In May 1958, a journalist from the Manchester Guardian visited Leamington Spa, a small town in Warwickshire. He was to report on the last performance of the Royal Pump Room and Baths' orchestra, which was disbanding due to the dwindling numbers attending the town's decorous tea dances. The “ladies of Leamington,” this journalist discovered
grow more and more convinced that Royal Leamington Spa is not what it was. “It's the character of the place that is slipping,” was how one of them put it. “The influence of Coventry, no doubt.” She paused, sighing bravely, and went on: “It used to be so pretty and so smart. Retired officers, Navy and Army, with their wives and families. Such a shame.” They have to face it: Leamington is now an industrial town as well as a residential and Regency one. It is also a car-park for shoppers, a night out for Teddies, many things to many men.Footnote 1
The postwar change that this journalist documented was not the increased presence of working-class people in town and city centers, but rather a transformation in working-class people's experience of civic life. In prewar decades, working-class people's experience of their town and city centers was either represented as a social problem or simply ignored by politicians, journalists, and planners. That changed in the postwar years, when working-class people were treated as vital to civic life. This article examines that change and the profound implications that it had for working-class people's experience of civic life.
We know little about urban working-class life in postwar England. Historians have highlighted the importance of working-class people as workers and consumers in prewar towns and cities and have examined their wartime experience of the Blitz.Footnote 2 The few histories of the postwar working class that exist have followed the pattern laid down by 1950s social investigators by focusing on experience of home and immediate neighborhood.Footnote 3 Against the parochial focus of such postwar classics as Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy and Michael Young and Peter Willmott's Family and Kinship in East London,Footnote 4 I suggest that working-class people's everyday lives and aspirations embraced a broader urban landscape than the street on which they lived. Here, I examine their experience of life in the central areas of Britain's towns and cities: the civic centers where major shopping streets, town halls, municipal buildings such as theaters and concert halls, and public squares were usually situated. These spaces were and are extremely important in British urban conurbations; local government, municipal offices, retail, major educational institutions, and hospitals tend to be concentrated in central areas, while suburbs are largely composed of housing.
This article focuses specifically on responses to civic reconstruction during the “historical moment of high urban modernism,” between the mid–1940s and the late 1960s.Footnote 5 During this period, central government actively encouraged local councils to modernize and, in some cases, rebuild town and city centers. By examining residents' responses to both the plans for, and results of, reconstruction, this article shows that many working-class people engaged positively, if critically, with urban redevelopment—not simply in their immediate neighborhood, but also in their town and city centers. A picture emerges of a working class whose lives were not confined to their home or street, and who were central, rather than marginal, to Britain's civic centers.
This account challenges existing scholarship that suggests that working-class people were the passive or unwilling recipients of postwar political and social reforms. Steven Fielding's claim that Labour's entry to government in 1945 was a victory for blue- and white-collar apathy has been lent tacit support by postwar social histories that suggest people were primarily interested in their family, home, and neighborhood. Politics was apparently outside the purview of everyday life in which the aspiration to economic and emotional security prevailed.Footnote 6 Dominic Sandbrook argues that blue- and white-collar workers unquestioningly adopted the acquisitive individualism promoted by the Conservative governments of the 1950s, disregarding the collectivist rhetoric of Labour's welfare reforms.Footnote 7
Scholars of postwar urban reconstruction have endorsed this impression of working-class people as recipients, rather than agents, of change and suggest that civic redesign was a top-down process pioneered by politicians and planners in the face of public disinterest or hostility. Technocrats, politicians, and middle-class conservationists are the focus of most urban histories.Footnote 8 Nick Tiratsoo has argued that most voters saw the reconstruction of town and city centers as a distraction from house building.Footnote 9 Planners, politicians, and the police marginalized the poor, economically and geographically; in Joe Moran's words, the poor were “trapped” in neighborhoods and housing that “f[e]ll behind the more spectacular transformations of everyday life” embodied in the modernist buildings and social amenities of the city and town centers.Footnote 10
These studies of postwar urban reconstruction are powerful reminders that a welfare state and full employment did not mean that postwar England experienced social or political equality. But these studies are at odds with a different version of the postwar past, one that pervades memoirs of the postwar years and was most powerfully expressed almost thirty years ago in Carolyn Steedman's autobiographical Landscape for a Good Woman. This alternative version of postwar society argues that class as a dynamic, lived relationship was central to postwar society. Moreover, the state helped to foster a “sense of entitlement” among working-class people, which they imbibed from “free milk and welfare orange juice,” education, and working-class welfare that told Steedman's generation they were “worth something,” and deserved a better life than their parents.Footnote 11
Only recently have other scholars explored the implications of Steedman's account, and seriously considered the postwar years as, in the words of Stephen Brooke, “a moment when working-class identity and community were being reworked and rearticulated . . . within the context of class, not outside it.”Footnote 12 Brooke focuses on representations of working-class life; by contrast Ben Jones focuses on the working-class experience of this change, specifically within council (public) housing.Footnote 13 But we need further research on working-class life beyond the home and the street, for, as Steedman suggests, class relations were also forged in a broader landscape, in interactions between people, politicians, and experts. This article examines how civic reconstruction helped to shape working-class experience and to foster that sense of entitlement. In doing so, it suggests that people did not simply respond to the environment provided for them by politicians and planners, but were agents of change, who helped to constitute and modify that environment.
This examination is organized into six sections. The first outlines the importance of class as a frame for understanding and experiencing postwar England. I then provide a national overview of reconstruction plans during the 1940s. Section three analyzes the experience of reconstruction between the mid–1940s and the late 1950s. Many planners and politicians represented urban centers as classless spaces, but residents frequently experienced reconstruction as the achievement, and the reward, of blue-collar workers. Section four highlights the frustration caused by the virtual halt of civic reconstruction by the late 1950s, and shows that popular grievances centered on the planners' failure to meet the needs of workers for good public transportation—a sign of the importance of work to people's everyday lives and identities. Section five argues that Steedman's “sense of entitlement” provoked teenagers in the late 1950s and early 1960s to seek to reshape the civic centers in ways that showed their engagement with, rather than detachment from, civic reconstruction. The article concludes with an examination of the real and imagined city of the 1960s. Focusing on a newspaper competition held in 1967, I demonstrate that many people used postwar reconstruction as a foundation for their own imaginings of a future community. As Ruth Percy has effectively shown—drawing on the work of Jessica Ellen Sewell—“[t]here are different landscapes: imagined, experienced and built.”Footnote 14 Never was that more true than during the years of postwar reconstruction. Far from harking back nostalgically to the terraced streets of prewar years, people actively contributed to the growth of new cities as workers on building sites, as supportive voices in debates over reconstruction, and as users of the roads and public spaces enshrined in the civic centers. In postwar England, many people had far more ambitious aspirations than planners or politicians were prepared to deliver.
THE WORKING CLASS IN POSTWAR ENGLAND
For E. P. Thompson, class was a lived relationship—something that happens—rather than an “identity” centered on the self.Footnote 15 Indeed, class was a dynamic experience in postwar England, and surveys of personal identity provide only partial glimpses into class relations. Nevertheless, it is significant that during the 1950s and 1960s, a majority of English people identified as working class in terms that Thompson would have recognized. Social surveys, opinion polls, and reminiscences suggest that for most of them—including many white-collar as well as most blue-collar workers—this meant having to work for a living in a society where not everyone was obliged to do so.Footnote 16 The breadth of this definition is significant, for it is rooted in the war and postwar years. Before the Second World War, being working class was frequently associated with poverty; the interwar Conservative Party was able to successfully appeal to white-collar workers as a distinct group defined by “middle-class” interests.Footnote 17 From the 1980s, “working class” became increasingly associated with powerlessness and shame.Footnote 18 But as Geoffrey Field has recently shown, working-class identity was recast during the Second World War. Working for a living was a claim to citizenship because work—as a munitions operative, for example, or a soldier—was a patriotic act. Hoarding food, evading conscription, or refusing to host evacuees—all actions that became associated with the upper class and with the Conservative Party that initially opposed state rationing and evacuation schemes—was seen as putting oneself before one's country. It was against such “vested interests” that Labour successfully forged an alliance of “workers by hand” and “workers by brain” that enabled the party to win the 1945 General Election. Far from suggesting that this was a classless consensus, the alliance that Labour promoted was represented and experienced as one of a united, but very broad, class of workers whose interests were defined against those of the class who did not have to work for a living.Footnote 19 Although this political alliance quickly fractured, most blue- and many white-collar workers continued to identify themselves as working class into the 1970s. Pride in being working class was rooted not only in collective memories of wartime service but in their experience of civic reconstruction.
In making this argument, I draw on hundreds of personal testimonies from people born between 1918 and 1948. Most of the testimonies are taken from social surveys that were conducted during the postwar years and archived. The majority of those who were interviewed were blue-collar workers although a minority were office workers. Most of the latter were women who were married to blue-collar workers and defined themselves as working class. Almost all of these respondents were asked what class they considered themselves to be; the exception was a study of inner-city Liverpool conducted in the mid–1950s, in which respondents were not asked about their social class. However, their extensive interviews make clear that most of them viewed their lives as shaped by their need to work for a living, their lack of power relative to the employers and landlords who controlled many aspects of their lives, and their identification of this as an experience shared with neighbors and relatives.Footnote 20 Twenty further testimonies are derived from memoirs written by people who identify themselves as working class, or who talk about working-class experience in the manner outlined above.Footnote 21
I extensively analyzed twenty-two respondents from Coventry and Liverpool who were interviewed in 2007 and 2008.Footnote 22 Coventry and Liverpool experienced contrasting fortunes in the postwar decades. Coventry's people experienced heavy wartime aerial bombing but subsequently benefited from near full employment and rapid rebuilding. Liverpool's residents remained heavily reliant on casual and low-paid work on the docks and experienced slow urban redevelopment. The distinctive histories of these two cities suggest that the current focus in postwar urban history on the relationship between London and the provinces requires further nuancing; regional variation, a common theme in studies of nineteenth-century urban life,Footnote 23 remained significant in the second half of the twentieth century.
Volunteers came forward after reading articles placed in the local press that invited “ordinary,” “working class” readers to respond: the wording was adopted from Mike Savage's work, which convincingly suggests that being “ordinary” became widely understood as synonymous with being “working class” in postwar Britain.Footnote 24 During life-history interviews, these respondents talked about all aspects of their life in postwar England. They were not explicitly asked about postwar reconstruction or about their town or city center; that most of them brought up this theme unsolicited highlighted its significance and prompted the research for this article.
THE RECONSTRUCTION PLANS OF THE 1940s
Debates about postwar reconstruction began in the early 1940s, when planners and politicians at local and national level began to discuss the future of the urban centers. Some of the most badly blitzed municipalities, such as Coventry and Plymouth, produced city plans before the war ended, receiving vociferous encouragement from Lord Reith, the wartime coalition government's minister for works and buildings. In 1944, a Town and Country Planning Act gave councils the right to compulsorily purchase land for redevelopment and promised government grants for civic reconstruction. By the time Labour came to power in 1945, most local authorities had produced plans for reconstruction. These plans tended to be written by architects (the most prominent was Sir Patrick Abercrombie) in consultation with local councilors and planning officials, and they focused both on new housing that was usually zoned into self-sufficient neighborhoods and on civic centers. Transportation was also given consideration in most plans. Councils were required to gain approval for their planning proposals at public inquiries and from the minister of town and country planning, who in Clement Attlee's postwar government was Lewis Silkin.
Civic planning received a new impetus in 1947, with the passing of the Attlee government's Town and Country Planning Act, which required all 145 county and borough councils in England and Wales to produce comprehensive development plans. The 1947 Act encouraged councilors to consider the central area as an important space within which to enhance citizens' cultural, social, and political participation in civic life. Local councils were given the power to preserve buildings of architectural and historic interest, control outdoor advertising, compulsorily purchase land, and promise Treasury grants of up to 90 percent of the cost of redevelopment. This marked a dramatic change from the 1930s, when local councils' powers had been confined to providing housing, and only then for their poorest inhabitants.Footnote 25
Many authorities attempted to interest the public in civic reconstruction. City and town plans were written in language “intelligible to the ordinary person.”Footnote 26 In a pamphlet distributed to residents in 1943, Leicester's planners declared that “[t]he post-war period is to be the age of the common man.” Planners invited residents to consider the question, “What does the common man and woman expect this city to provide for them?” The answer they provided: “First, they want a home.” But the planners quickly pointed out that the “common man and woman” were also “part of the life of the larger community,” and declared their objective to “make the city a more convenient and pleasant place in which to live and work.”Footnote 27 That same year, the authors of the Plan for Plymouth declared, “[d]uring the war years there has been a decided trend in public opinion back to the spirit of the community, and increasingly insistent demands are being made for better and more efficient use of the land to the benefit of the people as a whole.” This planner concluded that “[i]t is being realized that in considering essential matters public and private interest should march together. Experience in the war has exemplified the fact that when the cause of the community is at stake, individualism must be subordinated.”Footnote 28 Such convictions were not confined to the largest, or most badly bombed, urban centers. “The governing purpose of all domestic planning must be to enhance the positive health of our people, mentally, physically, spiritually,” declared the councilors of East Sussex in the wartime pamphlet they produced to inform constituents about postwar reconstruction.Footnote 29 Provincial towns and cities no longer represented social problems— instead they were celebrated as beacons of hope and progress.
Planners, policy makers, and residents expected that urban dwellers would spend a significant amount of time in their town or city center. While housing was a top priority, much of it was situated on cheap land on the outskirts of conurbations. In contrast, town and city centers were afforded a special role. In the nineteenth century, they had been spaces not only for commercial consumption, but also civic participation and cultural enrichment. Yet for the first forty years of the twentieth century, they elicited little comment or praise from planners or policy makers. During the 1940s this changed. The city and town centers were the spaces within which greater civic participation was to be enacted: in fact, making a contribution to the life of the city center as a worker was redefined as constituting civic participation. In 1945 Newcastle-upon-Tyne's planning committee stressed that the “City Centre calls for special consideration, for it is . . . a day-time congregation of workers, each with a task that forms part of the life of the city. The purpose, therefore is to provide conditions in which these tasks may be carried out with the minimum of discomfort, in surroundings of charm and grace.”Footnote 30 Workers' participation in civic life was recognized as important and afforded a new dignity. But everyone, regardless of whether they worked, was to be entitled to participate in civic life as consumers of leisure. At the heart of Leicester's redeveloped, pedestrianized central area was to be a civic center with space for concerts and exhibitions: “this building should be one which by its importance, would symbolize the civic life of the community in whose benefits and responsibilities all citizens share.”Footnote 31 The “Coventry of the Future” was, according to a municipal exhibition of 1945, to offer new swimming baths and an entertainment quarter with a “live night scene” for all budgets.Footnote 32 Donald Gibson, Coventry's city architect, was adamant that the city center must be characterized by “operational usefulness” but also by “a variety of experiences and stimulations for the mind” that included public art installations.Footnote 33 In these plans, shopping, working, and socializing were discussed alongside participation in high cultural institutions or local government: all were constituted as vital activities in the life of a vibrant urban center. Significantly, participation in commerce was not viewed as the only, or even the most important, civic activity in which citizens would engage. Instead, an emphasis was placed on granting wage earners (those who made the city centers “operationally useful”) and their families affordable or free access to recreational and cultural amenities.
Politicians and planners regularly declared their intention to make amenities that had previously been the preserve of the few now available to the many. In a version of Plymouth's city plan that was widely disseminated in the local press and at municipal exhibitions, planners and councilors explained that the new pedestrianized shopping area was modeled on “the Temple in London,” where “the professions have always appreciated the absence of traffic and the quietude of the . . . secluded square.”Footnote 34 It was time, their plan suggested, that these benefits be made available to all. Many urban centers were to be zoned in order to allow visitors to find what they required easily and to enable like-minded people to be accommodated close to each other and within convenient reach of the amenities they needed. “Just as Harley Street is famous for physicians,” wrote Newcastle-upon-Tyne's planners in 1946, “so should areas within the City Centre be planned for professions, trades or businesses.”Footnote 35 The inclusion of “trades” was significant, suggesting that these were just as important to the life of the city as the university buildings or the law courts. In 1947, the Manchester Evening News proudly reported that the city council's “first postwar flats . . . might have been transplanted from London's West End.”Footnote 36 The West End was a well-known district, popularly believed to be inhabited by the rich and famous—these Manchester council flats, located close to the city center, provided accommodation for the city's wage earners. Such comparisons in both city plans and the press reminded readers that for too long the richest parts of urban life had been monopolized by the privileged and invited them to identify themselves with the majority of ordinary workers, now finally receiving their just desserts.
Working-class residents were deeply interested in the reconstruction of their urban centers. Their active engagement with their councils' plans refutes the claim that the war-weary public was apathetic.Footnote 37 In the late 1940s, thousands of people attended municipal exhibitions promoting their respective council's reconstruction designs; as late as 1958, one such event in Coventry attracted 13,000 visitors. These exhibitions were at least as concerned with showcasing the new central areas as with promising new housing.Footnote 38 In 1948 the Liverpool Echo advised readers that “[i]f you want a free treat you should certainly visit the superb Liverpool Architectural Exhibition;” the emphasis on “free” stressed that the exhibition was open to all. The Echo's editor praised the city council for “boldly” investing in land and materials. This center-right newspaper encouraged readers to have optimistic expectations: “Many say to me: ‘it can't happen in our lifetime, can it?’” wrote the editor. “The answer is that it can.”Footnote 39 Lewis Silkin received positive coverage from the Daily Mirror for his declarations that Britain should “build for fun”; “in our towns, he said, we lacked opportunities for social intercourse.”Footnote 40
Historians have pointed out that postwar social reconstruction plans embodied suspicion of certain groups outside the white, nuclear family. New technologies and reconstruction plans embodied a prewar suspicion of working-class teenagers, whose activities within city centers were strictly policed. Council tenants' domestic behavior—particularly among large, “problem” families—was surveilled and censured by social workers and housing officials. When housing estates were planned, little provision was made for larger-than-average families, nurseries for working mothers, or for households accommodating more than two generations—which meant that the needs of many working-class families, including the increasing number of immigrants from the British Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent, were not addressed.Footnote 41 Postwar planners and politicians deployed a selective representation of the working class: a family headed by a male breadwinner, with a wife and mother with time and money to shop, and two or three children. This representation owed much to the ideals of the labor movement, but did not reflect the postwar reality of a baby boom in the late 1940s, an increase in the proportion of married women workers from the 1950s, and a rising number of immigrants.Footnote 42
These studies focus on neighborhood redevelopment, but within civic center reconstruction the picture was rather different. As planners' discussions of workers, shoppers, and leisure consumers suggest, a conscious attempt was made to address the needs of a wide range of people regardless of gender and age, but class relations were embedded into these postwar plans. Civic reconstruction was imbued with planners' and politicians' conviction that middle-class leadership was necessary if Silkin's “fun” and “social intercourse” were to have constructive ends. Thus Manchester's planners blamed the migration of “professional workers” to the suburbs for the civic center's lack of cultural activities. The 1945 Plan for Manchester proposed the creation of a “modern counterpart of the communities that have at various times in the last fifty years congregated in Chelsea, Bloomsbury and New York's Greenwich Village,” populated by “artists, writers, dons, students, Continentals, journalists, architects, actors, musicians [and] engineers.”Footnote 43 But the council made no provision for the city's working-class teenagers, who liked to congregate in the central area but were harassed by the police for doing so.Footnote 44
The town and city plans of the 1940s were never more than partially enacted. The government quickly reneged on promises of extensive financial support, in part because the need to build new housing took money away from the city centers. But the most badly bombed urban centers did witness some redevelopment in the decade following 1945, most conspicuously in Coventry. Here, the Labour council had made concerted attempts to interest local people in the process of reconstruction from the early 1940s. The city gained national recognition as a particularly badly blitzed city and this, together with the council's wholehearted support of reconstruction, placed pressure on government ministers to support civic redevelopment and resulted in Coventry receiving a large Treasury grant to assist the process.Footnote 45
THE EXPERIENCE OF CIVIC RECONSTRUCTION, 1945–C. 1957
Opposition to planning tended to come from the owners of city center businesses and from Conservative councilors opposed to compulsory purchase of property. The press frequently represented these groups as factions opposed to the common good. In 1947 the Daily Mirror, Britain's most widely read newspaper, represented opposition to the government's plan to turn the small southeastern town of Stevenage into a larger urban development as “Three Plan a Party but 4,700 Won't Be Going.” The occupations of the three men leading the opposition were recorded—farmer, landowner, and surveyor—as was the fact that they owned property that the plan would threaten. Supporters of the government plan were presented as ordinary people, like “Fred Hemmings, steward of the non-political Stevenage Club and Institute.”Footnote 46
In some towns and cities, this opposition proved highly influential. Liverpool had not been extensively bombed, and here a Conservative council proposed only minor redevelopment, with the approval of local business owners. The Liverpool Echo's praise for ambitious initial plans and public enthusiasm for the municipal exhibition of the late 1940s gave way to a watered-down set of proposals that were in turn quickly shelved. As a result, few Liverpudlians took much interest in their city center. Looking back from 2008, the city center played little part in recollections of interviewees remembering the 1950s. Their civic pride focused on Liverpool's status as a bustling port, a sign of its connections with a modern, cosmopolitan world. Terry Rimmer was born in Liverpool in 1937, the son of a war widow who worked in a factory. As a factory laborer in the 1950s he thought of America as “this wonderful new world that had never had a war.”Footnote 47 Despite Liverpool's relative poverty, its status as a port enabled residents to focus their civic pride on their city's connections to a more affluent world overseas. Asked to describe the Liverpool of their youth, Bill and Barbara Rainford—factory workers born in the 1940s—described the city's several railway stations, including “Riverside Station, [where] people used to sail from Liverpool to the likes of America and Canada.”Footnote 48 By the 1950s, that modern world overseas was remote from the undesirable, run-down city center. “You didn't go to town because there were shops near us,” explained Barbara Rainford about growing up in an inner suburb.Footnote 49 Rainford's neighborhood was not, in fact, well equipped with shops, but her statement makes clear that the city center was neither viewed as an attractive destination, nor was it a particularly affordable one. A survey of inner-city residents in 1954–55 found that most of them chose to shop at discount stores on Liverpool's London Road, a short walk from the city center but in a working-class neighborhood quite distinct from the city's main shopping streets and its major department stores.Footnote 50 In this low-wage city, where a high proportion of people continued to rely on unskilled work as dock and railway laborers, many people lacked the money that city-center shopping demanded. Moreover, as both Rainford's comment and the social survey of the inner city made clear, most working-class residents thought the city center offered nothing more than shopping opportunities. Local government failed to offer a strong commitment to civic reconstruction, and many working-class people in Liverpool felt no strong sense of entitlement either to the civic and cultural life of the city center's theaters and political arenas or to its rundown public spaces.
When change did occur, many people responded positively to it. Many did not experience the demolition of older buildings in their town or city center as a loss; rather, they viewed demolition as the necessary groundwork for a brave new world of planning for the people's welfare. In this regard, the experience of redevelopment in neighborhoods was often quite different from the experience of civic reconstruction. The destruction of people's homes during the war—and later during slum clearance—was often experienced as traumatic, because bombing and clearance destroyed settings possessing intimate significance.Footnote 51 But the redevelopment of town and city centers was interpreted positively, as erasing unpleasant memories of prewar poverty and wartime bombing and death.Footnote 52 During the mid-1940s, as discussion about how to commemorate the war dead got underway, Mass Observation—the socially progressive social-survey movement established in 1937—and municipal councils discovered a strong public preference for “living memorials,” including community centers, parks, and playing fields. The stone monuments erected after the Great War were widely unpopular.Footnote 53 Throughout the period of high modernism, the horror of the Blitz was still a vivid memory for many people; the rebuilding of their city centers performed an important emotional function by erasing the material reminders of the Blitz, and replacing them with shops, workplaces, and leisure facilities.
Coventry harnessed the enthusiasm for postwar planning that was hinted at by Mass Observation. Here, the main opposition to the council's ambitious reconstruction plan for the central area came from the Chamber of Commerce, an association of local business owners. In 1946, the council robustly defended its plans at a public inquiry and presented the Chamber of Commerce as representing a minority interest.Footnote 54 The local newspaper, the right-wing Coventry Standard, reported that “the bombing of the city has made new planning inevitable . . . private interests are bound to be affected.”Footnote 55 Both the council and the Standard presented such antipathy to planning as selfish and at odds with the interests of the majority. This representation of civic reconstruction enshrined the spirit of Labour's 1945 election victory, by suggesting that “‘ordinary people’ had come into their own.” Labour's vision of postwar reconstruction promoted on the one hand, “a patriotism which is dependent upon a dream of classlessness, whilst on the other, deriv[ed] its specific force and passion from . . . an informing belief that it was the working class who were really the backbone of the nation.”Footnote 56
This appeal had great success. Many Coventrians experienced civic redevelopment as a celebration of the working life of their city. They directed their praise not at planners or politicians, but at the working people who undertook the process of rebuilding. Civic reconstruction was so absorbing that it became a spectator sport. During the 1950s, Frank and Rita Gogerty—a car worker and a shop assistant—were among many Coventry residents who regularly walked into town on a Sunday to watch the new pedestrianized precinct being built.Footnote 57 The sight of hundreds of working men creating a new city was a heartening contrast to the unemployment of the 1930s and 1919, when the Great War gave way to long dole queues.
Residents also suggested that pride in their town or city sprang from the achievements of local working people. In the early 1950s, Coventry council, in conjunction with local businesses, erected a new municipal clock on Broadgate, the city's main street. This generated reams of readers' letters in the local press, most of them hostile. Disapproval centered on the clock's depiction of Lady Godiva, who was fabled to have ridden naked through the city on a horse. But in expressing their disapproval, readers also revealed that they did possess pride in their city, and that this was grounded in its traditions of craftwork. A typical criticism came from J. R. Burnwood, who asked, “As the dial is modern, why have an age-old legend depicted below it? Why not have a weekly cavalcade of the city's trades and crafts, i.e. weaving, watch making, cycles, motor cars, machine tools, aircraft.” Other correspondents wrote with pride that, “we are becoming an up-to-date city,” and that planners were delivering “a city worthy of the associations by which it is already world famous . . . cars, aeroplanes, machine tools.”Footnote 58 These historical representations of Coventry created a seamless narrative between its historic past and its affluent present. The Blitz, which destroyed much of the city's central area, did not appear in these letters; instead the correspondents emphasized a continuity of industrial and craft innovation. This narrative could incorporate both leaders of industry and ordinary craftspeople: it was distinctly different from the celebration of Britain's aristocratic heritage so evident in the legend of Lady Godiva.Footnote 59
The modernist architecture of the postwar years proved popular. Many of Coventry's residents thought that the buildings of the 1950s provided a powerful and confident riposte to the past of strife, slums, and war, or “a new city for a new age,” as Trevor Teasdel put it.Footnote 60 Alan Watkins grew up in Coventry's inner city in the 1940s. His parents—a factory laborer and a cleaner—rented a damp cottage in a medieval courtyard overlooked by the smoking ruins of Coventry Cathedral. They shared one tap with three other families. “Then in the early 1950s it was, ‘hang about, this is a bit rough’, and they moved us out to a brand new council house at Cheylesmore.” Watkins liked his new home, but his parents were not altogether keen on Cheylesmore: his mother missed the proximity of the city center shops. But the entire family enjoyed trips into the city center, and Watkins recalled the reconstructed high street with pride: “Broadgate was beautiful,” he said of its 1950s reincarnation.Footnote 61 Wherever one stood on Broadgate one could see old and new coexisting, apparently seamlessly. This high street retained its status as a wide thoroughfare that swept through Coventry's center, just as it had done before the war. At one end stood an old public square, at the other a smart new hotel with a public bar where local residents often met for a night out. The street itself was lined with bus stops that enabled residents like Watkins and his parents to have easy access to Broadgate's department stores and new theater and to the shopping precinct and dance hall sited just behind the main street. Benches invited people to rest and intimated that the bustle and buildings of Broadgate were worth observing.
Inhabitants of the most badly bombed cities frequently used the image of the phoenix, rising from the ashes of poverty and war, to describe urban reconstruction. Here again, Coventry played a pioneering role. In 1946, Coventry Council used Victory Day to unveil a leveling stone engraved with a phoenix. Situated in the city center, this large piece of slate symbolized the new foundation on which the reconstructed city would be built.Footnote 62 Architect Basil Spence used the image to describe his vision for Coventry's new cathedral.Footnote 63 The symbol had immediate popular appeal. Teasdel, who was born in 1951, recalled his mother taking him to watch the construction of the British Home Stores, a department store, which he described as “a brand new city centre taking shape . . . and the Phoenix rose from the ashes of war.”Footnote 64 Judy Walker grew up in Hillfields, an inner-city, working-class neighborhood of Coventry during the 1950s. Her father was a factory worker. After leaving her secondary modern school in 1956, Walker took a job as shop assistant at the very British Home Stores that Trevor Teasdel watched being built. “We had this saying,” said Walker fifty years later, “we shall rise from the ashes, like a phoenix. And we did.”Footnote 65 This image of the phoenix was increasingly drawn upon by residents of other towns and cities as well, who used it to explain reconstruction as an active process that owed more to an older virtue—people's ability to overcome adversity—than to technology or technocrats. “Phoenix-like, [Birmingham] has risen from the wartime blitz,” wrote E. Jukes to the Daily Mirror in 1967.Footnote 66 The phoenix was thus used to reinterpret the impact of the Blitz on these urban spaces. While the Blitz had caused trauma and ruin in the early 1940s, by the late 1950s many urban residents presented it as a turning point in their city's history, rather than as a rupture. The phoenix connected postwar redevelopment to a longer history of industrial innovation and hard work. Civic reconstruction did not represent a break with a prewar past, but rather a celebration of older traditions: hard work, collective endeavor, and mutual help. This narrative gave industry and ordinary workers a central role in urban development in the past, present, and future.
DISILLUSION WITH THE SLOW PACE OF CHANGE
By the late 1950s, residents of England's towns and cities were as likely to express frustration at the slow pace of civic redevelopment as pride in what had been achieved. Most of the urban plans of the early 1940s had not come to fruition, reflecting Labour's decision to focus on house building during the Attlee government of 1945–51 and the reluctance of the Conservative administrations of 1951–64 to commit public money to the city centers. The 1954 Housing Act shifted the focus of central-area reconstruction by emphasizing that priority should be given to commercial users and private developers rather than to public planning.Footnote 67 The commercial dimension of town planning provoked anger or disappointment from bored teenagers, inner-city residents with no access to green space, and pedestrians in congested city centers.Footnote 68
Popular discontent focused on the inefficiencies of public transportation. Historians suggest that enhanced mobility was a key feature of the modern city. Joe Moran states that the expansion of the road network and car production in postwar Britain granted a new social freedom to ordinary people: “[C]heap family saloons . . . made even the working classes more mobile” during the 1950s.Footnote 69 Certainly, the planners of new estates and towns had confidently assumed that they were building for a new generation of car owners.Footnote 70 But in fact cars were beyond the budget of most households until the 1970s.Footnote 71 Consequently, as one social investigator observed of a Sheffield estate in the early 1960s, “[b]us services are a source of common interest for residents.”Footnote 72
In the immediate postwar years, many people had experienced improvements in public transportation services. Before the war, private providers could run buses, but the 1947 Transport Act nationalized these. New bus stations were key early developments in many city plans, including those of Coventry and Liverpool.Footnote 73 In the late 1940s and 1950s, bus use peaked due to fuel rationing and a low level of car ownership. Buses were the most common mode of transportation used for the journey to work into the 1960s.Footnote 74 Millions of passengers therefore benefited from the regular services and better facilities that nationalization and municipal planning brought about—developments significant enough to be used as chronological landmarks decades later. “That was when they built the new bus station,” was how Pontefract's residents framed the late 1940s in reminiscences collected in the 1980s.Footnote 75 The building of bus stations and the provision of more public transportation was widely experienced as a benefit, and it was a move that emphasized that meeting the needs of ordinary workers and shoppers should be central to urban reconstruction.
By the late 1950s this positive picture had changed. Public transportation developments had not kept pace with the needs of an increasingly dispersed population. Suburban living had expanded as council estates and private housing was increasingly built on the edges of urban conurbations. Postwar industrial estates tended also to be located outside the town centers, built on cheap land. But postwar plans did not take account of this, and workers living in one suburb and employed in another had an onerous journey to work: bus services tended to run into the civic center, so many commuters had to take two or more time-consuming bus journeys.Footnote 76
In Liverpool, residents' problems were compounded by narrow, dilapidated prewar roads and a paucity of habitable accommodation within walking distance of the city center. The nationalization of public transportation, the offer of new council housing in Liverpool's outer suburbs, and the knowledge that postwar planning was meant to facilitate mobility around the city all encouraged people to view public transportation as a resource that should meet their needs as workers and consumers. In a survey of inner-city Liverpool conducted in the mid–1950s, many residents complained that they would like to move to the suburbs but could not afford the money or the time to take long bus rides to work or to the shops.Footnote 77 These residents did not aspire to car ownership, which was beyond their means; they wanted public transportation to provide them with a quick and affordable journey between work and home. The popularity of buses, together with the unimaginative design of bus routes, caused problems for those who worked on them. Terry Rimmer worked as a bus driver in the late 1950s. He recalled that “you had to get from A to B as quickly as possible because people relied on a bus to meet another bus, so you were continually chasing the clock, and you [got] headaches . . . a lot of [the drivers] had heart attacks.”Footnote 78
Teenagers “Take the City by Storm”
While workers were frustrated by their inability to move around and out of the city center, leisure consumers were exasperated by the constraints on their access to the growing commercial attractions of their local civic center. Prominent among those who were discontented were teenagers, the primary market targeted by entrepreneurs behind such civic delights as the cinema, the milk bar, and the coffee club.Footnote 79 Too young to drive, and in any case unable to afford a car, teenagers were heavily reliant on public transportation. Those in small towns and rural areas complained that bus fares ate up their spending money, a grievance that implied a sense of entitlement to the leisure facilities of their local urban center. “No wonder we teenagers are complaining of money worries,” wrote Sheila from Hertfordshire to the Daily Mirror's new “Teen Page” in 1959. “We have to pay adult fare on trains and buses.” Hers was named “star letter” of that issue.Footnote 80 This frustration over public transportation united those in small towns with those in larger conurbations. In Dundee and Manchester, thefts of cars and motorcycles increased during the late 1950s: teenagers had more spending power, enabling them to enjoy dancing and cinema outings, but they were also acutely aware that their freedom of movement was circumscribed by a lack of transportation and dependence on bus services that rarely ran on Sundays or late into the evening.Footnote 81 Ten years later the situation had not improved. For teenager Elizabeth Still, bus timetables dictated the staid pace of life in Cambridge in 1967. She complained to the Mirror of “cinemas finishing at 10pm so people can catch the last buses at 10.30!”Footnote 82
The teenagers of the late 1950s and early 1960s were the first to grow up with the welfare state, and possessed that sense of entitlement of which Steedman wrote. They derived this from welfare provision, education, and full employment, all of which encouraged them to expect a better life than their parents had known.Footnote 83 However, their dreams were not confined to the economic security that the postwar state promised; imbued with a sense of entitlement, they drew on popular culture to assert their desire for a more adventurous kind of life.Footnote 84 Most of them could barely remember the war. They did not contrast their urban spaces with wartime bomb sites or prewar slums, but instead compared them with the American cityscapes they knew from Hollywood films. Judy Walker spoke of Coventry's Di Maggio's ice cream parlor as being one of the most attractive venues in the city center because “it was a real American ice cream parlour.” As Coventry's road network expanded in the late 1950s she hankered after learning to drive “because I'd seen all these high school drive-ins on the Hollywood films—that's what I wanted,” but money meant she could not get a car and was instead reliant on “running for the last bus on Broadgate.”Footnote 85 Other teenagers expressed dissatisfaction with the limited free amenities that the new central areas offered them. They were offered the opportunity to do so by both local and national newspapers, like the Coventry Standard that reported on young people's boredom with Coventry's commercialized precinct.Footnote 86
Many young people aspired to leave their provincial homes. Moving to London was a common dream. When social investigators in inner-city Liverpool asked more than five hundred residents whether they would like to move out of the city only a minority did—but they tended to be young, and cite London as their preferred destination. They believed the capital would offer greater opportunities: for work but also for pleasure.Footnote 87 Forty miles away from Liverpool, Manchester's young people experienced near full employment, but many aspired to move south. Shirley Goss grew up in Ancoats, a working-class inner-city neighborhood. She enjoyed going to the cinema and window shopping in Manchester's city center, but “everyone I knew wanted to go to London” in the 1950s—Shirley included. “Some ran off and was brought back. Others made it. I never left Manchester save for a day trip to Southport and Chester.”Footnote 88 For young people in small southern English towns, London assumed even greater importance as the nearest city. A common recollection among Stephanie Spencer's sample of grammar-school educated women—most of them the daughters of businessmen—was of late-1950s London opening up “a new world” of economic, cultural, and sometimes sexual opportunity—but this was confined to a social group sufficiently affluent to afford lodgings in the city, or daily rail fares to the capital, plus spending money. But most parents could not allow their children this financial freedom.Footnote 89
Some teenagers felt entitled to take matters into their own hands in order to convert the material landscape in which they lived into the city of their dreams. In September 1956, teenagers across the country used cinema screenings of Rock Around the Clock to appropriate urban public space. In Manchester, for example, more than a thousand “screaming, jiving, rhythm-crazy teenagers surged” through the city center, “stopping traffic” and holding a mass jiving session in St. Peter's Square. The Daily Mirror's coverage of this event was ambiguous; while suggesting that the event constituted a “riot” led by “a gang of thirty Teddy-suited youths,” the newspaper refused to condemn the young people, describing the crowd's “singing, jiving and hurling fireworks” in a manner suggestive of a huge public party. The teenagers had taken “the city by storm,” a phrase that suggested their significance in shaping the civic center without framing this in a positive or negative manner.Footnote 90 Such tolerance was not universally shown: watch committees in Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Carlisle, Liverpool, and Warrington all banned screenings of the film after disturbances in London as well as Manchester.Footnote 91 Notably, most of the towns and cities that banned the film were governed by Conservative councils.
Ruth Percy has suggested that early twentieth-century strikers challenged “conventional uses of public space” and in doing so “subverted urban power relations, claiming collective rights.”Footnote 92 In the cities of the late 1950s, young workers often did likewise. But they also drew on an older understanding of civic space as a place of popular participation—St. Peter's Square had been the site of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, for example—“an old and familiar ‘image’” revived by the postwar planners' and politicians’ emphasis on civic and cultural participation.Footnote 93 In 1957, the Mirror reported that fifteen hundred teenagers had gathered outside Coventry's new Leofric Hotel, where Bill Haley and the Comets were staying, chanting “‘we want Bill’ . . . When Bill . . . walked out onto a balcony the crowd called on him to sing rock ‘n’ roll. He did not—so they did.”Footnote 94 Judy Walker was among the crowd of singing and dancing teenagers: “so that was part of the new Coventry city centre” she recalled in 2007, laughing; “hundreds of us all shouting for Bill Haley and stopping the traffic.”Footnote 95 Revealingly, she recalled this incident during a narrative about how she spent her leisure time as a teenager, unprompted by any questions about the city center or urban planning.
These teenagers were asserting a sense of entitlement to civic space, in a manner they believed was in keeping with the spirit of reconstruction. The images of popular participation conjured up by postwar planners—in pedestrianized precincts, consultation processes, the creation of broad streets and central squares—“resonated with the real practices and experiences of and within people's everyday lives.”Footnote 96 Coventry's Broadgate lent itself to large gatherings, as its broad sweep, enlarged by postwar reconstruction, made it easy for a crowd to gather. Like many other main streets—the Bigg Market in Newcastle and Oxford Road in Manchester, for example—Broadgate had long been a venue for working-class promenading; it was a “bunny run” (or “monkey parade” in towns and cities further north), where young women—including Judy Walker and, in the 1930s, her mother—courted young men. By identifying her actions and those of hundreds of other teenagers as “part of the new Coventry city centre,” Judy Walker suggested that the central area remained a public space in which all residents had the right to self-expression. Attempts by city-center businessmen, the police, and local councils to remove teenagers from the central streets after dark were never entirely successful.Footnote 97
The 1960s is often understood as one of growing disenchantment with urban redevelopment,Footnote 98 but this requires nuancing: widespread skepticism about the ability of private investment to revive city life coexisted with faith in public ownership to deliver better civic centers. The Town and Country Planning Act of 1962 required local authorities to submit five-year development plans to the Minister of Housing and Local Government, and it emphasized “the need for the redevelopment of the centres of towns.”Footnote 99 The expansion of office work, health care, and financial services provoked concern, while a rising birthrate and Commonwealth immigration contributed to the government's belated recognition that new building to house and cater to the growing populace was urgently required.Footnote 100
THE BOOM CITIES OF THE 1960s
Labour's return to government in 1964 focused press and public attention on provincial urban redevelopment. During the 1964 election campaign, Harold Wilson's Labour Party focused public attention on the government's poor record of urban redevelopment. “Is This the Promised Land?” asked a Daily Mirror headline over a photo of a woman hanging out laundry in the backyard of a decrepit Victorian terraced house, published on the eve of polling.Footnote 101 After Wilson entered government in November 1964, the Ministry of Housing and Local Government pressed ahead with urban redevelopment plans. In 1968, a study of more than two hundred shipyard workers on Tyneside asked them which developments had most improved their living standards during the past five years. About two-thirds believed that their lives had improved; the most common reasons were new housing, new shopping facilities, and new schools, hospitals, and roads—in that order.Footnote 102
In 1967, a glimpse of people's views on civic reconstruction was offered by the Daily Mirror's “Boom City” competition. Inspired by a new tranche of urban-redevelopment plans—including T. Dan Smith's aspiration to turn Newcastle-upon-Tyne into “New Brasilia”Footnote 103—Britain's most popular daily newspaper invited readers to celebrate the provincial conurbations as a decisive break with the past of poverty and war. “They're booming sky-high with vigorous young ideas, dynamic modern industries [and] go-getting leadership” was how the Mirror launched its initiative.Footnote 104 Such competitions were extremely popular in mid-twentieth-century newspapers and, while entries were shaped by respondents' assumptions about what the judges want to hear, they nevertheless “offer access to contemporaneous accounts of everyday lives and attitudes which would not otherwise be available.”Footnote 105
Most of the letters published by the Mirror's “Boom City” series focused on the opportunities provided for working-class people's participation in city life. The geographic spread of the published correspondents suggests that the optimism and enthusiasm of the late 1940s was rekindled by Labour's support for civic redesign twenty years later. Many letters spoke of ongoing progress. L. Sidebottom praised Sheffield, where “[t]op planning is creating beautiful estates serving all sections of the community.”Footnote 106 The winner of the one hundred pound prize expanded on this vision. She was twenty-one-year-old Jill Maxted, who wrote that “Manchester is GO! Around me I see new buildings going up, up, up—flats, laboratories, incising the skyline with that sharp, stark beauty of an age of precision.”Footnote 107
Many writers were confident that the best assessment of civic reconstruction was whether it met the needs of their community. They therefore focused on those institutions that appeared most important to providing housing, work, healthcare, and education. “During my eighty years I have seen Newcastle upon Tyne grow into one of the foremost cities in the land,” declared Frank Nichols. “There are bonny babies, well-groomed teenagers, well-planned housing estates, new industries, enticing modern shops, an airport open to the world. There's an ever-expanding university, two of the most modern and best equipped hospitals in the country, acres of moor to wander over within sight of the bustling traffic, and a dazzling night life.”Footnote 108 This was not simply the achievement of planners but of ordinary people. “What makes any city the greatest?” asked A. R. Walmall of Leicester. “A modern, far-seeing council, a modern active local press—and most of all, the people. . . . In Leicester, we don't think and wait, we think and do.”Footnote 109 The letter writers judged their civic centers according to similar criteria to those set down in the town plans of the 1940s: the extent to which their town or city center enabled everyone to enjoy economic security, a degree of private comfort, and participation in public life. A modern city was one that offered an improved standard of living to ordinary people.
The narratives of the Mirror's respondents were clearly shaped by the remit of the competition. But a number of entrants contravened the rules laid down by the newspaper, by lambasting their hometown. Their criticisms highlighted a widespread belief that the modern city was one that responded to working-class people's needs and desires—and particularly to the concerns of young working-class people, those born since the war. Pat White criticized “the drag, the boredom, the dead city” of Winchester. Mrs. J. Welton condemned Guildford's “snobbery and snooty contempt for anything progressive. . . . Industry is a dirty word and land which could be used for housing and development is jealously guarded.”Footnote 110 The Mirror encouraged such ingenuity, awarding Pat White £25. Elizabeth Still received the same amount for her declaration that Cambridge “couldn't be ‘swinging’ if it wanted to be, with control from the universities stopping even popular chain stores from building. As for the undergrads—ugh!”Footnote 111 Miss S. Pitts, who lived on one of Oxford's council estates, wrote disparagingly of her city as “an empty shell”: “They call it the Beautiful City of Spires, and that's all it is. . . . If any city needs a prize for the most unswinging city, it's Oxford.”Footnote 112 Symbolic of authentic Englishness in the middlebrow literature and the press of the 1930s, the affluent towns of provincial southern England, where many of Britain's wealthiest people lived and worked, were experienced by many of the Mirror's contributors as socially elitist and architecturally tired. Well-heeled conservationists' ability to use postwar legislation to prevent civic redevelopment was often resented by those who did not benefit from the ancient university, school, or religious buildings that were preserved, or share in the affluence that characterized the lives of the wealthiest inhabitants of their town.
Many saw the urban conurbations of northern England as the cradle of modernity, where ordinary people's hard work had brought about a dramatic social and economic transformation. Ronald Ayre of Winlaton, a northeast mining community, believed that “[i]t is easy to spend and build with an abundance of funds, but I think praise is due to the people who, in spite of poverty and bad times, make the most of the funds they get.” This writer praised “Newcastle which, in spite of depression and poverty, has got up off the floor . . . rolled up its shirtsleeves and got on with the job of building a new and swinging city.” He connected the “new university . . . a masterpiece of planning and workmanship” and the city's “skyscrapers” with the northeast's older history. “Too often has credit been given to cities south of Manchester,” he concluded. “But do not forget the North East—the place where a great proportion of Britain's heavy industry lives and strives.”Footnote 113
America and London, which had framed the dreams of 1950s teenagers, did not feature much in the letters of the Mirror's correspondents. Many drew instead on the “white heat” language of Harold Wilson and his government. They regularly praised their cities as “space age” (a phrase used by Labour ministers, including Tony Benn) and “supersonic.” New buildings and precincts proved fertile foundations on which to build dreams that were imbued with optimism for the future and defied comparisons with America, or with the past. “My city is supersonic,” wrote Mr. McHugh of Coventry. His home was in Wyken, a predominantly working-class suburb with a large development of new council housing. “New precincts to shop in. New art galleries . . . New flats and flowers. . . . We are a city with new ideas.”Footnote 114 Robert Jones wrote of the industrial town of Middlesbrough, in northeast England, that “Ours is the city of the future . . . the sky is forever lit up [by chemical plants]. Fabulous apartment blocks and excellent new estates are developing fast.”Footnote 115
The “Boom City” competition suggested that many people wanted urban life to offer them economic security, but also adventure and creativity. Some compared their cities to foreign climes: Ian Hackett of Hartlepool in northeast England wrote that Sunderland, his nearest city, “may not be the Costa Brava but it's a good substitute.”Footnote 116 At a time when package holidays to Spain were becoming increasingly popular, this comparison suggested that the provincial city could, and should, address inhabitants' desire for pleasure and leisure, as well as affordable work and housing. It was Swansea's ability to do this, one local “youth organizer” told the Mirror, that meant “we don't have an exodus at a certain age, as in other parts of the country.”Footnote 117 Many readers emphasized the need for a civic center to appeal to the full range of residents, not simply to one class or generation. “There is something for all ages,” was how Elizabeth Card praised Bristol.Footnote 118 Most correspondents shared a desire for an urban space in which they could enjoy secure work, affordable housing, and recreation, often in the company of family and long-standing friends. Their testimonies were imbued with optimism that the cities of the 1960s could fulfill this.
Such accolades of the modern city offer only a partial glimpse of working-class urban life. We know that many people were languishing in substandard housing, while those rehoused in council accommodation often found themselves in geographically isolated districts, or in the cheaply built tower blocks favored by the Conservative governments of the 1950s.Footnote 119 The late 1960s and 1970s witnessed the exposure of corruption among certain high-profile architects and municipal politicians. This tarnished the reputation of urban redevelopment, raising suspicions that planning was motivated by the self-interest of private investors and their political cronies, rather than community concerns.Footnote 120 But by the late 1960s, there seemed no hope that public investment would take over from private interests, as central government turned its attention to a growing economic crisis. The end of the decade witnessed a slow rise in unemployment in supposedly “booming” cities like Coventry as foreign competition hit British manufacturing, particularly the car trade. “At the moment our car industry is in the doldrums.” wrote Mr. McHugh of Coventry, “but watch us zoom out of that too.”Footnote 121 His optimism was misplaced.
We should not dismiss Mr. McHugh's optimism as overblown or as a less accurate understanding of postwar urban life than testimonies describing poor housing and isolated council estates. In their letters to the Mirror, these readers focused on the elements of everyday life that they wanted to see preserved and reproduced. This tells us much about the hope and confidence with which many working-class people imbued postwar reconstruction, and about their sense of entitlement to a future shaped by security, but also by pleasure, leisure, and education.
CONCLUSION
Postwar reconstruction of the civic centers shaped working-class experience and identity in postwar England. Civic reconstruction fostered and advanced a wartime conviction that working for a living was a strong, shared identity that gave people an entitlement to a certain standard of living. Many residents' aspirations for their civic centers focused on the provision of jobs—and thus economic security—but also on having greater control over their everyday lives and more educational and artistic opportunities. These aspirations were never fully met by postwar planners and politicians, but their existence demonstrates that working-class people's experience stretched far beyond the confines of their home or street. They were never exclusively focused on domestic and family relationships, nor were their ambitions ever entirely acquisitive or individualistic. We need more studies of working-class life that look beyond self, home, and neighborhood to scrutinize people's contribution to civic and political life more broadly.
Working-class people's experience of civic life encompassed both the mundane and the exceptional, in ways that deserve more attention from historians of everyday life. As in prewar decades, people's lives in the urban centers encompassed routine activities, including work and shopping. But when asked to describe the urban center at that time and since, they often dwelled on symbolic and material changes—such as the new hospitals of Newcastle and the laboratories of Manchester—and extraordinary incidents, such as the teenage takeover of Coventry's Broadgate. They suggest that if we are to understand “experience” we need to pay attention to the relationship between the everyday and the exceptional, for it was through extraordinary episodes and innovations that people explored the possibilities of changing the environment in which they lived.
The rebuilding of the civic centers was widely recognized as an achievement of ordinary working-class people, and the rebuilt centers were understood as places that should and could provide for their needs. This was particularly true in the late 1940s and late 1960s, moments at which central government encouraged municipal councils to invest in public amenities rather than exclusively in commercial, privatized developments. Public ownership could and did offer people new expectations that their interests were the state's primary priority.Footnote 122 This expectation was never completely fulfilled, but it was given sufficient credence to mean that many people experienced the postwar urban centers as places that could, and should, offer them a wealth of economic, social, and cultural opportunities. That vision of an alternative city, and the understanding of social justice that underpins it, endured long after the “boom cities” of 1967 had become bywords for urban decline.
