Issue No.six
CUPPA
CONTENTS
THE MODERNIST MAGAZINE
CUPPA Due Esspressi
Aidan Turner Bishop
Library Café
Matthew Whittfield
Indecent Exposure Ben Tallis
Meiner ist größer als deiner:Billy Butlin’s Secret Revolution Jack Hale
The Pride of Sheffield; David Mellor and a design called Thrift Maureen Ward
The Fifth Floor Kenn Taylor
Tea & Cakes Under an Umbrella Sky Joe Austin
Café view 51-61-71 Lucas Nightingale
Modernism, immortality and Melamine Gemma Galgani
Holidaying as Social Revolution Robert Griffiths
Cars and Cafes – A Sam Scorer trip Ian Tocher
Hewitts Domestic Goddess The modernists
Review
Wells Coates
DUE ESPRESSI PER FAVORE Drinking in an Italian coffee bar is often an act of communion with italianismo.
It’s hot. Piazza light glares. Your Baroque church is closed: in restauro. You need a break. Coffee cups clatter in the shady bar. You enter. Due espressi, per favore. The chrome Gaggia machine hisses. Red Lavazza sign. Running tap water. Clunk, clunk. Zucherro in paper tubes: Bialetti advert. Caffeine hits swiftly: calming, restoring. The Italian coffee trick has worked again.
Drinking in an Italian coffee bar is often an act of communion with italianismo. You taste 1950s, 60s and 70s Italian modernist design in your small cup: Fiat cinquecento cars, Lambretta scooters, Olivetti typewriters, Ponti’s Pirelli skyscraper, Domenico Modugno sings Volare, Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Ferrari testarossa cars, Sophia Loren, Dolce & Gabbana, Juventus, sharp suits, cinema, Cinzano. The familiar signs confirm the mood: the red square of Illy coffee, Bialetti’s Moka percolators, the Lavazza logo with the middle larger A, hissing Gaggia espresso machines. They combine into a distinct design identity.
Underlying this, in classic Italian cafés in Britain is a strong family tradition: mamma behind the counter, the carefully maintained Formica tables, varnished wood panels, aluminium trays, engraved windows, boxes of Perugina Baci chocolates, red Illy squares. Where did this come together? How? In 1933 Luigi de Ponti patented the aluminium Moka coffee pot. This pressurises steam, through a chamber filled with ground coffee, into an upper chamber holding espresso coffee. Alfonso Bialetti (1888-1970) bought the patent; Bialetti Industrie now manufacture thousands of Moka Express pots.
The classic design is displayed in the Design and Science Museums, London, and the Museum of Modern Art and CooperHewitt Design Museum, New York. Bialetti was influenced by other designers but his simple, symmetrical hexagonal-based metallic body was unique. It’s still largely unchanged. Aluminium wasn’t a domestic metal in the 1930s. Its tapering art deco shape and use of aluminium signals vorticist speed, abundant hydroelectricity (for smelting) and, maybe, aircraft engineering and confident fascist modernity.
Bialetti’s brand was strongly advertised on early Italian television. Paul Campani’s 1950s cartoon mascot l’omino con i baffi, the little moustachioed man, is still the group’s trademark. Home coffee brewing can also use the German Melitta drip brew filter system, with paper funnels (invented in 1908 by Melitta Bentz); French filtre drip-pots or percolateurs; the French press or Melior cafetière method: a glass, in a metal frame, with a
piston plunger. This was also an Italian design, patented by Attilio Calimani in 1929. Today many French presses are sold by Bodum, originally a Danish firm now based in Switzerland.
For hundreds of years coffee was brewed simply in tall pots with slender spouts to keep the grounds at the bottom of the pot. This design survives into modern tableware lines such as Portmeirion’s 1961 Totem and Martin Hunt’s Hornsea 1975 Contrast pot. Instant powdered soluble coffee, rehydrated often in a mug, achieved wider use in Europe during the Second World War when General Foods supplied Maxwell House to US troops. Originally it was a New Zealand invention in 1889. Nescafé dates from 1938; it was developed by the Swiss firm Nestlé. Instant coffee was strongly advertised in the UK on ITV, its appeal helped by the switch to mugs from cups and saucers. However, Elizabeth David, the cook-author, was relaxed about instant coffee. Indeed her 1968 cookware catalogue listed no coffee pots; David Mellor has two pages.
The second breakthrough in Italian coffee culture was packaging and mass marketing. Beans were sold loose and then ground and roasted for customers. Booth’s, the Preston-based grocers, called themselves ‘Italian grocers’. They roasted coffee until recently in their city centre premises. Francesco Illy, originally from present-day Timişoara, Romania, in the then Austro-Hungarian Empire, moved to Austrian Trieste in the Great War. After Trieste transferred to Italy he stayed there and established his coffee business in 1933. He developed a new packaging system using inert gases to preserve the coffee. This meant that Illy coffee could be widely sold across Italy. In 1935 he invented the illetta, the first automatic coffee machine, using compressed air instead of steam. His genius was to brand Illy coffee with the red square logo, a brand as classically simple as Bass breweries’ red triangle: once seen, never forgotten.
Lavazza coffee dates from 1895 in Turin. The family business declined in World War 2 but in 1947-8 branded packaging was introduced and the business expanded. The Lavazza trade name, with its larger central A, became widely known across Italy.
Large parts of coffee-producing East Africa were occupied by Italy in the 30s; Mussolini annexed Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1936. In 1938 Achille Gaggia patented the steamless coffee bar machine. Water flows over coffee grounds at high pressure producing espresso crema. The Gaggia company was founded in 1947, incorporated in 1948. The frothy cream was named after Capuchin monks’ robes: cappucino had arrived.
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Gaggia machines came to Britain in the early 1950s. The first coffee bar in Soho, London, was the Moka, 29 Frith Street, opened in 1953 by Gina Lollabrigida. Many Formica bars followed. Later cafes included the Arabica, Brompton Road; Bamboo, Old Brompton Road; The Coffee House, Haymarket; and the Mocamba, Brompton Road. The cafés attracted beatniks, jazzers, rock’n’rollers, exquisites and duffel-coated CNDers. Ray Gosling, the early Teddy boy, hung out at Brucciani’s, Leicester. Youth culture, nursing a glass cup of milky coffee, was here.
Many coffee bars were run by Italian families. In South Wales cafes were called ‘Bracchis’, after the leading family. Scottish Italians – many from Braga – spread widely. Think of Valvona & Crolla’s food store in Edinburgh or Glasgow’s Café d’Jaconelli, 570 Maryhill Road, featured in Trainspotting. In Lancashire there’s Grade II listed Brucciani’s in Morecambe (Brucciani’s, Preston, is a 1980s pastiche). Rossi’s, Hanbury Street, Spitalfields – used by the novelist and psychogeographer Iain Sinclair - is also listed. Pellicci’s, Bethnal Green Road, was favoured by the discriminating Kray brothers. So where’s the best café? My money’s on Nardini’s of Largs, Scotland: art deco grandeur, ocean liner chic, and knickerbocker glories in long cut-glass dishes. And café latte of course. Andiamo subito!
A tourist strolling down the right bank of the Vltava, contentedly absorbing the gothic and baroque splendour of Malá Strana and the Hradčany, might, a little further down the river, be forgiven for thinking ‘Where the hell did that come from?’ Downstream of the decorative Hanavský Pavilion, something that looks like it could be a modernist hermitage nestles in the trees at the Northern end of the Letna park, its minimal chic obtrusive among the expressive edifices of downtown Prague.
In Czechoslovakia, many of the golden generation of interwar architecture found under the new regime that they flew too close to the sun and so this rare possibility to reconnect to the international style was an alluring one. With the accent firmly on the modern, visitors to the Expo were invited to spend ‘One Day in Czechoslovakia,’ in an exposition that cracked the westernmanufactured façade of communist-era culture being uniformly dull and grey.
The arcing glass and shining steel of the kidney-shaped, elevated gallery grab the viewer’s attention from the riverside, with the subtle grace of the glazed pedestal only becoming apparent upon closer inspection. In answer to the tourist’s question, this light triumph came from Brussels, although, despite the flags fluttering in front of it, this building has nothing to do with the EU. It dates from a time before the Belgian capital became synonymous with the administrative HQ of the European political project, when Brussels hosted the World’s Fair: Expo ’58.
The light and voluminous spaces of František Cubr, Josef Hrubý and Zdeněk Pokorný’s pavilion set the scene for the most striking avant-garde theatre of the Expo. Josef Svoboda’s Polyekran (multiscreen) and Laterna Magika (magic lantern) combined projection and performance to stunning effect and stood proudly alongside the Corbusier–inspired Poeme Electronique as highlights of the festival. Function was not forgotten amidst these effervescent forms, with the pavilion’s elegant lines providing the backdrop to the best of contemporary Czechoslovak public and interior design, such as the classic T3 tram seat (heater included for those cold Prague winters) and the Hedgehog tea set.
This cold-war Expo was a highly politically charged event, a symbolic showcase for the superpowers, keen to trumpet their technical prowess and trump the progress of those on the ‘other side’ of what had yet to become a wall. The ’58 Expo was also the first major international exhibition to be held since the end of World War 2 and, despite being planned in the dark days of the 1950s, it was a modernist materialisation of hope, giving snatched glimpses of better futures. Although held less than two years after both the Suez crisis and the crushing of the Budapest uprising, the World’s Fair came in during a brief thaw in open hostilities, the lull before the storm of the proxy war in Congo and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Briefly it seemed that the cold war could be won by science and culture, by those who could not only divide heaven, but who could also harness technological progress to deliver better living. This was the time of both Sputnik and Saarinen, of Laika and the Lever Building; a time when Mad Men set about bringing the gains of Mutually Assured Destruction and the space race into mid-century living rooms. In the soviet bloc, Khrushchev’s 20th Congress denunciation had opened a narrow window of opportunity for architects and designers, as they were called upon to provide visual and material distance from the stodgy confections with which Boris Iofan and others had tried to coat tyranny.
While the political focus was on the potential standoff between the neighbouring American and Soviet showgrounds, it was the Czechs and Slovaks who took home the prize for the best pavilion. But that wasn’t all they took home, as the beautiful, curving structure that now sits in the Letna orchards, was the pavilion restaurant, where millions of visitors made sure that their one day in Czechoslovakia included a pint of the original and best Pilsner. The Saaz-laden suds of Bohemia’s best-known export undoubtedly helped things go with a swing. However, it was in the successful marriage of traditional craft and hi-tech architecture and of the local and the international that the pavilion restaurant most clearly echoed the elan with which interwar Czechoslovakia had risen to the world’s top cultural table. Unlike the American pavilion which rejected the “anonymity, uniformity and all the things that go to make up modernism [1]” or the confused Soviet pavilion which encased a thoroughly retrograde exhibition in a steel and glass shell, Czechoslovakia showed how modern architecture could both spur new sociocultural possibilities and accommodate more traditional pursuits. At the end of the Expo, the restaurant was transported back to Prague and fulfilled this function throughout the communist
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era, including the repressive period of normalisation, where it must have been a mirage-like reminder, a sleek, shimmering and somewhat unreal reminder of what Czechs came to know as the Bruselský Sen (Brussels dream). In 1991 a fire destroyed the interior and like so many buildings realised under the socialist regime, it was not properly valued in the heady tumult of what followed. Today, although it is well signposted in the park, visitors cannot enter the restaurant building, as it is now the offices of an advertising company. The company found itself embroiled in controversy in 2008 when it ran the Prague Mayor’s unrealistic
vanity campaign to bring the Olympics to Prague under the slogan ‘We are all on the National Team.’ This was parodied on the ‘Art Wall’ under the Expo restaurant by artivists Guma Guar who used the same artwork and slogan, but instead of lauding faux-noble equestrians perched ludicrously atop mountains, they applied it to well known Czech criminals. Is it too much to hope that the advertising agency would seek to show that they too are part of the national team and return this beautiful building to public use? In doing so, they would gain their greatest PR success and provide a welcome reminder of a time where modernist substance triumphed over superpower spin.
THE CZECHO EXPO 58 P
OSLOVAR PAVILION
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These roofs, composed of double curves, were often used because of their relative economy of construction in a time of postwar austerity. Last year, when I visited Sam Scorer’s Little Chef it was a fully functioning restaurant. The staff even had photocopies available of Scorer’s obituary to give out to interested passers-by (of which there are many). But on a recent trip back to this landmark building, located on the A1 at Markham Moor, Nottinghamshire, I was shocked to find it boarded up, covered in graffiti and sitting in an overgrown wasteland. This situation seems all the more sad considering that this late-fifties building was finally listed this year (having survived an earlier attempt to demolish it for a new slip road). But at least, according to a worker at a nearby hotel, it is soon to have a new lease of life, even if it is to become yet another branch of a ubiquitous coffeehouse chain. It is only the canopy roof and four structural supports that are listed and not the indistinct brick restaurant building that has sat under the canopy of this former petrol station since the 1980s. The canopy is one of Scorer’s finest examples of a hyperbolic paraboloid roof. These roofs, composed of double curves, were often used because of their relative economy of construction in a time of post-war austerity. They are often seen in developing countries and those by Felix Candela in Mexico are perhaps the most well known examples. In their listing notes for Markham Moor, English Heritage praises the canopy as “a dramatic piece of concrete design which displays the hyperbolic paraboloid form in a daring manner.” Scorer designed three buildings with this roof type, all in association with the structural engineer Dr Hajnal-Konyi. The other two are in Lincoln and both are listed – the former Lincolnshire Motor
Company Showrooms (1959-61) and the superb Church of St John (1962-63), which is Grade II*. The former Lincolnshire Motor Company Showrooms have seen two changes of use, firstly to a successful library and book storage facility and then to its currents use as three different chain restaurants. The massive roof is composed of four separate hyperbolic paraboloids, with high points in the centre and at the corners. At the time of construction the unfamiliarity of this roof type led people to call the Lincolnshire Echo to report that the roof had sunk. The interior has been changed to suit the corporate branding of the restaurants, but it is still possible to see the interior of the roof, complete with board-marked concrete. Scorer was a real innovator of this roof type in the UK and this building was mentioned in the contemporary architectural press and at conferences. On the bypass on the edge of Lincoln is a more recent Scorer building. Damon’s Restaurant (1987-88) is a circular brick building with an unusual feature in the middle of its roof. On my visit there I got talking to a couple at the front door. The man had worked as a joiner on the roof and confirmed the story I’d heard that the wooden crown was meant to signify the BBQ Ribs that are served in the American-style restaurant. The couple, regulars at this popular venue, invited me in for a tour of the glitzy, Hollywood-themed interior, with its film posters, smoky mirrors and artificial plants. On the wall is a framed picture of Sam Scorer, keeping an eye on proceedings.
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A SCORER TRIP CARS AND CAFES
THESE DESIGNS APPARENTLY ALL INSPIRED BY THE RESTAURANT AT THE 1951 FESTIVAL OF BRITAIN.
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Currently forlornly wrapped in plastic sheeting until its much-anticipated revamp is completed, Liverpool’s Lewis’s was once the quintessential British department store. Founded by David Lewis in 1856, it had a sister branch in Manchester by 1877. Lewis’s heirs, the Cohen family, expanded the company further, opening branches across the country by the early twentieth century. The flagship Liverpool store was rebuilt in 1923 to a design by Gerald De Courcey Fraser, becoming one of the biggest in the UK. Only the building’s destruction in WWII, during Liverpool’s infamous aerial Blitz on 3rd May 1941, halted Lewis’s supremacy. Post -war, Lewis’s commissioned De Courcey Fraser to design a replacement for his previous building. To mark the reconstruction, Lewis’s commissioned sculptor Jacob Epstein to create a new artwork for the prominent corner section of the building. A pioneer of Modernism in sculpture, Epstein had once been a controversial figure. By the 1950s though, he was something of an elder statesman in the arts. However, this didn’t mean Epstein had lost the power to shock. On 20th November 1956, the statue commissioned by Lewis’s to symbolise “the struggle and determination of Liverpool to rehabilitate itself after the grim, destructive blitz years”. (Evening Express, 1956) entitled ‘The Spirit of Liverpool Resurgent’ was unveiled. It was a large naked man standing up on the prow of a ship. Apparently the sudden sight of the naked statue caused some people to faint and a war of words for and against its artistic merits and morality began in the newspapers. Locally meanwhile, the statue quickly gained the nickname ‘Dickie Lewis’ and became a popular meet-up location for courting couples. The sculpture wasn’t the only radical feature of the new Lewis’s though. The interior of the store was filled with cutting edge design, nowhere more so than in its catering facilities. There were several eateries, each aimed at different ‘classes’ of shopper, and each containing remarkable Modernist features. Perhaps most notable was the self-service cafeteria. This contained large tiled murals designed by Carter’s of Poole, which later became the famous Poole Pottery. The murals featured bold and abstract designs of food, crockery, cutlery and kitchen utensils. Added to this were geometric light fittings with hints of the atoms and space themes that were so popular in the 1950s, and vibrant colours throughout. These designs apparently all inspired by the restaurant at the 1951 Festival of Britain. However, the cafeteria was not alone. For the middle classes there was The Mersey Room waitress service restaurant. This contained etched wooden panelling depicting the history of Liverpool, created by the influential Design Research Unit, the outfit behind such design classics as the British Rail logo and a key player in the Festival of Britain. The grandest eatery of all though, was the Red Rose Restaurant, which was silver service and aimed very much at the wealthiest of Lewis’s patrons. This featured a striking bronze sculpted screen depicting the Wars of the Roses created by Mitzi Cunliffe, perhaps best known for her design for the BAFTA Award statuette. With the opening of these eateries, Lewis’s was at its peak, in an era before internet shopping, supermarkets and out-oftown retail parks. By the 1960s Lewis’s even owned London’s Selfridges and opened a Modernist tile-fronted store on the Blackpool waterfront in its continued expansion. By the 1970s though, the company’s fortunes began to wane. For all their investment in cutting edge design in the 1950s, Lewis’s subsequently failed to adapt to changing markets. One by one its branch stores closed and the floorspace began to be reduced at its flagship Liverpool site. When the Red Rose Restaurant was closed in 1986, its bronze screen was acquired by Cunliffe and reinstalled at her home in Seillans, France. The remaining Modernist features in the building however were sealed up and forgotten. In 2008 photographer Stephen King entered the lift of the slowly dying department store and was greeted by the attendant (yes, in Lewis’s they still had lift attendants). They sparked up a conversation and King was told about the abandoned upper floors still containing their original 1950s interiors. King made it his mission to explore and photograph them, his project culminating in a book and exhibition entitled ‘Lewis’s Fifth Floor: A Department Story’. As fate would have it, the opening of the exhibition in 2010 coincided with the final closure of Lewis’s after 150 years and the show became a focal point for former staff and customers to reminisce about what had been the greatest store in Liverpool, if not the UK. Luckily, during one of Lewis’s pervious crises in 2007, the building had been Grade II listed, meaning its historic features were protected. The Lewis’s building is now being incorporated by developers Merepark into a huge scheme called Central Village, opening in 2013. This will see the creation of shops, offices, hotels, eateries and a cinema, as well as a rebuilt Central Station. The overall façade of the building is being retained, including the Epstein statue, and, though internally it will be largely unrecognisable as the old Lewis’s, its remaining Modernist features will be restored. Most prominently, the former cafeteria with its tiled murals and geometric lights will become the Breakfast Bar of the Adagio hotel, while the panelling from The Mersey Room will be refitted to one of the hotel’s corridors. It’s ironic perhaps that it was the decline of both Lewis’s and the Liverpool economy that saw these features preserved. Elsewhere, the building would have long been completely stripped for a new use before listing would have even been considered. Lewis’s is sorely missed, but at least elements of its proud history are being retained in a development that symbolises Liverpool, if not resurgent, then at least looking again to the future.
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LIBRARY CAFE
The library – as an institution, as a building-type, as an essential idea of public service – has for some time now been under attack. Questioned, defended, re-imagined, continually contested; their role in second decade of this century is far from clear as it becomes increasingly obvious that non-digital information is declining in importance much more rapidly than perhaps we had even imagined at the end of the twentieth century. Official debate is centred on the practical concerns of local government spending in a time of deficit reduction, but there is also an intellectual aspect to the whole question, about what library buildings could and should be for in the coming decades where physical printed matter will become one of the less important services they could offer.
Current high profile central library redevelopments at Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and Birmingham have sought to rebuild or substantially refurbish their existing buildings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with a sharp focus on offering a diversified range of services and placing an emphasis on creating useful meeting places at the centre of cities as much as repositories of knowledge. An idea that surfaces time and again is the introduction of cafés to these new libraries, as part of an effort to introduce an easy-going sociability and to echo the successful model used by bookshops, begun by the defunct Borders chain and since followed by most of the others.
The trend of stealing ideas from the private sector in order to gussy up supposedly moribund nooks of the public sector is now several decades old and at least five years beyond any reasonable claims to credibility, but in this case it is particularly galling to observers of the library service to claim the idea to be in any sense a new one. The combination of coffee and reading has a much longer conceptual history than that offered by Borders or Starbucks and can trace substantial roots in various branches of left-wing thought in the late 1950s. Anthony Crosland, future cabinet member of the Wilson and Callahan governments, set the tone in 1956 with The Future of Socialism, in part a clarion call that an educated electorate should be treated as fully rounded social beings with an eye for beauty and a desire to engage as much as so many units to produce, consume and pay taxes. Crosland’s vision of the good life included
open-air cafes, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing hours for public houses, more local repertory theatres, better and more hospitable hoteliers and restaurateurs, brighter and cleaner eating houses, more riverside cafes, more pleasure gardens on the Battersea model, more murals and pictures in public places, better designs for furniture and pottery and women’s clothes, statues in the centre of new housing estates, better-designed new street lamps and telephone kiosks and so on ad infinitum
It was these forms of modernisation, with the shared themes of less stuffiness and an embrace of colour, brightness and sociability that informed numerous areas of policy reform on the left. In part this was to pursue the same desires for a more
open, more equal and happier society that had defined the immediate post-war period and had been encapsulated in the spirit and aesthetic of the 1951 Festival of Britain, but as the 60s approached there was still much room for improvement for anyone with a progressive appetite.
The Albermarle Report of 1960 crystallised these issues insofar as they affected services for young people, calling in the first instance for substantially more funding for youth clubs etc. but also a different approach that acknowledged that the desire of the young for informality and the modern ways in which they wanted to associate with one another in order to realise their talents and enjoy fully what life has to offer. Into this atmosphere of openness and fresh thinking stepped the Library Association; not, perhaps, the most likely candidate for rethinking tradition, but which discussed at its 1963 conference the desirability of installing coffee bars specifically to engage teenagers who felt alienated by the atmosphere of exclusion created by layers of rules and membership requirements.
If the purpose of the library was to lend books, encourage reading and spread useful knowledge, then why couldn’t it be achieved in a sociable way that lowered the barriers of access? The coffee bar was positioned as a synecdoche of everything the library as an institution could be – not only as a place where the easily appreciated pleasures of caffeinated drinks could be combined with the deeper satisfactions of reading but as a visible symbol of the public value that libraries had always provided.
The trend was never overwhelmingly common. Typically, the insertion of café facility was connected to new schemes where some degree of progressive intent was obvious, but it seemed newness itself was the prerequisite; older bastions of silent library conservatism would fall only very reluctantly to the clatter of cups. But where they did appear the swinging hangouts could be found in central libraries and large branches alike, often with a degree of interior design chic that matched the ambition of much new library architecture.
At Redcar Library, Ahrends, Burton and Koralek’s innovative design of 1971, Bertoia diamond chairs were positioned behind a sleek plate glass and steel elevation; at Hulme, a kind of minimalistic Sixth Form Common Room was created with a rectilinear chrome coffee machine at its disciplined heart. Grimsby Library was opened in 1968 by Anthony Crosland – the progenitor of caffeine-infused socialism himself – who praised the provision of meeting rooms and a coffee bar as a particular enhancement of the town’s social facilities. It seems certain now that these post-war innovations in the public library movement were prescient in developing beyond the core function of book lending. Libraries have naturally been much more than this, as loci for various forms of association in a non-commercial setting, and it’s obvious that their future lies in the reinforcement of this role: hot drinks, buns and all.
In 1980, as a first year Architecture student I was taken to see, the then dilapidated Lawn Road Flats. Although I was not blown away by the scheme, its significance as an important modernist proposal must have impressed itself on me, as nearly 30 years later when asked by The Modernist if I would review this book, I jumped at the opportunity; and I found it a lovely book, well illustrated; crammed with information and enjoyable read.
Initially it reveals how Wells Coates, a Canadian, grew up in Japan, studied engineering, joined the RAF and ended up in London at the centre of the avantgarde modernist culture. It tells how his architectural agenda was established, as he started his career in the early 1920s and although his first projects were small shop fit-outs it, was clear from the start that his work was influential and significant. His unusual use of materials, restrained colour palette and stripped down aesthetic gained acclaim from the world of architecture, art and the cultural elite.
TWENTIETH CENTURY ARCHITECTS: WELLS COATES
Darling goes on to describe how Coates developed his distinctive design approach, brought his engineering skills and problem solving method to modern living and proclaimed ‘that a room exists for the man and not visa versa’. He gained commissions to design domestic interiors for which Coates “conceived a set of tools to facilitate the performance of daily life”, this resulted in interconnected spaces, adaptability, maximum use of technology and minimum use of colour.
The book also emphasises that Coates was lucky enough to have like-minded, wealthy and influential clients. Once established as a modernist architect, Coates had the opportunity to design two houses, Shipwrights and The Homewood, in which his ideas about modern living would be further developed and tested. All this is of particular interest to designers and architects of domestic space who now follow on from the design principles established in the early 20th century.
Wells Coates worked hard to promote the role of the modern architect and to bring together the disparate British architects working in the modernist cause. At this time, the 1930s, the Lawn Road flats and Embassy Court were designed; two projects that galvanised his ideas and promoted them to the world. This was the high point of his career. In addition to his architectural work, and integral to it in many cases, Coates designed furniture, products and fittings as his modernist ideology dictated.
The final two chapters of this book deal with the disappointments of the post war years, his death and finally the restoration of two of his remaining buildings. This part of the book is less captivating and as with Coates’ career, more disjointed.
As a young man, it would seem that he was at the right place at the right time and was riding the zeitgeist wave of modernism. After the Second World War, although Coates had the ability, and there was certainly a great need for buildings, he was no longer at the cutting-edge of architectural thinking and his contacts and acquaintances had lost influence. He returned to Canada in the mid 1950s and having begun to re-invent himself as an educator at Harvard, he died of a heart attack at the age of 63. Wells Coates was, as Elizabeth Darling says ‘an architects’ architect’ and although his remaining works are few, his legacy has undoubtedly left an imprint on housing design today.
The last chapter describes the refurbishment of the Lawn Road Flats and Embassy Court and, although I felt myself wanting more detail and more illustrations, I did find it well referenced and complete. This book gives us a good insight into the thinking behind British interwar housing design and provides an ideal background for anyone involved in housing design today.
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Butlin wanted something bigger and better, a taste of luxury, like the Canadian summer camps of his youth, but allowing for that great holiday spoiler, the British weather.
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Holidaying
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Social Revolution Say them out loud and they roll off the tongue like the chorus to a long forgotten Flanders and Swann ditty: Minehead, Bognor, Barry Island; Filey, Clacton, Pwhielli; Skegness, Ayr, Mosney. Names captured in glossy brochures, and elevated to utopian status for what they promised; dreams of freedom and release. To millions of ‘ordinary middle income people’ the annual choice of summer vacation wasn’t so much what to do but which Butlin’s camp to go to, unless, of course, you were in the Pontins camp.
Holiday camps were nothing new when Billy Butlin launched his empire in Skegness, their antecedents being in the British pioneer camps of the early 1920’s (yes, before the Soviets). But these camps were all canvas and sheds, built for the hardy outdoor types. Butlin wanted something bigger and better, a taste of luxury, like the Canadian summer camps of his youth, but allowing for that great holiday spoiler, the British weather. After the success of his first camp Butlin lobbied government in support of the 1938 holidays with pay act, which would guarantee a week’s paid leave to industrial workers. He then targeted his advertising at these workers, enticing them to exchange their ‘week’s pay for a week’s play.’ Each walled in village was a socialist paradise in miniature, with all campers paying the same and all campers receiving the same. Working class mixed with lower middle class, all free to enjoy their valuable week away from slavish routines, their ‘all in vacation’ being, like the future NHS, free at point of delivery.
Whilst there was early criticism of over regimentation and enforced conviviality (Butlin would go on to design and build military camps during World War II) the responsibility of continually ensuring the best week of the year for so many people (over 10,000 campers in peak season at the largest camps) necessitated centralised strategies and planning that would be the envy of Soviet committees. Central to these was the organisation of catering.
The collectivist nature of early ‘Butlinism’ centred around ‘Full Board’ catering with thousands of hungry mouths to feed 3 times a day. The Full Board only option was stipulated by Billy to liberate women from their kitchens, allowing them a holiday as well, away from the chores so rarely undertaken by their men folk. Facilitating this mass feeding exercise necessitated vast dining halls with upwards of a thousand diners in each. Upon arrival at the camp a family were allocated to one of two sitting times, to a dining hall and to a table. Each table had eight seats leading to enforced billeting with strangers and many friendships were formed by this random arrangement.
All meals were prepared fresh on site, the scale of the catering restricting the variety but not the quality. Little choice meant no menus so only memories remain of what actually was served; the great British fry up, bangers, beans and mash, and lots of meat and two veg. Behind the scenes potatoes were prepared in giant peeling machines and cleaning done by industrial dishwashers capable of cleaning up to 8000 plates an hour. Whilst waiters
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capable of cleaning up to 8000 plates an hour. Whilst waiters carried plates to tables in cylindrical steel towers allowing for the economy of just one journey to deliver all eight meals.
This efficiency was an absolute necessity, all diners in each hall had to be seated, fed, and cajoled out ready for the next thousand hungry mouths, all within an hour. This feat repeated three times a day, every day throughout the season. Little wonder the army turned to Billy Butlin to teach it the secrets of mass catering during the war.
For those wishing to unwind in more relaxed surroundings the Butlin’s bars offered a good choice of themed décor, best remembered of these being the exotic Beachcomber Bar. Influenced by the American Tiki bars of the 30’s and 40’s Butlin’s offered an exotic taste of Kitsch Polynesian decoration and exotic rum based cocktails as an alternative to darts and bitter. The practice of Garnett, Cloughley and Blakemore (GCB), responsible for so much of the style that epitomised sixties London, brought their pop sensibility to the leisure industry delivering the Beachcomber bars at the Butlins Camps – they would also work with Butlin on his restaurant at the top of the Post Office Tower. Erik Blakemore was behind the original Beachcomber Bar at the Mayfair hotel London, a design that Butlin so enjoyed he vouched to bring this experience of South Seas exotica to the windswept working classes.
Decorated in typical Tiki style, Butlin’s Beachcomber bars were adorned with bamboo and Polynesian god masks, with a landscaping of rocks, waterfalls, lagoons and even a small volcano. Grass skirted waitresses brought exotic cocktails to adventurous campers seated at wicker tables. Perhaps most memorable, certainly to my 10 year old mind as I peeped through the door, was their hourly tropical storms: lights would dim; wind would howl; a crack of thunder; a flash of lightning and then, real rain, indoors! Evidence of Erik Blakemore’s background in film set design and Butlin’s reputation as a showman. The days of the ‘full board only’ gave way to the individualism of self-catering and those campers looking for the exotic were eventually able to afford the real thing, tempted away by Sir Fred’s offer to go ‘Pontinental’. Memories of ‘Butlinism’ and the once mighty empire of camps are ever present in captured holiday photos. The omnipresence of the Butlin’s camp photographers, albeit for commercial gain, led to one of the greatest mass observation exercises of the post war years, if only all of those unsold holiday snaps were now sitting in an archive.
Psychologists tell us that every time we remember something we change it in some way, so for those wishing to revisit Butlins as they remember it, rather than how it actually was, the John Hinde photobook ‘Our True Intent is all for Your Delight’, offers beautiful, large format, Ektachrome memories. Whilst elaborately staged, these tableaux, dripping with colour, revisit perfectly an era when holidaymaking was a small act of social revolution and people genuinely seemed to be ‘all in this together’.