11
The consensus in the UK about housing, broadly a synthesis of the approaches taken by Bevan and Macmillan, seemed, by the mid-1950s, a solid and lasting feature of domestic politics. It was predicated on a commitment by the government (of whichever stripe) to provide sufficient housing for the population, and to raise sufficient money in taxes to enable this to be carried out.(1) What the public got from this approach was a mixture of garden cities in the guise of new towns, garden suburbs, overspill estates and urban flats, built by the combined might of the government, local government and the private sector. There was a huge role for the state, at all levels. It was a multi-track approach that worked well, with cheerleaders and detractors for all options.
One man with a foot in both camps was Michael Young, co-author of the 1945 Labour manifesto, who by the mid-1950s had switched to sociological research with a bias toward consumer protection. In 1957, he and his colleague Peter Willmott published Family and Kinship in East London. An astonishingly popular work, it ran to 14 editions, easily a record for a book of that type, became a standard text in planning, housing, family and sociology studies and was quoted from, approvingly, by government ministers. Its big message was that the mass housing programmes of the time were likely to end in failure, because the new homes, many of which were flats, were less popular than the houses that local people vacated. It also made a fair point about the breaking up of long-standing social networks when an area was demolished and the population moved.
In practical terms the book studied households and individuals from Bethnal Green that had moved to the LCC mini-new town estate at Debden, Essex, disguised as “Greenleigh” in the text. Based on interviews conducted with residents, Willmott and Young pointed out that there were fewer facilities (shops, public houses, cinemas) per capita in Debden than in Bethnal Green and that community cohesion generally was lower. This was despite a finding that “Our couples left two or three damp rooms built in the last century for the ‘industrious classes’, and were suddenly transported to a spacious modern home”.(2)Noting that the LCC charged higher rents than the owners of most of the homes in Bethnal Green that their correspondents had vacated, they ended up arguing that maintaining multi-generation families close together was a good thing, and that the inner-city homes they vacated should be refurbished, rather than demolished, to continue that traditional sense of community. They also made the telling point about why this was not evident in Debden in the first place: “One reason it is taking so long is that the estate is so strung out — the number of people per acre at Greenleigh being only one-fifth what it is in Bethnal Green — and low density does not encourage sociability.” (3)
None of this was a ringing endorsement of Howard’s and Osborn’s views about garden cities. But a lot of what Willmott and Young were saying was debatable, even at the time. To begin with, social networks everywhere were fraying by the mid 1950s, principally due to the impact of television (more people staying indoors in the evening) and to a lesser degree because of higher educational standards and an increase, generally, in social mobility. When young people upgraded from factory work to clerical or even managerial employment they often moved away from their original neighbourhood and acquired a different circle of friends. Secondly, moving from Bethnal Green to Debden was hardly an immense disruption. The LCC estate had been designed around a newly opened tube station on the Central Line, 27 minutes from Bethnal Green, and the area was served by three London Transport bus routes despite being outside the LCC boundaries.(4) Willmott and Young’s preferred alternative – staying in London E2 – was certainly feasible, but implied building even more homes in an area that was already noted for its density. It also ignored practicalities: many of the households who moved to Debden came out of properties where a grandparent was living in the living room, the mother and father had one bedroom and several children managed with whatever was left. The multi-generational household, with its overcrowding and lack of privacy might have sustained certain social networks, but it wasn’t necessarily a healthy option.
In 1960 Willmott and Young followed up their earlier success with Family and Class in a London Suburb. As with their earlier book, this was based on sample interviews conducted in Bethnal Green and, in this case, the suburb of Wanstead and Woodford.(5)After examining family and community life, social mobility and social status, it endorsed the view that the traditional suburb was a friendly location. As with Family and Kinship in East London this wasn’t what Osborn, his colleagues in the Town and Country Planning Association and most professionals particularly wanted to hear.(6) At the time Osborn noted, rather glumly, that Willmott and Young had “started New Town blues”,(7) even if his own views remained unchanged. Nor did he confine himself to the UK in proselytising these. The UK’s policy of building new towns was widely studied, often in surprising places, with Osborn stating in 1958 “…I have had a lot of correspondence with the USSR Ministry of Construction. They have fully adopted the Dispersal and Green Belt policy which they think they can operate more logically than Britain…”
It isn’t clear who Osborn was speaking to in this context – presumably not Nikolai Aleksandrovitch Dygai, Minister of Construction, Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers and Candidate Member of the Politburo – but more likely lower-ranking officials, asking generalised questions about the UK’s policy of moving people out of its main urban centres. Unlike the episode half a century earlier when Lenin might have gone to, but almost certainly didn’t go to, Letchworth, this contact actually happened. Why were the enquiries being made? Did the USSR really need advice from the Town and Country Planning Association? They didn’t, and the most probable reason they were seeking such “advice” was to check that the USSR’s dispersal policy, which was designed to preserve its population, and industrial capacity, in the event of a thermonuclear war, was consistent with anything the UK had, given its plethora of US bases. Certainly, Dygai’s public announcements throughout this period were closely monitored by the CIA, notably at the 10 July 1962 meeting (in Moscow) of the World Congress for General Disarmament and Peace.(8) For his part, and despite this sudden swerve into geopolitics, Osborn remained consistent and continued to advocate the policies that had attracted him to Howard, Letchworth and Welwyn decades earlier. By 1961 – looking at future population predictions – he was suggesting that rather than have the population of London “swell by two or three million” government planners should build new garden cities further and further afield, to which both people and industry should be relocated.
Despite Willmott and Young’s books, this was something that still commanded government support. Following in the path of Bevan and Macmillan came Keith Joseph, appointed Minister for Housing and Local Government by Macmillan on 13 July 1962 as part of a wide-ranging reshuffle of the government. Joseph had been elected MP for Leeds North East only six years previously, and his family ran the construction company Bovis (he himself had been its chair, though he resigned this position on becoming Minister)(9) and could be said to have done very well out of the post-war building boom. Bovis, like their competitors, were interested in diversifying away from building traditional homes with traditional materials. It was during Joseph’s tenure that high-rise residential towers, often assembled from factory-manufactured components, became common. Part of the rationale for going down this route was economic: to produce more homes for less money during a time when taxation was being cut. Macmillan was aware of the ongoing importance of housing as a political issue and wanted an annual target of 400,000 new homes per annum by 1965, most of which were to be provided by local authorities and new town corporations.
To meet these objectives six new towns were established between 1961 and 1964: Skelmersdale, Telford, Redditch, Runcorn, Washington and Livingston. A further four new town-style developments that were not centrally directed by the government were also sanctioned: Cramlington, Killingworth, Daventry and Tamworth. The first of these, Cramlington, was private sector-led, an indication of how a move away from purely statist solutions was now deemed possible. A further example of this mixed market approach was Joseph’s wish to increase the proportion of owner-occupied homes by offering first-time buyers help with mortgage deposits. Significantly, the four ‘non-new town’ new towns were all smaller and took longer to complete than state-run projects.(10)
The continued commitment by the government, and local councils, to a substantial programme of new towns and estates in what were formerly agricultural areas created other issues too. Whilst it was easy for the LCC in 1935 to plan Debden around a new tube station, replicating this type of access on the outskirts of a city elsewhere, proved problematic. In terms of public transport, particularly railways, a criticism can be made that the approach to providing this infrastructure for the post-1945 new towns was somewhat disjointed. Of the state-run new towns, Livingston, Skelmersdale and Washington remain (in 2021) inaccessible by rail(11) whilst five others, Cwmbran, Corby, Newton Aycliffe, Basildon and Telford all waited over 20 years for a train station, and Glenrothes (44 years) and Peterlee (56 years), even longer.(12) It does seem very chaotic today to be building what were effectively new cities without some kind of rail link. One clue as to why that occurred may be the axiomatic view held by many then that car ownership would always increase, and, indeed, that it was desirable that it should be maximised. Which is not to say that there weren’t extravagant plans for an alternative: a monorail was intended to serve Washington, County Durham and in a burst of immense optimism a hovercraft service was considered too, linking various destinations (including Peterlee) between Newcastle and Middlesbrough. Neither was provided.(13)
Part of the reason for the increase in car ownership was also related to the low density of the new towns: the lower the density, and the greater the surrounding space, the further a household were from shops, schools or work and the harder it was not to have a car. This clearly couldn’t have been envisaged by Howard in the 1890s when he first set out his proposals. But by the 1930s (and the blossoming car-orientated environment shown in Lewis Mumford’s The City) it ought to have been clear to Osborn, and his followers, that low density would, of itself, contribute significantly toward an escalation in car ownership even if nothing else did. The virtues of slightly more congested traditional town centres should have been considered. That they weren’t was noted by Mumford in 1964 when he commented to Osborn “…for you there is only one tolerable density, and therefore only one type of ideal town: that which, though it has all the other desirable attributes of a genuine city, is laid out on the pattern of the best nineteenth-century suburbs…”
As a definition of where Osborn’s views stood then, this wasn’t quite accurate. If anything, they were even more conservative than Mumford pointed out. Whilst it was true that low density remained his ideal, even where this applied Osborn was still capable of considerable criticism, noting about Cumbernauld in 1965 “…and its skilful propagandists have done a lot of harm to the housing standards of the later new towns…” Was this true? Eventually reaching a population of about 51,000, spread across 8 square miles (10 people per acre, or roughly an average of 3-4 homes per acre), Cumbernauld was well within, and even lower, than the standards set by Howard half a century earlier. What Osborn really disliked about it was the importation of modernist design quirks, notably an avant-garde shopping centre built of concrete that looked like nothing so much as a crashed space ship in the middle of a Scottish new town. It was linked to the surrounding residential areas by pedestrian pathways so that residents could walk safely to and from it without encountering any road traffic. However, this did not mean that Cumbernauld was expected by its designers to be a place where the motor car had a peripheral role. On the contrary. A giant motorway system was built to allow access to all parts of the development, and the residential areas were designed to accommodate 100% car ownership, something no town in the UK has ever achieved, with an abundance of lock-up garages and parking spaces being provided.
Cumbernauld was an early attempt to marry the concept of the new town with urban living whilst coping with the inexorable rise of road traffic. How much did Osborn understand this? The space standards were fine, and, if any criticism could be made, it would be that the abundance of concrete, and generally brutal appearance of the shopping centre, didn’t wear well, not least because of the Scottish climate. Cumbernauld had a grand opening in May 1967 (via Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon) and with its combination of wide dual carriageways and the UK’s first indoor shopping mall, was much acclaimed, even being likened to a visionary work by Leonardo da Vinci. But it was also very American, and a pointer to what would come a little later in Milton Keynes. This is where Howardism led in practice, the creation of an environment where the car was king, and the irony – not foreseen by anyone – was that this was enabled on a massive scale in the UK by the provision of substantial state funding, something Howard had always tried to avoid.
To be fair, other countries followed this path too, even if none built as much as the UK. A 1967 study of Dublin, for instance, proposed surrounding the city with four low-density satellite towns, of 60,000 to 100,000 each, over a period of 18 years at a cost of £1bn. Furthermore, although the UK produced Cumbernauld, a kind of garden city-modernist hybrid, and increasingly embraced the private sector as a provider, it was in the US, nearly a century after Howard had first encountered low-density new towns, that its ultimate development would be most clearly seen.
Here, arguably the most thorough attempts at trying to devise a perfect environment for living and working were made by Walt Disney. By the late 1940s, with his studio awash from the profits generated by a string of hugely successful animation features, Disney’s time was increasingly spent on trying to build a planned community. To this end he made an extensive study of the writings of both Howard and Le Corbusier.(14) Disneyland (built 1954-1955) was, of course, the most obvious example of his endeavours, but his interest in the subject was actually quite pronounced, and throughout the 1950s he promoted the use of various monorail and “people mover” designs as well as – like the Smithsons – dabbling in speculation about how mankind would evolve in the near future, with the advent of space flight.(15)
In housing, Disney’s most widely seen product was the Monsanto House of the Future, a prototype of which appeared in Orlando, Florida in 1957. Designed by Marvin Goody and Richard Hamilton(16) and built almost entirely of plastic, this was a cross-shaped dwelling (“Conventional plan is a T-shape”) that was elevated above ground level and perched on top of a broad column. The possibility of tailoring the design to individual requirements was recognised with an explanatory brochure proclaiming “Futuristic models sprout wings where you need them” and “‘Mansion’ may look like this”. Each came with a car port. The interior of the standard model contained 1,250 square feet of living space, equivalent to most conventional 4-bedroom houses, and was packed, like the Smithsons’ House of Tomorrow, with labour-saving gadgets. Being plastic throughout, most of the surfaces could be wiped clean. Lightweight, intended for mass-production and brightly coloured, this was pop-housing for the future, from the same people (Monsanto) who provided Agent Orange for use in Vietnam and later pioneered genetically modified crops. It seems that Disney intended to roll this, or something like this, out as part of his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT), but none was ever built for commercial use. Nor did EPCOT ever come to fruition, despite the efforts made by Disney to build a massive ski resort at Mineral King, California, from 1966.(17)
All of Disney’s plans were low density, depended on high levels of car use, and belonged best in a huge country with an abundance of space. Although he may have failed to build a major residential scheme, developments of this type were common throughout the US. Reston, Virginia where a new town took shape from 1964, was typical of these. Car-orientated, privately funded and just outside the Washington DC “beltway” this was intended to provide a self-contained urban environment for mainly well-to-do citizens. The architecture included some moderately high-rise residential blocks, but density, at 6 people per acre (roughly 1-2 homes), was absurdly low and beneath anything even Howard or Osborn would have recommended.(18)
The continued proliferation of out-of-town developments, all designed to be commutable from established urban areas, and the rapidity with which this trend occurred attracted the attention of leading US planners and theoreticians, notably the RAND Corporation, and the Hudson Institute. Both were strategic think-tanks that offered solutions to a range of issues affecting the US government, albeit many of these were primarily concerned with military matters. Herman Kahn was involved with both and with Anthony J Wiener authored Crisis and Arms Control in 1962. Five years later they followed this up with The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years, in which the huge expanse of residential, business and industrial development linking Boston, Massachusetts with Washington DC via New York City was noted and its massive future aggregation named, rather jokily, Boswash.(19) The remainder of their book predicted future technological developments in much the same way that Disney or the Smithsons might have done: computers, mobile phones, satellites in Earth orbit, space travel and so on. But not all of this was benign. Kahn, who worked for RAND from 1947 to 1961 before leaving to set up the Hudson Institute, was highly regarded for his studies of how the US could be best placed to survive a nuclear war. As with the dialogue between Osborn and the USSR Ministry of Construction, dispersing a country’s population as widely as possible, rather than concentrating it in a couple of large easy targets such as “Boswash”, was considered by political and military figures a much better option, and one they were happy to take advice about from experts. In Kahn’s case, displayed most clearly in his work On Thermonuclear War (1960) concepts such as a Doomsday Machine and the use of mineshafts as long-term nuclear shelters for the select few are introduced. It was a key text in the preparation of Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 film Dr Strangelove.(20)
In later years Kahn pondered topics such as over-population and a collapse of the world economy caused by various factors (pollution, food shortages, depletion of natural resources) and firmly discounted both, expecting, by the 1980s, cities on the Moon followed by colonisation across suitable bits of the solar system in the decades that followed. Like most nineteenth-century and early-to-mid-twentieth-century thinkers, he tended toward the boundlessly optimistic. A good comparator might be HG Wells. In this respect he was similar to Howard, even though – like his Soviet counterparts – he saw the usefulness of low-density, residential “dispersal” schemes in terms of enabling much of a country to survive a nuclear holocaust. It is an extraordinary quirk of history, given the fact that many of those to whom Howard pitched his ideas in the 1890s were religiously inclined progressives, pacifists and so on, that their application should have been sought for such destructive means.
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In the meantime, and pretty much divorced from speculation about the future, most people continued to live in long-established towns and cities. And, in so far as innovation and new ways of living were concerned, that is where noticeable changes occurred. The first supermarkets in the UK both appeared in London, in Manor Park (near a Cameron Corbett estate) and Croydon in 1948 and 1950 respectively. The providers were long-established purveyors of groceries, the Co-op and Sainsbury’s, and their decision to embrace this form of high-volume retail was quite simple: the numbers of customers living in the immediate vicinity of their stores made them commercially viable. In contrast, new towns, with their lower density and dispersed populations, continued to opt for “parades” of traditional shops, as Bevan had so warmly endorsed several years earlier.
The spread of more and more Howard-Osborn type developments, whether new towns, large local authority estates or private sector schemes that aped both of these was not without its critics, and by the mid-1950s a backlash against “English Vernacular” architecture was underway. In June 1955, Ian Nairn, an early observer of how architecture and planning were rapidly changing the UK landscape, commented in the Architectural Review “…By the end of the century Great Britain will consist of isolated oases of preserved monuments in a desert of wire, concrete roads, cosy plots and bungalows… Upon this new Britain the Review bestows a name in the hope that it will stick… SUBTOPIA…” As with all predictions of this type, this was both unduly negative and only partly true. What did emerge was a symbiotic relationship between the two different housing models, with one (the new towns) sucking population from the other (the older towns/cities), to its advantage, thus creating a terrain in the abandoned areas where it was easier to build modernist avant-garde schemes, and cultural riches (clubs, galleries, arts cinemas, niche bookshops, small theatres and so on) thrived in low rent surroundings.(21) Much of the latter was helped on its way by the 1956 Housing Subsidies Act, which gave three times more government subsidy for a flat in a block up to 15 floors high, than it did for a house. It became better value for local authorities to build blocks of flats.
What emerged, from this possibility of a virtual tabula rasa in selected inner-city areas, was an imaginative and visually striking series of high-rise schemes, the most celebrated practitioners of which at the time were Richard Seifert and Erno Goldfinger. Both had a European background (Seifert, Swiss; Goldfinger, Hungarian), both were influenced by Gropius, the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier, both favoured high-density urban living and both came to public prominence around 1960, when spectacular, and very tall, buildings began to blossom across London: the Shell Centre, the Post Office Tower, the Empress State Building, Millbank Tower and the Hilton Hotel.(22)
Of the two Seifert was the most prolific, and in purely financial terms, the most successful. Working with the LCC to improve the cluttered five-way road junction at the southern end of Tottenham Court Road, he obtained planning permission for Centre Point, a mixed-use office-residential development, in 1960. When complete the GLC acquired the freehold, and the developer, Harry Hyams, was granted a lease for 150 years.(23) Regarded as “a notable example of Le Corbusier style planning in London” it was later listed on the basis of having “the elegance of a Wren steeple”. For Goldfinger it was “…London’s first pop-art skyscraper…” and was certainly noted for its scale, juxtaposition with smaller, traditional buildings and how much Seifert got onto a small site, whatever notoriety it had as an empty building in later years. Seifert’s practice followed it with Space House, in Covent Garden, another Hyams project(24) but in many ways his signature scheme was probably Tolworth Tower. Built in a low-density traditional UK suburb criss-crossed by arterial roads this was an immensely tall mixed-use retail-office development, with the ground floor occupied, unusually for the time, by a supermarket.(25) It really was, whatever one thought of the architecture, a very Americanised environment when it opened in 1963, and made a huge impact visually, and culturally, on its surroundings.
In the tradition of Gropius and William Morris, Goldfinger was an all-round designer, whose work included shop fronts, furniture and exhibition materials. He was commissioned by the LCC in 1963 to design two residential buildings, Balfron Tower and Carradale House on a cleared site adjoining the motorway-width northern approach road to the Blackwall Tunnel. They were a prelude to what remains his masterpiece, Trellick Tower, designed from 1966 and opened by the GLC in 1972. An immensely strong structure, with 217 dwellings over 31 floors, this was briefly the tallest residential building in Europe.(26) Both schemes were built with reinforced concrete, poured on site, and both – like the very first examples of social housing at Lower Road, Pentonville and Old Pancras Road over a century earlier – were built on marginal land. In this case, not long-hidden, culverted rivers or space left over after the building of a railway terminus, but demolished sites adjoining newly completed urban motorways.
Such opportunities became common after the publication in 1960 of the White Paper Traffic in Towns. This looked at the problems caused by increasing car ownership in an urban environment and proposed an immense motorway construction programme, around and through existing towns and cities, to accommodate this. For various reasons relatively few examples of these were built, and those that were usually ended up being less extensive than envisaged in the report. In London, the greatest example, and one which swept past Trellick Tower, was the Westway. This provided a motorway-width connection between central London and the A40, the main route from London to Oxford, south Wales, and central Wales. To achieve its objective, minimise demolition and save on costs, it was built at roof height between Edgware Road and White City, making it (at 2.7 miles) the longest continuous elevated structure in Europe. Even with minimal disruption, this required the acquisition of a wide corridor of land along the route. The compulsory purchase of affected properties began in 1962 and eventually 3,356 people were moved. Not everything acquired was demolished though; some remained standing and were either left derelict or let on a short-term basis. Finally opened in July 1970 by John Peyton, Minister for Transport and his junior minister Michael Heseltine, it cost £30m to build (roughly £500m in contemporary prices) of which 25% was met by the GLC and the remainder by the government. It certainly eased traffic congestion initially, but a longer-term legacy of its construction was the wasteland that remained beneath the elevated section for many years afterwards for which the government had neglected to have any plans.(27)
Outside of London the most famous exponent of remodelling traditional cities via a combination of motorway building, demolition and new high-rise housing was T Dan Smith, the powerful leader of Newcastle City Council.(28) Examples of such work within his “domain” included Trinity Square, Gateshead, a 1967 mixed-use scheme combining retail units and multi-storey car park (famed for its appearance in the 1971 film Get Carter) and Byker Wall, built from 1969. The latter, like Trellick Tower, was designed to adjoin an urban motorway, albeit one that, in this case, was never completed. Consisting of 620 maisonettes in one long sinuous block resembling a city wall, its architect Ralph Erskine had actually worked on schemes at Welwyn Garden City in the late 1930s, prior to embracing modernism in Sweden throughout the 1940s and 1950s.(29) The most striking example, though, of the architectural licence that reigned in Smith’s Newcastle must surely be Bewick Court, a residential tower block in the city centre itself, built in 1970 by Taylor Woodrow, entirely on massive concrete supports above a dual carriageway-width main road. As an example of making the best use of scarce resources it could scarcely be bettered, floating as it does on air.
Almost every urban area in the UK had examples of modern, flatted council housing built during this period. Most were robust, long-serving and spacious, and many survive today, having given immense service to their local communities. Others were controversial even at the time. Just south of Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower Alison and Peter Smithson were commissioned by the GLC to build a new estate on another marginal site directly alongside the motorway-width approach road to the Blackwell Tunnel. In their case this was land cleared by the demolition of Grosvenor Buildings, 500 pre-1900 dwellings that were now deemed unfit for human habitation. They replaced it with Robin Hood Gardens, their only complete estate, containing 213 “brutalist” flats, built using a significant amount of concrete. It is interesting to note in this instance how modernism actively reduced density in a kind of micro-example of London being remodelled to fit increasing numbers of motor vehicles as its population decreased. Throughout the 1960s, with significant funding available, there were many other examples of innovative projects: Kenneth Frampton’s Corringham Building in 1962, Eric Lyons’s Pitcairn House for the LCC in Hackney 1963 and Kate Macintosh’s Dawson’s Heights in Southwark, from 1964. The largest, though, would be the City of London Corporation’s Barbican Estate. Built from 1965, by the same team that had completed the adjoining Golden Lane Estate a few years earlier, this was a large, dense, mixed-use development containing 2,000 homes. Ironically part of it was built across Fore Street – Ebenezer Howard’s birthplace – and with a density of 57 homes per acre (nearly 37,000 per square mile) it was the polar opposite of what he would have wanted. The scheme included a trio of residential towers, 42 floors high. They were approved at a point when the spread of high-rise buildings across London caused some concern, and was even briefly banned by George Brown MP (Minister for Economic Affairs) in 1964, though an exception was made for both these and the new residence of the Household Cavalry at Hyde Park Barracks.(30)
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From the mid-1950s there was a move to save money and loosen some of the post-1945 regulations but, in comparison with what came later, funding remained abundant and optimism prevailed. Each year, large numbers of new homes were built, split evenly between those completed for local authorities and new towns, and those completed for private sale.(31)
There were other innovations too. The issues that had been raised, after 1951, by the retreat from Bevan’s enhanced space standards were tidied up and codified by Sir Parker Morris, Chief Executive of the Metropolitan Borough of Westminster, in his report Homes for Today and Tomorrow. This concluded that council housing needed to be improved to match the rise in living standards and provided a set of arithmetical tables (“the Parker Morris Standards”) specifying the size of future properties. These were adopted by Sir Keith Joseph in 1963, and were later made mandatory for all housing built in new towns (1967) and all council housing (1969).(32) The opportunity was also taken to bring much of the surviving late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social housing within a state-funded and state-regulated framework. Many of the older “trusts” (Guinness, Samuel Lewis, William Sutton, Peabody and so on) were hardly developing new homes by the early 1960s as much of the earlier benefactions that they had relied on were spent. To address this, the 1964 Housing Act established the Housing Corporation, with powers to register, regulate and fund such bodies, most of which were now referred to as Housing Associations.(33) Finally, in recognition of how much London had increased as a geographical entity to include many of its suburbs, the London County Council gave way, in 1964, to the Greater London Council which expanded out into the surrounding counties and green belt as Charles Latham had wanted in 1947.
Today it may seem striking that Goldfinger and the Smithsons should have been commissioned to design and build entire social housing estates, for which they also designed elaborate windows, furniture and other fittings. This is to forget that both had participated in This Is Tomorrow, quite possibly the UK’s finest ever exhibition of pop art, with its robots, jukeboxes, pictures of Marlon Brando and much else. And it is also to forget that this was a time when divisions between different branches of the arts were being discarded (something Morris and Gropius would have approved of) as part of completely recasting the type of environment people should live in. By the early 1960s, this approach had been taken a step further by Archigram, a collective that exhibited at the ICA in 1963. They envisaged a future in which the “Plug-in-City”, a kind of “high-tech”, lightweight, modular and disposable design, would be common and manufactured in such a way that it could be adapted to any environment. In appearance, parts of this looked not unlike proposals made by Vladimir Tatlin, another all-rounder (in his case an artist, architect, musician and clothes designer) whose 1919 Monument to the Third International was a spiral structure 1300 feet high containing within it 3 separate, rotating buildings resembling gigantic versions of the Post Office Tower restaurant. Tatlin’s tower was never built, and nor was much of Archigram’s output, but by the mid-1960s there were many design collectives that tried with varying degrees of success, during a time of considerable state funding, to mix architecture, design and other disciplines.(34)
The impact of building so many new homes in cities, new towns and suburbs produced collectively an immense rearranging of the UK population. Millions of people moved to a new location, often connected to their employment and, in many cases, enjoyed living in their first ever secure, purpose-built home. Between 1914 and 1970 the UK housing stock doubled and the proportion of households which rented from local authorities increased steadily, peaking at 32% in 1980. Despite political changes, and variations in emphasis, there was no indication that this wouldn’t continue. In 1966, for instance, the GLC announced plans for two new towns of 40,000 people each as far away as Devonshire, and the highest ever number of housing completions, 415,000 and 426,000 respectively, occurred in 1967 and 1968.(35) Income tax remained at a rate high enough to pay for this, and much else besides.
It was a system that gave ordinary people a lot even if some of it wasn’t perfect. In the popular culture of the time, new towns served as the backdrop to the long-running TV series Z-Cars and were affectionately portrayed in the films Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush and The Garnett Saga, the plot of the latter centring on the family finally leaving the nineteenth century terraces of the deepest East End for a tower block maisonette in an unspecified location in the Home Counties.(36) Some criticism could be made that the new towns and estates lacked the level of closely spaced public facilities that characterised the older settlements, but they were mostly welcomed by the people who moved into them. In the depopulated (and depopulating) areas that they left behind the properties that survived were usually cheap to buy (or rent) and in some areas a new type of informal housing economy emerged. This took the form of large, old houses being converted into “bed-sitters” and, slightly later, of streets of empty properties that were due for redevelopment being reoccupied by bands of young cultural and political activists. Eventually, with local authorities planning extensive building and road-widening programmes, around 30,000 homes in London were awaiting demolition, only 1-2% of the total stock, but concentrated in certain areas. For many, this is where their experience of living, and making their way in the capital city began.
Throughout this period, it seemed that a consensus existed across political parties, supporting state-funded housing. And to some extent it did, as the figures for the number of new homes testify, but glimpses of a different language and a colder reality could even then be seen. The fictional Garnett, bounced out of his house and into a new estate, was a great admirer, as many were, of Enoch Powell. As early as November 1955, Powell, MP for Wolverhampton South West, spoke at some length in Parliament expounding his views on housing.(37) Starting with an attack on the Labour opposition, Powell claimed that their most recent manifesto (May 1955, Forward with Labour: Labour’s Policy for the Consideration of the Nation) would inevitably lead to the nationalisation of all privately owned housing, because as Powell asserted “One cannot leave uncontrolled one sector of a commodity—and that the minor sector—and purport to control all the rest”. (What Labour had actually suggested, unsuccessfully, six months earlier was “The failure of the Tory Rents and Repairs Acts has proved that the landlords will not repair those houses without steeper increases of rent than even a Tory Government would dare to permit. Labour will therefore ask local authorities to submit schemes for gradually taking over and modernising rent-controlled private property, subject to fair compensation. We shall help those who wish to do so to own their own homes. We shall give leaseholders an opportunity of purchasing the freeholds of their houses”).(38) From here Powell moved on to claim “The House ought to recall that the conception of subsidised housing, both after the First World War and the Second World War, has been that it is, in essence, temporary—to deal with conditions created by war”, a statement for which there was no evidence at all; neither Christopher Addison in 1918 nor Aneurin Bevan in 1945 said they were only carrying out a few temporary measures. Finally, he gets to the point: “We must, therefore, ask whether, in comparing the 1930s with today, the relationship between current building costs and wages has changed to the disadvantage of the tenant. We must ask whether the same people who in the 1930s were being built for by private enterprise, the people who were moving out of rented houses into houses built by private enterprise and sold on mortgage, are today less able to afford current costs either as rents or repayments on houses built to sell.”
What is being said here, and what Powell clearly believed, is that the housing market worked very well in the 1930s: the decade that enjoyed a private sector-led building boom. The 1930s were a time when things worked well for the lower middle classes, and upper working classes – people in secure employment who were careful with their money and saved a bit. From this (and ignoring how the rest of the country then lived) Powell extrapolates and asks the question: given how much living standards have now risen, why are we now doing something so different? Can’t we just – shouldn’t we – just revert to what we did in the 1930s and let the private builders do what they wish? Which is not to say that Powell wanted no social housing, or indeed wanted ribbon development all the way from London to his constituency. Rather, one imagines that he supported how social housing had been provided circa 1885, by privately funded companies and benefactors working in tandem with politicians like Joseph Chamberlain, a figure he greatly admired.
His arguments were selective, carefully constructed and had immense emotional appeal, creating as they did a fantasy of a recently vanished past and endorsing a kind of resentful victimhood in certain middle- and working-class quarters. They got him noticed politically. In December 1955 Prime Minister Anthony Eden appointed him junior housing minister to Duncan Sandys. Post-Suez, Harold Macmillan advanced him to the position of Financial Secretary to the Treasury. In the first of his theatrical denunciations, Powell resigned from this position, together with the Chancellor of the Exchequer Peter Thorneycroft MP, after just a year, with Thorneycroft stating by way of explanation “For twelve years, we have been attempting to do more than our resources could manage, and in the process, we have been gravely weakening ourselves… I believe that there is an England which would prefer to face these facts and make the necessary decisions now. I believe that living within our resources is neither unfair nor unjust, nor, perhaps, in the long run even unpopular.” Decoded, this was a firm laying out of what some years later became the Conservative mainstream position: since 1945 we have been spending too much, and that reverting to a pre-1945 way of doing things was both better and more popular than people imagined.(39) Macmillan was having none of it. He speedily replaced them, and, though a modest cut in taxation followed in 1960, the state still collected enough money to keep public services at a good level.
This was the backdrop against which Young and Willmott issued their findings about Debden. Although they partially recanted, their arguments would be picked up and recycled opportunistically by those who, however they framed their views, disliked the post-1945 consensus. It was hard, of course, to see exactly what Young and Willmott were recommending as an alternative. Presumably something along the lines of what Osborn had long suggested: the government should just give the public what it wanted. Recent re-evaluations of Family and Kinship in East London have cast serious doubt on its value as an impartial work. To begin with, it isn’t clear how many interviews they actually carried out, but it was certainly well below the threshold of a thousand, the level which statisticians accept as statistically significant. Critics have noted that their assertion that “the majority” of Debden residents wanted to return to Bethnal Green was based on replies supposedly made by 41 households, supposedly being the operative word as when the notes are read in full it is clear that the majority were not expressing a view that they actively wanted to move back to the East End.(40)
For those on the political right, questioning the level of public spending on housing, it helped no end that they could state that Young had been one of the co-authors of Labour’s 1945 manifesto. Another straw in the wind came in 1958 when John Betjeman abandoned his prior enthusiasm for modernity and became secretary of the Victorian Society. Based in Bedford Park, the Society aimed to raise awareness of the many good points associated with Victorian architecture, and also to preserve buildings, monuments and streets that were facing destruction from the extensive redevelopments being carried out in UK towns and cities. They were particularly active on the issue of the Euston Arch, the immense 1837 entrance to Euston Station that resembled a Greek temple. In 1960, proposals were made to completely demolish and reconstruct Euston Station, and get rid of the Arch. Betjeman, the Victorian Society and others fought this vigorously, up to cabinet level, where it was considered twice on 17 and 26 October 1961. They lost and Macmillan won.(41) There was no sentiment it seemed for old buildings at government level, and none at all for anything associated with the smoky, dirty atmosphere of the early industrial revolution. The building of the new Euston commenced with its airy open concourse, clean, electric trains, adjoining office tower and much use of concrete.
Notes
1. Again, in this respect note that the standard rate of income tax was 9s in the £ (45%) in 1955, falling to 7s 9d (38%) by 1960 before rising to 8s 3d (42%) in 1965. All were considerably greater than the amount levied today.
2. See Family and Kinship in East London p126.
3. See Family and Kinship in East London p153.
4. The conversion of the LNER Liverpool Street-Leyton-Epping-Ongar service into an extension of the LT Central Line had been approved in 1935 by Herbert Morrison’s LCC, and agreed by the government as a measure to help alleviate unemployment. The decision to locate a new estate at Debden dated from this time and was intended to ensure the viability of the railway line.
5. The MP for the area then was Sir Winston Churchill. Today part of it is represented by Ian Duncan Smith. On the Central Line, it is approximately 9 minutes closer to Bethnal Green than Debden. Young had opened his Institute of Community Studies at 18 Victoria Park Square, London E2 in 1953, in a building originally used as a settlement by Oxford University theology graduates. It was less than a minute’s walk from Bethnal Green tube station. Hence his focus on Bethnal Green, Debden and Wanstead.
6. Though in this case at least one contemporary reviewer noted that the book’s conclusions were not borne out by the data. See: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/223119
7. Something he considered they had recanted by 1964.
8. See Daily Report, Foreign Radio Broadcasts, Issues 132-133 CIA. In this Dygai confirms “…350 new flats are being built in Moscow every day. Last year alone half a million Muscovites moved into new flats”. The main UK delegate at the conference was Canon Collins. For a full account of Osborne’s dealings with the USSR see Appendix One.
9. He kept his shares however.
10. Throughout this period Parliament continued to exercise itself about proposals to increase the population of Stevenage from 80,000 to 140,000. See the February 1964 debates reported in Hansard about extending existing new towns. By this point Alec Douglas-Home was Prime Minister and Harold Wilson Leader of the Opposition. At the general election held that October, Labour gained Hitchin, the constituency containing Letchworth and Stevenage.
11. The new developments waiting the longest for a rail service include Livingston (line closed 1948: nothing for 73 years), Skelmersdale (line closed 1956, 65 years), Daventry (line closed 1958), Killingworth (station closed 1958) and Washington (station closed 1963, the first such “Beeching” casualty).
12. The Minister of Transport 1959-1964, with prime responsibility for introducing cuts that were blamed on Beeching, was Ernest Marples MP. Like Joseph he had significant business interests outside Parliament, in his case 80% of the shares in the road building firm Ridgway.
13. The extent to which car ownership was favoured above all else can be read in the deliberations of Washington Development Corporation (actually an area where car ownership was significantly lower than the national average) where a 1968 review proclaimed “By constructing a road system that is based on a primary network of urban motorways capable of carrying the ultimate anticipated traffic volumes and of distributing the traffic generating activities evenly throughout the town, Washington New Town will set a pattern that is likely to be adopted by the rest of the world…The inhabitants of Washington are fortunate in that whilst other towns wrestle with the problem of traffic congestion, they will be the first to enjoy a road network without equal”.
14. Disney and his team were also influenced by Victor Gruen’s Metropolis of Tomorrow from his book The Heart of Our Cities. (An Austrian, Gruen became prominent in the US in the 1940s by designing shopping centres). Others that they studied included Clarence Perry’s neighbourhood unit plan(s) for New York City (from the 1920s), Clarence Stein and Henry Wright’s pedestrian-oriented plan for Radburn, New Jersey, the emerging UK plans for Milton Keynes as well as various American company towns and planned communities. For a discussion on the links between Howard and Disney see: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3345&context=etd
15. Like many at the time Disney was a firm believer in the imminence of widespread space travel. See his 1955 film Man in Space at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFXza9RH7-E This includes a prediction from Wernher von Braun that passenger services into space will be running in about ten years, ie, by 1965. Disney’s obsession with developing a monorail as a viable means of terrestrial transport was equally unsuccessful. It remains, though, emblematic of a period when such optimistic thinking was taken for granted. For a satire of this, see the 1993 episode of The Simpsons, Marge vs the Monorail.
16. Sadly, not the same Richard Hamilton of Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?
17. Announced on 19 September 1966 the plans for “Disney’s Mineral King Ski Resort” in the valley were only finally stopped in 1978, after lengthy opposition by preservationists, when the valley became part of Sequoia National Park, following an Act of Congress. On EPCOT and Disney’s approach to ideal urban development see: https://carolinaangles.com/2017/04/21/walt-disney-planner/
18. Reston was planned by Robert E Simon as a private sector-led version of Greenbelt, Maryland. Like Howard’s Letchworth and Welwyn schemes it was governed by an elaborate set of legal agreements and covenants. Like them too, it developed at a slower pace than anticipated and took many years to reach its intended population. Because of this, financial problems arose and Smith had been replaced as owner by Gulf Oil by 1967.
19. However, this was not an original idea from Kahn and Wiener. For its genesis see Visit to the World’s Fair 2014 by Isaac Asimov in the New York Times of 16 August 1964 which can be viewed at https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/pfetimes/asi-v-fair.html
20. So much so that Kahn commented about the film “I liked the movie… Since Stanley lifted lines from On Thermonuclear War without change but out of context, I asked him ‘Doesn’t that entitle me to a royalty?’ He pretended not to hear me at first, but when I asked him again, Stanley replied, in the firmest tone I’ve heard him use: ‘It doesn’t work that way.’”
21. Note in this respect the comments of Mumford in 1958 “…in cities like New York, the older parts are more and more dedicated to the under privileged minorities; and in Washington, if the exodus continues, the core of the city will be simply one vast Negro slum… Space, with country or suburban living, has always been an upper-class privilege…”
22. All dating from between 1961 and 1963, though none was a residential building. The London Hilton, in Park Lane and the Post Office Tower, with its famous revolving restaurant, were particularly admired. Ironically, in 1962, Walter Gropius designed his only significant London building 100 yards to the north of the Hilton at 45 Park Lane. A small mixed-use scheme, the commercial element was occupied for many years by the Bunny Club.
23. The height of Centre Point was dictated by the cost of buying out the multitude of landowners in the area, something that also led to a reduction in the residential element of the scheme. Famously, Hyams kept Centre Point empty until 1975, insisting it could only be let to a single tenant. He did agree, though, to its being used as a film set for the 1967 Frank Sinatra spy film The Naked Runner, footage of which (the only surviving images of how it looked when completed) can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk3txHCx3yk. Remodelling busy road junctions with an abundance of modern high-rise buildings was actively pursued by the LCC throughout the 1950s. Goldfinger designed the DHSS HQ at the Elephant and Castle (1963) and Gropius worked for several years, unsuccessfully, on a projected redevelopment of Piccadilly Circus.
24. Which like Centre Point remained empty until 1975, when Hyams finally let it to the Civil Aviation Authority.
25. The first tenant of which was Fine Fare. In another irony, the first Fine Fare supermarket had opened in Welwyn Garden City in 1951, under the ownership of Howardsgate Holdings, a company started by Ebenezer Howard.
26. The rents for Balfron Tower and Trellick Tower were set at what was then quite a high level, reflecting the view that these were prestigious addresses. A flat in Balfron Tower cost £4 15s 6d (£4.77) per week in 1967, roughly 28% of average earnings, then. Comparable figures today would be a rent of £165.85p.
27. The extensive network of empty streets, awaiting demolition, along the Westway route was used as the setting for the 1970 John Boorman film Leo the Last and features in many other cinematic and TV works.
28. Smith served on Newcastle City Council 1950-1965, and was Leader from 1959; his influence persisted long after he had vacated the Civic Centre. He served on the Buchanan Committee, which produced Traffic in Towns, alongside Oleg Kerensky, an engineer and the son of Alexander whom Lenin ousted from power in 1917. Another committee member was architect William Holford, who had been on the team designing the new Brazilian capital of Brasilia in the 1950s. Smith often stated that his ambition was to turn Newcastle into the Brasilia of the north. Looked at today many of the findings in Traffic in Towns follow on logically from the Abercrombie Plan.
29. Smith too was much taken with Scandinavia, and oversaw the construction of a new Civic Centre that was opened, in 1968, by King Olaf V of Norway. Its Council Chamber was designed to be the seat of government for the proposed regional parliament in the North East of England, something recommended, as part of a division of the UK into 11 regions, by the 1968-1969 Redcliffe-Maud Committee of 1969, of which Smith was also a member.
30. Hyde Park Barracks, built by Sir Basil Spence from 1967, accommodates 514 officers and men and 273 horses in a residential tower over 300 feet high. It is thought to be the only tower block in the world designed for horses, and includes a special lift to transport them to and from their floors. One wonders if the urban myths that proliferated from the late 1960s about some council tenants in tower blocks keeping horses on their balconies are possibly misremembered or garbled accounts of the arrangements made for the Household Cavalry.
31. Between 1955 and 1970 5.48m new homes were completed (an average of 342,000 per year – considerably higher than today) of which 48.9% were for local authorities and new towns and 51.1% for private sale.
32. A comprehensive account, by Julia Park, of how space standards have evolved in the UK can be read at http://housingspacestandards.co.uk/assets/space-standards_onscreen.pdf
33. Similarly, the Act also allowed for the creation and registration of cooperatives. An early, and notable, development from one such body was 125 Park Road NW8, by Terry Farrell/Nicholas Grimshaw, built in 1968. Many of the newly created housing associations and cooperatives concentrated initially on buying and refurbishing neglected or abandoned pre-1919 housing in inner-city areas.
34. At the extremities of which, but still arguably within the genre, one can locate The Fool, a Dutch collective which produced clothing, music, film sets, album sleeves and decorated the exterior of the Apple Boutique in Baker Street during its brief existence in 1967-1968. The early version of The Pink Floyd was not dissimilar, combining 2 architects (Roger Waters and Nick Mason), a musician (Rick Wright), an artist (Syd Barrett), an economics lecturer (Peter Jenner) and a lighting technician (Peter Wynne-Wilson). The main practitioners at Archigram actually had day jobs with Taylor Woodrow at one point. One of their more feasible early ideas was a tower of buildings made of containers, stacked one above the other. The art work for this, together with many variations by other practices, can be seen at https://www.treehugger.com/its-time-another-look-plug-housing-4851410 and resembles a Blake or Hamilton pop collage.
35. The Minister of Housing at the time was Anthony Greenwood MP, whose father Arthur Greenwood had introduced subsidies for slum clearance whilst Minister for Health 1929-1931.
36. The Garnett Saga was actually filmed at John Walsh Tower (built 1966) overlooking Epping Forest. An account of the history of this block, which echoes that of many similar buildings, can be read at https://architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/2016/08/10/what-are-the-options-fred-wigg-john-walsh-towers/ New towns were not always portrayed as benign environments. The 1956 Philip King play Serious Charge, for instance, portrays teenage hooliganism, and Keith Waterhouse’s 1961 comic novel Jubb features a seedy, predatory single man whose indecent ambitions are thwarted by bureaucratic local committees.
37. See Hansard 21 November 1955.
38. See http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1955/1955-labour-manifesto.shtml
39. On 1958 Thorneycroft later stated “We probably made our stand too early”. In terms of supposed golden eras in the past that could be invoked as periods of better government note that the standard rate of taxation stood at 4s 6d in the £ in 1938 (22.5%) and at only 1s 2d in the £ (6.5%) in 1914. Both were significantly lower than the 1958 figure of 8s 6d (42.5%).
40. For a contemporary view see https://fabians.org.uk/family-and-kinship-in-east-london-revisited/ A study of how Young’s views developed appeared in The Guardian on 25 April 2007 and can be read at https://www.theguardian.com/society/2007/apr/25/communities.britishidentityandsociety Young’s background was originally in market research and no survey today of such a large population group would be based on such a tiny number of respondents: a minimum of 1,000 replies would be considered essential, this being likely to produce data that is “statistically significant”. Nor would those surveyed be asked such leading questions.
41. See https://cabinetroom.wordpress.com/2015/06/12/a-doric-tragedy-demolishing-the-euston-arch/ JM Richards, editor of Architectural Review who was part of a delegation that visited Macmillan on this issue, implied afterwards that he thought the Prime Minister might have been asleep during their meeting: “Macmillan listened – or I suppose he listened… he sat without moving with his eyes apparently closed. He asked no questions; in fact, he said nothing except that he would consider the matter.”