Concretopia Read online

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR CONCRETOPIA

  ‘With a cast of often unsung heroes – and one or two villains – Concretopia is a lively, surprising account of how Britain came to look the way it does.’

  Will Wiles, author of Care of Wooden Floors

  ‘Never has a trip from Croydon and back again been so fascinating. John Grindrod’s witty and informative tour of Britain is a total treat, and will win new converts to stare in awe (or at least enlightened comprehension) at Crap Towns and Boring Postcards…’

  Catherine Croft, Director, Twentieth Century Society

  ‘Fascinating throughout … does a magnificent job of making historical sense of things I had never really understood or appreciated … This is a brilliant book: a vital vade mecum for anyone interested in Britain’s 20th-century history.’

  James Hamilton-Paterson, author of Empire of the Clouds

  ‘From the Norfolk birthplace of brutalism and the once-Blitzed city centre of Plymouth, to the new towns of Cumbernauld and Sheffield’s streets in the sky, a most engaging, illustrated exploration of how crumbling austerity Britain was transformed into a space-age world of concrete, steel and glass.’

  Bookseller

  ‘A powerful and deeply personal history of postwar Britain. Grindrod shows how prefab housing, masterplans, and tower blocks are as much part of our national story as Tudorbethan suburbs and floral clocks. It’s like eavesdropping into a conversation between John Betjeman, J.G. Ballard and Jonathan Meades.’

  Leo Hollis, author of Cities are Good for You

  CONCRETOPIA

  A journey around the rebuilding of postwar Britain

  JOHN GRINDROD

  For Adam Nightingale

  ‘So we can build a new home for ourselves: a new Britain.

  No difficulties, except of our own making, stand in the way.

  Knowledge, enthusiasm and unbounded skill

  Wait for the opportunity. We alone

  The people of this nation are its deciders, it creators, its builders.

  A new world we must make: with what success we make it

  Rests in ourselves.

  The choice is our own.

  The future begins to-day.’

  from Building Britain: 1941, a film script by Thomas Sharp, in

  The Town Planning Review, October 1952, p204

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  ‘Concrete Jungle Where Dreams are Made’

  Part 1: So Different, So Appealing

  1. ‘A Holiday Camp All Year Round’:

  The Temporary Building Programme and Prefabs (1944–51)

  2. ‘A Decent Start in Life’:

  Garden Cities and the First New Towns (1946–51)

  3. ‘A Real Effort to be Jolly’:

  The Festival of Britain on London’s South Bank (1951)

  4. ‘An Architect’s Dream!’:

  Rebuilding Blitzed Plymouth and Coventry (1940–62)

  5. ‘A Touch of Genius’:

  Herts, Minds and Brutalism (1949–54)

  Part 2: Shake It Up Baby Now

  1. ‘A Flying Saucer Taking You to Mars’:

  Glasgow, King of Comprehensive Development (1957–65)

  2. ‘A New Dimension Added to the Street’:

  Sheffield’s Streets in the Sky (1957–61)

  3. ‘A Wild and Romantic Place’:

  Arndales and Urban Motorways (1959–65)

  4. ‘A Natural Evolution of Living Conditions’:

  Newcastle Gets the System Building Bug (1959–69)

  5. ‘A Contemporary Canaletto’:

  How Office Blocks Transformed our Skyline (1956–75)

  6. ‘A Village With Your Children in Mind’:

  Span and the Hippy Dreams of New Ash Green (1957–72)

  7. ‘A Veritable Jewel in the Navel of Scotland’:

  Cumbernauld’s Curious Megastructure (1955–72)

  Part 3: No Future

  1. ‘A Pack of Cards’:

  Tower Block Highs and Lows (1968–74)

  2. ‘A Terrible Confession of Defeat’:

  Protests and Preservation (1969–79)

  3. ‘As Corrupt a City as You’ll Find’:

  Uncovering the Lies at the Heart of the Boom (1969–77)

  4. ‘A Little Bit of Exclusivity’:

  Milton Keynes, the Last New Town (1967–79)

  5. ‘A City within a City’:

  The Late Flowering of the Barbican and the National Theatre (1957–81)

  Epilogue

  ‘The Dream has Gone but the Baby is Real’

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  ‘Concrete Jungle Where Dreams are Made’

  INTRODUCTION

  It is difficult to understand the place you come from. You grow up so much a part of it, and yet your home, street and town remain mysterious, full of questions no one seems able to answer. Why is one of our bedrooms so small? Why can’t we play ball games on that grass? Could we live in a tall block of flats like those kids do? For the most part you put up with these unanswered questions, distracted by the overwhelming banality of real life. We have to keep putting 50ps in the meter under the stairs. Other people own their houses. The buses don’t come down this end of the estate. Why? Who knows. These things just are.

  I grew up in New Addington. The place has always felt odd, like an inner-city housing estate abandoned in the country outside Croydon. I remember my O-level geography teacher arriving at a lesson in 1985, armed with an AV trolley and the ominous words, ‘I think you’ll find this very interesting.’ When she pressed play on the Betamax recorder, a scrawny man in seventies clothing popped up on the screen, describing a town planning experiment that had gone horribly wrong. Then a caption: ‘New Addington’. There was no reaction from us – mainly because at my school to express interest, surprise or engagement of any sort was a fatal sign of weakness – but that programme did something to me that a decade of geography lessons had entirely failed to do. It made me think. As the presenter made his way around the estate over the next half an hour, I felt increasingly as though I were listening to a surgeon explaining my symptoms to a group of medical students while I lay there with my gown open. What did he mean? Sure, New Addington was far from perfect, but what was so wrong with it? There it was, acres of it, getting on with inertly just being there – and we, the class of 1985, were all its children. If this was bad planning, did that make us bad people from a bad estate?

  A bad estate?

  Tower blocks mingle with low rise flats in New Addington.

  In all likelihood you have not heard of New Addington. It has few claims to fame. The most enduring export of this south London estate of 22,000 people is the Croydon Facelift, the no-mercy ponytail worn by strung-out working-class mums from the estate. ‘Racist Tram Woman’ Emma West – source of Twitter outrage in 2011 – briefly became its most famous citizen, after a video of her racially abusing a fellow passenger was viewed 11 million times on YouTube. Kirsty MacColl wrote a song about the place: The Addington Shuffle. It seems fitting it was a B-side. And in the summer of 2012, while the Olympics were briefly transforming the rest of London into a zone of peace, harmony and love, a truly dreadful news story kept the residents of New Addington transfixed. Twelve-year-old Tia Sharp was first reported missing from her grandmother’s house in The Lindens, and a week later her body was found wrapped in a blanket in the attic. Images of the fruitless searches, the wasted vigils, the shrine to the young girl were shown for days on the news, alongside Olympic champions proudly displaying their hard-won medals a few miles away in Stratford. A case like that does a lot to change a town. Owen Jones, auth
or of Chavs, wrote on Twitter that he felt it said as much about life in poor communities as Harold Shipman did about GPs. New Addington has the lowest voter turnout of anywhere in the south of England, what politics it does have shifting over the years from staunch Labour to a recent flirtation with the far right.

  Flats on the Fieldway estate.

  The tree gives some idea of the high winds experienced in ‘Little Siberia’.

  This vast estate was built seven miles outside Croydon town centre, on top of a hill so chilly, windswept and isolated it has earned the nickname Little Siberia. In 1935, just as ‘green belt’ legislation was being introduced to protect the area around London from urban sprawl, the land was bought by developer Charles Boot, whose company had been responsible for building more interwar houses than any other. Not everyone was thrilled at the prospect of a new estate being built on this wooded hill. ‘We know people have got to live somewhere, but there are so many other spaces more suitable for building,’ opined the vicar of Addington Village, which sat at the foot of the hill.1 Relations between the two settlements, ancient village and new estate, have not improved over time.

  1,000 red-brick semis were built by Charles Boot in the late thirties. © Croydon Local Studies Library and Archives Service

  Yet 1,000 red-brick semis and maisonettes were built before the war and a further 1,000 prefabricated council houses and flats joined them in the fifties and sixties. In 1970, the year I was born, my parents moved from Nine Elms, a working-class district of Battersea, into one of the prewar maisonettes.

  There was green space everywhere on this prewar section of the estate, most of it ruthlessly mown: grass verges, patches of grass between blocks of flats, broad avenues of grass separating rows of houses, enormous grass roundabouts, the contours of the hillside shorn like a lumpy scalp. By the time I was growing up, most of these areas had acquired ‘no ball games’ signs.

  A pair of New Addington’s prewar maisonettes.

  Small blocks of flats surrounded by acres of mown grass at North Downs.

  The postwar estate was more tightly packed, all alleyways, walkways and clusters of garages: the folk living here had to walk to the outskirts to see anything more than pinched slivers of green. Despite the farmers’ fields and woodland that still ring New Addington today, to me the place always felt more inner-city than suburban. It slotted neatly into my teenager’s view of British life in the eighties – a mental map composed of the riot-ravaged suburbs of Brixton and Liverpool, the desolate urban landscapes evoked by bands such as The Specials or The Smiths, and the concrete, post-apocalyptic settings of television sci-fi and Threads. Looking back, I see that New Addington wasn’t really like any of those places. It isn’t easy to pin the place down. This curious hotchpotch of a housing estate, plonked on the hill and surrounded by woodland, was unlike anywhere else I’d ever visited – until, that is, I started to research this book.

  The mothership is Croydon, a place lazy comics reflexively reach for as a synonym for shit. It’s shorthand for a rather dated English idea of ugliness, boredom and embarrassment, alongside Olive from On the Buses, woodchip wallpaper and school dinners. As a teenager I began to stray into the centre of Croydon, eventually getting a job there, but I understood it no better than I did New Addington. There were the office blocks, of course: ‘Manhattan built in Poland’ as one wag had it. And there was a lot of antipathy to the place, I knew. ‘It was my nemesis, I hated Croydon with a real vengeance … it represented everything I didn’t want in my life, everything I wanted to get away from,’ was David Bowie’s verdict, and many of my friends agreed.i

  Croydon is one of the biggest towns in Europe: a third of a million people live there. If it were a city it would be the twelfth largest in Britain. From 1977 onwards, it has repeatedly been identified by the Home Office as a prime candidate for city status, only to be overlooked – most recently in 2002, in favour of smaller towns like Newport, Stirling and Preston. The perennial experience of rejection has made the ambitious council chippy.

  Croydon’s origins are as a medieval market town, blossoming under the patronage of various Archbishops of Canterbury. It grew into a prosperous Victorian town that, by the turn of the twentieth century, was eager to rival England’s big cities. Then an airstrip built during the Great War to help the Royal Flying Corps tackle the zeppelin raids on Britain changed everything. When the war ended, the airstrip became glamorous, art deco Croydon Aerodrome, and suddenly, in the heart of suburban Surrey, was London’s airport, home to Imperial Airways. Britain’s richest citizens passed through Croydon on their way to jolly jaunts around Europe, or on the first leg of grand tours to His Majesty’s Dominions. It was what the Empire was to Liverpool and Bristol, or the Industrial Revolution was to Manchester and Leeds. For two decades, the airport put Croydon at the cutting edge of technology, design and innovation.

  The Second World War bloodied the borough, with doodlebugs damaging some 54,000 houses (and giving a boost to town planning), but it was the advance of technology that eventually made the airport redundant. The Second World War brought with it a need for ever-bigger planes to carry ever-heavier weapons everlonger distances, and by the end of the war, Croydon Airport was too small to house the new generation of airliners. Instead, the town looked to London’s office boom to supply a fresh raison d’être and fund its expansion.

  Amid the skyscrapers in central Croydon.

  In the sixties, thanks to some wily dealing by local MP James Marshall, the infamous office blocks – like scaled-up Mad Men-era G-Plan wardrobes and filing cabinets – exploded onto Croydon’s skyline. The resulting cityscape made sense during the week, when the ground-level car parks were crowded and the surrounding streets were bustling with suits and briefcases. But if you wandered in the empty space among their girlishly turned ankles on a Sunday, you couldn’t escape the impression that they had turned up in the wrong place, like giant social misfits. They seemed all the more awkward when you considered that they were standing where once there had been homes and gardens, whose owners had been encouraged to sell up for a few bucks.

  The Post Office depot, one of many towers being built at East Croydon in the late sixties. © Ian Steel

  Architecturally there was all sorts going on: here, the kind of blue-mirrored glass you’d see on children’s sunglasses; there, Tetris in concrete; beyond them, what looked to be a space freighter from a seventies sci-fi series, all glass curtain walls and concrete gables. By the early seventies this landscape of ‘total work’ would be familiar throughout the country.

  Not all of Croydon’s development was vertical: let’s not forget the urban motorway splitting the centre into East and West, or the shopping precincts sprawling across the centre of the town like so many fallen Titans. One such, the Whitgift Centre, was deemed the ‘showpiece,’ and has become the ninth busiest shopping centre in Britain. It was heavily featured in the opening credits of the original 1979 series of Terry and June, where Purley’s foremost couple were shown getting lost all over the centre of town as they attempted to find each other in the landscape of exposed concrete beams, squared-off steel railings and frosted wire glass panels. By the time I was working in a bookshop there eight years later, that style had fallen so out of favour that the entire structure had been clad in creamy, fibreglass Neo-Victoriana. Frumpy, functional Rosa Klebb had been given a makeover and emerged as flouncy, fairytale Princess Di. It was fascinating to watch the whole edifice regenerate around me, the future being tarted up as the past.

  The Whitgift Centre in 1971. © Ian Steel

  By 1993 the Berlin Wall had tumbled, and Croydon’s office centre in the east was looking decidedly frail too. Thatcherism’s great architectural legacy had been the Docklands, a vast new London business district of giant silver skyscrapers. It was built for the age of PCs, privatisation and the space shuttle, as East Croydon had been built for the Trimphone, devaluation and the Austin Maxi.

  Understandably worried that Docklands would wo
o all the major investors and financial service corporations away from the town, Croydon council invited the Architectural Foundation to pimp for entries for a competition they called ‘Croydon: The Future’, designed to showcase the town as a major corporate investment opportunity. Among them were a boomerang-shaped bridge across Wellesley Road, a giant propeller, an underground art gallery to replace the underpass, and travelators in the sky. My personal favourite were the inflatable Tokyo-style ‘dromes’ (or inverted bouncy castles) to be set on top of the multi-storey car parks in the centre of town, creating instant arenas for concerts, skiing, horse jumping and basketball. But the most outrageous solution was by the James Bond-style megalomaniac who intended to demolish Lunar House, bury its offices underground and replace it with a boating lake.

  Needless to say, none of these projects were ever realised, but in bigger cities all over the country private investment was flexing its muscles where government planners had once held sway. In the last 15 years, massive regeneration schemes in Newcastle, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester have transformed these cities, and brand new shops, apartment blocks and offices now stand where postwar concrete buildings once towered. Ambitious Croydon is rattled.

  The history of Croydon in the last 200 years has been the story of a town evolving and adapting in an effort to keep pace with the times: from Chaucerian market town through nineteenth-century industrialisation to the housing and commercial projects of the twentieth century. Today, while Croydon looks warily on, the concrete, prefabricated and high-rise buildings of the postwar era are being eradicated, and structures made with new, high-tech materials are taking their place. Where once nostalgic figures such as John Betjeman sprang into action to defend our Victorian heritage, now a small band of architectural historians and mid-century modernists are arguing for the preservation of our most important postwar monuments before they are all developed beyond recognition.