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 20thcentury 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
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Old Street Publishing Ltd Trebinshun House, Brecon LD3 7PX www.oldstreetpublishing.co.uk ISBN 978-1-906964-90-0 Copyright Š John Grindrod 2013 The right of John Grindrod to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in Great Britain.
CONTENTS Introduction ‘Concrete Jungle Where Dreams are Made’
5
Part 1: So Different, So Appealing 1. ‘A Holiday Camp All Year Round’: The Temporary Building Programme and Prefabs (1944–51) 2. ‘A Decent Start in Life’: Garden Cities and the First New Towns (1946–51) 3. ‘A Real Effort to be Jolly’: The Festival of Britain on London’s South Bank (1951) 4. ‘An Architect’s Dream!’: Rebuilding Blitzed Plymouth and Coventry (1940–62) 5. ‘A Touch of Genius’: Herts, Minds and Brutalism (1949–54)
21 35 71 99 129
Part 2: Shake It Up Baby Now 1. ‘A Flying Saucer Taking You to Mars’: Glasgow, King of Comprehensive Development (1957–65) 2. ‘A New Dimension Added to the Street’: Sheffield’s Streets in the Sky (1957–61) 3. ‘A Wild and Romantic Place’: Arndales and Urban Motorways (1959–65) 4. ‘A Natural Evolution of Living Conditions’: Newcastle Gets the System Building Bug (1959–69) 5. ‘A Contemporary Canaletto’: How Office Blocks Transformed our Skyline (1956–75) 6. ‘A Village With Your Children in Mind’: Span and the Hippy Dreams of New Ash Green (1957–72)
147 167 183 211 233 271
7. ‘A Veritable Jewel in the Navel of Scotland’: Cumbernauld’s Curious Megastructure (1955–72)
295
Part 3: No Future 1. ‘A Pack of Cards’: Tower Block Highs and Lows (1968–74) 2. ‘A Terrible Confession of Defeat’: Protests and Preservation (1969–79) 3. ‘As Corrupt a City as You’ll Find’: Uncovering the Lies at the Heart of the Boom (1969–77) 4. ‘A Little Bit of Exclusivity’: Milton Keynes, the Last New Town (1967–79) 5. ‘A City within a City’: The Late Flowering of the Barbican and the National Theatre (1957–81)
323 345 363 381 403
Epilogue ‘The Dream has Gone but the Baby is Real’
431
Index
465
Acknowledgements
473
‘Concrete Jungle Where Dreams are Made’
INTRODUCTION
I
t 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,
JOHN GRINDROD 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? 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
A bad estate? Tower blocks mingle with low rise flats in New Addington.
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
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CONCRETOPIA 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. 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
Flats on the Fieldway estate. The tree gives some idea of the high winds experienced in ‘Little Siberia’.
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JOHN GRINDROD 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
8
CONCRETOPIA 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, postapocalyptic 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,
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JOHN GRINDROD 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, 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.’
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CONCRETOPIA 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. 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,
Amid the skyscrapers in central Croydon.
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JOHN GRINDROD 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,
12
CONCRETOPIA 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
13
JOHN GRINDROD 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 nineteenthcentury 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-
14
CONCRETOPIA tech materials 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 midcentury 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
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JOHN GRINDROD 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
‘We went forward’: The town centre is a vision of the future from the past.
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CONCRETOPIA 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. 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, Marvintype 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
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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.
INDEX Abercrombie, Sir Patrick, 43, 44, 75, 76, 78, 89, 106, 107, 110, 114, 123, 148, 161, 184, 330, 334, 350, 352, 354, 356, 403, 410, 432, 434, 437 Aberdeen, 188 Accrington, 189 Aldershot, 307 Alpha Tower, 254, 255 Amery, Colin, 346 Anson, Brian, 356 Apollo House, 240, 252 Archigram, 400 Architectural Association, The, 112, 169, 195, 309 Arndale, 188–191, 197, 199, 201–203, 360, 361, 367 Arne Jacobsen, 359 Arts and Crafts movement, 38, 39, 42, 53, 170, 271, 280, 283, 432 Arup, Ove, 114, 118, 171 Aslin, Charles Herbert, 130, 131, 142 Attlee, Clement, 84, 95 Aylesbury Estate, The, 181 Balfron Tower, 323, 324, 327, 328, 330, 337, 341 Ballard, J. G., 138, 356, 428 Banham, Mary, 137, 138 Banham, Reyner, 137, 381, 382 Barbican, The, 18, 62, 162, 307, 403–410, 413–419, 424–430, 436, 439 Barr, A. W. Cleeve, 30, 223 Barry, Gerald, 74, 87, 97 Barry, Peter, 27, 31, 382, 394, 473 Basildon, 47, 52 Basingstoke, 250, 307 Bath, 107, 346 Battersea, 8, 34, 61, 92–94, 110, 355, 357 Bauhaus, 51, 55, 87, 112, 137, 195, 238, 277, 352
beaux arts planning, 105, 107, 114, 115, 121, 122 Bedford, Eric, 256, 257, 260 Benn, Tony, 256 Bethnal Green, 177–179 Betjeman, John, 15, 129, 345, 348, 419 Bewick Court, 357–359 Bilsby, Leslie, 275 Birmingham, 14, 37, 103, 183–185, 197, 199, 204, 206, 209, 213, 248, 254–256, 259, 266, 274, 314, 323, 338, 363, 376, 398, 473 Bison system, 225 Blitz, The, 18, 22, 75, 89, 99–110, 117, 127, 149, 183, 185, 18, 192, 211, 237, 238, 334, 361, 403–406, 439 Boissevain, Paul, 195 Bolton, 190–191 Bon, Christoph, 409, 410, 413, 415, 426 Boot, Charles, 8, 42 Borg, Neville, 205 Boring Postcards, 436 Bovis, 115, 214, 222, 277, 289, 290, 293, 336, 372, 374, 391 Bracknell, Bradford, 188, 34, 367, 369, 372, 373 Braithwaite, George, 366, 367 Brent Cross shopping centre, 360 Brett, Lionel, 143, 188, 242, 268, 315 Breuer, Marcel, 51, 87 Bristol, 11, 103 ‘Britain Can Make It’, 74, 76, 83, 282 Brixton, 9, 356, 357 Brown, George, 249, 250, 254 Brown, W. Clifford, 369 Buchanan, Colin, 186, 187, 198, 205, 207, 209, 371, 424, Bull Ring, The, 197, 198, 204, 205, 209, 435
Bunton, Sam, 161–163 Burns, Wilfred, 106, 187, 190, 207 Butlin, Sir Billy, 260, 267 Cadbury-Brown, H. T., 82 Calder Hall, 265 Campbell, Kenneth, 224 Camus system, 222, 334 Cannon Street station, 365, 434 Cardiff, 38, 47, 103, 223, 286, 384 Carry On films, 348 Casson, Sir Hugh 79, 81–85, 88, 410 Castlemilk, 161, 311 Castrol House, 238 Caswell, Michael, 56–58, 473 Caswell, Rosemary, 473 Central Lancashire New Town, 351 Centre Point, 234, 241–246, 253, 260, 268, 435 Chamberlin, Joe, 405, 407–410, 413, 415, 426 Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, 405, 407, 408, 410, 413, 415, 426 Chaney, Bob and Irene, 99–102, 104, 113, 114, 118, 120, 121, 124, 125, 127, 437, 473 Charing Cross, Glasgow, 248 Childs, Oliver, 279–283, 290, 291, 293, 437, 473 Chippindale, Sam, 188, 190, 191, 203, 361 Chrisp Street Market, 90, 91, 113, 330 Churchill Gardens, 85, 407 Churchill, Winston, 23, 30, 51, 73, 95, 102 CIAM, 177, 178, 235 CLASP, 142, 143, 222, 224, 336 Clore, Charles, 199 Clyde Valley Regional Plan 149 Coal House, Doncaster, 366 comprehensive development areas (CDAs), 90, 103, 149, 150, 164, 193, 249, 311, 334, 336, 337, 350 conservation (preservation), 15,
345–349, 351, 354, 355, 361, 437 Copcutt, Geoffrey, 296–300, 302–307, 309, 314 Corby, 47 Cotton, Jack, 199 County of London Plan, 44, 75, 89, 432, Covent Garden, 354, 355, 362 Coventry Cathedral, 18, 99–103, 110–114, 118–122, 124–127, 137, 160, 436, 437, 439 Coventry, 18, 22, 64, 99–115, 118–121, 124–126, 130, 137, 160, 187, 432, 436, 437, 439 Cox, Oliver, 307–309 Craigie, Jill, 106, 109, 110, 114, 116 Crap Towns, 15, 310, 394 Crawley, 44, 47, 86, 114 Crittall, 119 Crosby, Theo, 138, 141 Crossgates shopping centre, 367 Crossman, Richard, 223, 275, 300, 315, 366 Crowe, Sylvia, 48 Croydon, 5–8, 10–14, 17, 18, 42, 60, 77, 126, 167, 179, 199, 200, 240, 241, 249–254, 268, 357, 394, 432, 433, 437, 473, 474 Cruddas Park, 213–216, 220, 221, 230, 339, 357, 358, 371, 424, 433, 436–438 Crudens, 164, 222, 224, 372 Cruikshank, Dan, 346 Cullen, Gordon, 66, 67 Cumbernauld, 62, 149, 161, 295–320, 345, 360, 384, 390, 392, 434, 435, 437, 439 Cunningham, Andrew, 366, 367 Cwmbran, 39, 47, 49–51, 58, 65, 271, 286, 287, 296, 298, 348, 437 Davie, Ken, 296, 298, 299, 303, 304, 309–311, 315, 316, 318, 320, 437, 473, Day, Lucienne, 87 Day, Robin, 87, 281 Demolition, 303, 310
Denholm, Ken and Margaret, 213–221, 228, 230, 231, 339, 436, 473 Devine, David, 48, 51, 60, 63, 68, 434, 473 Direct Labour organisation, 174 Dome of Discovery, The, 71, 72, 81–83, 86, 93, 94, 97, 411, 438 Douglas-Home, Alec, 223 Draper’s Gardens, 248, 269 Drew, Jane, 51, 83, 326, 394 Duncan-Sandys, Lord 124, 407 Dundee, 107, 376–378 Dunnett, James, 235, 241, 242, 324, 354, 368, 473 East End, the, 75, 89, 90, 91, 106, 324, 329, 330, 356 East Kilbride, 47, 149, 161, 296 Ebery, Evan 376 Economist Plaza, 235 Eden, Anthony, moustache 116 Edinburgh New Town, 345–347, 350, 355–356 Eldon Square, 359, 360 Elephant and Castle, 18, 180, 183, 184, 191–195, 197, 201–204, 206, 208, 209, 235, 256, 272, 302, 326, 348, 415, 433 Elizabeth House, 434 Ellard, Patrick, 272–274, 276, 281, 284–286, 290–293, 437, 473 Engineering Gas Research Station, 266, Euston Centre, 234, 237, 238, 240 Excalibur Estate, 21, 23, 25, 29, 31, 433 exhibitions, 32, 53, 74, 71, 73, 74, 82, 92, 89, 90, 106, 92, 113 Festival Hall, 71, 72, 77–79, 81, 82, 84, 86–89, 92, 94, 96, 97, 149, 202, 237, 347, 353, 410, 413, 435 Festival of Britain, 18, 51, 55, 60, 71–74, 76–82, 85–97, 106, 111–113, 115, 140, 141, 144, 195, 223, 239, 241, 410, 434, 437, 438, festival style, 90 Fielding, Fenella, 295, 297
Fitzwalter, Raymond, 364, 365, 367, 369, 372–378, 437, 473 Forshaw, John Henry, 44, 75, 76, 78, 89 Forster, E. M., 46, 47 Foster, Norman, 390 Fry, Maxwell, 51, 83, 277, 394 Gaitskell, Hugh, 216 Galley, Kenneth, 358–360 garden cities, 37–39, 41–44, 47, 50, 53, 54, 62, 63, 67, 68, 80, 148, 151, 169, 170, 171, 217, 283, 296, 309, 346, 354, 398, 432 Gateshead, 201, 226, 433 Gateway House, 248 Gatwick Airport, 186, 266 Get Carter, 201, 433 Gibberd, Frederick, 32, 36, 37, 48–51, 53, 54, 56, 62–64, 67–69, 90, 91, 113, 154, 266, 288, 437 Gibson, David, 161–163 Gibson, Donald, 22, 103–106, 108, 120, 121 Gilbert Ash, 143, 164, 336 Gill, Danny, 147, 148, 152, 180, 181, 196, 414, 415, 473 Glasgow, 15, 47, 62, 92, 103, 107, 147–165, 175, 186, 212, 214, 248, 296, 297, 311, 312, 314, 337, 338, 346, 357, 415, 424, 433 Glenrothes, 47, 161 Gold, John, 178, 201, 350 Golden Lane estate, 137, 178, 405, 407, 409, 410, 414, 417 Goldfinger, Ernő, 82, 138, 194, 235, 323, 324, 326, 327, 330, 337, 339, 341, 433 Gollins, Melvin and Ward, 238 Goonhilly Downs, 266 Gorbals Riverside, 153, 155 Gorbals, 18, 147, 148, 150–157, 160, 161, 164, 171, 180, 214, 219, 296, 336, 340, 345–347, 433, 435, 436, 438 Gordon, Rodney, 201, 202
Greater London Council, 181, 239, 254, 276, 286, 324, 355, 411 green belt, 7, 38, 42, 43, 148, 271, 275, 432 Griffiths, Jim and Jo, 38, 45 49, 51, 58, 59, 65, 66, 271, 286–288, 384, 385, 473 Gropius, Walter, 55, 87, 112, 119, 277, 352, 394 Gyford, John, 71, 79, 80, 92, 94, 96, 237, 245, 246, 437 Hagenbach, Arnold, 188, 189 Hamilton, Richard, 138 Harlow, 32, 36, 37, 44–66, 68, 80, 83, 90, 91, 115, 164, 228, 272, 274, 287–289, 295, 296, 298, 300, 311, 316, 329, 330, 336, 382, 392, 434, 437, 438 Hatfield, 47 Hawtrey, Charles, 26 Hay, David, 260, 261, 264 Hayward, Sir Isaac, 193 Heath, Edward, 202, 351, 361, 363, 375 helicopter (also: helipad, heliport, hover plane, Rotodyne), 61, 95, 120, 167, 206, 207, 292, 295, 308, 313, 394, 406 Hempstead, Hemel, 44, 47, 67 Hereford, 346, Heygate Estate, 180, 181, 414, 415, 433 Hibbert, Katharine, 327–330, 341, 473 High Market, 207, 208 Hills system, 131 Holden, Charles, 75 Holford, Sir William, 142, 236, 352, 406 Holt, Allan, 17, 251 Honer, John, 405–410, 413, 416, 417, 426, 428–430, 437, 473 Hook, Hampshire, 18, 306–309, 314, 320 Howard, Ebenezer, 37, 39, 41, 46, 50, 346, 354 Hull, 23, 64, 103, 107 Hunstanton, 129, 130, 133–137, 139,
140, 143, 238, 397, 436 Hutchesontown-Gorbals, 147, 150, 152, 153, 155, 156, 164, Hutchie E (Hutchesontown-Polmodie), 150, 336, 337 Hyams, Harry, 233, 234, 239–244, 252 Impington Village College, 277 Irvine, 161, 474 Islington, 26, 45, 351, 356 Jacobs, Jane, 287, 346, 348 Jarrow, 188 Jellicoe, Geoffrey, 190, 208, Jesmond Vale, 228, 229 Jespersen system, 222 Jodrell Bank, 266 Johnson-Marshall, Percy, 101, 102, 103, 104, 130, 187 Johnson-Marshall, Stirratt, 130, 131, 142, 187, 235 Joseph, Sir Keith, 222, 223, 285, 374 Jozefowski, Paul, 411, 419, 420–424, 473 Kadleigh, Sergei, 406, 407 Kenyon, Sir Bernard, 366, 374 King, Lord, 373 King’s Reach Tower, 248 Knight, John, 297–302, 311–313, 345, 346, 437, 473 Korn, Arthur, 112, 120 Laing, 116, 118, 197, 198, 204, 214, 222, 283, 431, 432 Lambeth, 192, 351 Laming, George, 248 landscape architecture (also: parks, planting, wedges), 39, 42, 48, 49, 53, 54, 61, 66, 80, 104, 105, 112, 208, 216, 217, 280, 290, 389, 399, 406, 438 Langley, John, 420–424, 473 Larsen Nielsen system, 222, 333–335 Lasdun, Denys, 178, 411, 417–419, 423, 424 Lawns, The, Harlow, 53–55, 336 Le Corbusier, 15, 51, 54, 88, 112, 140,
141, 165, 169–172, 174, 177, 178, 208, 233, 235, 238, 241, 326, 327, 346, 394, 413, 414 Lee, Laurie, 83 Leeds International Pool, 368 Leeds, 11, 14, 32, 190, 213, 364, 366, 367 Leicester, 206, 335, 354 Letchworth Garden City, 38, 39, 44, 68, 130, 151 Levy, Joe, 234, 238, 239, 240, 352 Ling, Arthur, 90, 120, 121 Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, 435 Liverpool, 9–11, 14, 37, 103, 107, 110, 213, 334, 435, 474 Livingstone, 161 Llewelyn-Davies, Richard, 384, 387 London County Council, 23, 43, 71, 72, 74–76, 82–84, 86–90, 95, 96, 120, 130, 137, 142, 148, 179, 192, 193, 195, 204, 209, 214, 215, 219, 224, 236, 237, 240–242, 247, 250, 278, 279 307, 308, 352, 357, 407, 426 London Wall, 404, 405 Los Angeles, 352, 359, 381, 384 Luder, Owen, 201, 202 Lunar House, 14, 240, 252 Lund, Kenneth, 334 Lynn, Jack, 169, 174, 182 Lyons, Eric, 272, 275–278, 282, 283, 289–291 Macmillan, Harold, 61, 64, 116–118, 185, 194, 211, 222 Manchester Arndale, 360 Manchester, 10, 11, 14, 30, 64, 95, 103, 105, 133, 150, 184, 213, 223, 248, 279, 349, 360, 364, 366, 374, 435 MARS, 112, 120, 235 Marsh, George, 239, 240, 255 Marshall, Sir James, 11, 249, 250, 253 Martin, Leslie, 77, 84, 97 Mass Observation, 32, 33, 46 Matthew, Robert, 76, 77, 84, 87, 89, 91,
142, 148, 150, 151–153, 154, 156, 158, 165, 235, 279, 345, 346, 347, 351 Matthews, John, 225–229, 473 Maudling, Beryl, 374 Maudling, Reginald, 370, 374 Maudsley, Alan, 376 McAlpines, 418 McGonnell, Eddie, 148, 152, 157–161, 164, 165, 340, 436 Medd, David and Mary, 129, 131, 133 Meredith, Jo, 175, 176, 179, 349, 350, 367, 378, 391, 437, 473 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 136, 137, 140, 238, 254, 397, 433 Milton Keynes, 27, 49, 62, 206, 315, 381–401, 432, 438 Ministry of Housing and Local Government, 220, 222, 224, 249, 337, 351 Ministry of Town and Country Planning, 43–45, Ministry of Works, 23, 75, 256 monorail, 206, 207, 386, 387 Moore, Henry, 60, 95 Morrison, Herbert, 73, 76 mosaic tiling, 66, 121, 183, 193, 241, 253 Motopia, 208 ‘motorway box’, 356, 357 motorways, 12, 17, 63, 120, 121, 185, 186, 356, 357, 359, 362, 384, 433, 435, 436 Moya, Jacko, 51, 85 Mulrenan, John, 183, 184, 192, 193, 196, 197, 473 Mulrenan, Patrick, 192, 197, 473 Myton, 415 Nairn, Ian, 278, 304, 319, 354 National Building Agency, 223 National Health Service, 69, 438 National Theatre, 77, 403, 410–413, 416–424, 435 NatWest Tower, 248, 268
Nelson, 351 New Addington, 5–10, 17, 33, 42, 43, 254, 283, 431, 432, 437 New Ash Green, 271–277, 280, 281, 284–293, 391, 433, 439, new brutalism, 129, 140, 141, 396, 438 New London Bridge House, 244, 269 new towns, 15, 17, 18, 35–37, 39, 44– 51, 53–63, 65–69, 72, 86, 90, 91, 105, 108, 114, 114, 130, 140, 141, 143, 144, 149 151, 161, 170, 190, 206, 271, 276, 284, 286–288, 295–298, 300, 307–310, 314, 315, 319, 347, 348, 350, 372, 381, 382, 384, 386–388, 392, 396, 397, 399, 400, 401, 407, 431, 432, 435–437, 439 New Zealand House, 235 Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, 14, 148, 212–214, 216, 219–221, 223, 225, 228, 266, 338, 357–360, 362, 364, 366, 371, 372, 376, 378, 391 Newton Aycliffe, 47 Niemeyer, Oscar, 238 NLA Tower, 252, 253, 258, 259 North Peckham Estate, 181, 415 North, Thomas, 333, 334 Notting Hill, 351 O’Sullivan, Mark, 39, 41, 473 Olivier, Laurence, 411, 422 Open Systems Building, 366, 371, 372, 375 Open University, 173, 394, 396, 399 Osborn, Frederic, 43, 68, 170, 288 Osmond, Barbara, 195 Oxford, 27, 31, 196, 330, 383, 408 Paddington, 244, 357, 407 Park Hill, 167–169, 171–180, 182, 216, 217, 222, 241, 272, 327, 339 Parkleys, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 290, 291, 293 pedestrian decks, 188, 309, 353, 386 Peterlee, 47, 372 Philip, HRH Prince, 259 Piccadilly Circus, 192, 352–355
Pilkington Brothers 207, 208 pilotis (also: column, pillar), 54, 90, 119, 240, 241, 242, 243, 261, 390 Piper, John, 64, 119, 127 Plan for Plymouth, A, 107 Plymouth, 32, 43 64, 75, 99, 102, 103, 106–111, 115–118, 122, 149, 208 424 point block, 53, 54, 66, 154, 164, 171, 214, 220, 327, 431, 432 Pontefract, 364, 367, 369 Poole, 188 Pooley, Fred, 386 Poplar, 89, 90, 314, 327 Portsmouth, 15, 201, 304 Post Office Tower, 255–260, 265, 266, 268, 435, 439, Pottinger, William, 366, 367 Poulson, John, 364–376, 379, 434, 438 Powell, Enoch, 323, 379 Powell, Geoffry, 405, 407–410, 413, 415, 426 Powell, Philip, 51, 85, 407, 408 ‘prairie planning’, 67, 296 ‘pram town’, 59, 60, 67, 132 precincts, 12, 64, 105, 114, 115, 121, 185, 187, 188, 278, 305, 346, 359, 436 prefabs, 8, 14, 21–35, 83, 85, 103, 130, 131, 132, 137, 141–143, 160, 168, 217, 222, 224, 238, 246, 273, 278, 280, 283, 290, 311, 336, 390, 431, 432, 433 Preston bus station, 433 Preston bypass, 185, 187 Price, Sir Frank, 184, 197, 199 protests (also: campaign), 47, 67, 141, 243, 276, 323, 333, 337, 348, 355–357, 359, 360, 362, 363, 381 public consultation, 253, 387 Queen Elizabeth II, 58, 71, 124, 125, 147, 160, 209, 265, 336, 337, 340, 436 Queen Elizabeth Square (the Queenies), 147, 156, 157, 159–162, 165, 171, 340 Rachman, Peter, 352
Ravenseft, 64, 188, 191, 197, 199, 201 Rawtenstall, 351 Red Road estate, 162–164, 337, 433 Reed, John, 36, 51, 52, 54, 56, 57, 63, 473 Reilly, Tom, 298, 29, 302–304, 311, 313, 313–315, 318, 473 Reith, Lord, 44, 45, 75, 105, 381 Rhiwbina, 38, 39, 43, 45, 271, 432 RIBA, 237, 419, 473 Richard, Cliff, 254, 398 Richards, J. M., 66, 296 ring roads (also: urban motorway), 65, 105, 106, 109, 120, 184–186, 191, 197–199, 206, 209, 355, 356; 12, 120, 356, 359, 362, 433 Rippon, Geoffrey, 355 RMJM (Robert Matthew JohnsonMarshall), 142, 150, 155, 351 Roberts, James, 198, 255, 256, 363 Roche, Fred Lloyd, 389, 390 Rogers, Richard, 245, 355 Ronan Point, 288, 330–333, 335–337, 339, 342, 363, 438 Ronan, Harry, 333, 342 Rosenauer, Michael, 236, 238, 242 Rotunda, The, 198, 363 Royal Engineers, 239 Roystonhill, 338 Runcorn, 62 Ryder and Yates, 266 Sales, Billy, 366 Scandinavian modernism, 53, 65, 96, 105, 115, 140, 141, 151, 160, 171, 222, 273, 277, 281, 288, 432 Scott, Sir Giles Gilbert, 110, 111 Scottish Office, 45, 316 Seagram Building, 238 Search, Janet, 35, 36, 55, 57–60, 63, 473 Sectra system, 222 Seifert, Richard, 233, 239, 240, 241, 243–249, 252, 254, 255, 268, 269, 368, 433 Shankland, Graeme, 307
Sharp, Dame Evelyn, 18, 224, 300, 345, 354, 360, 371, 374 Sharp, James, 376 Shee, Bill, 366 Sheffield, 10, 17, 132, 167, 168, 174, 175, 216, 241, 339, 349, 360, 367 Shenfield House, 338 Shone, Kenneth, 361 shopping centres, 12, 16, 17, 56, 5964, 66, 90, 105, 14, 121, 160, 161, 176, 183, 184, 187–191, 194–199, 201–205, 208, 209, 256, 274, 291, 292, 302–304, 307, 309, 314, 355, 359, 361, 367, 397, 398, 433 Shore, Peter, 400 Silkin, Lewis, 43, 44, 46, 47, 57, 62, 109, 110 Skarne system, 222, 376 Skelmersdale, 298 Skylon, 51, 81, 85, 89, 93–95, 259, 438 Slough, 250, 474 slum clearance, 18, 164, 212, 349, 432 Smith, Ivor, 169, 174, 179 Smith, T. Dan, 212–218, 220, 224, 230, 357, 371–375, 378, 438 Smithson, Alison and Peter, 67, 112, 126, 129, 133, 135–141, 143, 144, 159, 169, 177, 178, 207, 235, 238, 397, 433, 436 Soviet Union, 62, 74, 211 Space House, 240, 244–247 Span, 272–281, 283, 284, 286–293, 305, 311, 431, 433, 437, 438, Spence, Sir Basil, 74, 76, 82, 92, 111–114, 118–120, 125, 126, 150–152, 157–160, 163, 164, 171, 235, 340, 341, 433, 435, 436 Sporle, Sidney, 372 SPUR, 307 Squires, Grenville, 173–175, 180, 436, 473 St George’s Tower, 251 Stamp, Gavin, 18, 326, 346
Stanley Miller, 225–229, 338 Stevenage, 44, 46, 47, 52, 61, 62, 64, 115, 300 Stirling, James, 138 streets in the sky (also: elevated walkways), 155, 167, 171–174, 176, 179–181, 187, 207, 209, 245, 272, 285, 307, 308, 324, 339, 353, 357, 359, 411, 438 subways (also: underpasses), 14, 17, 121, 183, 191, 193, 194, 198, 202, 203, 209, 239, 272, 314, 352 Sunderland, 240, 349 Swindon, 250 Sydney Opera House, 195 system building, 131, 142, 143, 222– 227, 229, 283, 288, 310, 330, 333–337, 366, 370, 372, 375, 432, 438 Tait, Thomas, 115, 117, 122 Taylor Woodrow-Anglian, 222, 333 Telstar House, 240, 244, 269 terrorism (also: IRA), 267, 363 Thamesmead, 62 This is Tomorrow, 137, 138 Thorn House, 235 Toast Rack, The, 435 Tolworth Tower, 240 Tonbridge, Graham, 365, 367 tower block, 6, 54, 65, 121, 152, 154, 159, 162, 164, 212, 213, 221, 222, 225, 226, 228, 405 Townsend, Geoffrey, 275 Tracoba system, 222, 336 Traffic in Towns, 186, 207, 209, 371 Trellick Tower, 324, 435, 438 Tricorn Centre, The, 201, 435 Trinity Square, 201, 202, 209 Tripp, Sir Herbert Alker, 185 Tubbs, Ralph, 82, 86 Twentieth Century Society, The, 18, 107, 129, 133, 137, 474 Unité d’Habitation, 165, 169, 170, 172, 178
United Nations Secretariat building, 124, 238, 239 vandalism, 74, 180, 291, 338, 339, 429 Victoria Centre, Nottingham, 360 Victorian Society, The, 345, 348 Walker, Derek, 387, 388, 390, 397, 399, 400 Walker, Peter, 244 Wandsworth, 372, 374 Wates, 283 Watson, James Paton, 107, 109, 115, 122 Weir, Daniel, 135, 136, 139, 473 Welfare State, 69, 77, 132, 144, 217, 391, 434, 438 Wellingborough, 202 Wells Coates, 82 Welwyn Garden City, 39–44, 47, 63, 80, 105, 122, 123, 130, 151, 283, 398, 432 Westway, The, 356, 357 Weybridge, 289 Whitgift Centre, 12, 13, 200 Williams, Kenneth, 348 Willets, 196 Willis, Margaret, 90 Willmott, Peter, 178, 319 Wilson, Harold, 214, 225, 249, 256, 259, 288, 350, 363, 394 Wilson, Hugh, 296, 313, 360 Wimpey, 116, 159, 164, 174, 214, 243, 391 Winter, John, 326 Woking, 250 Womersley, Lewis, 168, 169, 176, 339 Woolwich, 334 Worcester, 346 Worlds End, 289 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 84, 87 Yorke, F. R. S., 51, 54 Young, Michael, 178