Description
In 1963, my family was on an outing to central London. As we headed back to where the car was parked off Tottenham Court Road, I looked up at the emerging skeleton of a building under construction at what appeared to be an enormous traffic island at the junction of New Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road. ‘What are they building?’ I asked. ‘I’m not sure’, said my Mother, ‘but there are a lot of new flats and offices going up. You won’t be able to recognise the place soon.’ Recalling that now, it sounds like there should have been a wistful tone in her voice – noting the passing of an era as the historic city in which she was brought up was ripped apart. Yet, as far as I can remember, she said it in a perfectly matter-of-fact sort of way. She was neither excited nor alarmed at the prospect. This was just the way of the world at that time. Things were irrevocably changing, or so it seemed, and the city was changing with them. This was progress, change was normal, and cities needed to be brought up-to-date to match the new sensitivities. Normality, however, has a habit of being a strangely short-term phenomenon in the world of urban development. Within a short space of time, those ‘new sensitivities’ were themselves under scrutiny and attack. The structure to which I had addressed my chance remark was none other than Centre Point, the office block built at the site of a proposed, but shortly to be abandoned, traffic roundabout. Centre Point, which remained vacant for many years due to anomalies in the financing and rating of property development, was a powerful symbol. Not only was it a good example of what Ted Heath might have considered the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’, but also it was a highly visible symbol of the ills of urban renewal. By the end of the decade, there would be other symbols of equal potency. They included Westway, the elevated section of the A40(M) roadway that divided communities in the west of the city; Ronan Point, the partially collapsed tower block in Canning Town that prompted far-reaching inquiries into the condition and safety of system-built public housing; and the Coal Exchange and Euston Station’s Doric arch – two important historic structures demolished because they happened to stand in the way of developers’ plans. Each became an emblem of resistance for those who opposed the accepted approaches for redesigning the modern city. Each too, in widely differing ways and with varying degrees of fairness, could be associated with the application of architectural modernism. London’s experience was not unique. Many other British cities witnessed the same cycle in which the peak of enthusiasm for things associated with modernism turned sour within a remarkably short period. Similar protests were experienced elsewhere, particularly in the older cities of the USA, as groups concerned about the transformation of the urban environment started to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies and the values that lay behind them. The trend proved infectious. Inner-city neighbourhoods threatened with clearance saw campaigns mounted that, just occasionally, held off the developers. A number of recently redeveloped housing estates, both low- and high-rise, started to show patterns of social disorder that called into doubt aspects of renewal policy. What started as sporadic protests over specific issues consolidated into something larger that challenged the accepted policies of planned urban reconstruction and undermined the authority of architects and planners deemed responsible for them. ‘Modernism’, however nebulously defined, became characterised as the derided inspiration for the architecture of another, now happily concluded, phase in the life of cities. Indeed, it was well on its way to becoming the dragon that a new generation of critics queued up to slay
Contents
List of figures viii
List of tables xi
List of illustration credits xii
Preface xiii
1 On the threshold 1
2 Practising modernism 18
3 Public and private 42
4 Professions 61
5 Towards renewal 77
6 Heart and soul 105
7 Second generation 146
8 The pursuit of numbers 165
9 With social intent 204
10 Succession 228
11 Late-flowering modernism 246
12 Storm clouds 270
Notes and references 290
Index 329