Introduction
While a great deal has been written about urban civic pride in the nineteenth century, there has been comparatively little work on its significance in the post-war city. Rather, the idea of civic pride has been largely ignored or even rejected as studies have focused on the economic decline of the old industrial cities and the retreat of the middle classes from urban politics and culture in the twentieth century. However, studying the language of redevelopment in the post-war city highlights continuity and change with the civic pride of the Victorian era.Footnote 1 Although social, political and economic developments in the post-war period led to greater levels of homogeneity, local authorities and developers still laid claim to individuality, to a distinct identity and urban superiority based on the continuing discernible rhetoric of civic pride.
Studying expressions of civic pride is fundamental in understanding the shifts in urban governance in post-war Britain. While the departure of the middle classes from the urban landscape meant that civic pride was no longer connected to class identity and prestige, it still became a reflection of the ambitions and dreams of the governing partnerships, the local councillors, professional planners, architects and designers, and the developers and builders. This article will examine how local authorities, the press and the private sector continued to use the aspirational language of civic pride. It was apparent in some of the development plans and projects, the local authority transport and civic building schemes and the new office blocks and shopping precincts built by developers. As in the nineteenth century, the ambitions, architecture, design and planning choices of these partnerships were portrayed as elevating the status of the city and as creating a unified environment with which everyone could identify. However, this was also different from the past. Civic pride embraced modernism with its promise of a new, dynamic and clean city. The language used promised to clear away the old and worn. As such, civic pride was no longer an expression of middle-class culture but the language of the technocrat, councillor and developer.
Civic pride – the historical context
In early modern England, civic pride, which found expression in the portrayal of civic officials as opposed to royalty or religious leaders, served to define the cultural identity of the town. The portraits of mayors, aldermen and other leading public figures created a distinct civic identity.Footnote 2 Historic regional and county centres have a long tradition in which local civic pride created a feeling of identity.Footnote 3 However, it is with the Victorian period that many see civic culture as achieving its zenith, a golden age. Civic pride was structured around architecture, use of public space, public improvement schemes and a distinct language used to describe the apparent qualities of the modern city.Footnote 4 A huge array of public ceremonies, especially royal visits, elevated community spirits and reinforced the feeling of civic pride.Footnote 5 Rituals were intrinsically bound up with the language of civic pride.Footnote 6
Civic pride became the driving force behind many of the environmental changes in cities such as Leicester in the mid-nineteenth century and in several areas in the late nineteenth century, highlighted by the ‘civic gospel’ in the 1870s and 1880s.Footnote 7 It found expression in municipal parks, galleries, museums, libraries and the magnificent town halls which themselves became a reflection of the vitality of the local council, a symbol of their confidence and self-belief.Footnote 8 The sanitary improvements in the latter part of the century in cities like Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds became a part of a language of grandeur as reformers gloried in their wide boulevards, a symbol of their status.Footnote 9 These improvements, the new roads, squares and monuments, were also an attempt to link the city, to create a single unified identity. Alongside this was a broader attempt to build a grand city, reflected in the architectural choices. Areas like Victoria Square in Birmingham underlined the attempt to create places of distinction. The old, dirty industrial city centre was, in effect, repackaged to become a source and expression of pride and culture. Joseph Chamberlain gloried in the building of ‘great public edifices not unworthy of the importance of a midland metropolis’, the ‘fine streets and open places’ as well as the libraries, museums and art galleries which were open to everyone.Footnote 10 Hunt argued that the reforms carried out by government, local authorities and civic groups in the second half of the nineteenth century transformed Britain's cities into models of urban civilization.
These reforms inspired many local writers. The ‘booster’ writers of the nineteenth century extolled the virtues of the Victorian city.Footnote 11 A ‘boosting tradition’ emerged which reflected the optimism of the time and which continued into the twentieth century.Footnote 12 This was not the only narrative. The city was described as bleak and brutish, just as much as a source of pride and achievement.Footnote 13 Nevertheless, the booster language gave structure to a local sense of pride. In the mid-Victorian period, cities like Glasgow and Liverpool vied for the title of ‘second city of the Empire’, while Leeds was described as ‘one of the finest towns of the Empire’.Footnote 14
Pride in progress, and in being better than rival cities, was the key to civic pride.Footnote 15 But this pride was also an extension of the public culture of the dominant middle classes.Footnote 16 Increasingly, from the 1860s, the town halls and public squares and statues symbolized their wealth, power and influence, a public expression of middle-class culture.Footnote 17 Local elites used the cultural capital acquired through civic attainments to underpin their own status.Footnote 18 This changed in the twentieth century as middle-class identity was associated with the state and the nation rather than the urban.Footnote 19 They were no longer interested in local politics and the decline in their involvement can be seen as the precursor for the end of civic pride.Footnote 20 Morris shows how, from the 1920s, the ‘urban place’ changed as the ownership of local capital, the growth of national institutions such as the NHS and ownership of utilities and the retreat of the middle classes all undermined civil society and local democracy.Footnote 21 Coupled to this, local authorities had a set of ethics and enjoyed a sense of purpose, derived from civic pride, which was lost in the twentieth century.Footnote 22 The loss of autonomy, and especially financial independence, undermined the role of local government, while the fall of the empire increased the criticism of the country's cities as focus shifted from abroad to social issues. Cities, allegedly, lost their way in the twentieth century; the discourse of civic pride was replaced by the rhetoric of decay.Footnote 23
When, precisely, this decline began in the twentieth century is debatable. Trainor highlights how research on Leeds, Norwich and Blackpool has shown that middle-class involvement in civic affairs, improvement and pride remained a part of the urban landscape at least until the 1930s.Footnote 24 Moreover, there are few historical studies of governance in the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote 25 Trainor claims that it is time to ‘discard the language of decline’ when examining post-war urban governance.Footnote 26 It is a claim that is largely supported by the ambitions and language of local authorities and private developers up to the early 1970s. Although local cultural structures were a product of the local class structure, while the middle classes shifted their basis of identity from the urban to the national, this did not mean civic pride ceased to be relevant. The old elites had gone, but governance was restructured around local councillors, technocrats, from both the public and private sectors, and investors and builders.Footnote 27
Civic pride – continuity and the post-war city
Despite the critics, therefore, the post-war period is one of continuity as well as change. The language, ceremonies and broad aspirations expressed in the plans and ambitions to rebuild Britain's city centres parallel the Victorian period. There were also startling differences. The aim was to use modernism to sweep away the old city and build for the future rather than repackaging the past. Yet this also reflected an important link with the past. Just as civic pride and the nineteenth-century reforms were an extension of middle-class public culture, of the values and aspirations of those who dominated the local urban landscape, so were the dreams and objectives of the late 1950s and 1960s evidence of the aims of those dominating the political landscape. Civic pride was no longer mirrored in the choice of Gothic or classical styles of design, but through the dirt-free and the modern, promised by concrete and glass. The use of public space and the choice of modern public sculpture and modern architecture reflected the new ambitions of the technocrats, shared by councillors and promoted by developers, whilst reflecting the same civic pride of the late Victorian period, the same self-belief in the status of their city. The same booster language, for instance, characterized local authority literature.
The language of modernity and renewal appeared in the development plans and public exhibitions produced by local authorities from the early 1940s. These were often ambitious in what they proposed and they usually promised a bright, clean new world. However, while they were an expression of civic pride, of boosterism, the plans also showed an awareness of the value of place promotion.Footnote 28 The two were inseparable. Local authorities dreamed of a better future but they also needed to ‘sell’ their city in order to attract investment. The dilemma is in trying to separate marketing rhetoric from expressions of civic pride. Civic pride and the need to market a city were inextricably linked. It would be an oversimplification to claim that the expressions of pride were just economic or, indeed, were only of cultural significance. The two elements, cultural and economic, were evident in Manchester city council's decision to create its own Publicity Committee in 1941. Alec Spoor, the Public Relations Officer for the National Association of Local Government Officers, applauded the initial proposal to create civic films for ‘exhibition in ordinary citizens’ which, he hoped, would be a means through which a ‘keener civic interest may be aroused and fostered’.Footnote 29 They eventually produced an hour-long marketing film, ‘A City Speaks’, screened in 1946, which drew on civic history, showing how Manchester had developed since Roman times through to the Industrial Revolution and a series of social reforms.Footnote 30
Similarly, reconstruction plans were informed by the language of civic pride whilst being an exercise in subverse place promotion and an attempt to attract external investment and business. Wolverhampton council, for instance, published their ideas in a glossy brochure which they believed, like many local authorities across the country, were ‘bold, practical and imaginative’.Footnote 31 They promoted their ideas through a large public exhibition which included detailed maps, illustrations and models. On opening the exhibition, Lord Woolton remarked that it reflected a ‘far-seeing municipality’, which had shown ‘bold, adventurous planning for the future’.Footnote 32 Building a bold and adventurous future was central to the post-war vision embraced by many British cities. Local authorities wanted the ‘best’, but that could only be achieved through professionals, technocrats and private investors. Coventry's city architect, Donald Gibson, believed that future planning aimed to create a ‘beautiful city’.Footnote 33 The plans were unveiled in a second exhibition held after the war, ‘Coventry of the Future’, which attracted 57,500 visitors. People were clearly interested in what the future ‘dream city’ would look like.Footnote 34 Southampton council met to discuss redevelopment in January 1941, a month after the first major bombing raid. Councillor Matthews demanded ‘big, bold and (effective) planning’ which meant employing ‘first class brains and first class thought’.Footnote 35 They wanted to be the best by employing the best. Plans for a new promenade shopping precinct to attract businesses in Southampton would, according to a council report, provide a ‘unique arrangement in this county’, comparable only to the ‘Rows’ in Chester.Footnote 36
Exhibitions such as these were a useful means of public engagement. In Liverpool, public engagement included a public competition in which citizens were asked to submit their ideas for the future redevelopment of the city. In 1944, the Liverpool council's Post-War Redevelopment Advisory Committee asked the Merseyside Civic Society to provide an outline of suggestions for rebuilding the city. The Society decided to open it up to the public through a civic competition. They were supported by the Daily Post which believed in the ‘constant need for encouraging civic pride and interest’.Footnote 37 It attracted over 10,000 entries. Experts addressed local meetings, discussions were held at women's and business men's organizations and schools were invited to ask their pupils to submit essays. Judges included Viscount Leverhulme, Percy Thomas (president of the Royal Institute of British Architects), Liverpool University's Professor of Architecture, Lionel Budden, and Mrs Charles Booth. The winner, Corporal Ginsburg, was awarded his 50 guineas in a public ceremony at the town hall.
Engagement and public ritual continued to be important features of local government. The use of symbols and ceremonies such as the Lord Mayor's Parade or being granted the freedom of a city did not disappear with the post-war British city. Public ceremonies highlighted continuities with the past, reinforcing civic pride and local identity. In the 1950s and 1960, Liverpool, like many other major cities, organized a number of public events, including the Festival of Britain in 1951, the Coronation in 1953 and the Charter Celebrations in 1957. Besides elaborate street decorations, the council celebrated the Festival of Britain with a large exhibition on a bomb site in the city centre, ‘Daylight on Industry’, while the 750th Charter celebrations included another large industrial exhibition, ‘Industry Advances’.Footnote 38 With the Coronation, the council believed they had a duty to take a national lead for the sake of the city's own status. The Coronation Celebrations (Special) Committee claimed that as they were the ‘second provincial city of England’, they had to give a lead ‘if only for prestige purposes’.Footnote 39 They believed that as they were a great ‘social, artistic and cultural centre’ they could not be satisfied with merely the size of public pageants and ceremonies.Footnote 40 In 1965, Liverpool teamed up with Glasgow, Cardiff and London to host the Commonwealth Arts Festival.Footnote 41 Liverpool hosted themes based on music, art, general entertainment, education and a military tattoo. The council believed it was all a success in keeping with the ‘great cultural traditions of this city’.Footnote 42
‘I have seen the holy city’ – redevelopment and the 1960s
While public festivals highlighted continuities with Victorian Britain, civic pride in the post-war period emphasized a break with the past and an ambition to build for the future. Local authorities wanted to sweep away the dirt and grime, largely inherited from the nineteenth century, and to build new city centres. They were acutely aware of critics such as Professor Kantorowich, Professor of Town and Country Planning at Manchester University, who told delegates at a conference of civic societies that the north-west of England was a ‘drab, dismal and dirty dump and a scourge on people who had to live amid its mess’.Footnote 43 Equally, A.J.P. Taylor's account of Manchester in the 1950s was far from flattering, describing the city's architecture as ‘grandiose tastelessness’ and that ‘Manchester is also very dirty’, while ‘the climate rounds off the gloom’.Footnote 44
By the 1960s, local authorities were desperate to get rid of the past and to build a bright new world. Civic pride now embraced the language and aspirations of modernity, the values of a perceived progress which became reflected in the planning system, new designs and building techniques. As Mandler points out, the rebuilding of British cities was where the past met with a high-tech future.Footnote 45 The new urban partnerships shared this basic vision for a revitalized Britain. Tiratsoo shows that post-war British cities were not merely reconstructed by planners with a ‘New Jerusalemist’ agenda for building an idealized utopia from their offices.Footnote 46 Planners did not hijack the process from central and local government. Politicians from across the political spectrum, private developers as well as planners, designers and architects were all involved in what they believed would be an ‘urban renaissance’, albeit in concrete rather than stone.Footnote 47 Key figures such as Bor and Shankland in Liverpool, Smith and Burns in Newcastle and Bent, Millar and Billingham in Manchester, along with national and local developers such as Frank Taylor and, in Leeds, Arnold Ziff provided the driving force behind the new plans and projects. Relationships between the different groups may not have always been ideal, but necessity (and profit) provided sufficient motivation to maintain most of the partnerships.
Articulations of civic pride mirrored the new structure of urban governance. In the early to late 1960s, these expressions and ambitions became increasingly optimistic. Finally, it appeared that they were on the brink of something new, a break with the dirt of the old industrial world. The war, the end of empire and the austerity of the 1950s were to be put behind them and while the discourse of civic pride still embraced the past and used it as evidence of status and image, this was also about embracing the modern, about being progressive and forward thinking. Throughout the 1960s, there was a new push to revolutionize the commercial, retail and public sectors across all of the country's cities. Administrative structures in many local authorities were reorganized with new planning departments being created to provide a ‘joined-up’ approach to new plans and developments. These included new pedestrianized zones, public transport facilities, motorways and car parks, all of which provided the essential infrastructure for the modern city to support the series of large-scale private developments, including office blocks and shopping centres.
The development plans, demanded under state legislation, reflected the lofty ambitions by many British cities to be bigger, better and bolder than anywhere else, though everywhere also became quite similar. Perhaps most famously of all, in Newcastle, under the leadership of T. Dan Smith and Wilfred Burns, the city's first chief planning officer, it was believed that their plan would transform the city into the ‘Brasilia of the North’.Footnote 48 In a promotional film, ‘The Pacemakers’, Smith stated that he wanted Newcastle's new £5 million civic centre to leave a legacy similar to St Paul's, while he also claimed to have studied cities such as Venice, Athens and Rome before finalizing the plans for the redevelopment of the city.Footnote 49 The city's first development plan reflected a radical desire to build on a grand scale. Its author, Percy Parr the city engineer and planning officer, envisaged an almost complete redevelopment of the entire centre.Footnote 50 Newcastle city centre had largely been created in the late Georgian period by Richard Grainger.Footnote 51 His legacy of Georgian elegance was immediately recognized as a part of the city's civic pride.Footnote 52 In the 1960s, Smith wanted Newcastle to be seen as a modern and progressive city, the norms and values around which civic pride was now structured.Footnote 53 The plans for Newcastle, unveiled in the 1963 Development Plan, were claimed to be imaginative, but they were also controversial as they involved the loss of historic buildings such as the Royal Arcade and residential properties around Eldon Square. Nevertheless, this was about creating a new and dynamic city and they were confident that the Eldon Square shopping centre would be ‘equally as great’ as Grainger's nineteenth-century buildings.Footnote 54 They proposed to employ three of the most eminent architects in the country in Sir Robert Matthew, Sir Basil Spence and Professor Arne Jacobson.Footnote 55 Other architects were used to design the new civic centre and a series of office blocks including the new eleven-storey offices for the Scottish and Newcastle Breweries. Burns believed that these and other city-centre developments would create a place for the ‘parade, for stimulation, for excitement’.Footnote 56 He ended with a quote from the Book of Revelation, ‘And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.’Footnote 57 Wilfred Burns described Newcastle as a ‘unique, powerful, exciting city’.Footnote 58 He believed that the buildings created this ‘feeling of power and excitement’.Footnote 59
Early plans for Liverpool reflected similar ambitions. The city's city engineer and surveyor believed that their plans for the development of the city centre showed that the council was being ‘long sighted’ because the new bus station would include ‘provision for helicopter services’ as the roof would be utilized as an ‘air stop’.Footnote 60 Progress, however, was slow and it was only in the mid-1960s that the council started to make real progress. The city's ‘Master Plan for Renewal’ was started in 1965 by the city's planning consultant, Graeme Shankland, and the chief planning officer, Walter Bor. Shankland believed that his job in Liverpool demanded a ‘new kind of plan, bold and radical, and different from any so far’.Footnote 61 Moreover, he also claimed that he had to banish the ‘smell of defeat’ and reignite a sense of civic pride. He paid tribute to the political leadership of Sir Maxwell Entwistle and Alderman Macdonald Steward who started the process and Alderman Sefton and Councillor Gibbs who were continuing with the plans. The first two were Conservatives; the latter two were Labour members. The new development administration cut across traditional partisan politics as the ambitions and rhetoric of civic pride gave them all a singular, defining purpose. Politicians from across the political spectrum, together with professionals and developers, professed to share the vision of building a better city. Shankland believed that together they had a ‘dynamic and combustible relationship’ which was driving the redevelopment, plans which he believed were ‘unique in Europe’ and the progress of which was being watched by the world.Footnote 62 W.H. Sefton, chair of the Finance Committee, and W. McKeown, chair of the General Purposes Committee, claimed that the redevelopment plans were ‘ambitious and imaginative’, that they had aroused international interest and that they would place Liverpool into the ‘forefront of modern cities’, justifying the claim that Liverpool was a city of ‘change and challenge’.Footnote 63 Walter Bor believed that the council's plans were, with the exception of Philadelphia, without compare even in America.Footnote 64 He and Shankland boasted that theirs was the ‘greatest urban renewal plan in the world’.Footnote 65
The plans were followed by a plethora of promotional literature. In 1966, the city council embarked on a publicity campaign, producing a series of glossy magazines, Liverpool ’66, in which it made a number of similar boasts about the ‘unique city’. Besides their apparently legendary sense of humour, they claimed to be the ‘City of the Future’, and the ‘Gateway to the World’.Footnote 66 They even laid claim to being the ‘Capital City of Sport’.Footnote 67 The new civic centre was heralded by the council as a great showpiece. Its architect, Colin St John Wilson, claimed that ‘there is a feeling among architects that when it comes to buildings, Liverpool takes a bigger and bolder plunge than anyone’, and that the £21 million civic centre would be ‘the world's most modern development in local government’. In 1966, the council claimed that a £50 million plan by Oldham Estates to develop a 53-acre site on the waterfront, known as River City, would not only attract new hotels and shops but would also mean that Liverpool would have the ‘largest office centre in Britain outside London’. It believed that this would provide Liverpool with a waterfront to compare with ‘Stockholm Town Hall or the British Houses of Parliament’.Footnote 68 The project failed to materialize, but the building of the two cathedrals provided further examples of the city's apparent greatness. John Betjeman described the Anglican cathedral as ‘one of the finest buildings of the world’, while a special edition of Liverpool ’67 described the Catholic cathedral as the ‘world's newest and world's fastest ever built’.Footnote 69 Liverpool was to have the first, the biggest and the best.
These expressions of civic pride were shared by some of the major developers in the 1960s. In Leeds, for instance, Arnold Ziff, chairman of Town Centre Securities Limited, viewed his new shopping precinct, the Merrion Centre, as an extension of the city's status as a leading centre in the country. Ziff, who became one of the most prominent and, according to his biography, one of the most successful businessmen in the whole of Yorkshire, became known as ‘Mr. Leeds’.Footnote 70 In 1959, he won the council contract to build a new shopping centre in the city and he proudly proclaimed that there had not been anything ‘as big as this in the country, in Birmingham, Manchester or Glasgow, in any of the big cities’.Footnote 71 When it was completed, Ziff insisted on a large civic ceremony to mark its official opening. This was as grand as any public Victorian ritual. Initially, Ziff asked the mayor, Loy Woolmer, if he would approach the queen to perform the ceremony, but Woolmer infuriated Ziff by asking the queen to open a smaller development built by the council in Seacroft. Ziff stormed into Woolmer's office, telling him that he would not open the new centre until a new mayor had been appointed because he would not give him the ‘glory of it’.Footnote 72 Instead, his wife performed the lavish ceremony. Over 2,000 guests were invited, including the new mayor Lizzie Naylor. A golden key was used to unlock a gilded cage that contained a cake shaped like the centre. Commemorative medals with an impression of the centre were presented to all the guests. Of course, Ziff was publicizing a large project for commercial reasons. However, figures like Ziff were also a part of the social fabric of the city, sharing the sense of civic pride. He described himself as being ‘hugely proud of Leeds’ and, as president of the local chamber of commerce, he became actively involved in local politics; Ziff never missed an opportunity to promote the profile of the city.Footnote 73
The local press gloried in the detail of the ceremony and the scheme. The Yorkshire Evening Post ran a four-page special feature on the ‘Great New Landmark that looks over Leeds’.Footnote 74 For them, it was an ‘outstanding landmark’, and was built on specifications based on ‘imaginative, far reaching thinking’.Footnote 75 The scheme was trumpeted as the ‘greatest commercial development in Leeds for more than a century’, and as ‘one of the most imaginative property ventures of the day’.Footnote 76 In some respects, the local press was following the company line. Ziff's own publicity pamphlet described how the centre's stores, shops, offices, bowling alley, cinema, hotel, garage and car park (which, with over 1,000 places, was the ‘largest car park in Great Britain’) meant that the Merrion Centre ‘qualifies as a city-within-a-city’.Footnote 77 The press wanted to believe the publicity. This was evidence that finally their city was rising from the ashes. The marketing and public coverage and reporting of large developments gave structure to the expressions of civic pride. Office blocks, hotels and shopping centres were promoted, and reported in the press, as developments which would provide their particular city with the best facilities and infrastructure in the country. They were not stand-alone developments but became an extension of local esteem. As Daunton pointed out, although many of the schemes of the 1960s have been condemned as the ‘product of arrogant architects and planners’, the fact is that they had a great deal of contemporary popular support from across local communities.Footnote 78 These included projects like Birmingham's Bull Ring which, like the Merrion Centre, was heralded at the time as the finest shopping centre in Europe. The builders, J. Laing Development, claimed it would become the ‘most advanced shopping centre in Europe’ and the ‘most comprehensive multi-level trading centre in the world’.Footnote 79 The large £5 million scheme was approved in 1959 and was finally opened in August 1965. The complex was not seen as an independent building but as being a connected part of the city as a whole. For Laing, the Bull Ring was to be a ‘prominent feature of Birmingham's skyline’, dominating the view of the city from the south.Footnote 80
Status and pride, fuelled by a mixture of economic necessity, competition for resources with other cities and a more basic instinct to be the first, biggest and best, drove the hyperbolical rhetoric. Driven as they were by the desire to make quick and often large profits, the developers have often been criticized for misleading local authorities and for using poor designs and building materials.Footnote 81 Yet, while the motivation might be economic, the functional impact of the ceremonies and language still reinforced publicly the ideal of civic pride. Laing's company journal, Team Spirit, listed a series of public topping out and opening ceremonies throughout the mid- to late 1960s. In 1968, for example, they described the opening ceremonies for a series of new projects at Shankland's Cross in Glasgow, presided over by the city's lord provost, the Claremont Tower and bridge at Newcastle University, opened by the lord high chancellor, and the topping out ceremony at Blackburn's new civic centre.Footnote 82 They utilized the same exaggerated rhetoric used by local authorities, claiming, for instance, that once they had built Preston bus station it would have ‘airport status’.Footnote 83
This language of status was important, but it was not only the marketing sections of local government or private companies that used the new booster language of the 1960s. As the opening of the Merrion Centre underlined, the press, local and national, were instrumental in adopting the rhetoric of civic pride. This was highlighted with the new Co-operative Insurance Society (CIS) building in Manchester. Laing was again responsible for the £5 million office block. When it was completed in 1962, it was heralded as Europe's tallest skyscraper, a building which, according to local journalist Alan Phillips, was a ‘mighty’ project which provided the ‘last word in gadgetry . . . in many respects years ahead of contemporary office design’.Footnote 84 The Guardian (ever supportive of its home city) gleefully quoted F.G. West, deputy architect for London county council, who claimed that the possession of the tallest building was ‘the greatest status symbol of them all’.Footnote 85 It also claimed that the building was, according to CIS policy, designed not only to improve the prestige of the company but also ‘to improve the appearance of the city’.Footnote 86 It described how workers on the project look out across Manchester ‘which becomes a panorama of beauty and significance’. The CIS even took out a full-page advertisement in the Daily Mail, not because they needed to sell office space. They were the owner occupiers. Rather, they wanted the nation to know that the city had the tallest building in the country. Similarly, the rebuilding of Piccadilly, a £4 million project which included a large hotel, two office blocks and a shopping centre, was described in the Guardian as bold and imaginative, a ‘fabulous’ project which reflected the city's status.Footnote 87 Other commercial schemes became the cause for public celebration. The opening of a new regional office for the Bank of England in 1964 was trumpeted as a symbol of civic progress and turned into a grand occasion. The public ceremony was performed by the governor of the Bank of England, the earl of Cromer, the mayor and the ‘leaders of Manchester's civic, commercial and industrial life’.Footnote 88 Business interests promoted the city but companies were themselves a source of civic pride. The main retail area, Market Street, was described in the local press as ‘one of the richest shopping thoroughfares in Britain’,Footnote 89 while an announcement to implement changes to the Stock Exchange meant that, according to the Manchester Evening News, Manchester, ‘Britain's number one industrial city’, would soon become the ‘leading provincial centre for investment’.Footnote 90
The press was often keen to support claims to greatness.Footnote 91 Writing in New Society about Liverpool, Paul Thompson described how the city's nineteenth-century buildings provided ‘extraordinary classical municipal splendour’, while its 1960s' developments created a new ‘Liverpool look’ which would be ‘dramatic and long lasting’.Footnote 92 The local press in particular never missed an opportunity to bolster the status of their city. This could include the smallest most mundane information. It was reported, for instance, that construction of the Catholic cathedral, alternatively and affectionately known as Paddy's Wigwam, involved using the biggest crane in Europe.Footnote 93 Throughout the mid-1960s the Manchester Evening News ran a weekly series of articles under the banner, ‘Manchester, Capital of the North’. This was a shameless exercise in civic boasting. It heralded every new building such as the Crown Courts, Hollings College and a succession of tower blocks as examples of the city's greatness. One ‘Proud Northerner’ from Cheadle praised the series, believing that ‘the world should always be aware of what is going on in Manchester’.Footnote 94 Similarly, Manchester's 1965 ‘Operation Rebirth’ was greeted with elation by the Manchester Evening News which claimed that ‘Manchester leads Britain into the challenge of the seventies’, and that the city, ‘Britain's second city’, was a ‘booming, prosperous city rightly called Capital of the North’.Footnote 95 The newspaper never missed an opportunity to let the people know how superior their city was when compared to others. A discourse developed around civic pride, an ambition to build the biggest and the best. The rebuilding of Piccadilly Station was claimed by the Evening Chronicle to be the ‘biggest single project ever tackled by British Rail’, and that it would be the ‘finest railway station in the country’.Footnote 96 The newspaper could not resist adding that the new station gave added historical interest to a city which ‘proudly boasts of having the first railway station in the world’.Footnote 97 It was all very modern and dynamic and it continued to claim that the station would have an ‘atom-age look’.Footnote 98 The local press gloried at times in minutia such as when 18 Leningrad teenagers were visiting the city in 1965 and were reported by the Manchester Evening News as having allegedly claimed that, compared to London, Manchester was a ‘much cleaner, much friendlier and much more lovely city’.Footnote 99 Putting one over the metropolis was always a particular source of glee.
Competition between cities was something the press was keen to pick up on. In 1962, the Manchester Evening News ran a double-page spread down the sides of which it proclaimed in big, bold print, that the city had: ‘Most cars per head, Most TVs and radios, Most phones, More advertising income and then it is Second only to London for bank transaction, postal trade and individual businesses.’Footnote 100
It was, according to the headline, ‘the most exciting city in the provinces’, and ‘booming bustling Manchester – [was] kingpin provincial city of Britain’. Reporting on details from a survey, ‘Comparative information on some large British cities’, published by the Manchester Municipal Information Bureau for the benefit of the business community, the newspaper also claimed that in a range of areas Manchester outstripped all other cities except London.
Claims of superiority between rival cities were not only a part of a Victorian tradition but they underlined how expressions of civic pride reflected the structure of contemporary urban governance. It was still a means of articulating local pride. Each project seemed to be brilliant, unique and astounding. The Liverpool press, for instance, described the new shopping centre, St John's Precinct, as ‘one of the most exciting developments ever visualised in Liverpool’, while the chair of the Development and Planning Committee, Alderman H. Macdonald Steward, was quoted claiming that ‘altogether these plans are unique, there is nothing like this anywhere in this country, nothing even in Europe, outside Venice’, and that they showed ‘astonishing architectural ingenuity’.Footnote 101 Again, this enthusiasm was shared by the developer. The chair of Ravenseft, Louis Freedman, could not hide his excitement as he stated ‘we love it. It is easily the most exciting project ever seen.’Footnote 102 The local press were bursting with enthusiasm as they took the line adopted by the council and the developers and promoted it with vigour. The Liverpool Echo described the new precinct as ‘brilliantly conceived’ and how both the ‘municipal planners and private developers’ were working together with a mutual sense of enthusiasm and excitement. All promoted the dream that ‘Liverpool will one day be the envy of the country’.Footnote 103 Of more immediate importance was the belief that it was better than anything in Manchester. The Liverpool Weekly News could not hide its profound sense of civic pride while also having a slight dig at its long-time rival:
This, then, is the city centre of the future. In recent years, Liverpool has been gradually usurping Manchester's traditional role of capital of the North. With far reaching developments such as this, the whole world can see how this lusty growing city is casting off its long-held reputation as a city of slums and is pinning its faith in all that is best in this revolutionary space age.Footnote 104
Association with Liverpool meant identifying yourself with something new, bold, futuristic and, naturally, being better than anywhere else. Perhaps this justifies a Freudian interpretation of civic pride. It was (and still is) a male-dominated language and was almost macho in its dispositions (first, biggest and best) and the inter-city rivalries.Footnote 105 Suffice to point out that the idea of the St John's Beacon was based on the Euromast in Rotterdam following a visit to the city by Shankland. However, at 400 feet, Liverpool's would, naturally, be bigger!
Conclusion – civic pride, continuity and change
Many of these grand schemes rapidly turned into sources of civic embarrassment. The period from the early 1970s through to the late 1980s witnessed even greater urban decline as the old industrial urban economies sank from gloom to deep depression. The architectural choices of the 1960s and early 1970s, which had been supposed to bring about the realization of the modernist vision, increased the feeling of despondency. The lofty discourse of the 1960s began to degenerate in the 1970s and 1980s. As early as 1968, for example, the Bull Ring was being openly criticized. In a paper presented to the national housing and town planning conference at Brighton, James Roberts, a chartered accountant and town planning consultant, damned the scheme as lacking both ‘architectural and commercial merit’.Footnote 106 Later, in the 1970s, the architectural design of Manchester's Arndale was often referred to as Europe's biggest toilet. From the mid-1970s, cities suffered a series of set-backs which created a discourse of despair. Even at the time, Wilfred Burns claimed that the new developments were catastrophic. Some were commercially successful, others lost money but nearly all were aesthetically disastrous.Footnote 107 In addition, new housing developments crumbled and the economic recession of the 1980s devastated many northern cities. A different rhetoric came to overshadow the language of grandness. Liverpool, which was described at the start of the twentieth century as the ‘second city of the Empire’, was, by the late 1970s, the symbol of British post-industrial decay and decline.
Nevertheless, the importance of civic pride can only be understood in the broad historical context. Civic pride in the pre-1945 period was complicated. Even in the nineteenth century, progressive reforms, so often heralded as an extension of civic pride, were never universal features of the urban landscape. There was considerable temporal and spatial diversity. Birmingham under Chamberlain may have witnessed a few golden years, but the periods before and after were not distinguished by sustained activities. Other major urban areas suffered under the paralysing yolk of ratepayers’ associations whose aim was to keep the rates down. The large swathe of Victorian slums, which proved such a blight and political problem across the twentieth century, point towards the limitations to grand notions of universal civic pride. From the 1930s, Britain's main urban centres suffered from economic decline, war, austerity, an underlying lack of investment and failure to modernize. But every period in modern urban Britain has been characterized by contrasting perspectives and varied fortunes. The ‘reality’ as perceived by the public sector, press and developers might not be the reality of an outsider. Even in the nineteenth century, the ‘golden age’ of civic pride, Disraeli might have thought Manchester was as great a human achievement as Athens, but de Tocquville believed it was a town where civilized men were almost turned into savages.
Civic pride is equally complex in the post-war period. There were parallels with the past as well as changes. Local authorities and developers in the 1950s and 1960s were attempting to change the climate of gloom but they did so in ways which departed from the past. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, civic pride was bound to the rise and dominance of local middle-class elites. However, their retreat from urban politics, especially after the war, seemed to be connected to a broad demise in the quality, competence and legitimacy of urban governance. The deterioration in civic pride reflected this decline in standards. But the post-war period did not bring an end to expressions of civic pride. The substance and the means by which it was articulated may have changed, but this reflected the shifts in the structure of urban governance in the post-war period. Society transformed in fundamental ways. The governing coalitions that emerged, often supported by the local press, continued to express civic pride through the booster language used to describe new plans, ambitious schemes and large projects, as well as through public ceremonies. It did not include the grand architecture and public squares of the Victorian period, but new architecture, new public spaces and new public art. It stressed a belief in the virtues of the modern. They did not want to be constrained by the styles of the past but wanted a fresh environment based on a contemporary and even futuristic vision. This would clean away the dirt, imagined and real, which, ironically, they had inherited from a time dominated by the old elites. Urban governance was now structured around qualified professionals, architects, designers, planners and engineers, as well as councillors who wanted their cities to be the first and the best, and developers and investors who wanted rolling profits. Civic pride was articulated in ways which reflected this shift.
Similarly, from the mid-1980s there has been a sustained attempt to arrest the decline of many British cities. Local authorities forged effective partnerships with non-governmental bodies, the EU and the private sector, adopting an ‘entrepreneurial’ strategy.Footnote 108 Many of the new projects have, again, become an extension of civic pride. Boosterism and place promotion have become central features in local government marketing strategies. The language of civic pride and the grand civic projects have returned. Several cities have developed new art galleries, museums and staged international festivals as part of a process of regeneration whilst simultaneously using them as expressions of civic pride. These include the likes of Salford's Imperial War Museum and Lowry Centre, Manchester's Olympic and Commonwealth Games bids, which led to the construction of the City of Manchester Stadium, the Velodrome and the Arena, as well as the city's Bridgewater Concert Hall, the Urbis centre and the large multi-million pound expansion of the City Gallery. Liverpool became the European City of Culture for 2008, Gateshead built the Sage and developed the Baltic Flour Mill into a new contemporary arts centre while Bristol's Harbourside contains a number of cultural centres. The essential characteristics of civic pride and the way it has been articulated may have changed over the centuries, but it continued, and continues, to be a defining feature of the urban landscape, a reflection of both the aspirations of those who never wasted an opportunity to promote their city and of the new political structures that came to dominate British cities.
