8
When the Second World War started only 25% of UK households lived in homes that they owned (compared with 10% in 1914) and 75% rented. Of the latter, only 10% were local authority tenants. An enormous part of the population – 65% in total – rented “privately”, this definition covering housing associations, industrial dwellings companies and landlords managing everything from properly self-contained accommodation through to houses in multiple occupation with shared cooking and washing facilities. House-building itself had slowed virtually to a halt by the spring of 1940 as the diversion of manpower and materials to wartime uses took precedence. Thereafter only a tiny number of new homes were completed: between 1940 and 1945 just 113,000 of all types would be built.(1)
It had been expected that the outbreak of a war would be immediately accompanied by mass bombing raids, something featured decades earlier in the writings of HG Wells, and then seemingly confirmed by the destruction in April 1937 of the Basque city of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.(2) Official policy on this in the UK had been made clear as early as November 1932 when Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin declared, when stating that the UK would not pursue unilateral disarmament, “…I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through…” This was not to mean, though, that the government regarded itself as helpless. In the years that followed elaborate precautions were put in place to minimise civilian casualties, including plans to evacuate women and children out of large urban areas. The Home Office set up an Air Raid Precautions department in 1935 and began recruiting Air Raid Wardens from 1937.
Many of these plans were put into operation in August and September 1939, only for very little – by way of aerial destruction – to occur. The bulk of those evacuated in the autumn of 1939, for instance, had moved back home voluntarily by the spring of 1940. When Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940, with the war escalating, he welcomed Neville Chamberlain’s decision to remain in the government, expecting that Chamberlain would “look after the Home Front for me” whilst he concentrated on military and naval strategy.(3)In fact, although Churchill brought Labour and Liberal figures into his administration, apart from Ernest Bevin (whose role was to mobilise the national workforce and provide an effective war economy), they had mainly secondary positions. The key post of Minister of Health, with responsibility for housing as well as medical services, was held by Malcolm MacDonald (1940-1941), Ernest Brown (1941-1943) and Henry Willink (1943-1945) none of whom was a Labour MP. Similarly, the position of First Commissioner of Works was occupied by Lord Tryon, Lord Reith, Lord Portal and Duncan Sandys respectively, none of whom was a Labour (or even Liberal) representative. It is hard not to draw the conclusion that Churchill wanted the support of the Labour Party mainly because it enabled him to wage war, not for any broader set of objectives. In so far as he thought about post-war arrangements at all in the early months of his premiership, he assumed that these could be devolved to Chamberlain, the architect of much of the pre-1939 house-building boom.
If that were his assumption it disappeared in September 1940 when Chamberlain resigned on grounds of ill-health. Coincidentally, the mass bombing of UK cities commenced the same month. It had a severe impact, killing over 43,000 people and injuring another 52,000 over the next eight months. Approximately half the casualties inflicted by the Luftwaffe occurred in London. Estimates of how many buildings were destroyed and damaged vary, but figures suggesting 70,000 completely destroyed and 1,700,000 damaged (many of which were then abandoned) are quoted. By November 1940, 25% of the population of London had left the city, most making their own arrangements to live elsewhere.(4) It was true, of course, that these figures were much less than those suffered subsequently in Russia, Germany or Japan. It was also true that a great many of the damaged houses were duly patched up and brought back into use, and that most of those made homeless found accommodation with friends or family. But the overall impact, which saw fairly extensive areas of London and other key UK cities remain derelict with many abandoned properties and a substantial number of households voluntarily rehousing themselves away from likely target areas, did not change.
The scale of the damage in London – clearly visible to government ministers as they went about their business – meant that from early on in the conflict, with victory far from assured, bullish proposals were made for post-war reconstruction. In early 1941, Lord Reith, First Commissioner of Works, asked the LCC to draw up proposals to completely rebuild London. Reith set out the parameters the government were setting in how this should be carried out in a speech on 17 July 1941: “…There are four main points in both the Interim Report and the Government statement. The first is a standard of maximum values; the second, a definition and appropriate special treatment of reconstruction areas; the third, a general strengthening of planning control to safeguard the future while plans and the full post-war planning system are being worked out; the fourth, a central planning authority. On the first, a standard of maximum values, the Government have made the ‘announcement of intentions’ which the Committee recommended as sufficient for present purposes. The announcement of the principle—that is, that values for public acquisition or control of land should not exceed those of March, 1939—should not and does not prevent legitimate dealings in land meantime, but it should and does give us sufficient warning to prevent undesirable speculation and speculative dealings of any sort. Caveat emptor! If there be any of the vampire breed who expect to profit in this particular direction from the war, they will have cause to regret their action and they will find themselves in error…”(5) In other words: the government would set land values, with these not exceeding March 1939 prices, there would be centralised planning, and planning rules themselves would be strengthened. By the time Reith and the government committed to this, the LCC had appointed Patrick Abercrombie to draft a County of London Plan, work that he would carry out with John Forshaw, Chief Architect of the LCC.
Abercrombie had been associated with Osborn, Purdom and Howard from 1918, via his membership of the National Garden Cities Committee. It might have been thought that his appointment by the LCC signified a preference for low-density solutions to housing and planning issues. In fact, his outlook was more nuanced than this, and his approach to issues generally was heavily influenced by Baron Haussmann and the École des Beaux Arts.(6) Between 1853 and 1869, Haussmann had accomplished an immense reconstruction of Paris at enormous expense. Much of the old, cluttered city was torn down and replaced by mile after mile of multi-storied apartment blocks built above ground-floor commercial space. Density was high (as it was too, in the early Victorian London equivalent of this) and a huge proportion of the population was moved to facilitate the plan. Haussmann himself enjoyed autocratic powers, and whilst his plan delivered a new, ideal city, it also had a military purpose. The wide, broad boulevards made it easier to clear demonstrators (or even revolutionaries) out of the way by the use of artillery fire, and the green belt of recreational land that surrounded Paris contained 38 forts, built between 1840 and 1890 for the defence of the city.
As early as 1914 Abercrombie had shown an interest in re-planning a large UK city. In that year he entered, and won, a competition to provide a plan for Dublin.(7) By 1922, he was acting as adviser to Cork, after which he returned to Dublin in 1925 to complete the Dublin Civic Survey. This was intended to rebuild areas that had been devastated between 1916 and 1923 during the Irish War of Independence and the Civil War that followed. Much of the Civic Survey (and of Abercrombie’s earlier plan) was never implemented: to this day Dublin lacks the underground rail network that was envisaged over a century ago. What did happen, after a fashion, was the expansion of various low-density suburban areas like Crumlin and Drumcondra.(8)
As far as most people in the UK were concerned, though, Abercrombie’s reputation rested on his work with the Council for the Preservation of Rural England and in particular his 1929 report The Thames Valley from Cricklade to Staines: A survey of its existing state and some suggestions for its future preservation. This certainly tapped into the feeling of the time: that largely unregulated ribbon development spreading out of existing cities was in danger of “joining up” much of the country in one extended suburban sprawl.(9) Appointed chair of town planning at University College, London in 1935, Abercrombie was back in Dublin a year later to work on further plans for remodelling the city. These emphasised open-space provision within the centre and recommended a green belt up to six miles wide around the city within which some low-density development would be permitted. When finally appointed by the LCC, Abercrombie was 62 years old, impeccably well-connected and regarded as the leading UK expert in strategic town planning. Always immaculately dressed, his bearing was patrician veering to haughty, an impression confirmed by his wearing a monocle at all times. Forshaw, his colleague, had been chief architect of the Miners’ Welfare Committee in the 1930s prior to joining the London County Council, where, by 1941, he had responsibility across the metropolis for clearing land that had been damaged in air raids and disposing of the debris that resulted from this.
The knowledge that a major report was being written about the future planning of London produced, as was to be expected, a lively correspondence from those with a specific professional interest in whatever recommendations it might produce. As early as 16 January 1942 a pessimistic Frederic Osborn was commenting “Most planners are too much cowed by the City-in-Being”(10). Throughout that year he found himself increasingly crossing swords with Erno Goldfinger, a Hungarian émigré architect who favoured an unashamedly modernist approach. In a series of articles for The Architectural Review Goldfinger, who had built little at that point, put forward his own definition of how space should be used to maximum advantage and attacked Osborn, observing that his writings “state as axiomatic truths the one-sided arguments of the Garden City Movement”.(11) At its simplest, Osborn wanted an abundance of low-density garden cities outside London, to which a high proportion of the city’s population (and its employment) would be moved, whereas Goldfinger wanted most of the city demolished and rebuilt in situ, to a much higher density, Le Corbusier style. At the extreme end of the spectrum were the members of the Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS), founded in 1933, who produced their own Plan for London in June 1942. Led by Morton Shand, a kind of upper-class connoisseur and friend of Le Corbusier, MARS brought together Wells Coates, Maxwell Fry and John Betjeman as well as a host of other figures.(12) Their plan – heavily influenced by Nikolay Alexandrovich Milyutin’s 1930 design for a linear city – would have involved demolishing most of London and starting again from scratch.
Not surprisingly, gigantic proposals of this type were avoided by Abercrombie and Forshaw. Even so, when published in 1943, The County of London Plan was judged to be “a profound disappointment” by Osborn. Despite such mutterings it was the subject of an exhibition at County Hall, London, which ran from July to August 1943 and drew 75,000 people, including the King and Queen.(13) Further afield, news of the debate at home about planning for the post-war world was even studied in some POW Camps, including Stalag Luft III, noted in later years as the site of The Great Escape. In fact, with the UK now part of an international coalition that was clearly prevailing against Germany and Japan, at this point public interest in the post-war world was running at a very high level. Penguin books, who had already published Living in Cities by Ralph Tubbs, a colleague of Goldfinger’s, now asked Goldfinger and EJ Carter to explicate what the report meant in practice in a Penguin special.(14)
Despite the immense acclaim for The County of London Plan, Osborn remained in despair, commenting on 7 September 1943 “90 to 95 per cent want houses and gardens and don’t want this… The LCC is led by middle-class Labour Councillors right out of touch with popular opinion.” This was a cutting remark, albeit one made in private correspondence. To whom might it have applied in Osborn’s eyes? The 1937 LCC elections produced 69 Labour and 49 Conservative councillors, with the Labour contingent including 3 former MPs and 9 current MPs, including Herbert Morrison, Lewis Silkin, George Strauss and John Wilmot, all of whom would hold senior positions in the Attlee government. There was also the Earl of Listowel, who sat as an LCC councillor, and, like the quartet just mentioned, would later serve under Attlee. A further 12 LCC members would be elected Labour MPs in 1945. That the LCC was operating as a kind of incubator, providing personnel for a future Labour government, reflected Morrison’s efficient management of the Labour Party across London in the 1920s and 1930s, something very much designed to produce Labour supremacy in the capital. Was Osborn referring, perhaps, to Peggy Jay, one of the “Hampstead middle-class Labour grande-dames” whom Morrison had groomed to facilitate his takeover of the LCC? Or if not her, suspicion falls on Ewart Culpin, ousted by Howard from the Garden City Association in 1918. Culpin had served on the LCC since 1925, and had qualified as both a town planner and architect, designing council housing in Bermondsey, an area he would later represent.(15)
In the event Osborn’s fears were groundless. Abercrombie kept a foot in both the modernist and garden city camps. In 1944, he produced a sequel, The Greater London Plan, known subsequently as the “The Abercrombie Plan”. This introduced the idea of satellite towns, and recommended that much of the population of London and other cities should be moved out to them. His proposals were extremely detailed, and took as their starting point his view, which Howard would have shared, that there was inadequate open space in existing cities and towns. He recommended a future allocation of 4 acres of public amenity space for every thousand people living in an urban setting, the equivalent of 174 square feet or 16 square metres per person. Whilst many inner-urban areas in the 1930s and 1940s had resident groups, or local politicians, who were vocal in their demand for additional open space, it isn’t clear how Abercrombie reached his figures, or why he made the assumptions that he did.(16) It is worth considering that, if the same formula were used today, it would require the conversion of 395 square miles of UK urban land into public open space. Abercrombie also called for most major roads within London to be expanded to dual carriageways and either elevated above or placed in tunnels below the new urban fabric. Additional arterial roads would be built and treated as “parkways”, with substantial planting on either side (including wooded areas) to muffle their noise from the surrounding residential and commercial buildings. He also suggested that all the railway bridges across the Thames ought to be abolished (instead the lines would tunnel beneath central London, to and from colossal subterranean termini) and be converted into road crossings with a couple of substantial extra bridges added for good measure. It was almost, but not quite, as ambitious as the MARS Plan.
The view that something exceptional had to be done about housing, and the built environment generally, extended beyond Abercrombie, Osborn and the LCC. Churchill too had thoughts about this, creating the posts of Minister of Town and Country Planning, from December 1942, and Minister of Reconstruction, from November 1943. Both were held by Conservatives, and the Labour Party was kept securely away from any such responsibilities. With so much destruction across the UK’s cities these initiatives were understandable, and the government’s intention was to make an immediate impact on the problem via a programme of Emergency Factory Made (EFM) housing. This would erect hundreds of thousands of temporary bungalows, quickly named “prefabs” by the public, wherever there was some empty land. Prefabs had the advantage – at a time when traditional building materials were in short supply and the construction industry still lacked manpower – of being assembled from mainly non-traditional materials. A prototype, “the Portal” (named after Lord Portal, Minister of Works and Planning) was exhibited at the Tate Gallery in May 1944. Sponsored by the UK automobile industry, and built of steel – which turned out to be in equally short supply – it was quickly abandoned in favour of other prefabricated designs that used concrete panels, aluminium and even asbestos. Some could be assembled in 41 minutes, and there was also a complementary range of slightly more elaborate prefabricated houses that could be built in 2-3 days. The intention with all of these was that none would remain in use for more than 10 years. By then, normal market conditions would have resumed, something which in Churchill’s eyes would mean a continuation of the inter-war private housing boom with a few substantial council house and flat building projects thrown in for good measure.(17)
The final stages of the conflict brought further destruction to the UK, notably via the use by Germany of the V1 (from June 1944) and V2 (from September 1944) which between them damaged or destroyed over a million buildings, mainly in London and the south east, before attacks finally ceased in March 1945. By then, Goldfinger and Carter’s The London County Plan had appeared. It sold 100,000 copies and a precis of it was distributed to the armed forces. Illustrated with attractive hand-drawn maps and diagrams, it pointed out in particular the advantages of building properly spaced 7- to 10-floor residential blocks. Goldfinger and Carter also discussed issues of density and overcrowding, and clearly illustrated, as had Abercrombie and Forshaw, the need to decant 2 million people out of London. New planning powers would be used, with all urban areas in future carefully divided into residential, leisure, industrial or employment areas. To demonstrate how this would work in practice, they selected Shoreditch as an example, providing “before” and “after” illustrations showing the impact of these theories.
Churchill was not in favour and personally rejected the garden city/dispersal thesis in a cabinet meeting in April 1945, commenting “Ah yes… all this stuff about planning and compensation and betterment. Broad vistas and all that. But give to me the eighteenth-century alleyway, where footpads lurk and the harlot plies her trade, and none of this new-fangled planning doctrine…”(18) By then the war against Germany was in its last stages and he had already committed, in October 1944, that the end of the war in Europe should determine the date of the next general election. At a meeting with Clement Attlee on 18 May 1945 both agreed that the government should continue until the defeat of Japan, which, at that point, might not have been until 1946, or possibly even 1947. Attlee was immediately advised afterwards by Bevin and Morrison that in their view an election should be held that October, when the current Parliament rose. With this in mind, and after taking soundings at a party conference, Attlee went back to Churchill and told him Labour would be leaving the government. Bevin and Morrison had good reason for insisting that Labour take this course of action. Although in their infancy, polls by the British Institute of Public Opinion showed in February 1945 that Labour were leading the Conservatives by 47% to 27%, with this commanding lead narrowing to 45%-32% by June. In their view, they had a chance of winning a general election.(19)
Churchill’s response to Labour leaving his government on 23 May 1945 was to disregard the polling data – if he took much notice of it at all – dissolve Parliament and call a general election. The highly personalised Conservative Party manifesto that appeared shortly afterwards (Winston Churchill’s Declaration of Policy to the Electors) opened with an attack on his former coalition partners “…I had hoped to preserve the Coalition Government, comprising all Parties in the State, until the end of the Japanese war, but owing to the unwillingness of the Socialist and Sinclair Liberal Parties to agree to my proposal, a General Election became inevitable, and I have formed a new National Government, consisting of the best men in all Parties who were willing to serve and some who are members of no Party at all…” Despite approaching the campaign as a yes/no endorsement of Churchill as leader, on housing the Conservative campaign produced a surprisingly detailed set of proposals. They were explicit in stating that because of rising costs both local authorities and private builders would be subsidised by the state, the first two years post-war would see 300,000 new permanent homes built (albeit many of these would be “factory-made permanent houses”) as well as between 150,000 and 200,000 additional “well-equipped temporary houses”. In addition to this rents would be controlled via a new system of Rent Tribunals.
Churchill also committed to assist the reconstruction of urban areas by fixing land values at 1939 levels and “to secure for the future the best use of land in the public interest, including proper reservation of open spaces and the best location of industry and housing”.
In contrast to this, Labour went into the election with a manifesto overseen by Herbert Morrison and Ellen Wilkinson, the text of which was written by either Patrick Gordon Walker or Michael Young.(20) It had little specific to say about housing, preferring instead a set of generalisations, that were in many ways quite close to the Conservative position: modern methods and materials “will have to be the order of the day”, price controls on the cost of building materials would be enforced by the state and a programme begun that would continue until “every family in this island has a good standard of accommodation”. To facilitate this Labour committed to setting up a Ministry of Housing and Planning, exercising the housing powers of the Ministry of Health with the planning powers of the Ministry of Town and Country Planning. Finally, Labour repeated Attlee’s statement of 1937 that it would nationalise land, caveating this by stating it was something it “would work towards”. It would ensure fair compensation to landowners affected by this, against which a new source of revenue would be set up, derived from the better use of the land in question. There was no mention anywhere in the Labour manifesto of how many properties it might actually build.
Similarly, the Liberal party avoided specifics. Proclaiming “…There is a house famine in the land…”, they planned like Labour to create a Minister of Housing, and like both the main parties they would control the cost of building materials. From here they went on to concentrate on the rural aspects of housing (most of their remaining seats were rural), making, inter alia, the assertions “…Great Britain is a small country with a vast population…” and “…The fullest use must be made of agricultural land for food production…” (21)
The absence of any costings, by any of the main parties, was curious, given the scale of the undertakings to which they were committing. One explanation for this may be that with the standard rate of income tax running at 50% in 1945 (10s in the £), the public were used to (and understood) the idea of large-scale, dramatic spending programmes.(22) Polling day was held on 5 July 1945. After votes had been cast by, and collected from, UK servicemen overseas, the result was declared on 26 July: Labour had an absolute majority of 147 over all other parties. Churchill departed and Attlee formed a government.(23) Aneurin Bevan became Minister of Health. Lewis Silkin went to the Ministry of Town and Country Planning with George Tomlinson installed as First Commissioner of Works. Contrary to the manifesto commitment there was no Ministry of Housing and Planning.(24)
But, in the late summer of 1945, there was much to celebrate. To universal surprise, and after atomic weapons had been used against two of its largest cities by the US, Japan surrendered only 20 days after Attlee became Prime Minister. The opportunity thus opened up, long before it had been expected to become possible, for widespread social change. The vision the new government would follow in housing was spelt out in the documentary film The Proud City: A Plan for London. Produced by Edgar Anstey and directed by Ralph Keene, this recycled footage from Housing Problems and war time newsreels, and features Forshaw and Abercrombie spelling out their proposals for the reconstruction of the city post-1945. Like Housing Problems, it focusses on Stepney as an illustration of how best to proceed. The benefits of clear, detailed, bureaucratic planning – involving all government agencies as well as the private sector – are spelt out with great emphasis, with Abercrombie stating, very firmly, that London has “…mean hideous slums of which any city ought to be ashamed…” and “…all these bad things must go and the sooner the better…” whilst lamenting that “…we have allowed uncontrolled ribbon development…”(25)
The film doesn’t actually articulate what will happen, but viewers would surely have concluded that there would soon be a new world, where a lot of demolition and reconstruction would take place in a very short space of time, ribbon development would be prevented and traffic would be accommodated via a massive array of new multi-lane arterial roads. (This is illustrated with footage of US urban motorways). The film ends with Lord Latham, Leader of the LCC, and an advocate at the time of a new regional authority that would stretch far into the Home Counties, batting away criticism that any of this was unachievable. In particular he deals sharply with the traditional canard that there would be difficulties with the finances: “…It will certainly cost a great deal of money. But not more than unplanned building and certainly less than war…” Screened in cinemas through 1946, much of this had been in Howard’s vision half a century earlier. Now, modified by Abercrombie, and backed by substantial state funding, it would be implemented.
Notes
1. Both the figures for housing tenure and the numbers of dwellings built 1939-1945 are included in Butler and Butler, British Political Facts 1900-1994 and were drawn from data held, at that point by the Department of Environment.
2. Wells was much taken, from very early on, with the impact aerial bombing might have on civilisation. The War in the Air (1908) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933) both depict massive destruction caused by fleets of bombers.
3. Quoted in Robert Self Neville Chamberlain: A Biography (2006).
4. Estimates of Blitz casualties vary. Dear and Foot in The Oxford Companion to World War II (2001) give figures of around 43,000 killed and up to 139,000 injured. The estimates given to Parliament were lower.
5. See https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1941/jul/17/post-war-reconstruction#S5LV0119P0_19410717_HOL_22
6. On Abercrombie, Haussmann’s influence on him, and his proposals for Dublin, see The Irish Times 5 February 2003 at https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/an-irishman-s-diary-1.347850. As early as 1913, in Town Planning Review, Abercrombie had commented “Haussmann’s modernisation of Paris is the most brilliant piece of Town Planning in the world”.
7. Abercrombie was awarded a £500 prize for his 1914 Dublin plan. (Equal to around £150,000 today). For details of his plan, and its subsequent modification see https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/an-irishman-s-diary-1.347850 and https://comeheretome.com/2013/02/22/patrick-abercrombies-vision-of-dublin-1922/ and Abercrombie, Sydney Kelly and Arthur Kelly, Dublin of the future: the new town plan, being the scheme awarded first prize in the international competition University Press of Liverpool, Liverpool (1922). (The report is online at https://www.rte.ie/centuryireland//images/uploads/further-reading/Ed92-DublinOfTheFuture1.pdf). Raymond Unwin designed a garden suburb of 428 houses at Marino, near Drumcondra, which was built 1922-1926. The Crumlin scheme, built 1926-1936, consisted of 136 houses built for the workers at the Guinness brewery on land donated by the Earl of Iveagh.
8. Abercrombie’s recommendation for a substantial underground railway system in Dublin – which he replicated in his later London plan – was not formally taken up until 1972. Granted permission to proceed via a Railway Order in 2011, work has yet to commence.
9. See Patrick Abercrombie The Preservation of Rural England, London (1926). Abercrombie co-authored his 1929 book with the Earl of Mayo and Stanley Adshead. Literary representations of the opposition to ribbon development during this period ranged from George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air (1939), which is set in a Thames Valley market town that has been swallowed up by suburban housing, to Betjeman’s missive Slough in his 1937 poetry collection Continual Dew.
10. See Page 21, The Letters of Lewis Mumford and Frederic J Osborn: A Transatlantic Dialogue 1938-1970 Ed Michael Hughes London (1971).
11. Quoted in Kynaston Austerity Britain 1945-1951. Born in Hungary, Goldfinger had Polish nationality, and initially worked in Paris where he employed the young John Cage, later a major figure in avant-garde art and music, as his assistant. Resident in London from 1934 he married Ursula Blackwell, a relative of Blanche Blackwell, mistress of Ian Fleming.
12. On the MARS Plan for London see https://drawingmatter.org/the-mars-groups-plan-for-london-1933-1944/. Betjeman’s involvement with this is curious, given his later reputation as a founder member of the Victorian Society.
13. Details of the exhibition can be found at https://municipaldreams.wordpress.com/2014/07/08/the-county-of-london-plan-1943-if-only-we-will/
14. Carter combined his work as librarian of the RIBA with being Secretary of the RIBA Refugee Committee. In the latter capacity he was responsible for bringing key Bauhaus figures like Walter Gropius and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to the UK in 1934. Both found themselves with little to do in the UK – where modernism had shallow roots at that time it would seem – and left for the US in 1937. The departure of Gropius was commemorated by a dinner at the Trocadero Restaurant on 9 March 1937, attended by Abercrombie, HG Wells, Henry Moore and many others. The menu card for this event, designed by Moholy-Nagy can be seen at https://www.architecture.com/image-library/ribapix/image-information/poster/menu-card-for-dinner-in-honour-of-professor-walter-gropius-on-march-9th-1937-at-the-trocadero-restaurant-piccadilly-london-on-the-occasion-of-his-leaving-england-for-havard-university-the-toasts-menu-and-front-cover/posterid/RIBA94505.html During his stay in the UK Moholy-Nagy was also commissioned by John Betjeman to provide photographs to illustrate his book An Oxford University Chest and worked on the documentary films Lobsters (1935) and New Architecture and the London Zoo (1936), the former of which can be watched at https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-lobsters-1936-online
15. After being outmanoeuvred by Howard, Culpin’s political career saw him stand unsuccessfully as the Labour candidate in Islington North in the 1924 general election, after which he sat on the LCC 1925-1946.
16. Abercrombie’s assumptions ignored existing open space, such as traditional parks, squares, churchyards, cemeteries, playing fields, allotments, grazing land and so on. In some cases, boroughs already met his stringent requirements by virtue of existing land use. What he concentrated on was areas where there was deficiency, irrespective of whether the local authority as a whole might already have “sufficient” open space, and to meet this, he advocated demolition and clearance to create new parkland. Some of these projects, such as Burgess Park in Southwark, took more than 50 years to complete. Many of Abercrombie’s proposals and much of his approach can also be found in later reports like Traffic in Towns (1960).
17. Details of what the temporary housing looked like can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7kfL0-QhpM
18. Quoted in Kynaston Austerity Britain 1945-1951 P 31. The target of Churchill’s comments appears to have been William Morrison, his own Minister of Town and Country Planning.
19. As well as the opinion poll data pointing against a Conservative win, Labour had gained 18 seats at parliamentary by-elections between 1935 and 1939. After the wartime “truce” was introduced (in which the three main parties agreed not to contest by-elections against each other) additional left of centre gains continued to be made by Commonwealth (3 seats), Eire Labour and even the SNP (at Motherwell, in April 1945). Support for the Liberal Party also rose from 12% (February 1945) to 15% (June 1945). See Butler and Butler, British Political Facts 1900-1994.
20. Gordon Walker worked for the BBC at the time, and would later sit as a Labour MP 1945-1964 and 1966-1974. Young was employed at Political and Economic Planning, a prototype UK “think-tank”.
21. Each manifesto can be read in detail at http://www.conservativemanifesto.com/1945/1945-conservative-manifesto.shtml, http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1945/1945-labour-manifesto.shtml and http://www.libdemmanifesto.com/1945/1945-liberal-manifesto.shtml
22. The standard rate of income tax in the UK stood at 5s 6d in the £ in 1939 (27.5%) and rose to 10s in the £ (50%) in 1942, remaining at that level until 1947. It had been 1s 2d in the £ in 1914 (5.8%). In 2021 it sits at 20%, the same level it was at in 1923.
23. The full result in 1945 was: 393 Labour; 200 Conservative, 13 National Liberal, 12 Liberal, 10 Ulster Unionist, 3 Independent Labour Party, 2 Communist, 2 Irish Nationalist, 2 Independent, 1 Commonwealth, 1 Eire Labour.
24. Silkin had entered politics as a Liberal member of the LCC in 1925, switching to Labour a year later. He preceded Herbert Morrison as Leader of the Labour Group on the LCC, and was elected Labour MP for Peckham in 1936.
25. The film can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZyUJ2CCQF8