Concretopia Page 2
This is no easy task. There is an accepted narrative to the way we think about our postwar architectural legacy. That narrative is somewhat akin to the plot of a superhero blockbuster: a team of supervillains – planners, architects, academics – have had their corrupt, megalomaniac way with the country for 30 years. Then, at long last, a band of unlikely heroes – a ragbag of poets, environmentalists and good, honest citizens – rise up against this architectural Goliath and topple it in the name of Prince Charles. In this story, prewar modernism equals good, postwar modernism equals bad. One only has to look at an episode of Channel 4’s Grand Designs to see that people are still keen to build glass-fronted white boxes of the kind popularised in the twenties by Le Corbusier.
Hence, while early modernism is still much imitated, the default word for what we ended up with after the Second World War is monstrosities. The towers, the blocks, the redeveloped city centres, the new towns: concrete monstrosities, mostly – even if they’re not concrete, or, for that matter, monstrosities. Postwar buildings are concrete monstrosities in the same way that political correctness is always going mad. It’s a potent and irresistible cliché, worming its way into your psyche, even if you don’t agree with the sentiment. A litany of planning decisions, from the demolition of the Euston Arch to the remodelling of cities from Glasgow to Portsmouth, all appear to tell the story of a bloodthirsty elite out to smash the decent British way of doing things, to crush the life out of it beneath concrete monstrosities.
And yet, was that what actually happened? Were these architects and planners the philistine barbarians of popular myth? Are the places they planned and built as awful as Crap Towns might make us believe? And is their legacy one of catastrophic failure? After all, they inherited a nation where millions lived in overcrowded conditions in cities, where factories belched toxic fumes onto the slums next door and the most basic sanitation was a dream for millions. It isn’t all that hard to understand the demand for change and the excitement of new ideas. A mere half-century had brought the motorcar and aeroplanes, antibiotics and nuclear physics. The possibilities for human progress seemed endless, and after the catastrophic upheaval of two wars, people around the world were open to new ways of living. Croydon’s postwar Borough Engineer Allan Holt’s view was, ‘I think that Croydon had either got to deteriorate or go forward. We went forward.’ And so did thousands of other projects, from homes to offices, power stations to pylons, airports to motorways, and in some cases, entire new towns.
‘We went forward’:
The town centre is a vision of the future from the past.
On 8 August 2011, while I was researching this book, riots erupted in Croydon. I was in Sheffield at the time, watching events unfold on television, a strange reversal of the situation in 1981, where Sheffield had been one of the places I’d seen rioting break out in on the news. One thing that was apparent from the media coverage afterwards was that no one seemed to know anything about Croydon. It had long passed under the radar of crime correspondents and journalists, and the reportage consequently had an empty feel. Pundits seemed at a loss to explain what Croydon was, let alone how the riots had started there.
When I was a kid I wanted to be a robot. A big, clunking, Marvin-type android. Today, as I look out at Croydon, it seems obvious why. These supersized, solid-state monoliths have stood patiently by for decades, just waiting for their robot friends to turn up and give them meaning. Croydon makes sense as a town to be approached by jetpack, where paranoid androids hum early Human League songs in the underpasses and flying saucers land on top of shopping centres, transforming Terry and June into George and Jane Jetson at the zap of a ray gun. Like those aliens and androids, I feel quite at home wandering among the office towers of East Croydon, caught forever on the cusp of decimalisation, silicon chips and the death of our sci-fi vision of the future. Surely there are millions of people like me in Britain, who don’t recognise the village green, country cottage or Georgian square as the epitome of our nation, but whose identities have instead been moulded by concrete monstrosities or bad planning – or rather, the postwar optimism that sought to build a better future.
This book is my attempt to get to the root of this obsession, and to plug the gaps in my own knowledge of the world I grew up in. How did estates like New Addington come to be built, and what were the ideas behind them? Why did towns like Croydon completely rebuild their town centres? What principles, if any, lay behind these decisions, and whose principles were they? How did they meet the challenges of city centre Blitz damage, vast Victorian slum clearance and endless suburban sprawl?
Over the years the fortunes of these grand modernising projects have ebbed and flowed, from admiration and the kudos of listing to demonisation and demolition. Often the original feelings of pride have been lost over time. ‘It cannot really be claimed that any of the rebuilt cities of Britain are works of art,’ wrote historian Gavin Stamp,2 while geographer Alice Coleman’s view is that ‘the modern movement’s brand of utopia is a virtually universal disaster.’3 Yet in recent years the era has found its champions too, not least in the Twentieth Century Society.
In July 2011, I set off round the country to explore some of these extraordinary places, and meet some people who helped create the world that was built after the war, to find out what that time was really like. They shared their experiences of everything from designing the Barbican Centre to growing up in a Gorbals high-rise, from building the Elephant and Castle to planning new towns in Wales and Scotland, from helping in the reconstruction of Coventry Cathedral to visiting the Festival of Britain. I’ve also delved into a lot of books, journals and newspapers from the era. It’s fascinating to me that my copy of the book on Hook – the Hampshire new town that never was – came from the University of Wisconsin Library; and Dame Evelyn Sharp’s dry-as-dust tome on the Ministry of Housing had to be prised out of the possession of Ohio University. They demonstrate that these experiments in Britain had worldwide fame.
I didn’t know what to expect when I set out, but what I found was a story of design triumphs and planning disasters, of heroic struggles and thwarted schemes, widespread corruption and utopian ideals. This is the story I have tried to tell in the pages that follow.
Notes
1 Rev. F. J. Nixon, Croydon Advertiser, 10/3/35
2 Gavin Stamp, Britain’s Lost Cities, p3
3 Alice Coleman, Utopia on Trial, p176
i Oddly enough, many pop stars have lived, worked or studied in Croydon, from Art College punks to more recent BRIT School alumni such as Amy Winehouse and Adele, but it’s rarely mentioned alongside pop powerhouses like Sheffield, Liverpool or Manchester. No one wants to be associated with a Croydon sound. Even Bob Stanley, architecturally savvy member of Croydon pop champions Saint Etienne is faintly disparaging. ‘South London’s not really London, is it?’ he told the Guardian. ‘It’s just an endless suburb.’
Part 1
SO DIFFERENT, SO APPEALING
1. ‘A Holiday Camp All Year Round’
THE TEMPORARY BUILDING PROGRAMME AND PREFABS (1944–1951)
I was excited about my grand odyssey around Britain, so it was almost disappointing when it turned out that my first journey would be a mere three-mile stroll from my flat in Forest Hill. On a rainy spring morning I set off on foot for Catford, south-east London, home to the largest estate of wartime prefabs still standing in Britain. Even with the help of the GPS on my phone they weren’t easy to find. A damp, half-hour walk through streets of small, terraced Victorian houses revealed little. So there was a mild rush of relief when I rounded yet another red-brick corner and came face to face with a sleeping army, barely peeping above privet hedges, wooden fences and parked cars, and dwarfed even by the two-storey houses. Here were the 187 forties prefabs that formed the Excalibur Estate.
I was surprised by how immediately my heart went out to them. It may have been their size, so modest and low-lying in this vertical urban landscape. Or the signs of ageing which they
made little effort to hide, with their paint peeling off external walls. Or perhaps it was the knowledge that soon there will only be six of them left, Lewisham council having finally gained approval for their plans to demolish the estate and replace the prefabs with twice as many new homes. Here was the evidence, soon to disappear, of a heroic tale from the end of the Second World War: not the usual story of destruction and catastrophe, but one of ingenuity and humanity. A story of how enterprising engineers turned Spitfire factories to making homes for the bombed-out, the displaced, the exhausted generation.
The immediate aftermath of the war was a hard time. Rationing was at its height: bread joined the long list of basic controlled items in 1946, and potatoes in 1947. The population had been either dispersed – to fight, to work the land – or flung together, forced to share overcrowded homes. The country was bankrupt, and day-to-day life for millions was increasingly colourless and threadbare – a fact all too clearly brought home by the sleek, well-fed US troops who’d been based all over Britain. By 1951, eight million homes had been declared unfit for habitation, of which seven million had no hot water and six million no inside toilet. In 1949, a fifth of London homes were officially classed as slums. For bombed-out families crushed into sharing homes with relatives or strangers, the relief of peace was soon overshadowed by pressing problems. New homes were needed – not so much fast, as instantly.
The war had shown people what modern materials and production techniques could achieve in munitions factories up and down the land. ‘Why not switch these factories over to the production of houses, using the light, efficient and beautiful materials, like steel duralumin, and light alloys, which are stretched to such efficiency and economy in aircraft,’ asked Donald Gibson, the progressive young city architect for Blitz-damaged Coventry, in 1940.1 Prefabrication was not a new idea – over the past few decades thousands of huts, shacks and billets had been created using the technology, from the curved corrugated roofs of Nissen huts to the slatted timber of houses imported from Sweden – but it was about to be embraced on the home front with the fervour of a ‘Dig for Victory’ or ‘Make Do and Mend’ campaign.
Late in 1942, with housing shortages worsening at an alarming rate and predictions that four million new houses would be needed within 10 years, the government began to take action. Sir George Burt, who ran the construction company Mowlem, was tasked with finding new ways of building homes, given the shortages of materials and labour. In no time the committee was flooded with hundreds of proposals for building prefabricated houses, and a painstaking process of sorting the wheat from the chaff commenced. In October 1944, the Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act was passed, authorising the government to spend up to £150 million on the provision of temporary housing: the Burt Committee began to roll up its sleeves and start work in earnest. Hopes were high. ‘[T]he government hope to manufacture up to half a million of these prefabricated houses,’ reported The Times, while Churchill declaimed, with typical panache: ‘The erection of these emergency houses will be carried out by exceptional methods, on the lines of a military operation … The success of this undertaking is not to be impeded by reliance at any point on traditional methods.’2
The first fruits of the government’s research into temporary houses were made public that autumn, when four experimental prefabs were exhibited at the Tate Gallery in London. The first was a design by the Ministry of Works, known as the Portal House, named after the Minister himself. This all-steel bungalow, lined with plywood for insulation, had been constructed by two car manufacturers, Briggs Motor Bodies and the Pressed Steel Company. It was never put into production due to a wartime steel shortage. Next there was the Selection Engineering Company’s Uni-Seco prefab, which was timber framed and clad with asbestos cement panels. In due course 30,000 of these flat-roofed little bungalows were manufactured, and these were what greeted me in Catford at the Excalibur Estate. The head of the company, Bernard Brunton, wasn’t impressed with the strength of the government’s commitment to the Temporary Housing Programme, and wrote to The Times in February 1945 complaining of ‘a deplorable lack of coordination as between various Ministries concerned’.3 As if to prove his point, three months later 3,000 Uni-Secos originally destined for the capital had to be relocated around the country instead because the London County Council couldn’t clear space fast enough to site them. Also on display at the Tate was a prefab made by the Hull company Tarran, built from reinforced concrete panels around a lightweight timber frame: 19,000 of these were built. The final exhibit was the Arcon house, whose pitched roof gave it the familiar look of a scout hut. Manufactured by construction firm Taylor Woodrow, the corrugated asbestos walls and roof were attached to a steel frame. Nearly 40,000 of these were put into production.
It was, however, the design that replaced the rejected steel Portal that would go on to become the most numerous of all the temporary houses. This aluminium prefab issued not from the construction industry, but from the military industrial complex. The Aircraft Industries Research Organisation on Housing, or AIRO H, manufactured a total of 55,000 of these metal bungalows, on production lines that, until very recently, had been churning out heavy bombers. They were built from aluminium from melted-down aircraft. The AIRO H prototype wouldn’t be exhibited until the following year, 1945, when one was erected behind Selfridges department store in London.
The Times was a little sniffy about the original four they had seen at the Tate. ‘The present exterior is dull and unpleasing,’ wrote their reporter, opining that ‘repetition of these units would, in fact, be wearisome.’ Inside, he found there were ‘all sorts of awkward connexions; that from bed rooms to bath room and w.c. being through the kitchen’. Yet, in summary, the article refrained from condemnation: ‘To say that the emergency house cannot be properly judged until it has been lived in is to state the obvious … All will agree that a very significant first step has been taken in the direction of building by mass-production.’4
Before I could reach the Uni-Seco houses at Excalibur I had to negotiate the estate’s strange and wonderful tin tabernacle. The church, St Mark’s, has the curved, corrugated roof of a Nissen hut. Its neighbour, the community centre, is like a temporary mess for Battle of Britain pilots. It was as if these two militaristic sentries were guarding their little estate against the bigger brick buildings all around. They were embodiments of the effort that was made to create a discrete, bona fide neighbourhood.
All of the roads and pathways on Excalibur were Arthurian-themed: Mordred Road, Ector Road, Pelinore Road … These heroic names – like calling a hamster Samson – contrasted with the modesty of the prefabs, whose height, or lack of it, was the most striking feature of the estate. There really wasn’t a lot going on above head height, other than the odd tree or telephone pole. Though factory-produced, there was something strangely organic about these houses. Whereas the surrounding Victorian brick buildings had the look of giant fossils – long dead beasts that had become immovable features of the landscape – the prefabs had none of that sense of rock-solid permanence. Instead, they were slowly sagging, stricken by rickety joints and crumbling skeletons, worn out by the constant, losing battle to halt the decay evident in their mottled skin.
The Excalibur Estate’s ‘tin tabernacle’ St Mark’s Church, a former Nissen hut.
Some of the estate’s prefabs were falling into disuse or disrepair.
Yet back in the early postwar years, these huts were at the cutting edge of British construction technology. ‘It is the scheme which is temporary, not the houses,’ ran a Uni-Seco advert in 1945.5 In 1952, four years after the last temporary house had been delivered as part of the government’s programme, the company was still vigorously marketing its products: ‘Building programmes can be maintained in spite of the steel shortage by using Seco,’ ran one opportunistic advert.6 Another led with the mildly alarming claim that anything ‘from a light factory to a labour camp’ could be ‘delivered immediately from stock’.7
A h
uge amount of public resistance to rehousing people in prefabs had been expected, and the government-sponsored media campaign launched to promote them went far beyond a few show houses at the Tate. A public information film was made, the first of many I’d see in the course of my research, covering every new development from the forties to the seventies. This one was directed by Lewis Gilbert, who went on to mastermind three James Bond films as well as Alfie and Shirley Valentine.
The Ten Year Plan followed a dogged young journalist on his journey to discover just what these new temporary houses were all about, and what people thought of them. Who played this womanising, chain-smoking young journalist? That’s right: Charles Hawtrey. In big round glasses, he’s a hoot, whether fearlessly interviewing mouthy mums or listening to earnest briefings on prefabrication by a panel of military types, like a scene from Reach for the Sky (which, funnily enough, Gilbert later directed).
In the event, the prefabs were received more favourably than anyone had expected. ‘It was beautiful,’ recalled Islington prefab-dweller Betty Vodden, who moved into hers in 1947. ‘There was a fridge, which was something I’d never had before, an electric cooker, electric kettle.’8 ‘Mother went to the housing office every Wednesday,’ remembered Mary Sprakes, ‘and my father went every Saturday to see where they were on the list. Such was the demand that the housing officer had a nervous breakdown. In the end my mother found a councillor that she vaguely knew, contacted him and they got a prefab.’9 Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock grew up in one too. ‘It seemed like living in a spaceship,’ he said of the modern amenities like fridges and plumbed-in baths that few at the time had.10