Preface

Harwood, Elain

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Preface

Elain Harwood

Space, Hope and Brutalism: English Architecture, 1945–1975

This is a book about the rebuilding of England after the Second World War, when architects were among those who sought to create better living and working conditions for everyone, a better educational environment and support for the arts. The hopes engendered by Clement Attlee’s Labour governments of 1945–51 saw some realisation into the...

Author

Elain Harwood

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-32122

Preface

This is a book about the rebuilding of England after the Second World War, when architects were among those who sought to create better living and working conditions for everyone, a better educational environment and support for the arts. The hopes engendered by Clement Attlee’s Labour governments of 1945–51 saw some realisation into the 1970s, and the country was transformed, greater opportunities and a more widespread affluence finding expression not only in its people but also in its architecture and landscape. The values of the Welfare State formed me and I grew up believing that they would last forever. This book explores the framework of that belief as expressed in the architecture built from the war until the mid-1970s, when the Three Day Week and rising inflation brought a lull in construction.

There, then, is the ‘hope’ of the title. ‘Space’, as architect readers might suppose, comes from Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture, the classic history of architecture from a functionalist perspective first published in 1941. Brutalism was functionalism’s successor and it was a development first identified in Britain in the 1950s. So this is a book about functionalism, Brutalism and the Welfare State, and just about everything else that produced a building between 1945 and 1975, with some overlap at either end. An all-encompassing title was needed for such a venture, and this was suggested to me by a colleague on a Twentieth Century Society trip to Robert Harvey’s house at Ilminster, Stonecrop, in about 2002. I should have known his name then but was too embarrassed to ask, and for this I apologise.

Space, Hope and Architecture grew out of a series of lectures by the secretary of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in 1938–9. The origins of this book lie in the research work undertaken by English Heritage in the 1990s as a basis for listing post-war buildings. The Government, first through the Department of the Environment and now the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, has since 1987 committed itself to list buildings more than thirty years old for their special architectural or historic interest; in exceptional cases where the building is both threatened and outstanding it can be listed if it is just ten years old.

English Heritage’s first recommendations for listing buildings from the 1950s found little Government sympathy. On the advice of a one-off Heritage Forum, Baroness Blatch of the Department of the Environment commissioned a research project and the Post-War Steering Group was formed — a vociferous mix of historians and practitioners from the period which encouraged staff and outside experts to collaborate as equals. It embarked in 1992 on a three-year programme to identify buildings broadly from the years 1941–65 for listing, though it continued a broader programme until 2002. The book was commissioned in 1997. The research has been carried out anew, but it follows the original project in studying the period by building type. By placing each building in the context of why it was needed and the ideas of the times, post-war architecture can be better understood and, it is hoped, more appreciated. So much has been altered or destroyed that it has become less a call to arms than an obituary, especially in the areas of schools and new towns in which England led the world in the 1950s. Nevertheless, the battle to preserve the best of the post-war legacy — and increasingly of the more recent past — continues. The book has taken eighteen years to write, partly because other projects intervened, but also because I have used the unique opportunity to be thorough; books on the period have appeared in the intervening years but there remains surprisingly little that is substantial in depth or broad in scope.

The economic story of twentieth-century Britain is that of the reassertion of the south after the brief ascendancy of the north and Midlands in the Industrial Revolution. Better transport and a national grid restored the dominance of the capital city and its hinterland, and this is where architects were located and much of the better-funded new architecture was realised. The north got individual special projects and university work, but despite best efforts London dominates large sections of this book, not least because of the ambitious and well-organised work of the London County Council’s Architect’s Department in the years 1945–65 under the successive leadership of J. H. Forshaw, Robert Matthew, Leslie Martin and Hubert Bennett.

This is a book based on research for English Heritage and is therefore about England. Scotland has its own architects and its own traditions and laws, notably in housing, and while there are many overlaps its post-war story is rather different. There are references here, notably to the churches of Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, but Historic Scotland has its own publications on many post-war topics.1See, for example, Scotland: Building for the Future (2009) and Power to the People (2010), available from Historic Scotland. Wales, too, can be treated separately, though the most significant housing schemes are mentioned and there is a short account of the Brynmawr Rubber Factory in Monmouthshire (Gwent), in 1985 the first building to be listed specifically as a piece of post-war architecture. Those needing more on general post-war architecture such as the works of Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn and Alvar Aalto should also refer to the extensive literature elsewhere.

The subject matter of post-war architecture is developed from that set out in the first architecture book I owned, Lionel Esher’s A Broken Wave, which I read on its publication in 1981.2Lionel Esher, A Broken Wave: The Rebuilding of England, 1940–1980 (London: Allen Lane, 1981). This was a chronicle of recent public building which stood out in comparison to the nostalgic images of semi-derelict Victoriana with which most writers and photographers were concerned at that time. The early 1980s were an important era of reassessment in the cold light of Thatcherism, and there is much in common between Esher’s work and that of the latest generation of commentators on the period, such as Owen Hatherley. I have tried to fill the gaps in knowledge. Giedion wrote that ‘it is not the historian’s task to tell the public what pleases or displeases him personally. That is a private affair which loses all its interest in the telling. The historian is not required to correct an epoch in the light of his own opinions. He has to explain it, to show why history took a certain direction.’3Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition [1941] (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 17.

That is the course followed here, though the buildings included are the ones I believe are important. I have just found the first internal English Heritage brief from 1995, which states that ‘this book aims to inform and stimulate the interest and appreciation of the open-minded’.4Written by Diane Kay, now Diane Green, in June 1995, to whom I am most grateful. Since writing the book, the period has become more fashionable, and although the text has been updated, other books have appeared that have not been referenced.

This book would not have been possible without the unique support of English Heritage. But it is also a personal one, in the arguments put forward and specifically in the choice of buildings: they are what I think are rewarding to study, and a remarkable number of them have never been listed and/or have been demolished. The selection also reflects new research and concentrates on the gaps in published material as I found them a decade ago. So St Catherine’s College, Oxford, gets more detail than Churchill College, Cambridge, and both of them more than the works of James Stirling, the Smithsons, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers which already have several books dedicated to them. For the same reason modernism predominates over the survival of traditionalism so much trumpeted since the 1980s; books exist on Raymond Erith, Albert Richardson and latterly Donald McMorran. These architects are included where there is something new to say, while other sections have been reduced, notably on the Barbican, where my research has been published elsewhere.

The years 1945–75 saw little progress in metrication until its end, though there was some attempt to use measurements like 3′ 4″ that were roughly convertible. As imperial sizes were used in the design of most buildings they have been adopted throughout the book, together with words in similarly standard usage such as ‘chairman’ for both sexes. Abbreviations are given in sections where names such as the Royal Fine Arts Commission (RFAC) recur. More general, for clarity, is the use of ampersands within the names of architectural partnerships. The inclusion of a building in this book does not mean that it is listed or open to the public; where possible, notes of demolition have been given without disturbing the text — the future of Preston Bus Station has become more assured since it was listed in 2014, but that of other favourite structures remains uncertain.

1 See, for example, Scotland: Building for the Future (2009) and Power to the People (2010), available from Historic Scotland. »

2 Lionel Esher, A Broken Wave: The Rebuilding of England, 1940–1980 (London: Allen Lane, 1981). »

3 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition [1941] (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 17. »

4 Written by Diane Kay, now Diane Green, in June 1995, to whom I am most grateful. »

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