass mirrors and “kitsch”, and the furniture comprised ugly three-piece suites, not even the clean forms of wartime Utility furniture.’ The estate’s special eminence was recognised in a lengthy piece by Nikolaus Pevsner in the July issue of Architectural Review. Admiring its ‘pride in béton brut’, its ‘delight in chunky shapes’ and its ‘instinctive refusal to compromise with sentimentality’, he approvingly asserted that altogether the estate was a ‘vast, yet not inhuman, composition’.13

 
In many towns and cities, the juggernaut – which some dared criticise, or even resist – was still only revving up, but in September the Shrewsbury Chronicle printed a heartfelt letter (‘Stop knocking Shrewsbury about’) from B. Dodd of 9 Combermere Drive:

  The Crown Hotel is to be knocked down and replaced by shops. The Raven Hotel may be demolished and its place taken by more shops. On the old Smithfield site – a splendid setting for a public garden – there is to be more ‘development’ in the form of a large block of shops. Next April, the market clock is to be knocked down and a characterless modern structure is to be erected in the place of that charmingly ugly piece of Victoriana, so essentially a part of the Shrewsbury skyline.

  Can nothing be done to halt this maniacal ‘progress’? . . .

  We can see the kind of proposed ‘improvements’ in any of a hundred other towns. There is, sir, at present, only one Shrewsbury. Has not the time come to cry halt and keep it that way? Or is it already too late?

  Lurking increasingly by this time was the sometimes barely visible hand of the property developer. ‘We knew nothing about the matter; nobody has approached us and the suggestion that someone can come along and pull down our property like that is quite laughable,’ declared (in August) the indignant managing director of the Tolmer Cinema in Tolmer Square, just north of Euston Road, after St Pancras Borough Council rejected a planning application to demolish the cinema and redevelop the island site:

  This cinema is regarded with a great deal of affection locally and many of our elderly patrons come along three and four times weekly and they like us because we do not hustle them out; if they want to stop for three or four hours, they are welcome. I am certainly looking further into this matter because I want to know if it is really possible for someone to seek planning consent in respect of property that they do not even own.

  The Hippodrome at Golders Green was also under threat, with Hallmark Securities Ltd seeking to have the theatre demolished and turned into a 13-storey block of flats, but during September some 25,000 people signed a protest petition, stars of stage and screen attended crowded ‘Save the Hippodrome’ meetings (‘If I were in charge,’ announced Bruce Forsyth, ‘this would never have happened’), and eventually Hendon Council unanimously recommended to Middlesex County Council that the application be rejected.14

  Two situations this summer highlighted the gulf between planners and planned. ‘Pit Village Preferred to New Town’ was the Manchester Guardian’s story in June after over 1,700 of the 2,000 adults in the Durham mining village of South Hetton had signed a petition protesting against the rehousing of 620 of them in the new town of Peterlee. The county’s planning department could not understand, observed the special correspondent, why they did not want ‘good new houses’ in Peterlee in preference to the back-to-backs in South Hetton scheduled for demolition. The answer, he went on, was partly the six miles between new town and pit head, but also ‘the community spirit built up through 120 years of living and working together’, making South Hetton ‘a large, close-knit family’. Accordingly, ‘its new and handsome miners’ institute is not an experiment in social living, it is an elegantly painted roof over a thriving social life to which the happiest citizens of new towns may sometimes look back in wistfulness’. In another mining area, South Wales, the conflict in Aberdare, running for almost two years, was between the Labour-run council supporting Glamorgan County Council’s town plan – one-third of the buildings (including over 3,000 houses) to be demolished, with instead comprehensive development areas releasing the townspeople from an ‘outworn environment’ – and the many local residents who bitterly opposed it. ‘They will have to get the bloody army to get me out,’ declared one. ‘Whether they want my house for a bus station or a car park, I just don’t intend to go.’ Ralph Samuel wrote up the case in August in the New Statesman. ‘The Glamorgan planners did not set out to destroy a community,’ the young historian reflected. ‘They wanted to attack the slums and give to the people of Aberdare the best of the open space and the amenities which modern lay-out can provide. It did not occur to them that there could be any opposition to a scheme informed by such benevolent intentions; and, when it came, they could only condemn it as “myopic”.’ In the spirit of the New Left, he concluded: ‘When bureaucracy is at work in the institutions of welfare, its intentions are quite frequently benevolent, and its face is always bland. As a result, its sway is generally unresisted and its assumptions rarely challenged. But the people of Aberdare have shown that its advance need not be inexorable.’

  Overwhelmingly, the sense in 1959 was of being on the eve of not only a new decade but also of urban change of a fundamental nature with unknowable consequences. ‘This is a very ambitious project and one can only wish its sponsors luck,’ John Osborn, a prospective Conservative candidate in Sheffield, told the local Telegraph in June after touring show flats among what the paper called ‘the giant honeycomb of future homes’ at Park Hill, just a few months before the first residents were due to arrive. ‘It is indeed a social experiment and the architects have given a lot of thought to the problems involved,’ he went on. ‘This trend for building upwards is new to the city and it is something we have got to accept.’ Osborn was asked if high-rise development was the answer to the problem created by the huge Sheffield housing list. ‘We shall know that only in the future,’ he replied. ‘When, in fact, people have the choice of living on estates or in multi-storey blocks. I would like to walk around these flats – which I consider very good – in five years’ time. Then we shall know how successful the project has been.’

  Or take the thoughts of a clergyman, observing at close quarters the whole fraught process of slum clearance and subsequent development. Norman Power, occupant of about-to-be-demolished Ladywood Vicarage, wrote in the Birmingham Post of Ladywood’s ‘strange appearance’, as ‘besides the shells of the condemned back-to-back houses, the new flats rise in hygienic, impersonal majesty’. He did not pretend to be regret-free. ‘I do think it is very tragic that some fine old roads, with real charm and character, should also be swept away. Surely a civilised city would wish to preserve roads like Calthorpe Road, Hagley Road, and Beaufort Road? Surely its citizens would insist that it should?’ He found it impossible too to quell his doubts about ‘the great, American-looking blocks of flats’ that were making up the new Ladywood. ‘Splendid as they look, there is something very cold and impersonal about the new flats. And each block seems curiously separate – here are people without any community where once thrived the intense social life of a city centre.’

  Yet overall, Power’s glass was at least half full. ‘On the whole, it is impossible not to rejoice. I have seen too much of what living in “back-to-back” does to the third or fourth generation to have many regrets.’15 A perceptive witness with humane concerns, he was still travelling hopefully. And so, to a greater or lesser extent, were most people.

  13

  We’re All Reaching Up

  ‘I turned on BBC Television – so often hopeless, & we were agreeably surprised to find it as clear as ITV,’ reported Nella Last about her reception on 3 July, the same day that the three reassuring words Sing Something Simple, as performed by the Adams Singers (directed by Cliff Adams), were first heard on the Light Programme. ‘Morecambe area, like up on the East Coast, often has a poor “shimmering” screen,’ Last continued. ‘We hope for better results when the new receiving station is built in this district.’ She had always been preoccupied by her listening habits, and now she and her neurasthenic husband had to juggle the viewing too. ‘I like Tuesday night – The Flying Doctor & Twenty Questions & little or no Television,’ she wrote four days later.

  Far from ‘becoming a fan’ as friends told me, we seem, now the ‘novelty’ has worn off, to be as ‘choosy’ as over sound transmission, & as our watching time can only begin when my husband has heard The Archers & finishes at 9 o’clock – except Sunday night, if he is enjoying a Variety show from 8.30 to 9.30 – & he won’t have cowbo
y, Emergency Ward 10 or ‘crime’ shows where there is shooting or killing, it’s a bit restricting. I’m often wryly amused at his attitude of ‘nothing to interest me’.

  The following Friday, ‘doing several little jobs at once’ in the ‘kitchenette’, Last heard on the radio (from the adjoining sitting room?) the Adams Singers, so she ‘sat down & listened to the gentle, “sweet” voices, as they sang the years away for me’.

  Predictably, Frances Partridge had not yet yielded to the box in the corner, but soon afterwards, visiting Robert Kee in his London flat, she had no choice but to give Tonight a try. ‘It certainly riveted one’s attention in a horrid, compulsive sort of way, yet I was bored and rather disgusted, and longed to be able to unhook my gaze from this little fussy square of confusion and noise on the other side of the room,’ she recorded. ‘“Ah, here’s one of the great television personalities – the best-known face in England!” said Robert, and a charmless countenance [presumably Cliff Michelmore’s] with the manner of a Hoover-salesman dominated the screen.’ Yet among the millions who did watch regularly, there were perhaps signs of changing taste. ‘He is vulgar and gives the rest of the country a horrible impression of Northerners,’ noted one among several critical viewers later in July in response to the BBC’s Blackpool Show Parade featuring a well-known, long-established variety comedian. ‘Dave Morris is still doing the same act he did twenty years ago . . . His usual “bar” or “club” humour does not work on a stage, or on television.’ And perhaps most damningly: ‘Probably OK for those on holiday there and out for the evening, but not for a television audience.’