Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  In my view slum property is more likely to keep people in a state of mind that is not conducive to helping them to develop a sense of pride in their homes, rather than the fact that, if given better houses, they would wreck those houses. Whether we like it or not, there are thousands of houses in this city without baths and water. When they were built a hundred years ago they were built in the belief that that was all the ordinary people were worth. With rat-ridden houses, houses without water, people living four and five in a room and conditions in which people suffer from tuberculosis, we, as public representatives, cannot be complacent. We say we want a plan and must get on speedily.

  In short: ‘There is not a single problem facing us today, whether in Newcastle or the country, that is not linked up with the social problems of the slums.’22 On the question of what exactly would replace these slums, though, Smith for the moment was silent.

  Architecturally speaking, the force in the early 1950s apparently lay with the ‘soft’ Modernists, also called the ‘New Humanists’. While their most acclaimed work was the Royal Festival Hall, they were also responsible for an increasing number of new school buildings (typified by the bright, airy and generally Scandinavian-style St Crispin’s Secondary Modern at Wokingham), Geoffrey Powell’s winning entry (admired for its village-like qualities) in the 1952 competition for the Golden Lane housing scheme on the edge of the City of London, and the Alton East (originally called Portsmouth Road) Estate in Roehampton. The Roehampton development was a showcase for the LCC’s Architect’s Department and attracted much attention when the Alton East plans and models were revealed in November 1951. Across 28 acres there were to be 744 dwellings, 60 per cent of which were in the form of nine 11-storey point blocks, all with central heating; the other 40 per cent were to be, along increasingly fashionable mixed-development lines, a combination of maisonettes and houses. ‘An interesting and architecturally exciting scheme,’ was the verdict of the Architects’ Journal, and over the years Alton East, built between 1952 and 1955, would win much praise, not least for its overall composition. Back in 1951, though, not everyone was so delighted by the picturesque possibilities. That December the Wandsworth Borough News reported the views of the Labour chairman of the LCC’s Housing Committee, which two months earlier had approved the plans. He could offer ‘no reprieve’ to existing Roehampton residents; accepted that ‘we shall be cursed for this in future, for families should live in intimate houses’; but added that ‘we have no alternative if we are to solve the housing problem’.23

  For the mainly youthful British followers of Le Corbusier, the problem with the generally acceptable, soft Modernism of Alton East – and before it the South Bank – was that it did not go nearly far enough. ‘The style of the Festival of Britain seemed at best sentimental, at worst effete,’ recalled the architect Robert Maxwell. ‘It lacked seriousness. It was bland, and it was parochial. Modern architecture had been sold short in Britain.’ The great showpiece building by Le Corbusier himself, the Unité d’Habitation near Marseilles, was completed in 1952 – an aggressively modern 20-storey block on free-standing columns, housing 1,600 shipyard workers and their families. It was a building that exercised an almost mesmeric fascination over the up-and-coming generation of architects. By 1951 work was under way on an LCC site on Bentham Road, Hackney to build a large maisonette block along Unité-style ‘slab block’ lines. One of its architects was Colin St John Wilson (future architect of the British Library), who in an Observer article in July 1952 laid into the recently acclaimed Lansbury Estate in Poplar, with its ‘pitched roofs, peephole windows and “folksy” details of the current Swedish revival’, all of which were in lamentable, hidebound contrast to the Unité’s exemplar of ‘the grand scale of city life’. Unsurprisingly, Frederic Osborn, doyen of the town-planning movement, had noted shortly before how the fashion for Le Corbusier was ‘raging in the Architectural Association School in London now’, with ‘the young men under his influence completely impervious to economic or human considerations’.

  In June 1952 the LCC’s Housing Committee accepted in principle the development plans for what would become the ‘hard’ Modernism of the explicitly Le Corbusierite Alton West Estate in Roehampton, and the following month the nod was given for the similarly influenced Loughborough Road development near Brixton. Le Corbusier himself visited London in March 1953 to be presented with the Royal Gold Medal at the Royal Institute of British Architects. After speeches by the architectural great and good, Colin Glennie, a student at the AA, spoke for the younger generation:

  It is no use climbing our ivory towers and talking about humanising the modern movement. In those terms modern architecture means nothing. It is the very humanness of the movement which Le Corbusier played so great a part in initiating and the impetus of which he has done so much to sustain, which makes it so wonderfully worth while, and to attempt to stylise and play tricks with it so futile. His life has been devoted to the creation of beauty and essential rightness, which is the true work of the artist and the highest form of human endeavour. Indeed, it is vital if life is to mean anything more than a full belly and a reserve in the bank.

  ‘Le Corbusier is a dreamer,’ declared Glennie. ‘He is also one of the only truly practical men of our age. He understands the spirit of the 20th century.’24

  Two of Le Corbusier’s most articulate admirers were the charismatic young architects Peter and Alison Smithson, who set up in private practice in 1950 a year after their marriage. Peter ‘tempered considerable intellectual arrogance with a streak of dry humour’, in the words of the architectural historian Mark Girouard, while Alison ‘was opinionated, outrageous, convinced of her own and her husband’s importance’. During the early 1950s they were regular visitors to the Bethnal Green home of the photographer and artist Nigel Henderson and his social-anthropologist wife Judith, between them closely observing the day-to-day life of the area and soon leading the Smithsons to realise the importance of the street and the community to their architectural projects. Specifically, their unsuccessful entry for the Golden Lane competition pioneered what would become the hugely influential concept of ‘streets in the sky’, to be implemented essentially through a system of pedestrian decks.

  Soon afterwards, in a lengthy essay on ‘Urban Reidentification’, the Smithsons elaborated their idea:

  Each part of each deck should have sufficient people accessed from it to become a social entity and be within reach of a much larger number at the same level.

  Decks would be places, not corridors or balconies: thoroughfares where there are ‘shops’, post boxes, telephone kiosks.

  Where a deck is purely residential the individual house and yard-garden will provide an equivalent life pattern to a true street or square; nothing is lost and elevation is gained.

  The flat block disappears and vertical living becomes a reality.

  The refuse chute takes the place of the village pump.

  In a piece of writing full of sharply turned phrases – ‘New Town development – query, find the new; query, find the town’ – the Smithsons robustly confronted the Englishman’s traditional castle-on-the-ground dream:

  You might argue that the back garden and front pocket handkerchief are necessary to look out on. But what fills the windows of your day rooms is the houses opposite and the backs behind. Do you really think this is a sustaining prospect? . . .

  How many gardens in your street are gardened for other reasons than that of keeping up ‘appearances’, and for how many is the possession of a garden at all not a personal solution but the only known answer for a civilised existence?

  Is your home just what you’d build?

  The argument that suburbs are what everyone wants is invalid.

  We are not a medieval community that actually directs its individual houses to its taste. Folk-build is dead in England.

  The modern, the urban, the vertical (albeit with horizontal decks), the communal: there, unambiguously and without compunction, lay the
Smithsonian future. ‘If the life lived high-up is worth living then it should be suitable for everyone who wants it,’ they insisted. ‘No taboo should be put on those with children, to live the lopsided existence of the suburbs; ostracised from town and country, forced into this antiquated way of life. We cannot afford to leave people scattered indiscriminately across the ground.’25

  Not many were as fanatical about the joys of the vertical, but during 1952/3 the activator mood was continuing to shift in that direction. This included the activators in the Ministry of Housing. Although its manual Living in Flats, dated December 1951, had been distinctly cautious – recommending that ‘families with several children should as far as possible be accommodated in houses or maisonettes rather than in flats’ and adding that ‘large estates of flats are apt to be impersonal, and are better developed as a combination of small areas, each a distinct unit’ – the mood there seems to have decisively hardened in 1952. In February the ministry warned the LCC against following the example of ‘many provincial cities’, where an ‘unreasoning prejudice against flats’ meant that they ‘go on eating up the countryside with cottage estates [ie of houses] while their decaying centres cry out for redevelopment at high density’; two months later one of the ministry’s mandarins, the formidable Dame Evelyn Sharp, informed a suitably dismayed, dispersion-minded Town and Country Planning Association (still run by Osborn) that in the ministry’s forthcoming manual, The Density of Residential Areas, ‘the standards of density were immensely influenced by the need to conserve land’, adding that higher density would also produce ‘positively better living conditions’; in his foreword to the manual, Macmillan was adamant that ‘it is important to save every acre that can be saved’; and in February 1953 his Parliamentary Secretary, the super-energetic Ernest Marples, expressed the wish, in the context of a Commons debate on the loss of agricultural land, that ‘the nation as a whole will become a little more flat-minded’. Altogether, it was a hardening of line that reflected not only the failure to question the axiomatic assumption that flats saved land whereas houses gobbled it but also a remarkably effective campaign by the agricultural lobby, headed by the National Farmers’ Union. In March 1953 the Any Questions? panel was asked in Tavistock whether the nation could support itself in terms of food production. ‘The boot is now, ladies and gentlemen, on the other foot – you’ve got to face it,’ solemnly replied the nation’s best-known farmer, A. G. Street. ‘The thing that will save you from starvation is your home farming, and the make-weight is the little bit that you can buy from abroad, and it’ll get less and less and less unless you can work harder and harder and harder.’26

  There were other high-density, pro-flats opinions expressed, including by architects – increasingly prestigious figures, unlike planners. In Glasgow the fervently pro-flats Sam Bunton put forward plans in January 1952 for the high-rise redevelopment of the bombed area of Clydebank, employing what the Builder called ‘the cross-wall, multi-flat system’ that ‘aimed to prove that by a new planning and constructional technique, building into the air is the cheapest and soundest form of providing homes’. Soon afterwards, St John Wilson in the Observer declared that the choice in city planning lay between the ‘cottage-and-a-cow man’, wanting to scale down cities, and ‘the supporter of Corbusier’s “human” vertical garden city’, with Wilson clearly in the latter camp. That autumn the Glasgow Herald’s municipal correspondent insisted that ‘the new types of flats’ going up in the city’s peripheral estates were ‘in appearance and in practical living conditions far removed from the old conception of the Glasgow tenement’, while in December an article in the Architects’ Journal on the future redevelopment of blitzed, badly rundown inner-city Liverpool called on it to be ‘the first city in these isles to undertake some multi-storey building’, with ‘multi’ meaning 15 or 20 storeys. And in February 1953 the Daily Mirror declared that ‘there is no doubt that this country must save space by building upward and that many more people will have to live in flats’, adding that ‘if they were all satisfactorily sound-proofed half the dislike of them would disappear’.27

  A particularly interesting take came from Michael Young’s valedictory ‘For Richer For Poorer’ report in November 1952. There, as part of his overarching theme of revival of the community, he advocated ‘rehousing people in the central areas of our cities and towns, as part of a great plan of urban reconstruction, instead of forcing them to move to housing estates on the outskirts’. What did that mean in terms of practicalities? Young conceded that ‘it would clearly be quite wrong, and unacceptable to the public, to put everyone into flats’, and that ‘families with young children need houses with gardens, not flats without’. But in the case of ‘old people’, he argued, ‘most of these can quite well be housed in flats (with lifts) of varying heights’. Quite as much as the Smithsons, Young equated high density with community and low density with social anomie:

  The Garden City type of open development, as represented in many housing estates and suburbs, is unfavourable to community spirit: for one thing, the distances which the mother has to walk, at a time when she is tied by her children, to get to shops, clinics and centres may be so great that she just doesn’t go and, if she doesn’t go, she doesn’t meet anyone. To many of the slum-dwellers and others who are taken from their crowded tenements to new estates, the vast open spaces are not a virtue but a vice, making for dreariness and isolation.

  ‘The higher the density,’ in short, ‘the fewer will have to move, and the more people will be able to remain near their relatives and friends in the community which they know.’ Given that dispersal from the unhealthy, overcrowded inner city had been at the very heart of the progressive ‘1945’ project, and that Young himself had written Labour’s 1945 manifesto, this was a striking shift.

  The final decision over flats rested with the local authorities, and here too the trend was almost entirely one way, influenced in part by increasingly favourable central-government subsidies for their construction. West Ham in July 1952 broke its own four-storey limit and gave the go-ahead to a ten-storey block of flats, notwithstanding the finding of a recent report that ‘the dislike of flats is particularly strong in West Ham’; Liverpool two months later, even before the Architects’ Journal’s advice, approved ‘a number of multi-storey flats up to ten storeys in height’ in order ‘to make the most of the land in the central areas’; Salford in January 1953 went for a series of seven-storey flats, largely to reduce dependence on overspill housing and in marked contrast to anti-high-rise Manchester; while Coventry’s decision in April to have 11-storey flats in its forthcoming housing programme was sold in terms of ‘flats with unique heating systems and electric washers included among the fittings’. During the Newcastle debate on slum clearance, Councillor Huddart did note that ‘flats are only justifiable for families if the residents have some compensation for the disadvantage of living in flats’, but argued that ‘in this case [ie in inner-city Newcastle] they can have the compensation of being near their work and entertainment and shops’.28

  So too in Birmingham, especially with the appointment in 1952 of the flats-minded (though preferably in the context of mixed development) A. G. Sheppard Fidler as City Architect. Early that year, moreover, the council unveiled its development plan, largely the work of the City Surveyor, the arch-engineer Herbert Manzoni. ‘The Birmingham of 1972’ was the Birmingham Post’s front-page headline: ‘In 20 years much of the physical aspect of the centre of Birmingham will be changed. It will be a city of tall blocks of offices and flats, traffic congestion will be no longer a problem and underground subways will enable pedestrians to cross the roads without reference to the traffic.’ These new roads would include three concentric ring roads, thirteen radial roads and various link roads, while large blocks of flats were also envisaged for the outer suburbs in order to preserve existing agricultural land within the city’s boundaries. A public exhibition was held, and the Post (generally supportive of the proposals) described the
reaction of ‘the most incongruous visitor to this apotheosis of modern architecture and town-planning’, namely ‘a man who shed a metaphoric tear for the back-to-back houses’. Or in his own words: ‘They’re nice and warm, and cosy and companionable.’

  There were other dissenters. Shortly before, the architectural writer John Summerson, in his 1930s youth a convinced Modernist, had offered a thoroughly gloomy appraisal of the LCC’s new 20-year development plan. The picture it evoked was, he told the New Statesman’s for the most part impeccably progressive readers, ‘one of indescribable melancholy, consisting of ranges of near-corbusier “working-class” flats standing on sooty lawns, with concrete kerbs; of schools which might equally be massed lavatories or unemployment exchanges; and of private enterprise office blocks bulging upwards into a silhouette hacked out of space in a battle with rights of light and zoning limitations’. He argued, moreover, that there remained ‘a serious psychological barrier between the modern architect and his public, a public which persists in believing that buildings, like people, have their feet on the ground and their heads in the air’. Another erstwhile architectural Modernist, John Betjeman, probably felt the same, for in the autumn of 1952 he came out strongly against Sergei Cadleigh’s ambitious ‘High Paddington’ scheme for a vertical township of 8,000 people above Paddington Station’s goods yard area – a scheme blessed by Marples but abhorrent to Betjeman, who pointed out that gardening was a national hobby and asked indignantly whether we were to be turned into a nation made up largely of flat-dwellers. Even Thomas Sharp, in the 1940s a dominant, deeply urbanist architect-planner, now had his reservations. ‘We should not advocate the building of high flats merely because we like the look of them aesthetically,’ he warned the architectural profession in February 1953. ‘We have to measure the sociological, economic and aesthetic problems all together. It’s that which makes housing such a tough problem.’29