by A. N. Wilson
In fact, however, although LCC, the City Corporation and the boroughs, and the central government probably all shared the wish to rebuild London in a manner that was humane and decent, they lacked two vital properties: taste and ownership.
First, though there was a natural, fair, and altruistic wish that Londoners, who had endured the Blitz, should to have indoor lavatories and warm sitting rooms, there was no Christopher Wren to oversee the enterprise. In the eighteenth century, had aerial bombardment been a possibility and had London needed to be rebuilt, it would perhaps have mattered less than in the twentieth century, since in that era of architecture, builders and craftsmen were themselves stylists; many of the best eighteenth-century buildings are all but anonymous, put up according to classically tested and approved designs. It so happened that the end of the Second World War coincided with a period of architectural history when these notions had, for reasons that now seem obscure, been rejected by the architectural establishment and when the aesthetic of modernism, largely untried on townscapes in Europe outside the Stalinist satellites, was the inspiring dream of many aspirant practitioners.
But—and this is the second vital fact—even if there had been a Sir Christopher Wren in the era of the Festival of Britain, it is difficult to know how much power he would have had over the rebuilding of postwar London. Strangely enough, the local authorities possessed every legal right to make compulsory purchase of bombed sites—an act of 1944 gave them the right to buy any blitzed areas—but they did not always do so. The war provided the golden opportunity for property developers to acquire acre upon acre of London. The other factor in the fatal story was that many of the old landowners were crushed by the death duties brought in by the Socialist government. For example, in 1953 the death of the second Duke of Westminster cost the Grosvenors £20 million, a bill that could have been covered only by their surrender of Pimlico. True, the big landowners (the Grosvenors, the Cadogans) still owned, and own, huge acreages in London; but in the early 1950s, the clever property developer, having already bought up bomb sites, stood to make more in rents by building high-rise properties than by reproducing the traditional London street patterns. Once planning permission had been granted for one high-rise, the precedent had been established and there was little that could be done to prevent more.
It was, therefore, in the comparatively cozy world of postwar and 1950s London that the decisions were made which would change the London skyline, and the living conditions of Londoners, so irrevocably and with such brutality. When Harold Samuel bought a property company called Land Securities in 1943, “the only real estate of the company now comprises three houses in Kensington, two of which, the directors regret to state, are unoccupied.” Twenty-five years later, the assets of Land Securities, Limited, amounted to £28 million. Harry Hyams, the doyen of developers, took over Oldham Estates at £22,328 in 1959.1 By 1967, it was worth £46 million.
In the late 1950s, the LCC wanted to build a large motor roundabout at the intersection of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street. The land was owned by Pearlmans, directors of the Ve-ri Best Manufacturing Company, which was in fact not a manufacturing company at all but a property company. They turned down an offer of £55,000 for Ve-ri Best. But then along came Harry Hyams, who bought out Pearlmans for half a million, acquired several adjacent properties, then rented back the land on a lease to the LCC at £18,500 per annum. In the middle of the site, Hyams proposed to erect a thirty-five story office block. There was still on the statute books the 1939 London Building Act, which forbade buildings of more than a hundred feet, but this contained the deadly loophole “unless the Council otherwise consent.”
Since the council were in Hyams’s debt, they could hardly refuse his desire to build Centre Point, which was completed in 1967. Construction costs were about £3.5 million. The finished building was “worth” some £17 million, a net profit of £11 million simply through the rise in property prices. Hyams nevertheless left the building empty for years to await the rise in rentals. The LCC never actually built their roundabout. There Centre Point stands, a monument to greed and folly, a perpetual obstruction, since there is no decent sidewalk around it and anyone who alights from a bus in New Oxford Street near its base has to weave a circuitous course by crossing three or four roads if he wishes to get to the top of Charing Cross Road.
The architect of Centre Point was Richard Seifert, an undistinguished figure whose architectural experience was limited in prewar days to minor domestic projects in north London. He once won second prize for designing a boring façade for the Building Centre, Store Street, off Tottenham Court Road. Seifert’s genius was not for architecture, as Londoners are now all too painfully aware: it was for getting round planning regulations. This made him the ideal man for Harry Hyams, who commissioned him to design the thirty-six fin-shaped stories of Centre Point. He was to go on to design the NatWest Tower, opened in 1981 but already condemned then as obsolescent and reminiscent of the 1960s, at the time the tallest unbraced building in the world, each of its fifty office floors bringing in huge rentals for the property company. He built high-rise flats in Birmingham and Glasgow, but it is in London that he made his mark: the Kensington Palace Hotel blights Kensington Gardens just as Tolworth House, all twenty-two stories of it, influenced by the Brazilian expressionist Oscar Niemeyer, looms out of scale over Kingsway. “Seifert,” said his obituary in the Guardian in October 2001, “built more London buildings than Sir Christopher Wren and undeniably had as great an effect upon the city skyline.”
Seifert, of course, was not alone. The Corporation of London, somewhat unwillingly at first, were urged by the LCC to take over the forty-acre bomb site of the Barbican and to create there a complex of flats, theaters, and other amenities. The only building within that site to survive bombardment is St. Giles Cripplegate, the church where Milton was buried. The brutalist result, rough-hewn and threatening, looms out of a chaos of swirling roads. Finding your way in or out as a pedestrian or a motorist is a hazardous undertaking. Few now can consider the Barbican Centre an object of beauty.
When asked to redesign the Royal College of Physicians, next to the Nash terraces in Regent’s Park, Denys Lasdun in 1959 came up with a poor imitation of Le Corbusier. The academic world was so impressed by the unsparing results that Lasdun was asked to rebuild the School of Oriental and African Studies in Bloomsbury, and the University of East Anglia. Hungry for more disproportionately massive flat layers of concrete, those anxious for a National Theatre invited him to adorn the banks of the Thames with his protuberant oblongs.
As these masterpieces of twentieth-century taste rose before the eyes of Londoners, the government commissioned Basil Spence to design a tower block for Knightsbridge Barracks (approved 1960, built 1967).
Lasdun’s public or university buildings might now seem good for a laugh, but imagine having to live in the cluster block he designed in Claredale Street, Bethnal Green, which towers over the attractively proportioned old tenement buildings. “Lasdun,” writes an admirer, “was given the opportunity to explore some of his ideas in reality in the early 1950s.”2
The cluster was perhaps preferable to the truly high-rise blocks into which Londoners, usually the poorer Londoners, were herded by housing authorities in the 1950s and 1960s. Students of architecture claim that Ernö Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower in north Kensington is an object of beauty, but most people must see it as a blight, an affront to any of the ideals so touchingly expressed by the Festival of Britain.
We have dwelt at length upon architecture, since it is the dominant fact of postwar London: the city had to be rebuilt somehow, and it happened to be rebuilt in a particular way. But the 1950s were also an era of growing prosperity. The Port of London had been patched up and by mid-decade it was still the largest employer of manpower in the capital, with a thousand ships docked there each week. The industries of the suburbs were productive as never before. The London aircraft industry—Vickers at Weybridge, Surrey; Viscount at Colin
dale, just west of Hendon—enjoyed a golden age, with Hatfield de Haviland producing the world’s first jet airliner, the Comet.
At Dagenham, Essex, Ford were producing 250,000 cars a year. All this was going to change at the beginning of the sixties; but even after the debacle of Suez in 1956, when Eden resigned to be replaced by Macmillan, it was by no means clear to most Londoners that Britain’s place in the world, and its very identity, had irrevocably altered.
Londoners could believe Harold Macmillan’s smug political slogan that they had “never had it so good.” If this was true for the law-abiding, it was by extension good for the criminals, since at last there was some money to steal after the austerity years. Wage snatches, of a kind parodied in the Ealing Comedy The Lavender Hill Mob, became the vogue, with Billy Town’s Camden Town mob getting away with £287,000 in cash after one raid on a post office van in Eastcastle Street, Marylebone. Blaggings, as the friendly homegrown Cockney criminals called robberies of this kind, increased in London by 68 percent between 1955 and 1957. Charlie and Eddie Richardson ran one of the most ruthless of south London protection rackets. Ronnie and Reggie Kray, twins from Bethnal Green (born 1933) specialized in protection rackets and gaming clubs, where they could enjoy the pleasures of extortion, torture, and robbery, and add the pleasures of social climbing. They enjoyed being photographed with such figures as Judy Garland, George Raft (himself linked with the Mafia), and Lord Boothby, the notorious bisexual lover of the Prime Minister’s wife, Lady Dorothy Macmillan.
Boothby’s link with the Bethnal Green gangster world was a sexual one, but it was one of those satisfying reminders of how London links up by tenuous threads of cognition and acquaintanceship, and how the crimes of the poor and those of the rich interlace. Just as highway robbery flourished at the beginning of banks and stockbroking, in the reign of Queen Anne, it seems apt that in the era of Supermac (Harold Macmillan), property speculation and protection racketeering should have become chief among London’s trades. They had never had it so good. So it would seem if you look at Dan Farson’s photographs of bohemian life in Soho bars, or read Iris Murdoch’s racy novels of adultery and homosexuality in London’s arty world.
After the heroic years of war, and the necessity for everyone to pull together and behave well, there was a palpable and collective need to behave badly, or at least to seem to behave badly. In 1955 the police made a raid on the legendary Fitzroy Tavern in north Soho. They found between fifty and eighty people who “paraded themselves unashamedly” with “rouged” cheeks and “blatantly dyed” hair. Constable Pyle said in his evidence that he had been approached by a prostitute who had asked, with a winsome smile, “Are you looking for a naughty girl or a naughty boy?”3 The decades to come would demonstrate that London had plenty of both to choose from, and that the police could do very little to stop them.
13
THE END OF THE BOWLER HAT
Even until the late 1960s or early 1970s, if you stood on the platform of a suburban or provincial railway station in England it was possible to identify those male passengers who were going up to London. They were the ones wearing bowler hats. When Peter Walker finished his National Service in the 1950s, he was offered a position as an insurance broker in the City firm of Griffiths Tate. “You will be joining the American Department on 1 May,” the letter of appointment informed him. “Your salary will be £300 per annum, your hours of work will be 8.45 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. Monday to Friday and 8.45 to 12 noon on Saturday. You will have two weeks’ holiday a year. You will wear a bowler hat to and from the office.” 1
Thousands, tens of thousands, of office workers in the civil service, and in journalism and the City, were clad in almost identical clothes—dark suit, bowler, a furled umbrella on the arm. By the 1970s such figures would look old-fashioned. By the 1980s, for a man under fifty to wear a bowler hat would look positively bizarre. The outfit proclaimed an inner self-picture. The various workplaces of London—the Bar, the City, and even to a certain extent the journalistic fraternity of Fleet Street—were all seen as institutions, almost as clubs to whose rule a chap—and it was very much a male world—was expected to conform.
The efficiency and wealth-creating capacity of the City actually depended upon the brokers and dealers all belonging, in fact, and not just in theory, to a cohesive social group. The smaller merchant banks and investment companies, the family-run insurance businesses, the stockbroking firms were all permeated with varying types of social glue, which enabled the chaps to stick together and to know “who anyone was.” There were the private schools at which the richer chaps had all been educated. There were the clubs to which they belonged, and there were the livery companies by which the institutions of the City were administered. There were the old families, still dominant in the City.
“Hallo, Jacob, what are you up to these days?” the journalist Paul Foot breezily asked of his old Oxford acquaintance Rothschild, when they bumped into one another in the 1960s.
“I work at the bank which bears my name” was the reply.
Your Hambros, your Barings, your Cattos and Cazenoves, were the aristocracy of the City, but there was an army of well-heeled lesser beings, all of whom were in the club together. Jiggery-pokery was not their aim: it was too obviously not in their interest. They wished to become richer, but to do so honestly and with “sound money.”
But different times lay ahead. The Big Bang in the City on October 27, 1986, took account of the new technology. It was now possible to buy and sell shares other than on the floor of the London Stock Exchange. The chaps, in their paneled boardrooms, clubhouses, and City halls, would really have no control anymore over who was going to be buying and selling. Many of those who rose to prominence in the new, fast-moving world of finance were fast-living spivs who certainly had not been to university with anyone famous and assuredly did not have banks bearing their own name. Tim Congdon, in an article in The Spectator a week before the Big Bang, pointed out,
It is a sideshow to, indeed almost a by-product of, a much Bigger Bang which has transformed international finance over the last 25 years. This Bigger Bang bears about the same relation to the Big Bang as the construction of Canary Wharf to the refurbishment of the Royal Exchange. One totally overshadows and dwarfs the other. Whereas the Bigger Bang is a new departure in the pattern of international financial activity, the Big Bang merely alters the way in which a long established business is conducted.2
The collapse in 1995 of Barings Bank, an impeccable blameless enterprise for 105 years, was a parable of what was happening to the City of London, likened by William Rees-Mogg to the sinking of the Hood in the Second World War. The twenty-eight-year-old trader who appeared to bring about the collapse single-handed was Nick Leeson, born in a council house in Watford, whose mysterious activities in front of a computer screen in Singapore managed to clock up astounding losses, hundreds of millions. But it would be a very simple-minded diehard who supposed that Nick Leeson’s story merely showed what happened when you let a chap into the club who wasn’t quite the thing. The Sunday Times remarked, as Barings went down:
In layman’s terms, Barings’ top team chose to smash through red light after red light in a craven chase for “easy” profits. Then, in the final moments, when it was clear that the next stop was a brick wall, they scrambled desperately to find someone, anyone other than themselves to blame. Leeson, the oik from Watford, looked the perfect fall-guy.
The truth is that in the heyday of Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism, when there was no such thing as society, everyone, and not just the Baring family, was addicted to the idea that work was a thing of the past. Money could be made by magic. The yuppies or slickers who knew how to operate the arcane mysteries of the computer and the markets they seemed to control could make sums of money of which earlier generations had not even dreamed.
Everyone in London was affected by the dream: it was as though a collective South Sea Bubble had taken hold of London’s imagination. The City itself might contain
old-fashioned men, who had first gone to work wearing bowler hats, who now deplored what was happening, but they were powerless, as Swiss Bank Corporation took over Warburgs, Kleinwort Benson were taken over by Dresdner Bank, and all the great British merchant banks, some of which had been in business on the same site since the reign of William III, fell to foreign and collective ownership. (As the sentence implies, England itself had done quite well out of Dutch takeover all those years back.)
It was easy to speak sentimental words about the good old days, but the power of the market, in the short term, to make Londoners rich was like a drug. Londoners watched their flats and houses double and quadruple in price, and then double again. Writers, who had been paid a few hundred pounds for their books, suddenly found that publishing could be treated like any other industry, with huge sums paid for the takeovers and conglomerations, and concomitant riches offered to them. The managers and editors who attempted to make the account books balance had as much chance of doing so as Swift’s academician, attempting to extract sunbeams from cucumbers.3
Old London had been a workplace in which the leisured classes were in the minority. New London became a play-ground, where those who worked, in any of the recognizable meanings of the term, were hugely outnumbered by those seeking leisure, thrill, gratification. The London of the last forty years has grown steadily richer than it has been at any period in its history. The value of property has increased often and by vast dimensions. Every time there is a boom in the property market, a minority get trapped. They have over-borrowed; for a short period their property is worth less than they paid for it, and they are the victims of “negative equity.” Yet pass a number of years, and the same property will once more have multiplied in value.