Concretopia Page 6
‘The building of a new town is not merely a great task of physical construction, it is also a great adventure in social construction,’ wrote Lewis Silkin in his introduction to the New Towns Act 1946, ‘for the new towns must be lively communities with their own civic consciousness and civic pride.’20 But constructing communities amid the mud, drudge and chaos of a building site wasn’t easy. The theme tune for all of the early postwar new towns could have been ‘Getting to Know You’, from The King and I. It was certainly the tone adopted by the local paper and the development corporation: the first edition of the Harlow Citizen in 1953 included notices on the formation of a new scout troop, the laying of a foundation stone for a new Methodist church, the debut of a young wives club, an old-time dancing society and the town’s inaugural pigeon race. Yet the adverts sold a different, more inward-looking dream, featuring television repairmen warning those lucky enough to own a set to make sure it was ready for the coronation.
‘There was a great friendship because everybody moved in with the same boat,’ said Janet Search. ‘On the Queen’s coronation one person had a telly and we all took sandwiches or whatever into this Mrs Sullivan’s and we all watched the coronation there together. You all helped each other. There was outings arranged in factories and if there was any spare seats you sort of got offered those.’ Community groups were keen to explain the rules of new town life to new arrivals from the off.
‘When we first moved to Harlow all the kids were given a booklet on how to behave in the countryside,’ explained former city kid Michael Caswell. ‘They told us that you mustn’t kill birds, leave birds eggs alone, don’t break trees, respect. Very nice, it’s what the countryside’s all about, because we’d come from towns.’
Almost two decades later, on the brand new Cwmbran neighbourhood unit of Coed Eva, Jim and Jo Griffiths also had to deal with the dislocation of moving from London to a town where they knew no one.
‘You’re all migrants,’ said Jim, recalling what it was like for them to be the first generation of people moving into a new estate. ‘There was a Scotsman, there was someone from Yorkshire we knew, there was another guy from Barnsley, and so on, and that immediately pushed you together. And the Welsh dimension was, I suppose, 50/50.’
‘We happened to have family who were quite near – my parents were in Newport,’ explained Jo. ‘Most people didn’t have the backup of a family, and I think that makes people much more friendly if you know your family aren’t going to turn up every Sunday for lunch. Babysitting had to be done amongst friends and babysitting circles and things like that.’
‘One of the things that happened with a new town,’ recalled Jim, ‘there isn’t that structure – religious structure or community structure – that already exists in every suburb. It made people more inventive.’
‘It all seemed to be made up of cardboard boxes and things,’ agreed Jo. ‘The fun was generated without it costing a lot of money, so everyone had a fair crack of the whip. Because the amenities weren’t there. The most expensive thing you could do was go to the pictures or go swimming.’
‘It was out in the field playing kickabout,’ said Jim wistfully.
Local shopping centres were springing up everywhere, creating some very fifties PR opportunities.
‘Pram town’: Woolworths, Dolcis and H. Samuel beseiged by young mothers with children in the late fifties. © Harlow Museum and Science Alive
‘Different shops had different celebrities to open them,’ remembered Janet Search. ‘Sabrina was one in Bush Fair. Hermione Gingold opened W. H. Smith in The Stow. She got given a teddy bear for doing that.’ Yet shopping and old-time dancing were not the only pastimes in Harlow in the early days. By 1956 it had the highest birth-rate in the country, and cheeky Daily Mirror journalists coined a phrase that would haunt Harlow for decades: ‘pram town’. In the Museum there are amazing photos of high streets completely rammed with coach-sized baby carriages. ‘If you went into Sainsbury’s or Boots or Woolworths you just parked your pram outside – with the baby in it!’ said Janet, shaking her head in disbelief at the memory. The photos highlighted the unbalanced nature of the town’s population, which was heavily weighted towards young professionals. Indeed, Ben Hyde Harvey, General Manager of the corporation, predicted in 1957 that ‘virtually no one will die in Harlow for 30 years.’21 This youthful, middle class workforce had been attracted by the concentration of high-tech industry: something all the new towns had in common, bar the handful that had been built around coal or steel.
‘If you were a businessman with a start-up business like my own father,’ said museum curator David Devine, ‘they said, well you’re going to bring enterprise to the town, you’re going to bring employment, you can come to Harlow.’ His family moved there from Croydon, his father setting up a factory specialising in the impossibly futuristic business of encasing electrical components in plastic. They were by no means the only high-tech firm. ‘We had Cossor’s, which is basically radar; we had STC, Standard Telephone and Cable, which is valves and everything like that; then you had STL, Standard Telephone Laboratories, the research arm of STC, which later became ITT and then became Nortel; we also had Pitney Bowes, who do all your franking machines.’
By October 1952 the number of industrial workers outnumbered the builders for the first time, and the town’s amenities were growing. In an attempt to embrace modern art as well as architecture, Barbara Hepworth’s ‘Contrapuntal Forms’ had been re-sited from its original home in the Festival of Britain, soon joined by her archrival Henry Moore’s ‘Family Group’.i There were 53 social groups, and 25 shops had opened. One of the standard factory units in the industrial estate had been converted into a temporary cinema. The Essex Skipper became the first pub. There was one primary but no secondary school. A mere five years later, 15 million square feet of factory space, 300 social groups, six pubs, 150 shops and 11 schools had sprung up. As befitted any self-respecting high-tech postwar town, a heliport opened in 1955, and the first passenger was the new head of the development corporation, the building magnate Sir Richard Costain, choppering in from Battersea.
An ever-more skilled workforce was needed to oil the wheels of commerce in this state-of-the-art town, and a gulf began to appear between the new town’s founding principles and their reality. Unless they were builders, the working-class former residents of big city slums – the very people the new towns were built for – were left out in the cold. The experience of Londoner Jim Cattle, interviewed in 1986 for the LWT programme The Making of Modern London, was shared by many trying to jump through the requisite hoops to get a home away from the city.
‘When they started to build the new towns like Stevenage they said, Well, would you like to go? I said, Yeh, cor, I’d love to go. They said, What do you do for a living? Well, when I turned around and said to them I worked at Smithfield Market they looked at me and said, Well, you’d better go back there. We weren’t qualified for anything like that. With me not being skilled we had no chance.’22
Not all the residential areas in Harlow were like Mark Hall North with its great wedges of green. Their styles were varied, as was the quality of their housing and design. The Potter Street area, for example, was built as part of Macmillan’s housing drive and 1,000 houses were built more swiftly and cheaply than the development corporation would have liked. Other districts near the centre, such as The Dashes or The Hides, were tightly packed. Here blank-faced red-brick terraces and part-rendered semis were often built around a complex arrangement of pathways, where the house numbers were bafflingly hard for an outsider to follow. Gibberd acknowledged that the problems his development corporation faced were compounded by a brain drain. ‘With the advent of the later new towns with new concepts, like Redditch and Milton Keynes, the Mark I new towns found it harder to attract the same calibre of staff, and their work on the whole became less imaginative.’23
The appeal of the new towns was international. Ben Hyde Harvey reported back from a town planning confe
rence in West Germany, where his experience appeared to confirm Lewis Silkin’s prediction that the new towns would become world famous. ‘The main topic of conversation was Harlow new town,’ he claimed, ‘which many of them had visited.’24 Yet by then, the West Germans were building 540,000 homes a year, almost double the figure in England and Wales. By the seventies Harlow was receiving visitors from the Soviet Union, who had built large garden cities of their own, such as the steel town of Magnitogorsk in the Urals. ‘We are very interested in both the architecture and the sociology of the new towns,’ Mr V. S. Vysotski, the chief design architect at the Russian Institute of Town Designing was quoted as saying in The Times. He was one of a delegation of three experts from Russia who, in a peculiar footnote to Cold War détente, visited Harlow, Stevenage, Runcorn, Cumbernauld, Thamesmead, Glasgow and the Barbican in 1971. It was reported as a triumph of the British new town movement, though the visitors were not enamoured with everything they found: ‘They were surprised … at the many low houses and maisonettes compared with their own mainly tall blocks of flats. The extensive road network around Harlow has also come as a shock to them.’25
The sheer quantity of tarmac may have seemed shocking to delegates from a Soviet bloc mired in stagnation, but in fact the road network would turn out to be a universal failing across the first wave of new towns. Gibberd was the first to admit that they’d massively miscalculated the growth in car ownership. In 1940 the Ministry of Health, then responsible for housing, was recommending that Britain would need just one garage for every 10 homes. Two decades later Welwyn Garden City’s development corporation reported that they were still building only 106 garages a year – despite a waiting list of 3,955. ‘It is becoming apparent,’ they wrote with a modicum of understatement, ‘that whatever the national proportion of car owners may be, the statistics have little relation to the problem in the new towns.’26 Facilities for cars still leave something to be desired today. John Reed pointed out to me that his next-door neighbours alone had five cars to one house.
‘Even now the roads are quite narrow,’ said Janet Search. ‘A lot of them are cul-de-sacs and you weren’t ever supposed to park in the hammerheads because that was for turning.’
And roads were to cause another huge headache for the master-planner, as curator David Devine explained to me. ‘The motorways were going to be on this side of the town,’ he said, indicating the northeast corner where we were stood, ‘and that’s why the industrial areas are on this side of the town. But then the government in 1972, or thereabouts, decided to put the motorway here’ – he pointed to the south of Harlow on the map – ‘and that’s because they wanted to have a Norwich-Cambridge-London link.’ David was getting quite worked up at this point. I was beginning to recognise this proprietorial note in all of the people I interviewed in Harlow. ‘It’s buggered up the plan. People drive in on Southern Way, which is a minor road. Freddie Gibberd at the time went absolutely mad. He actually said – and this is the polite version – that it was like planning a seaside town and then they moved the sea.’
‘It was nice when the town centre was first built,’ Janet Search recalled of Gibberd’s showpiece, which for the early residents had been a long time coming. Her mild praise was echoed by the Manchester Guardian, who in 1957 found it a rather meek affair, with ‘an engaging air of restrained gaiety, of tastefully tentative fun’.27 He’d left the centre (known as ‘The High’ due to its position on a hill) blank on the plans, but by the end of the fifties, at the insistence of Macmillan’s Conservative government, this space was being sold off to private developers rather than carefully planned out by the corporation. One of the successful bidders to build ‘superblocks’ along a new Broad Walk was Ravenseft, a slick operation specialising in building shopping centres in bombed cities such as Plymouth, Exeter and Hull. The first ‘superblock’ on Broad Walk opened in 1957, part of the first wave of pedestrianised precincts outside America, and just behind Stevenage and Coventry. The Harlow Citizen carried a special sponsored supplement extolling the joys of the 52 new shops, which included H. Samuel, MacFisheries, Timothy Whites and Dolcis.
Gibberd recalled that the process of choosing between Ravenseft’s sketches of proposed developments was ‘like choosing a hat’. He was distinctly unimpressed with the plans, which fell well below the standard of design he’d been keen to uphold in the town. After much wrangling, however, he claimed that the developers had come to accept ‘that the appearance of the building mattered as much to the company as it did to the corporation.’28 Ravenseft, on the other hand, were quoted as saying that ‘on aesthetics we didn’t really care, provided we didn’t feel the building to be offensive’.29 Their plain red-brick superblock ended up facing the colourful marble ‘crazy paved’ gables and gently swooshed asymmetric awnings of Seymour Harris and Partners’ parade, across Broad Walk. The zigzag-patterned precinct floor led pedestrians into the earlier Market Square, commanded by a large modernist clock, not unlike the sort used to count down schools’ programmes on the telly, affixed to the wall above a shop unit. The design of the shopping centre may have been tentative, but The High was soon home to a huddle of more impressive civic buildings: St Paul’s Church with its beautiful John Piper mural; a modernist water garden designed by Gibberd; and the Town Hall, a stout tower block with a lighthouse-like viewing gallery perched on top. There was also Britain’s first purpose-built postwar cinema – operated by J. Arthur Rank – in 1960.
The Market Square taken shortly after completion. © Harlow Museum and Science Alive
The High came in for a great deal of criticism when it was finally built. Roger Berthold in The Times wrote in 1977 that it was ‘like a morgue at night, the dance hall is expensive, the only cinema often only shows X films … a coffee bar has only recently opened in the centre, and many young people cannot stand youth clubs.’30 This was a dig at the new town fetish for social organisations such as sports, arts and social clubs as the centre of community life, which showed no signs of abating by the late seventies. Harlow’s showpiece Town Hall and water gardens have since been demolished.
Jim Griffiths showed me around Cwmbran’s central area, built a few years after Harlow’s in the early sixties. They shared a design principle: the centres look inwards, presenting a blank brick-and-concrete face to the rest of the town. In Cwmbran a ring road circles the centre beneath pylon-topped hills. From the roof of the car park Jim pointed out the earliest areas, houses and maisonettes of a mildly Scandinavian modernist bent, built from local brick, their roofs barely pitched. Then there was a slender 20-storey concrete point block, which had a huge industrial-looking duct snaking up the side. This was the chimney for the town centre’s district heating plant, suggesting that the entire point for this block of flats was less to provide a landmark, as in Harlow, than to disguise the flue as far as possible. To its left we could see the industrial zone, with its small factory units, and beyond that a ribbon of thirties semis that followed the existing road – exactly the kind of unplanned sprawl the new towns were developed to counter.
The shopping centre itself was a pretty mellow place: elderly people sat outside coffee shops; kids played by the old corporation office block, with its concrete and mosaic frescoes of kings and dragons; and a few drunks hung out by a sunken water garden. A theatre and a bus station were built into the edifice, and the car park offered free parking. I took a few snaps, and before we knew it we were surrounded by fluoro-jacketed security guards. Excuse me, have you got permission to take photographs? one of them asked. I admitted that I didn’t. Jim was outraged as we were ushered up to the centre’s management offices. We waited around for a while as the staff dealt with a young mum who’d stubbed her toe on a paving stone and needed a plaster. Eventually we were seen, and Jim explained I was researching a book. Did I, the administrator asked, have a certificate for that? After an exasperating half hour spent trying to explain that authors don’t come with certificates, we were released, a promise having been extracted that
I would not take any further photographs. It was a reminder that the centre was no longer public space, as it had been when built: like all new towns, the development corporation had been wound up, and the centre sold off.
The backlash against Harlow and the other early new towns struck early and viciously, before many of the first wave even had populations in the thousands. In the July 1953 edition of Architectural Review, editor J. M. Richards and art editor Gordon Cullen decided to put the boot in. The hitherto celebrated green wedges were suddenly accused of dislocating these fledgling communities, the vast green areas of sucking the energy and vitality out of the place by separating everyone to an unnecessary extent. ‘Prairie planning’ was Cullen’s dismissive description of the concept, and one that stuck in architectural rags as quickly as ‘pram town’ had in the tabloids. He took a number of swings at the ‘un-use’ of land by the planners, which created ‘a feeling of hopelessness in the face of a terrifying eternity of wideness, punctuated at intervals by seas of concrete’.31 He illustrated his piece with drab photos of the ‘sulky monotony’ of Hemel Hempstead’s wide streets and long, low municipal lawns. Richards insisted that a town should be ‘a sociable place, for people who want to live close together … The new towns, by and large, have none of these attributes … Their inhabitants, instead of feeling themselves secure within an environment devoted to their convenience and pleasure, find themselves marooned in a desert of grass verges and concrete roadways.’32
Cullen, generally better known for his beguilingly colourful architect’s drawings than for vitriol, had a field day with these ‘prairies’. ‘In spite of all the administrative energy, publicity, and cash expended on them,’ he wrote, ‘what should have been a great adventure has come to nothing and less than nothing. And so far with hardly a word spoken in protest.’33 Their portraits of ‘footsore housewives and cycle-weary workers’ were a startling and unexpected blow to Frederick Gibberd and his fellow new town planners, who believed they’d successfully moved beyond the soporific garden city to create something exciting and new that really worked. Richards even went so far as to suggest that there was little to differentiate these towns from the sprawling ribbons of privately built suburban semis of the interwar years, claiming Gibberd and his peers had built houses ‘in the wrong place, of the wrong size and laid out in the wrong way’.34 A new wave of younger architects was equally contemptuous. Peter and Alison Smithson, a recently qualified and increasingly influential pair of architects, described them as ‘English towns as off the mark as any English scene by Hollywood’.35 And they didn’t stop there. ‘Drive or walk into any example of the garden city idea and you will lose your sense of direction in the wide streets that lead nowhere. Wide tarmac rivers wave off in every direction, any of them may be the way out.’36 Even Lewis Mumford, American planner and friend of garden city champion Frederic Osborn, wasn’t convinced by these early postwar experiments: ‘Because the new planners were mainly in revolt against congestion and squalor, rather than in love with urban order and cooperation, the new towns do not yet adequately reveal what the modern city should be.’37 The new town planners were bewildered by the vehemence of these reactions to their masterworks. ‘We, the architects, found it all rather discouraging,’ said Gibberd, with characteristic understatement, ‘and we were only reassured when we talked to householders.’38