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- Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
TOWER BLOCKS. FLYOVERS. STREETS IN THE SKY. ONCE, THIS WAS THE FUTURE. Was Britain's postwar rebuilding the height of midcentury chic or the concrete embodiment of Crap Towns? John Grindrod decided to find out how blitzed, slum-ridden and crumbling 'austerity Britain' became, in a few short years, a space-age world of concrete, steel and glass. On his journey he visits the sleepy Norfolk birthplace of Brutalism, the once-Blitzed city centre of Plymouth, the futuristic New Town of Cumbernauld, Sheffield's innovative streets in the sky, the foundations of the BT tower, and the brave 1950s experiments in the Gorbals. Along the way he meets New Town pioneers, tower block builders, Barbican architects, old retainers of Coventry Cathedral, proud prefab dwellers and sixties town planners: people who lived through a time of phenomenal change and excitement. What he finds is a story of dazzling space-age optimism, ingenuity and helipads -- so many helipads -- tempered by protests, deadly collapses and scandals that shook the government. Concretopia is an accessible, warm and revealing social history of an aspect of Britain often ignored, insulted and misunderstood. It will change the way you look at Arndale Centres, tower blocks and concrete forever.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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ADVANCE PRAISE FOR CONCRETOPIA
‘With a cast of often unsung heroes – and one or two villains – Concretopia is a lively, surprising account of how Britain came to look the way it does.’
Will Wiles, author of Care of Wooden Floors
‘Never has a trip from Croydon and back again been so fascinating. John Grindrod’s witty and informative tour of Britain is a total treat, and will win new converts to stare in awe (or at least enlightened comprehension) at Crap Towns and Boring Postcards…’
Catherine Croft, Director, Twentieth Century Society
‘Fascinating throughout … does a magnificent job of making historical sense of things I had never really understood or appreciated … This is a brilliant book: a vital vade mecum for anyone interested in Britain’s 20th-century history.’
James Hamilton-Paterson, author of Empire of the Clouds
‘From the Norfolk birthplace of brutalism and the once-Blitzed city centre of Plymouth, to the new towns of Cumbernauld and Sheffield’s streets in the sky, a most engaging, illustrated exploration of how crumbling austerity Britain was transformed into a space-age world of concrete, steel and glass.’
Bookseller
‘A powerful and deeply personal history of postwar Britain. Grindrod shows how prefab housing, masterplans, and tower blocks are as much part of our national story as Tudorbethan suburbs and floral clocks. It’s like eavesdropping into a conversation between John Betjeman, J.G. Ballard and Jonathan Meades.’
Leo Hollis, author of Cities are Good for You
CONCRETOPIA
A journey around the rebuilding of postwar Britain
JOHN GRINDROD
For Adam Nightingale
‘So we can build a new home for ourselves: a new Britain. No difficulties, except of our own making, stand in the way. Knowledge, enthusiasm and unbounded skill Wait for the opportunity. We alone The people of this nation are its deciders, it creators, its builders. A new world we must make: with what success we make it Rests in ourselves. The choice is our own.
The future begins to-day.’
from Building Britain: 1941, a film script by Thomas Sharp, inThe Town Planning Review, October 1952, p204
CONTENTS
‘Concrete Jungle Where Dreams are Made’
INTRODUCTION
It is difficult to understand the place you come from. You grow up so much a part of it, and yet your home, street and town remain mysterious, full of questions no one seems able to answer. Why is one of our bedrooms so small? Why can’t we play ball games on that grass? Could we live in a tall block of flats like those kids do? For the most part you put up with these unanswered questions, distracted by the overwhelming banality of real life. We have to keep putting 50ps in the meter under the stairs. Other people own their houses. The buses don’t come down this end of the estate. Why? Who knows. These things just are.
I grew up in New Addington. The place has always felt odd, like an inner-city housing estate abandoned in the country outside Croydon. I remember my O-level geography teacher arriving at a lesson in 1985, armed with an AV trolley and the ominous words, ‘I think you’ll find this very interesting.’ When she pressed play on the Betamax recorder, a scrawny man in seventies clothing popped up on the screen, describing a town planning experiment that had gone horribly wrong. Then a caption: ‘New Addington’. There was no reaction from us – mainly because at my school to express interest, surprise or engagement of any sort was a fatal sign of weakness – but that programme did something to me that a decade of geography lessons had entirely failed to do. It made me think. As the presenter made his way around the estate over the next half an hour, I felt increasingly as though I were listening to a surgeon explaining my symptoms to a group of medical students while I lay there with my gown open. What did he mean? Sure, New Addington was far from perfect, but what was so wrong with it? There it was, acres of it, getting on with inertly just being there – and we, the class of 1985, were all its children. If this was bad planning, did that make us bad people from a bad estate?
A bad estate? Tower blocks mingle with low rise flats in New Addington.
In all likelihood you have not heard of New Addington. It has few claims to fame. The most enduring export of this south London estate of 22,000 people is the Croydon Facelift, the no-mercy ponytail worn by strung-out working-class mums from the estate. ‘Racist Tram Woman’ Emma West – source of Twitter outrage in 2011 – briefly became its most famous citizen, after a video of her racially abusing a fellow passenger was viewed 11 million times on YouTube. Kirsty MacColl wrote a song about the place: The Addington Shuffle. It seems fitting it was a B-side. And in the summer of 2012, while the Olympics were briefly transforming the rest of London into a zone of peace, harmony and love, a truly dreadful news story kept the residents of New Addington transfixed. Twelve-year-old Tia Sharp was first reported missing from her grandmother’s house in The Lindens, and a week later her body was found wrapped in a blanket in the attic. Images of the fruitless searches, the wasted vigils, the shrine to the young girl were shown for days on the news, alongside Olympic champions proudly displaying their hard-won medals a few miles away in Stratford. A case like that does a lot to change a town. Owen Jones, author of Chavs, wrote on Twitter that he felt it said as much about life in poor communities as Harold Shipman did about GPs. New Addington has the lowest voter turnout of anywhere in the south of England, what politics it does have shifting over the years from staunch Labour to a recent flirtation with the far right.
Flats on the Fieldway estate. The tree gives some idea of the high winds experienced in ‘Little Siberia’.
This vast estate was built seven miles outside Croydon town centre, on top of a hill so chilly, windswept and isolated it has earned the nickname Little Siberia. In 1935, just as ‘green belt’ legislation was being introduced to protect the area around London from urban sprawl, the land was bought by developer Charles Boot, whose company had been responsible for building more interwar houses than any other. Not everyone was thrilled at the prospect of a new estate being built on this wooded hill. ‘We know people have got to live somewhere, but there are so many other spaces more suitable for building,’ opined the vicar of Addington Village, which sat at the foot of the hill.1 Relations between the two settlements, ancient village and new estate, have not improved over time.
1,000 red-brick semis were built by Charles Boot in the late thirties. © Croydon Local Studies Library and Archives Service
Yet 1,000 red-brick semis and maisonettes were built before the war and a further 1,000 prefabricated council houses and flats joined them in the fifties and sixties. In 1970, the year I was born, my parents moved from Nine Elms, a working-class district of Battersea, into one of the prewar maisonettes.
There was green space everywhere on this prewar section of the estate, most of it ruthlessly mown: grass verges, patches of grass between blocks of flats, broad avenues of grass separating rows of houses, enormous grass roundabouts, the contours of the hillside shorn like a lumpy scalp. By the time I was growing up, most of these areas had acquired ‘no ball games’ signs.
A pair of New Addington’s prewar maisonettes.
Small blocks of flats surrounded by acres of mown grass at North Downs.
The postwar estate was more tightly packed, all alleyways, walkways and clusters of garages: the folk living here had to walk to the outskirts to see anything more than pinched slivers of green. Despite the farmers’ fields and woodland that still ring New Addington today, to me the place always felt more inner-city than suburban. It slotted neatly into my teenager’s view of British life in the eighties – a mental map composed of the riot-ravaged suburbs of Brixton and Liverpool, the desolate urban landscapes evoked by bands such as The Specials or The Smiths, and the concrete, post-apocalyptic settings of television sci-fi and Threads. Looking back, I see that New Addington wasn’t really like any of those places. It isn’t easy to pin the place down. This curious hotchpotch of a housing estate, plonked on the hill and surrounded by woodland, was unlike anywhere else I’d ever visited – until, that is, I started to research this book.
The mothership is Croydon, a place lazy comics reflexively reach for as a synonym for shit. It’s shorthand for a rather dated English idea of ugliness, boredom and embarrassment, alongside Olive from On the Buses, woodchip wallpaper and school dinners. As a teenager I began to stray into the centre of Croydon, eventually getting a job there, but I understood it no better than I did New Addington. There were the office blocks, of course: ‘Manhattan built in Poland’ as one wag had it. And there was a lot of antipathy to the place, I knew. ‘It was my nemesis, I hated Croydon with a real vengeance … it represented everything I didn’t want in my life, everything I wanted to get away from,’ was David Bowie’s verdict, and many of my friends agreed.i
Croydon is one of the biggest towns in Europe: a third of a million people live there. If it were a city it would be the twelfth largest in Britain. From 1977 onwards, it has repeatedly been identified by the Home Office as a prime candidate for city status, only to be overlooked – most recently in 2002, in favour of smaller towns like Newport, Stirling and Preston. The perennial experience of rejection has made the ambitious council chippy.
Croydon’s origins are as a medieval market town, blossoming under the patronage of various Archbishops of Canterbury. It grew into a prosperous Victorian town that, by the turn of the twentieth century, was eager to rival England’s big cities. Then an airstrip built during the Great War to help the Royal Flying Corps tackle the zeppelin raids on Britain changed everything. When the war ended, the airstrip became glamorous, art deco Croydon Aerodrome, and suddenly, in the heart of suburban Surrey, was London’s airport, home to Imperial Airways. Britain’s richest citizens passed through Croydon on their way to jolly jaunts around Europe, or on the first leg of grand tours to His Majesty’s Dominions. It was what the Empire was to Liverpool and Bristol, or the Industrial Revolution was to Manchester and Leeds. For two decades, the airport put Croydon at the cutting edge of technology, design and innovation.
The Second World War bloodied the borough, with doodlebugs damaging some 54,000 houses (and giving a boost to town planning), but it was the advance of technology that eventually made the airport redundant. The Second World War brought with it a need for ever-bigger planes to carry ever-heavier weapons everlonger distances, and by the end of the war, Croydon Airport was too small to house the new generation of airliners. Instead, the town looked to London’s office boom to supply a fresh raison d’être and fund its expansion.
Amid the skyscrapers in central Croydon.
In the sixties, thanks to some wily dealing by local MP James Marshall, the infamous office blocks – like scaled-up Mad Men-era G-Plan wardrobes and filing cabinets – exploded onto Croydon’s skyline. The resulting cityscape made sense during the week, when the ground-level car parks were crowded and the surrounding streets were bustling with suits and briefcases. But if you wandered in the empty space among their girlishly turned ankles on a Sunday, you couldn’t escape the impression that they had turned up in the wrong place, like giant social misfits. They seemed all the more awkward when you considered that they were standing where once there had been homes and gardens, whose owners had been encouraged to sell up for a few bucks.
The Post Office depot, one of many towers being built at East Croydon in the late sixties. © Ian Steel
Architecturally there was all sorts going on: here, the kind of blue-mirrored glass you’d see on children’s sunglasses; there, Tetris in concrete; beyond them, what looked to be a space freighter from a seventies sci-fi series, all glass curtain walls and concrete gables. By the early seventies this landscape of ‘total work’ would be familiar throughout the country.
Not all of Croydon’s development was vertical: let’s not forget the urban motorway splitting the centre into East and West, or the shopping precincts sprawling across the centre of the town like so many fallen Titans. One such, the Whitgift Centre, was deemed the ‘showpiece,’ and has become the ninth busiest shopping centre in Britain. It was heavily featured in the opening credits of the original 1979 series of Terry and June, where Purley’s foremost couple were shown getting lost all over the centre of town as they attempted to find each other in the landscape of exposed concrete beams, squared-off steel railings and frosted wire glass panels. By the time I was working in a bookshop there eight years later, that style had fallen so out of favour that the entire structure had been clad in creamy, fibreglass Neo-Victoriana. Frumpy, functional Rosa Klebb had been given a makeover and emerged as flouncy, fairytale Princess Di. It was fascinating to watch the whole edifice regenerate around me, the future being tarted up as the past.
The Whitgift Centre in 1971. © Ian Steel
By 1993 the Berlin Wall had tumbled, and Croydon’s office centre in the east was looking decidedly frail too. Thatcherism’s great architectural legacy had been the Docklands, a vast new London business district of giant silver skyscrapers. It was built for the age of PCs, privatisation and the space shuttle, as East Croydon had been built for the Trimphone, devaluation and the Austin Maxi.
Understandably worried that Docklands would woo all the major investors and financial service corporations away from the town, Croydon council invited the Architectural Foundation to pimp for entries for a competition they called ‘Croydon: The Future’, designed to showcase the town as a major corporate investment opportunity. Among them were a boomerang-shaped bridge across Wellesley Road, a giant propeller, an underground art gallery to replace the underpass, and travelators in the sky. My personal favourite were the inflatable Tokyo-style ‘dromes’ (or inverted bouncy castles) to be set on top of the multi-storey car parks in the centre of town, creating instant arenas for concerts, skiing, horse jumping and basketball. But the most outrageous solution was by the James Bond-style megalomaniac who intended to demolish Lunar House, bury its offices underground and replace it with a boating lake.
Needless to say, none of these projects were ever realised, but in bigger cities all over the country private investment was flexing its muscles where government planners had once held sway. In the last 15 years, massive regeneration schemes in Newcastle, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester have transformed these cities, and brand new shops, apartment blocks and offices now stand where postwar concrete buildings once towered. Ambitious Croydon is rattled.
The history of Croydon in the last 200 years has been the story of a town evolving and adapting in an effort to keep pace with the times: from Chaucerian market town through nineteenth-century industrialisation to the housing and commercial projects of the twentieth century. Today, while Croydon looks warily on, the concrete, prefabricated and high-rise buildings of the postwar era are being eradicated, and structures made with new, high-techmaterials are taking their place. Where once nostalgic figures such as John Betjeman sprang into action to defend our Victorian heritage, now a small band of architectural historians and mid-century modernists are arguing for the preservation of our most important postwar monuments before they are all developed beyond recognition.
This is no easy task. There is an accepted narrative to the way we think about our postwar architectural legacy. That narrative is somewhat akin to the plot of a superhero blockbuster: a team of supervillains – planners, architects, academics – have had their corrupt, megalomaniac way with the country for 30 years. Then, at long last, a band of unlikely heroes – a ragbag of poets, environmentalists and good, honest citizens – rise up against this architectural Goliath and topple it in the name of Prince Charles. In this story, prewar modernism equals good, postwar modernism equals bad. One only has to look at an episode of Channel 4’s Grand Designs to see that people are still keen to build glass-fronted white boxes of the kind popularised in the twenties by Le Corbusier.
Hence, while early modernism is still much imitated, the default word for what we ended up with after the Second World War is monstrosities. The towers, the blocks, the redeveloped city centres, the new towns: concrete monstrosities, mostly – even if they’re not concrete, or, for that matter, monstrosities. Postwar buildings are concrete monstrosities in the same way that political correctness is always going mad. It’s a potent and irresistible cliché, worming its way into your psyche, even if you don’t agree with the sentiment. A litany of planning decisions, from the demolition of the Euston Arch to the remodelling of cities from Glasgow to Portsmouth, all appear to tell the story of a bloodthirsty elite out to smash the decent British way of doing things, to crush the life out of it beneath concrete monstrosities.
And yet, was that what actually happened? Were these architects and planners the philistine barbarians of popular myth? Are the places they planned and built as awful as Crap Towns might make us believe? And is their legacy one of catastrophic failure? After all, they inherited a nation where millions lived in overcrowded conditions in cities, where factories belched toxic fumes onto the slums next door and the most basic sanitation was a dream for millions. It isn’t all that hard to understand the demand for change and the excitement of new ideas. A mere half-century had brought the motorcar and aeroplanes, antibiotics and nuclear physics. The possibilities for human progress seemed endless, and after the catastrophic upheaval of two wars, people around the world were open to new ways of living. Croydon’s postwar Borough Engineer Allan Holt’s view was, ‘I think that Croydon had either got to deteriorate or go forward. We went forward.’ And so did thousands of other projects, from homes to offices, power stations to pylons, airports to motorways, and in some cases, entire new towns.
‘We went forward’: The town centre is a vision of the future from the past.
On 8 August 2011, while I was researching this book, riots erupted in Croydon. I was in Sheffield at the time, watching events unfold on television, a strange reversal of the situation in 1981, where Sheffield had been one of the places I’d seen rioting break out in on the news. One thing that was apparent from the media coverage afterwards was that no one seemed to know anything about Croydon. It had long passed under the radar of crime correspondents and journalists, and the reportage consequently had an empty feel. Pundits seemed at a loss to explain what Croydon was, let alone how the riots had started there.
When I was a kid I wanted to be a robot. A big, clunking, Marvin-type android. Today, as I look out at Croydon, it seems obvious why. These supersized, solid-state monoliths have stood patiently by for decades, just waiting for their robot friends to turn up and give them meaning. Croydon makes sense as a town to be approached by jetpack, where paranoid androids hum early Human League songs in the underpasses and flying saucers land on top of shopping centres, transforming Terry and June into George and Jane Jetson at the zap of a ray gun. Like those aliens and androids, I feel quite at home wandering among the office towers of East Croydon, caught forever on the cusp of decimalisation, silicon chips and the death of our sci-fi vision of the future. Surely there are millions of people like me in Britain, who don’t recognise the village green, country cottage or Georgian square as the epitome of our nation, but whose identities have instead been moulded by concrete monstrosities or bad planning – or rather, the postwar optimism that sought to build a better future.
This book is my attempt to get to the root of this obsession, and to plug the gaps in my own knowledge of the world I grew up in. How did estates like New Addington come to be built, and what were the ideas behind them? Why did towns like Croydon completely rebuild their town centres? What principles, if any, lay behind these decisions, and whose principles were they? How did they meet the challenges of city centre Blitz damage, vast Victorian slum clearance and endless suburban sprawl?
Over the years the fortunes of these grand modernising projects have ebbed and flowed, from admiration and the kudos of listing to demonisation and demolition. Often the original feelings of pride have been lost over time. ‘It cannot really be claimed that any of the rebuilt cities of Britain are works of art,’ wrote historian Gavin Stamp,2 while geographer Alice Coleman’s view is that ‘the modern movement’s brand of utopia is a virtually universal disaster.’3 Yet in recent years the era has found its champions too, not least in the Twentieth Century Society.
In July 2011, I set off round the country to explore some of these extraordinary places, and meet some people who helped create the world that was built after the war, to find out what that time was really like. They shared their experiences of everything from designing the Barbican Centre to growing up in a Gorbals high-rise, from building the Elephant and Castle to planning new towns in Wales and Scotland, from helping in the reconstruction of Coventry Cathedral to visiting the Festival of Britain. I’ve also delved into a lot of books, journals and newspapers from the era. It’s fascinating to me that my copy of the book on Hook – the Hampshire new town that never was – came from the University of Wisconsin Library; and Dame Evelyn Sharp’s dry-as-dust tome on the Ministry of Housing had to be prised out of the possession of Ohio University. They demonstrate that these experiments in Britain had worldwide fame.
I didn’t know what to expect when I set out, but what I found was a story of design triumphs and planning disasters, of heroic struggles and thwarted schemes, widespread corruption and utopian ideals. This is the story I have tried to tell in the pages that follow.
Notes
1 Rev. F. J. Nixon, Croydon Advertiser, 10/3/35
2 Gavin Stamp, Britain’s Lost Cities, p3
3 Alice Coleman, Utopia on Trial, p176
i Oddly enough, many pop stars have lived, worked or studied in Croydon, from Art College punks to more recent BRIT School alumni such as Amy Winehouse and Adele, but it’s rarely mentioned alongside pop powerhouses like Sheffield, Liverpool or Manchester. No one wants to be associated with a Croydon sound. Even Bob Stanley, architecturally savvy member of Croydon pop champions Saint Etienne is faintly disparaging. ‘South London’s not really London, is it?’ he told the Guardian. ‘It’s just an endless suburb.’
Part 1
SO DIFFERENT, SO APPEALING
1. ‘A Holiday Camp All Year Round’
THE TEMPORARY BUILDING PROGRAMME AND PREFABS (1944–1951)
I was excited about my grand odyssey around Britain, so it was almost disappointing when it turned out that my first journey would be a mere three-mile stroll from my flat in Forest Hill. On a rainy spring morning I set off on foot for Catford, south-east London, home to the largest estate of wartime prefabs still standing in Britain. Even with the help of the GPS on my phone they weren’t easy to find. A damp, half-hour walk through streets of small, terraced Victorian houses revealed little. So there was a mild rush of relief when I rounded yet another red-brick corner and came face to face with a sleeping army, barely peeping above privet hedges, wooden fences and parked cars, and dwarfed even by the two-storey houses. Here were the 187 forties prefabs that formed the Excalibur Estate.
I was surprised by how immediately my heart went out to them. It may have been their size, so modest and low-lying in this vertical urban landscape. Or the signs of ageing which they made little effort to hide, with their paint peeling off external walls. Or perhaps it was the knowledge that soon there will only be six of them left, Lewisham council having finally gained approval for their plans to demolish the estate and replace the prefabs with twice as many new homes. Here was the evidence, soon to disappear, of a heroic tale from the end of the Second World War: not the usual story of destruction and catastrophe, but one of ingenuity and humanity. A story of how enterprising engineers turned Spitfire factories to making homes for the bombed-out, the displaced, the exhausted generation.
The immediate aftermath of the war was a hard time. Rationing was at its height: bread joined the long list of basic controlled items in 1946, and potatoes in 1947. The population had been either dispersed – to fight, to work the land – or flung together, forced to share overcrowded homes. The country was bankrupt, and day-to-day life for millions was increasingly colourless and threadbare – a fact all too clearly brought home by the sleek, well-fed US troops who’d been based all over Britain. By 1951, eight million homes had been declared unfit for habitation, of which seven million had no hot water and six million no inside toilet. In 1949, a fifth of London homes were officially classed as slums. For bombed-out families crushed into sharing homes with relatives or strangers, the relief of peace was soon overshadowed by pressing problems. New homes were needed – not so much fast, as instantly.
The war had shown people what modern materials and production techniques could achieve in munitions factories up and down the land. ‘Why not switch these factories over to the production of houses, using the light, efficient and beautiful materials, like steel duralumin, and light alloys, which are stretched to such efficiency and economy in aircraft,’ asked Donald Gibson, the progressive young city architect for Blitz-damaged Coventry, in 1940.1 Prefabrication was not a new idea – over the past few decades thousands of huts, shacks and billets had been created using the technology, from the curved corrugated roofs of Nissen huts to the slatted timber of houses imported from Sweden – but it was about to be embraced on the home front with the fervour of a ‘Dig for Victory’ or ‘Make Do and Mend’ campaign.
Late in 1942, with housing shortages worsening at an alarming rate and predictions that four million new houses would be needed within 10 years, the government began to take action. Sir George Burt, who ran the construction company Mowlem, was tasked with finding new ways of building homes, given the shortages of materials and labour. In no time the committee was flooded with hundreds of proposals for building prefabricated houses, and a painstaking process of sorting the wheat from the chaff commenced. In October 1944, the Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act was passed, authorising the government to spend up to £150 million on the provision of temporary housing: the Burt Committee began to roll up its sleeves and start work in earnest. Hopes were high. ‘[T]he government hope to manufacture up to half a million of these prefabricated houses,’ reported The Times, while Churchill declaimed, with typical panache: ‘The erection of these emergency houses will be carried out by exceptional methods, on the lines of a military operation … The success of this undertaking is not to be impeded by reliance at any point on traditional methods.’2
The first fruits of the government’s research into temporary houses were made public that autumn, when four experimental prefabs were exhibited at the Tate Gallery in London. The first was a design by the Ministry of Works, known as the Portal House, named after the Minister himself. This all-steel bungalow, lined with plywood for insulation, had been constructed by two car manufacturers, Briggs Motor Bodies and the Pressed Steel Company. It was never put into production due to a wartime steel shortage. Next there was the Selection Engineering Company’s Uni-Seco prefab, which was timber framed and clad with asbestos cement panels. In due course 30,000 of these flat-roofed little bungalows were manufactured, and these were what greeted me in Catford at the Excalibur Estate. The head of the company, Bernard Brunton, wasn’t impressed with the strength of the government’s commitment to the Temporary Housing Programme, and wrote to The Times in February 1945 complaining of ‘a deplorable lack of coordination as between various Ministries concerned’.3 As if to prove his point, three months later 3,000 Uni-Secos originally destined for the capital had to be relocated around the country instead because the London County Council couldn’t clear space fast enough to site them. Also on display at the Tate was a prefab made by the Hull company Tarran, built from reinforced concrete panels around a lightweight timber frame: 19,000 of these were built. The final exhibit was the Arcon house, whose pitched roof gave it the familiar look of a scout hut. Manufactured by construction firm Taylor Woodrow, the corrugated asbestos walls and roof were attached to a steel frame. Nearly 40,000 of these were put into production.
It was, however, the design that replaced the rejected steel Portal that would go on to become the most numerous of all the temporary houses. This aluminium prefab issued not from the construction industry, but from the military industrial complex. The Aircraft Industries Research Organisation on Housing, or AIRO H, manufactured a total of 55,000 of these metal bungalows, on production lines that, until very recently, had been churning out heavy bombers. They were built from aluminium from melted-down aircraft. The AIRO H prototype wouldn’t be exhibited until the following year, 1945, when one was erected behind Selfridges department store in London.
The Times was a little sniffy about the original four they had seen at the Tate. ‘The present exterior is dull and unpleasing,’ wrote their reporter, opining that ‘repetition of these units would, in fact, be wearisome.’ Inside, he found there were ‘all sorts of awkward connexions; that from bed rooms to bath room and w.c. being through the kitchen’. Yet, in summary, the article refrained from condemnation: ‘To say that the emergency house cannot be properly judged until it has been lived in is to state the obvious … All will agree that a very significant first step has been taken in the direction of building by mass-production.’4
Before I could reach the Uni-Seco houses at Excalibur I had to negotiate the estate’s strange and wonderful tin tabernacle. The church, St Mark’s, has the curved, corrugated roof of a Nissen hut. Its neighbour, the community centre, is like a temporary mess for Battle of Britain pilots. It was as if these two militaristic sentries were guarding their little estate against the bigger brick buildings all around. They were embodiments of the effort that was made to create a discrete, bona fide neighbourhood.
All of the roads and pathways on Excalibur were Arthurian-themed: Mordred Road, Ector Road, Pelinore Road … These heroic names – like calling a hamster Samson – contrasted with the modesty of the prefabs, whose height, or lack of it, was the most striking feature of the estate. There really wasn’t a lot going on above head height, other than the odd tree or telephone pole. Though factory-produced, there was something strangely organic about these houses. Whereas the surrounding Victorian brick buildings had the look of giant fossils – long dead beasts that had become immovable features of the landscape – the prefabs had none of that sense of rock-solid permanence. Instead, they were slowly sagging, stricken by rickety joints and crumbling skeletons, worn out by the constant, losing battle to halt the decay evident in their mottled skin.
The Excalibur Estate’s ‘tin tabernacle’ St Mark’s Church, a former Nissen hut.
Some of the estate’s prefabs were falling into disuse or disrepair.
Yet back in the early postwar years, these huts were at the cutting edge of British construction technology. ‘It is the scheme which is temporary, not the houses,’ ran a Uni-Seco advert in 1945.5 In 1952, four years after the last temporary house had been delivered as part of the government’s programme, the company was still vigorously marketing its products: ‘Building programmes can be maintained in spite of the steel shortage by using Seco,’ ran one opportunistic advert.6 Another led with the mildly alarming claim that anything ‘from a light factory to a labour camp’ could be ‘delivered immediately from stock’.7
A huge amount of public resistance to rehousing people in prefabs had been expected, and the government-sponsored media campaign launched to promote them went far beyond a few show houses at the Tate. A public information film was made, the first of many I’d see in the course of my research, covering every new development from the forties to the seventies. This one was directed by Lewis Gilbert, who went on to mastermind three James Bond films as well as Alfie and Shirley Valentine.
The Ten Year Plan followed a dogged young journalist on his journey to discover just what these new temporary houses were all about, and what people thought of them. Who played this womanising, chain-smoking young journalist? That’s right: Charles Hawtrey. In big round glasses, he’s a hoot, whether fearlessly interviewing mouthy mums or listening to earnest briefings on prefabrication by a panel of military types, like a scene from Reach for the Sky (which, funnily enough, Gilbert later directed).
In the event, the prefabs were received more favourably than anyone had expected. ‘It was beautiful,’ recalled Islington prefab-dweller Betty Vodden, who moved into hers in 1947. ‘There was a fridge, which was something I’d never had before, an electric cooker, electric kettle.’8 ‘Mother went to the housing office every Wednesday,’ remembered Mary Sprakes, ‘and my father went every Saturday to see where they were on the list. Such was the demand that the housing officer had a nervous breakdown. In the end my mother found a councillor that she vaguely knew, contacted him and they got a prefab.’9 Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock grew up in one too. ‘It seemed like living in a spaceship,’ he said of the modern amenities like fridges and plumbed-in baths that few at the time had.10
One of the residents of Excalibur, Eddie O’Mahoney, had lived there from the time it was built and was still there when this book was being written. ‘I’d been demobbed from the army and my wife was living in some bomb-damaged property with the two children,’ he told the Guardian in 2012. ‘When the council offered it, I immediately said, “I don’t want a prefab – I want a house.” I’d had enough of living in tents and Nissen huts. They told me to go and look before I decided. We opened the door and my wife said, “What a lovely big hall! We can get the pram in here.” There was a toilet and a bathroom. I’d been used to a toilet in the garden. The kitchen had an Electrolux refrigerator, a New World gas stove, plenty of cupboards. There was a nice garden. It was like coming into a fortune. My wife said, “Start measuring for the lino.”’11
One of my own interviewees also had fond memories of them. I hadn’t expected to talk to Peter Barry about prefabs; we met up much later, on the final leg of my journey, to discuss his experiences as one of the pioneers of Milton Keynes in the seventies. But he surprised me almost at once by declaring that he’d been a pioneer in more than one field: he’d grown up in a prefab straight after the war. A large, avuncular, excitable figure, Peter had moved to the Barton Estate in Oxford in the forties.
‘They were so well equipped!’ he told me as we chatted in his modernist Milton Keynes house.
‘I think it was 1946 when we moved into there. When you think of 1946–47, what basic equipment there was in the house! We moved into this little prefab bungalow and all the kitchen was steel. It had a refrigerator. It had an immersion heater. It had a gas boiler to do your washing in. And everything was built-in. It was like going into a futuristic environment you see on television programmes! It was all built-in units, which are quite common now, but not then. The boiler was, I suppose, a forerunner to the washing machine. You lit it and it boiled the water and then you did all your washing in it. It was all part of the fitted kitchen, it was an amazing bit of kit.’
He made it sound more like a much-loved sports car than a kitchen. Like many of the new prefab occupants, Peter’s family had moved out of an overcrowded and awkward situation, squashed into his grandmother’s house. ‘My parents were thrilled to have their own place,’ he remembered, ‘albeit council. They had their own house and they could do what they wanted. My grandmother: if you’re living in her house, you’re living under her rules, which are not your rules. They’re not what you want to do as a married couple.’ In his case, religious tensions had aggravated the relationship between Catholic father and Protestant mother-in-law. ‘I don’t think she went to my mother’s wedding. She wouldn’t have anything to do with it. And dad had to come home from Egypt to live in that sort of atmosphere. There was tension.’ It was a huge relief to be able to live as they liked. ‘My father was a great gardener, he grew all his own veg. My mother kept chickens. It was a good lifestyle, really. I remember what it was like being able to have a hot bath every night, which was unheard of at that time. And fields to play in. I was off playing cowboys and Indians or whatever. In the prefab from where we lived you could see open country out of the garden. You could roam.’
The prefabs at Excalibur sit along a network of narrow paths that stretch between a simple grid of roads. The layout serves no fancier purpose than to fit in as many buildings as possible in the space, allowing for small gardens around each home.
A row of well-maintained Uni-Secos on the Excalibur Estate, 2011.
I’m sure the Selection Engineering Company would be shocked – and perhaps also proud – to know that a whole estate of them is still standing, nearly 70 years after their construction. Despite their initial popularity, it soon became apparent that these miracle boxes, and many others like them, weren’t perfect: there were leaky roofs; their thin walls and single glazing let the warmth out and the cold in; and the concrete, or sometimes wooden, bases allowed the damp to rise. For otherwise homeless families they must have been a godsend in the winter of 1946-7 – the harshest on record – but no doubt their flimsiness was frequently cursed. These days a damp cardboardy smell permeates many of the remaining buildings. And while their frailty and small scale makes it easy to feel a connection with them, the same qualities can also prompt resentment – even without the many tragic cases of asbestosis and bronchitis that have been attributed to them.
Naturally enough, moving to a more permanent residence was the dream for many a prefab-dweller. But that didn’t happen quickly. By 1948, around 157,000 temporary houses had been produced – significantly less than the half-million Churchill had promised. They’d been far more expensive to produce than had been anticipated. ‘This was partly because the basic materials used were expensive (particularly aluminium and steel),’ wrote the government’s advisor on construction, Cleeve Barr, in 1966. The assumption was that prefabs were a much cheaper solution than building traditional bricks and mortar homes, but Cleeve Barr was at pains to point out that this was not the case. He wasn’t much taken by their homely charms, either. ‘Two hundred standardised houses on a flat site can look like a shop floor full of shoe-boxes.’12
By 1964, 15 years after they should have been emptied and dismantled, 71 percent of these shoe-boxes were still standing. In Manchester, of the 3,004 prefabs built in the city, just one had been removed by 1960, and that was only because it had burned down. This was understandable given the scale of the city’s housing problem: in 1955 alone, 68,000 houses in the city had been condemned, 13,000 people had been forced to live in lodgings and 800 old homes had simply fallen down of their own accord. Despite the expiration of the original licenses that had allowed the prefabs to occupy what had been parks and open spaces – often where makeshift airfields and military camps had been built during the war – the council had no option but to allow them to remain.
Not that all prefab dwellers wanted to move out, even when they did get the chance. ‘Council officials came round this morning and offered some families the choice of three new houses to move into,’ a Mrs Barnes, resident of Heaton Park’s improvised prefab town, told the Guardian in 1961. ‘But we don’t want to go. The vast majority of us are satisfied with where we are now. We’re settled in, have got the prefabs nicely decorated and find them very comfortable. We’ll even pay more rent if they let us stay.’13 Not so in Birkenhead, where in 1961 the tenants of 41 prefabs handed a petition in to the town hall demanding to be rehoused.
‘They were built with a stated life span which was by far exceeded,’ recalled Peter Barry, ‘because they were there long after we were rehoused. And I think in the end they were sold by Oxford city council to anyone who wanted them. And a lot of them ended up on the coast. Because all you needed was a concrete base with the services and you could plonk it down and plumb it in and they made wonderful holiday chalets! You still see them around in places in Somerset, Devon and Cornwall.’ Excalibur resident Ian Goold told the Guardian, ‘To me it’s like a holiday camp all year round.’14
Many of the houses in the Excalibur Estate are painted white or magnolia, but a number are in striking pastel colours, and some have painted the Uni-Seco’s structural frame a mock-Tudor black. There’s a flush of Georgian front doors, and the odd leaded window, but many still have the original single-glazed metal frames, identical to those on the prewar council house I grew up in, with nets hanging in most of them. Mid-century modern-style kitsch is nowhere in evidence. Sure, there’s the odd neglected one gradually mulching where it stands, but for the rest it’s an even split between the very well kept and the considerably more lived in: portacabins versus cottages. There’s an amazing variety considering that they all started off the same. And unlike the surrounding Victorian terraces, they are all detached, with their own gardens.
The friendly, nostalgia-inducing cosiness of these prefabs belies a dark side to their history. Many were built by prisoners of war: Germans from Rommel’s Tank Corps, as well as some Italians. Britain was slow to repatriate PoWs, even to countries that had been far more devastated by the war and were desperately in need of labour to begin the work of rebuilding. In 1946, over 400,000 Germans were still in British camps, and were used as forced labour, not just in construction but also in agriculture, as a form of reparation. ‘When we had the keys to move in there were no pavements laid, no entrance down to the house,’ recalled Ruth Haynes, of her AIRO H prefab in Plymouth. ‘Every day, German PoWs came by lorry to work on the estate. Seeing our predicament, they very kindly laid a few blocks as stepping stones for us to get to the door “mud free”. Seeing we weren’t really allowed to fraternise, when I was baking there would always be some small warm cakes, left on the doorstep, for them as a thank you.’15
By no means were all of the prefabs built as part of the temporary housing programme. Some became prototypes for the most enduring housing types of the postwar period. The BISF – British Iron and Steel Federation – house was typical of these permanent structures. This was a two-storey semi, designed by engineer Dominic Lee and architect Frederick Gibberd (who would go on to be the master planner of Harlow). A steel frame was erected first, then steel panels were used for the roofs and upper storeys, with more conventional building materials used for the lower floor. The BISF house was one of the prefabs on show at the Daily Herald Modern Homes Exhibition in Dorland Hall, Lower Regent Street, in spring 1946. Opinion pollsters Mass Observation were on hand to record the thoughts of the public: they described the crowd as containing ‘a very high representation of the artisan class’, with more than half of the men and almost half of the younger people they interviewed having no home of their own or expressing dissatisfaction with it.16 The kitchens, fitted with the latest gadgets, and the sturdy new utility furniture were the most popular exhibits, but people were less taken with the one-room flat that was on display, which was considered impractical due to its size.
The Dorland Hall exhibition featured several examples of prefabs other then the BISF. There was the Orlit, a two-storey house made from reinforced concrete, designed by Czech architect Erwin Katona, and produced in Scotland and the Airey house, from Leeds, made from concrete panels and reinforced with tubing made from decommissioned military vehicles, and available in flat or pitched roofed variants. To the visitors the Orlit ‘looked more permanent … had a personality’, while the BISF houses seemed ‘a bit barracky… Imagine rows and rows of them.’17 Many of the visitors gave them a hard time. ‘You know we were offered the choice of a prefab?’ one told the Mass Observation interviewer. ‘Well, I wouldn’t have it. They’re nice inside, but they look dreadful from the road.’ Another was rather more blunt. ‘Those prefabs are awful – when you see a lot together they look like pigsties or hen-houses I always think.’18 We had some BISF houses in New Addington; their steel panels were always painted bright colours and were fascinating to me as I was growing up, with so much of the estate being so red-brick and uniform. They seemed somehow to speak of adventure, with their improvised-looking metal walls and the moss growing on their corrugated steel roofs. I didn’t know then that the estate had once been home to hundreds of temporary prefab bungalows, before the red-brick houses were built in the fifties. This whole prefab story was closer to home than I’d realised.
Prefabs in New Addington in the early 1950s: Arcons in the foreground, AIRO Hs top left, and BISF houses along the top of the hill. © Croydon Local Studies Library and Archives Service
The experience of living in a prefab, like the experience of rationing, is disappearing from popular memory. For the 44 percent of residents at Excalibur who voted to keep the prefabs rather than redevelop, their slow and painful dispersal is causing much heartfelt opposition: photocopied A4 notices in windows read I’m not moving I’m takeing the council to court so is the rest of us who loves owe prefabs. [sic] These notices and the whole estate have a dignified air of doom that stays with me as I walk away. I feel unexpectedly moved: perhaps by faint childhood memories of prefab holiday homes by the sea, or school buildings past, or the story of my parents’ life in Battersea after the war.
‘To move out of here … quite frankly, I’d rather be finished,’ said Eddie O’Mahoney, fiercely loyal to his prefab and the little estate when he was interviewed in 2012. ‘If they want to evict a 92-year-old war veteran, good luck to them. I’ve been happy here, all my memories are here. Be honest: what will they offer someone like me? What I bought, I want to keep. I took a pride in this place. I loved it.’19
Notes
1 Donald Gibson, Midlands Daily Telegraph, 5/12/40 (talk on Wednesday of that week, report is from Thursday)
2 Nicolas Bullock, Building the Post-War World, Routledge, 2002, p173
3The Times, 24/2/45, p5
4The Times, 27/6/44 p5
5 Seco ad, The Times, 29/10/45, p3
6 Advertisement, The Times, 27/11/52, p7
7 Uni-Seco ad, The Times, 30/9/52, p3
8 Steve Humphries and John Taylor, The Making of Modern London, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1986, p144
9 Greg Stevenson, Palaces for the People, Batsford, 2003, p55
10 Greg Stevenson, Palaces for the People, Batsford, 2003, p103
11 Ros Anderson, Guardian, 28/12/2012
12 Cleeve Barr, chief architect NBA, The Times Supplement on Industrialised Building, 21/3/66, piii
13Guardian, 14/2/61, p6
14 Ros Anderson, Guardian, 28/12/2012
15 Greg Stevenson, Palaces for the People, Batsford, 2003, p56
16Daily Herald Modern Homes Exhibition in Dorland Hall, Lower Regent St, Spring 46, Mass Observation, p3
17Second Report on Modern Homes Exhibition, Mass Observation, 8/4/46, p10
18Second Report on Modern Homes Exhibition, Mass Observation, 8/4/46, p11
19Guardian, 28/12/2012
2. ‘A Decent Start in Life’
GARDEN CITIES AND THE FIRST NEW TOWNS (1946–51)
The big manor house stood surrounded by horse chestnut trees in the heart of the Hertfordshire countryside. A group of highly skilled technicians had taken Terlings over in the forties with the government’s blessing, erecting two rows of prefabricated huts in the garden to form their offices. Their urgent, detailed work was overseen by ex-military commanders, senior civil servants, doctors, even Bertrand Russell’s pipe-smoking wife, Peta. ‘Everyone worked terribly hard and played hard during their lunch break,’ wrote Ena Elliot, one of the many secretaries busy at work there in the late forties and fifties. ‘I remember tennis and swimming, and then the annual garden parties, cricket matches and cross-country runs … I remember the great enthusiasm and interest of the staff – many of them would take work home each night.’1
I met one of those members of staff, Janet Search, in her ranch-style house in the Hertfordshire village of Sawbridgeworth. ‘It was all right unless it poured with rain and there was flooding,’ was Janet’s rather less romantic memory of working at Terlings. ‘You all cycled on these high pavements to get into the building. But it was a beautiful building. And all of the drawing offices were these prefabricated wooden places.’ It’s easy to see Terlings, with its huts teeming with intellectuals, experts and their committed support staff, as another Bletchley Park. But the place wasn’t full of secret code-breakers. It was home to a dynamic team of planners, architects, draughtsmen and women, and administrators – all working frantically to create something vast and new in the English countryside with a minimum of time and resources. A new town – one of the first four designated by the postwar Labour government. The team at Terlings were inventing Harlow.
‘I worked at Terlings when I first left school,’ said Janet, who’d arrived in Harlow as a teenager in 1952, as the first phase of the town was in progress. ‘And that was quite interesting really because it was all planning.’ What was her job? ‘Tracer. Plotting lampposts!’ She laughed. Sounds like a thankless task, I said. ‘It was.’ Yet the plotting of lampposts perfectly encapsulates how all-encompassing the work at Terlings was, from the grandest vision to the most basic detail. The Harlow Journal reminded its readers two years later that ‘during the autumn and winter of 1951 there was just one lamp standard in the new town. There were no shops, no cinema, no new school, no Moot House and no pub. There was, however, mud, more mud, and still more mud.’2
John Reed, whose family had also moved to Harlow in 1952, pointed out the concrete lampposts as we walked together around Mark Hall North, the first area of Harlow new town to be built. ‘I’m told these lamp standards, the concrete part was built before the war for a big job in Germany’ – he gave a hearty laugh at the absurdity of the situation – ‘and after the war someone found them lying about so we’ve got lamp standards. One of the things my dad told me once, I dunno where he got the information from.’
Both Janet and John had fathers who were builders, which explains their early arrival in a town that had been announced to the public only five years previously and, by 1952, had barely begun to be built. As Janet plotted lampposts and John’s father pondered their provenance, much bigger decisions were being made by the senior planners. ‘When I worked at Terlings, Frederick Gibberd used to come in quite regularly,’ said Janet. ‘He always had a buttonhole. He was ever such a nice chap. He’d always acknowledge you and come round.’ Gibberd, he of the government-sponsored temporary steel house, had been chosen as the master planner for the town in September 1946, well before the designation of the town had been made public, in an effort to ensure they had some attractive plans to reveal when the announcement was made. ‘Apart from having an attitude to design acceptable to the new generation of architects, I was one of the few among them with planning qualifications,’ said Gibberd, explaining his appointment for such a plum job.3
To understand the genesis of new towns like Harlow, and the ways many existing cities set about solving the problem of overcrowding, we must look to the work of an extraordinary man with no planning training: Quaker, Hansard clerk and fluent Esperanto speaker Ebenezer Howard. In 1898 he had written a groundbreaking book, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, more famously reprinted in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-morrow. It was these garden cities, whose construction was overseen by Howard from 1903 until his death in 1928, that became the direct inspiration for the postwar new towns programme. Like many engaged citizens of the late Victorian era, Howard was repulsed by the quality of life in the industrialised cities, particularly for the poor. Pollution and overcrowded slum housing had ensured the spread of diseases such as cholera, tuberculosis and rickets. Between 1848 and 1872 the child mortality rate for boys in Britain was a staggering 36,000 per million of the population, and children had only a 50 percent chance of surviving their first year. In response, a number of philanthropic employers, such as William Lever in Liverpool and George Cadbury in Birmingham, created healthy ‘model’ villages for their workers to live in at Port Sunlight and Bournville, along the lines of New Lanark, built on the banks of the Clyde for millworkers in the late eighteenth century. Ebenezer Howard envisaged a world where the menace of overcrowding would be relieved by decanting a significant portion of the population to new settlements beyond the boundaries of the city: healthy, spacious, self-contained towns that were part rural, part urban. ‘There are in reality not only, as it is so constantly assumed, two alternatives – town life and country life,’ wrote Howard, ‘but a third alternative, in which all the advantages of the most energetic and active town life, with all the beauty and delight of the country, may be secured in perfect combination.’4 He named this ideal hybrid settlement a garden city, and such a phenomenon was his book that by 1902 he’d set about securing funding to actually build one of these towns in Hertfordshire: Letchworth.
Howard conceived the garden cities as functional towns, each housing 32,000 people, and, crucially, self-supporting, rather than mere commuter hubs for the nearest big city, as so many suburbs were. Partly to ensure this, they would be separated from the city by a ‘green belt’ of land, and the plans allocated generous space for light and air within the garden cities themselves. Howard went so far as to envisage a ring of six of these towns, connected by road and rail to form one huge, leafy garden city of nearly 200,000 inhabitants. Being a practical man, over half of Garden Cities of To-morrow was concerned with the funding and management of such a project – more a how-to guide than an abstract treatise. Although raising the money to build Letchworth was almost as hard as actually building the place, Howard managed it and the resulting town became something of a sensation among town planners and architects around the world.
