10
Harold Macmillan was 57 years old in 1951, and his appointment as Minister of Housing and Local Government was his first significant peace-time political role. After a conventional upper-class education – Eton and the Grenadier Guards – he declined to complete his degree course at Oxford, embarking instead on a political career. An admirer of Lloyd George, he was elected Conservative MP for Stockton-on-Tees in 1924, lost the seat in 1929, won it back in 1931 and remained in situ until 1945, declining the opportunity of a safer constituency and going down, inevitably by that point, to defeat in the Labour landslide.(1) Re-elected elsewhere within a few months at a convenient by-election, Macmillan’s inter-war record, particularly his hostility to appeasement, commended him to Churchill, who stressed the great importance on meeting the house-building target in the Conservative manifesto, stating “It is a gamble—it will make or mar your political career, but every humble home will bless your name if you succeed”. This was true, in the sense that attaining any objective in politics might be a bit of a gamble, but Macmillan had many things working in his favour.
Firstly, he was able to rely during his time in office on a largely bipartisan commitment to high quality public services together with levels of personal taxation that provided more than sufficient funds for his objectives. The strain of operating a wartime command economy had increased the standard rate of income tax in the UK to 10s in the £ (50%). Attlee’s government cut it to 9s (45%) in 1947, only for the Churchill administration to put it back up to 9s 6d (47.5%) five years later, a year after they took office. It remained at what today would be regarded as an extraordinarily high level until the end of the decade when it was still at 8s 6d (42.5%).(2) Secondly, the new government rowed back on the space standards Bevan had set. The size of an average 3-bedroom council house dropped from 1055 square feet in 1951, to 947 square feet in 1952 and finally to 897 square feet by the end of the decade, an overall fall of 15%.(3) Thirdly, the Churchill government increased both the speed of construction, and the number of properties built, by increasingly adopting prefabricated designs, and building proportionally more flats than houses. Fourthly, and finally, the Conservative pledge was to complete 300,000 new homes a year not, as some thought, 300,000 new council homes per year. To reach this target the private house-builders were allowed a much freer rein than they had enjoyed under Attlee and Bevan. By the decade’s end they were virtually deregulated, and producing, more or less, the same volume of homes they had achieved in the 1920s and 1930s. Thus, Macmillan, with his own ministry at his disposal, met his targets because, whilst there was plenty of money available for housing, he built smaller, cheaper units and increasingly diversified into private sale.(4)
But it would be wrong to regard this as merely sleight of hand. Churchill and Macmillan presided over years of very high housing completion, and established another new town, Cumbernauld, the third in Scotland, in 1955. From 1954, additional government subsidies were provided for slum clearance, as the backlog of historic neglect in urban areas was finally tackled. Carefully compiled official statistics showed that 60% of houses in York had an outside WC, this figure rising to 90% in Sunderland. Macmillan sought to eliminate this as rapidly as possible. It would be fair to state that the period from 1945 to 1955 represented a time when both political parties were travelling in the same direction, albeit with a slightly different emphasis. What was also true was that both Bevan and Macmillan regarded the improvement of housing conditions as a priority.
It was also a period when architects’ reputations were made on the basis of their public housing work; a time when working in a local authority architects’ department had the same kind of artistic glamour found in later years by those who designed opulent hotels, corporate headquarters and bespoke residences for oligarchs. The roll call of those who built the new Britain was impressive: within the new towns were George Grenfell-Baines (Newton Aycliffe and Peterlee), Sir Frederick Gibberd (Harlow) and Geoffrey Jellicoe (Hemel Hempstead) whilst among those making their mark in local councils were Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya (Churchill Gardens, Pimlico – a major example of inner-city clearance and reconstruction that produced 1,600 new homes), Sir Colin Wilson (Wyke Estate, Hackney, for the LCC and heavily influenced by Le Corbusier) and Sir Denys Lasdun, a former colleague of Lubetkin (Keeling House, Bethnal Green and much else).
Not everyone regarded this as progress. In particular, Frederic Osborn, the UK’s best-connected advocate of Howard’s theories, and still active throughout the 1950s and 1960s via his role with the Town and Country Planning Association, railed against the influence of Le Corbusier on young architects, claiming they had gone “…indecently, inhumanly wrong…” He visited France to look at Unité d’Habitation, Le Corbusier’s great scheme at Marseilles, soon after its completion, noting (in his view) its “economic and social absurdity, and with less amplitude… technical absurdity”. Osborn also found Macmillan hard to deal with, complaining in March 1953 that he had been “stampeded by the agricultural lobby” into building flats rather than houses and had also stopped the development of Congleton as a new town.(5) As evidence of this, Osborn referred to the Ministry of Housing manual The Density of Residential Areas in which Macmillan had written “it is important to save every acre that can be saved”. But surely anyone aware of the physical size of the UK in relation to its population would realise that, wouldn’t they?(6) For Osborn it was simple, people should just be given what they want, a point he made throughout his correspondence, citing various surveys about what the public liked and preferred. By 1954, he was campaigning to prevent development of housing at 30 units per acre (roughly the density found in urban areas today) and pointing out how unfair it was that the housing subsidy local authorities received was £2,301 per flat, but only £845 per house. After Macmillan’s exit (in October 1954, he became Minister of Defence) Osborn found his successor, Duncan Sandys, “far more respectful… to me personally, than Macmillan was”.
This may have been so, but it didn’t stop a continued stream of Le Corbusier-inspired projects coming to fruition, including the Alton Estate in Roehampton, built by the LCC and their most ambitious project since Boundary Estate(7); Park Hill, Sheffield opened by Macmillan, by this point Prime Minister, who proclaimed it would “draw the admiration of the world”(8); and Golden Lane Estate in the City of London, notable for Great Arthur House, in appearance almost a vertical Mondrian, and, when complete, briefly the highest residential building in the UK.(9) All of these were either being designed or built by the mid-1950s, a time when being Minister of Housing was a recognised path to a successful political career, and one trodden then by Macmillan, Duncan Sandys, Keith Joseph and later by Richard Crossman and Anthony Crosland.
Nor was this just about building boxes for people to live in. The construction of new towns, new estates and new blocks was undertaken at a time when local government, and in particular the LCC, acted as a major sponsor of the arts. Many of the new developments were decorated with cutting edge pieces of sculpture or murals, the latter relatively commonplace. Artists like Victor Pasmore, for instance, worked on Peterlee New Town. The summation of this publicly funded cross-fertilisation between architecture and the wider arts came in August 1956, at the This Is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. This matched architects, including Erno Goldfinger, Sir Colin Wilson, James Stirling and Alison and Peter Smithson, with sculptors, graphic designers, abstract artists, sociologists, photographers, printmakers, structural engineers and cultural critics.(10)
Most people associate This Is Tomorrow with Richard Hamilton’s magnificent pop-art collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? What the show was really seeking to do, though, was to integrate the provision of housing with design in general, stressing the external environment and the impact of how the public accessed information in an era of mass production. Nor was this just kite-flying by leftist intellectuals. The mainstream too embraced change. The Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition of 1956 included a House of the Future, as envisaged by Alison and Peter Smithson.(11) Footage of this shows something akin to a capsule, or series of interconnected pods, within which everything is operated by a remote control. A man and woman (presumably an actor and actress) are shown, both wearing the type of streamlined, figure-hugging clothing seen in 1950s science fiction films. At one point the woman shows the man what appears to be either a transparent ball gown or a négligée, presumably manufactured from a man-made fabric, in keeping with the light, carefully designed interior where everything is clean, simple and easy to maintain. No bulky wardrobes here. Context is important: a significant amount of what was shown at the exhibition emphasised space travel, rockets, and astronauts. Just 53 years after the Wright brothers took to the air for a couple of hundred yards in North Carolina, London had been bombarded by inter-continental missiles and long-distance jet travel was commonplace. Many wondered what might happen in the next 50 years: expectations were of manned space flight and cities on the moon at the very least.(12) Today, the Smithsons’ House of the Future looks utopian and mildly foolish. But in 1956 it was seen as what might be typical within 5 to 10 years, given the exponential rate of technological progress in the twentieth century.
* * * * * *
How much the wider public noticed the intellectual battles fought about housing throughout the 1940s and 1950s is a moot point. When peace came in 1945 most UK households rented privately, and many of these shared kitchens and bathrooms with other families. Much of the UK’s housing stock was in poor condition and owner-occupation remained the privilege of a minority. Most of the country’s larger cities exhibited war damage, London to a considerable degree, where vacant, cleared sites remained common for another 20 years. What people experienced, and surely noticed, were the practical effects of a significant housing shortage.
As early as 1945 there was an organised squatting campaign, involving 300 families who moved into empty mansion flats in Bloomsbury and Kensington.(13) Government action followed swiftly – targeting those who advocated such activity – and the official view remained that the public should await the arrival of new homes at whatever speed was possible. Thankfully, and due to the efforts of Bevan and Macmillan, in the years that followed completions accelerated. Indeed, in the two decades after 1945 4.473m new homes were built (nearly three-quarters by local authorities and new towns) a rate of building that was, on average, approximately four times that achieved from the mid-nineteenth century through to 1914.(14) Many of these were provided in suburbs or garden cities/new towns. Trying slowly to fill in the bomb-damaged gaps in inner cities was very unfashionable, and in truth more expensive.(15) Thus, many of the households rehoused after 1945 were offered brand new properties in an area that was often some distance from where they lived. But, contrary to many prevailing urban myths, people were offered a choice. And the choice might be either to remain in their existing home, and if that home was one requisitioned and managed by the local authority under wartime powers possibly buy it from the council(16), or to stay wherever they were until a new home became available for them in their current location, or to move to a new home provided much more quickly in a different area. Nor did moving to a new area have the same dislocating factors that came later: the two decades after 1945 were a period of almost continuous full employment, with the lowest ever unemployment figures (185,000) being announced in July 1955.
In terms of what the public saw, an important factor in their experience, they would have noticed that, as local authorities implemented the new legislation and drove forward their own building programmes, they emulated the design and layout of the new towns, creating many other miniature garden suburb and garden city schemes across the UK.(17) As with the “official” new towns a great many of these addressed the increase in car ownership by adopting the “Radburn” design for positioning blocks and terraces that had so interested Howard at the time of his death. Along with the typical Howardesque design features of playing fields, allotments, grass verges, large cultivated flower beds and properties often “set-back” a considerable distance from the nearest pavement, this meant living in an environment with a very considerable amount of open space. Whether people ever really wanted this, or not, isn’t clear. Certainly, they wanted new homes, and in an area where there was employment. They may, though, have been just as happy living in an early LCC-style cottage estate, or something akin to a Cameron Corbett development, rather than somewhere with a density level derived from nineteenth-century US suburban housing. The public, however, weren’t consulted and the long-term maintenance issues of so much open space remained an undiscussed issue for decades.(18)
One effect of the policies that had been advocated by William Morris and endorsed/embellished via Howard, Abercrombie and Osborn was that the UK’s traditional cities and urban areas suffered a sharp (and deliberate) depopulation for decades after 1945, as millions of people were energetically relocated out of them by central and local government. The population of London, for instance, fell by 25% between 1945 and 1985. The horror expressed by Morris, Howard and others at the urban conditions they saw in the nineteenth century suggests that they would have deemed this a good thing. Certainly, the award of a knighthood to Osborn in 1956 reflected a strong “establishment” endorsement for this approach. But, by the end of the 1950s, Osborn was fighting off an attempt by property developers to take over the trust that ran Letchworth: reliable governance, it will be recalled, had always been a weak point in Howard’s plan. Nor was that all. Lewis Mumford, a long-standing friend of Osborn, visited the UK in 1953 and 1957 and considered that the new towns were too open, wasteful of space and lacking in variety. In 1957 he commented “…the New Towns had not gone beyond the planning principles of Letchworth or Welwyn and had, indeed, been bound down by an arbitrary set of space standards to be nothing other than a more extensive and voluminous reproduction of these earlier efforts…” If Mumford, who was far from being the type of revolutionary modernist who usually derided garden cities, felt that about Stevenage, Harlow and their ilk, it was hardly surprising that the intellectual climate within which debate on housing and planning took place remained ambivalent, at best, toward Osborn and his views.
In 1963, at the age of 78, Osborn produced a riposte of sorts to this criticism, publishing, with Arnold Whittick, The New Towns: The Answer to Megalopolis.(19) This suggested that, however poorly executed some of the new town/garden suburb ideas had been, they were still preferable to “Megalopolis”: the conjoined urban/suburban sprawl that linked many adjoining US cities and was particularly observable along the Boston-New York-Washington corridor. This remained true (the UK then remained nothing like the US) but a cynic might have pointed out that the Letchworth-Hitchin-Stevenage-Welwyn route was not dissimilar, albeit on a smaller scale, and was, on that basis, a conjoined mini-megalopolis within Hertfordshire. The same year found Osborn admitting “…there are powerful pressures… for further increases of density. They come from (a) the shortage of land in old cities (b) from the architectural obsession with the phony concept of ‘urbanity’ coupled with the artists boredom of love of gimmicks and (c) from the agricultural and country preservationist obsession with ‘saving land’” Mumford, in correspondence with him, said that the layout of Letchworth and Welwyn “required a change in the pattern of density if the essential virtues of a small city were still to be preserved and furthered” and pointed out that he hadn’t noticed this when visiting both in 1932.(20) It was a powerful argument. Could a low-density environment of that type contain enough people to pay for the provision of the services that the population of the area required? What would happen if circumstances changed, and the funding were no longer available?
Notes
1. Whilst considering whether to recontest Stockton-on-Tees in 1930, Macmillan narrowly failed to get selected as the Conservative candidate in Hitchin, the seat that encompassed Stevenage. Had he been the MP there in 1945, would he have stopped the scheme? In the late 1930s he held the view that the best type of government for the UK at that point would have been a Labour-led coalition, within which some Conservatives and Liberals could have served.
2. This compares with tax levels of 6s (30%) in 1919, and 5s (25%) in 1938. The UK’s standard rate of income tax in 2021 is 20%: a level it was last at between 1926 and 1930.
3. These remained far greater than the space standards used by the LCC when building its cottage estates in the 1920s and 1930s, which were enduringly popular. They are also significantly higher than those used by most private sector house-builders in recent years.
4. Macmillan still built more local authority housing than anyone before, or since, peaking at 262,000 homes in both 1953 and 1954. By 1955 private house-building had recovered to something like its pre-war levels, and by 1959 there were, annually, more private sector homes being completed than local authority/new town homes. The rebooting of private house-building followed the abolition, in 1953-1954 of the complex system of post-1945 licences that had overseen private development. A 100 per cent tax on the profits of property development was abolished at the same time.
5. Macmillan inherited two proposals for new towns, in Congleton and Mobberley. Both were in Conservative-held constituencies. (The MP for Congleton was Arthur Vere Harvey). He rejected both proposals in 1953-1954.
6. Pre-1939 the UK imported the majority of its food. It had come close to being starved into submission by a German U-boat blockade in 1916-1917. Achieving as much agricultural self-sufficiency as possible was thus regarded as an important national requirement. Macmillan’s comments should be seen in this context.
7. Like Osborn the LCC architects’ department (which employed 250 people alone on housing projects) had made a pilgrimage to Marseilles to look at Le Corbusier’s masterpiece. Alton Estate, built 1951-1961, was the outcome. See: https://historicengland.org.uk/psting/the-list/pst-entry/1466474
8. See: http://midcenturymagazine.com/architecture/the-park-hill-estate-brutalist-icon/ Park Hill was built on a site previously occupied by back-to-back housing with shared outside lavatories.
9. Density on Golden Lane Estate (79 homes per acre) is massively greater than anything planned or deemed acceptable by either Howard (who was born very close to the site) or Osborn. It is also approximately 40 times that found at Greenbelt, Maryland. Golden Lane, in the Cripplegate area, served as a prototype for the slightly later Barbican Estate. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AM2yw7hNyLI
10. Whilst most of those exhibiting at This Is Tomorrow were from the UK, the show also had contributors from Italy, Russia, Hungary, the US, South Africa, Guyana and Ecuador.
11. The Smithsons were employed in the LCC architects’ department. The Exhibition is shown at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY7oAPT7QXs and footage of their House of the Future can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CudemgNQqMs
12. There were indeed plans to do just that. See Basic Criteria for Moon Building John S. Rinehart Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol. 17, September-October 1959 P126-129. Arthur C Clarke, a long-term member of the British Interplanetary Society, set the plot of his 1951 novel The Sands of Mars on a man-built city on Mars. The novel takes place in the 1990s, implying that the city itself had been built possibly a decade earlier.
13. For more on this see: https://pasttenseblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/10/today-in-londons-housing-history-ivanhoe-hotel-squatted-bloomsbury-1946/ This notes, though, “There were no actual evictions. The squatters mostly went to a ‘rest centre’ organised by the London County Council, from where they were eventually rehoused”. The brief squatting campaign in London at that time was organised by Ted Bramley, Communist LCC member for Stepney, Mile End.
14. Figures taken from the English Housing Survey 2015
15. There were builders who did this work, notably Day (Contractors) Ltd (run by a Mr Arthur Cattle) who built 1049 flats and houses on small sites, almost all in Islington, between 1955 and 1972. Of these 127 were purchased on completion by Islington, the remainder were sold privately, on long leases. Plots were purchased for very small sums from absent owners or from the local authority, in the latter case after they had been demolished and cleared. Properties were built to Ministry of Housing standards. As can be seen, the speed at which these homes were produced (approximately 60 a year) was far below that at which local authorities built. See The Story of Day Flats in and around Islington A Bosi 2001.
16. The author is aware of instances, in the mid-1950s in Hackney, where households renting in properties requisitioned by the council were offered (and refused) the chance to buy them for £700, preferring instead a secure tenancy on the nearby Pembury Estate. In fact, as demonstrated in Colin Jones and Alan Murie The Right to Buy (2006), local authorities had always been obliged to sell certain types of property, and the notion that this began in 1980 via Margaret Thatcher is false.
17. A process that continued down to the 1970s. A late example was the scheme developed by Essex County Council from 1972 on a ramshackle earlier “plotlands” site at South Woodham Ferrers. Very much in keeping with Howard’s vision this created a low-density new town (in all but name) with separate shopping, employment and residential areas. In a very 1970s gesture, many of the new streets and roads in the development were named after characters in J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
18. See Family Britain 1951-1957 David Kynaston p273-283 and p635-639 quoting various sources.
19. Written as a riposte to Ivan Gottman’s Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States (1961).
20. See The Letters of Lewis Mumford and Frederic J Osborn: A Transatlantic Dialogue 1938-1970 Ed Michael Hughes London (1971) Letter from Mumford to Osborn 3 July 1963.