In his 1962 The anatomy of Britain Anthony Sampson asked the question: ‘How potent, one wonders, is the influence of architecture?’, speculating whether Foreign Office policy would ‘be more up to date if it were housed in a steel-and-glass block?’ rather than its present home in the Victorian edifice by Sir George Gilbert Scott: ‘Surroundings, I expect, do influence attitudes, and it is the social habits and rituals of the Foreign Office that have helped to hold back the realization of change.’Footnote 1
The Wilson government's support of the ambitious Whitehall plan of 1965, by a team headed by Sir Leslie Martin, with Colin Buchanan in charge of traffic planning, is a strong indication of the Labour government's commitment to a modernist planning philosophy. The comprehensive plan involved making Parliament Square into a pedestrian precinct, the demolition of swathes of Whitehall including the Foreign Office, the building of new offices in megastructural ziggurats and the construction of a road-tunnel under the Embankment.Footnote 2 The plans were to give a modern, dynamic, and progressive image to government.Footnote 3 It is therefore tempting to see the Whitehall scheme as a physical embodiment of the ‘White Heat’ moment generally, or more specifically of Thomas Balogh's influential Labourite critique of the conservatism of the civil service, which would lead to the Fulton report in 1968.Footnote 4 As Alan Powers argues, ‘Images of modern architecture formed a natural backdrop for [Wilson's] vision of Britain's future.’Footnote 5 However, Martin and Buchanan were appointed in April of 1964 by the minister of buildings and public works Geoffrey Rippon; that is to say, before the change of government.Footnote 6 This gives an indication of the argument of this article: that the desire to reshape the face of cities in the early 1960s into an image of modernity was tantamount to orthodoxy in these years, and that the Conservative-controlled government was a fertile ground for radical planning ideas.
The Conservative embrace of modernism has been obscured in most narratives of British modernism.Footnote 7 This is partly due to the general phenomenon that though modernism has been employed in a wide international array of political and institutional contexts, it has not shaken off its associations with the socialist values of many of its early proponents. The fact that in Britain, Thatcherite conservatism was implicated with the traditionalist reaction against modernism further cements the deeply ingrained association of modernism with the left. There are also historiographical reasons for overlooking the way the Conservatives were implicated in British modernism. Until recently, writing about British modernism has mostly been polemical.Footnote 8 Those attacking modernism have tended to do so from a right-wing perspective, and have been only too ready to associate modernism's perceived failures with the failures of a state-led socialism.Footnote 9 On the other hand, defenders of modernism have argued, in the words of one historian, that ‘we need to be a bit more forgiving of our forebears’ passion to alleviate suffering’,Footnote 10 and have subsequently tended to focus either on the social commitment of individual architectsFootnote 11 or else on buildings for the welfare state such as schoolsFootnote 12 or public buildingsFootnote 13, and thus have tended to avoid the developer-led modernism of office blocks and shopping centres that occurred in central areas.
Peter Mandler's complaint that the history of post-war redevelopment had been based on a few celebrated but misleading examples such as Coventry no longer holds,Footnote 14 with much recent work usefully looking at the experience of less-well-known cities, and plans both realized and unrealized. Current historiography of 1960s town-centre redevelopment has tended to focus either on the ideas and culture of planners themselvesFootnote 15 or on the experience of individual cities or plans, and local government's role and aspirations.Footnote 16 This focus on individual localized case-studies contrasts to the much larger literature on the same period dealing with high-rise housing, the push towards prefabrication,Footnote 17 and residential urban renewalFootnote 18 where central government, and especially the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (MHLG), has from the beginning been seen as a central catalyst. The role played by central government is not just a lacuna in the subject of central area redevelopment. Because of the influence it exerted, historians of this period need a focus more weighted towards both national concerns and national politics. Guy Ortolano has recently shown how one early 1960s plan, by Fred Pooley for a new town in Buckinghamshire, was ‘part of a complex social vision’ meant to alleviate a sense of crisis brought about by the perceived consequences of affluence.Footnote 19 Ortolano's article usefully showed how plans were formulated in a way that responded to political issues. This article expands upon Ortolano's point that planning ideals and political ideology did not occur in separate spheres, by arguing that not only were the urban futures promulgated by planners informed by the political culture of the 1960s, but the flow of ideas went both ways, as the visions of planners were incorporated by the broader social visions of political parties, often functioning as political propaganda.
I
During the parliamentary term 1959–64, many radical ideas about the reconstruction of cities were appropriated from an avant garde town planning discourse by politicians, forming the basis of what was perceived at the time as a consensus for how to deal with cities. Ideas such as comprehensive redevelopment on a vast scale, the segregation of vehicular and pedestrian traffic, higher densities, virulently anti-suburban attitudes, and an almost unquestioned use of a modernist idiom were upheld as ideals. In a parliamentary speech on the subject of urban renewal in 1962 the Conservative MP Bill Deedes noted that a ‘whole range of organizations, have been turning their minds to a consideration of this central, major problem in recent months’. He went on to cite a number of documents about the subject, produced by both left- and right-wing organizations, from the Bow Group to Socialist Commentary.Footnote 20 Taken together, he argued, these ‘indicate the astonishing consensus of informed opinion that this matter represents a great social task’.Footnote 21 Citing a similar group of texts, a committee set up by the Civic Trust, an organization founded in 1957 by then minister of housing Duncan Sandys, also noted ‘a remarkable measure of agreement on the current problems of economic and physical planning’.Footnote 22 Both parties mined the same influential 1950s British planning examples, especially those of Coventry, Sheffield, and the London County Council (LCC), as models for what the city of the future should look like. Although this was rarely acknowledged, many of the concepts and terminology of redevelopment, such as ‘urban renewal’, came from the United States.Footnote 23 Pedestrianization was an obsession of the planners of the period, a theme much taken up by central government. Pedestrianization could be achieved through pedestrian precincts, as first set down by Alker Tripp in the early fortiesFootnote 24 or by the new ideas of vertical segregation as proposed by many planners during the early 1960s.Footnote 25 There was a new receptivity within both parties towards the ideas of modernist planners trained after the Second World War, rather than planners associated with the first generation of new towns and the Town and Country Planning Association, let alone any planner who could be characterized as traditionalist. The difference in the rhetoric of left and right was in how far radical transformations were to be achieved through public or private means.
The thirteen years of Conservative government from 1951 to 1964 had seen massive changes to the physical face of the country, although this was primarily directed towards the area of housing.Footnote 26 The 1951 manifesto had committed the Conservatives to building 300,000 new homes a year, a figure exceeded by Harold Macmillan as minister of housing. Unlike his predecessor on housing Aneurin Bevan (a disciple of Lewis Mumford), Macmillan displayed little curiosity about architectural aesthetics, and was criticized for being interested in quantity at the expense of quality.Footnote 27 Nevertheless, the single qualitative statement on architectural matters to be found in his diaries from this period deals with a trip to Sheffield and the gestating plans for the premier megastructural ‘streets in the sky’ estate Park Hill: ‘The architect (Womersley) seemed very good. Some new flats (on the hill) should be very good.’Footnote 28 Housing numbers remained an important electoral issue, with Alec Douglas-Home promising 400,000 new homes a year.Footnote 29 In the 1966 election, the Tory pledge went up to 500,000 new homes a year.Footnote 30 Looking back at his time as minister in 1987, Keith Joseph wrote, ‘I didn't really have a philosophy. I was just a “more” man. I used to go to bed at night counting the number of houses I'd destroyed and the number of planning approvals that had been given … Just more.’Footnote 31 Nevertheless, for the Conservative party house building did have an ideological basis as well as an electioneering one, showing the strong influence of Noel Skelton's idea of a ‘property owning democracy’ on the party leadership.Footnote 32 The other way in which the Conservative government had radically affected the built environment in Britain during these years was through the unleashing of a property boom, following the deregulation of building licences in 1954.Footnote 33 The controversial effect this had had on the skyline of London, and the enormous fortunes made by property developers would form an important backdrop for debates about inner-city redevelopment.
The renewed interest in positive activity in city centres (rather than a laissez faire approach which left it to property developers) can be seen as part of a switch in Conservative ideology, towards managing, rather than creating affluence – a physical manifestation, perhaps, of Macmillan's economic ‘New Approach’ and the ‘Modernization of Britain’ policy drive.Footnote 34 The Buchanan Report Traffic in towns (1963)Footnote 35 and the Parker Morris Committee report on housing standards Homes for today and tomorrow (1961), both by official advisory committees to the government, were two signs of a more dirigiste attempt to grapple with the qualitative elements of urban life in what was proclaimed as an age of affluence. Buchanan described a problem which had arisen ‘directly out of man's own ingenuity and growing affluence’.Footnote 36 Affluence was also the self-congratulatory foundation on which it was suggested housing ought to be built:
Since the end of the war, the country has undergone a social and economic revolution, and the pattern of living is still changing fast. There is full employment, a national health service, and the various social insurance benefits. In material terms people are better off than ever before … These changes in the way people live, the things which they own and use, and in their general level of prosperity … make it timely to re-examine the kind of homes we ought to be building, to ensure that they will be adequate to meet the newly emerging needs of the future.Footnote 37
There was a moment after the 1959 election when, as D. R. Thorpe puts it, ‘many areas of British life were being subjected to fierce scrutiny in the cause of improved efficiency’.Footnote 38 The Buchanan Report came out of the same moment which produced the Crowther report Fifteen to eighteen on the future of secondary education, the Newsom eport Half our future on secondary moderns, the Robbins report on Higher education, the Trend enquiry into the organization of the civil service, and, most infamously, the first Beeching report on railways.Footnote 39 Though by 1963, when the majority of these reports were released, the Profumo affair and the satire boom would highlight all that was antiquated and patrician about the Tories, these reports suggest an intellectually propulsive government, and one not fearful of promising significant state investment in bold projects. They were to form the basis for the party's modernizing and centrist 1964 manifesto Prosperity with a purpose, which promised to ‘apply the principles of the Buchanan Report to comprehensive campaigns of town replanning’.Footnote 40
The Bow Group'sFootnote 41 pamphlet Let our cities live (1960) was an early manifestation of the coming together of Conservative thinking and the ideas of radical planners. Its principal author was a twenty-seven-year-old businessman, Timothy Knight. Another author was the Architectural Association trained architect Brian Falk, who was later a director with the commercial architectural firm Covell Matthews & Partners, and author with the planner Jacqueline Tyrwhitt of a book on city planning.Footnote 42 A surveyor and a property developer were also involved. Mirroring an argument reminiscent of the influential town planner Thomas Sharp,Footnote 43 and concurrently being used by the Architectural Review,Footnote 44 planners such as those involved in HookFootnote 45 and CumbernauldFootnote 46 new towns, as well as in the Society for the Promotion of Urban Renewal,Footnote 47 the pamphlet stated that suburbia was an unintended consequence of Garden City ideals: ‘So suburbia spread around and between the cities, giving birth to suburban life, a curious phenomenon of the twentieth century so alien to Howard's ideals.’Footnote 48 The document is a proclamation of the need to reinvest in a romantic ideal of urban life, in a way that strongly echoes the types of historicizing arguments common at the time:
The image of the Big City as a creation of the ‘snorting steam engine’ belongs to the nineteenth century. It is our proposal that we should shake off this image of the conurbation as a Victorian horror. We must find a way of having conurbations without the conditions we associate with them. This is the challenge of the next decade and we believe that in order to succeed, planners first must accept conurbations as here to stay and … to grow; second they must concentrate on overall designs for the Big Cities allowing them to grow without impairing their efficiency.Footnote 49
Traffic was already seen as the ‘key to urban planning’, with the authors advocating an alternative to either ‘obliterating the city by a network of roads, flyovers, cloverleaf junctions, and multi-storey junctions’, or to banning traffic outright, which ‘would be as disastrous as cutting off the supply of blood to the brain, and just as impracticable’.Footnote 50 The motor-car was to be made ‘the servant and not the master of the city’, through segregation, fast inner-city roads, and improved commuter railway links. The pamphlet proposed much higher densities: ‘It should be the objective of all rehousing schemes to fit as many dwellings as possible in the available space’, although this would involve ‘building tall blocks of flats’; they also advised copying experiments by the LCC and in Scandinavian countries in ‘new forms of terrace and courtyard houses and flats’.Footnote 51 It would be possible to incorporate high density living into the Macmillanite vision of the affluent society:
Does this picture of high density city development instead of garden city sprawl entail a different kind of society? Can its social conditions be made acceptable in the light of our aspirations for an ever increasing standard of living? At first glance this may smack too much of Huxley's ‘Brave New World’, but if the varying needs of population and household structure are analysed it will be found that they are not incompatible with the developments we envisage.Footnote 52
The authors argued that ‘the spur to redevelopment will come from the private sector, and the planners would be able to use this growing activity to mould our towns and cities into modern shape’.Footnote 53 To make sure rebuilding was on a large enough scale they suggested a land pooling system to help with central redevelopment. The end result remained the modernizing one of ‘rebuilding our cities so that they can function properly’. Local authorities would achieve the desired aim of an efficient city that would act as the ‘foundation for an ever increasing British standard of living’,Footnote 54 through requiring developers to ‘incorporate in their schemes facilities which only indirectly benefit them such as basement car parking, subways, and elevated or segregated pedestrian walks’.Footnote 55
In 1960, the Civic Trust held a conference on the subject of ‘Rebuilding Cities’.Footnote 56 The conference resulted in the commissioning of a committee of politicians and planners, who published a pamphlet in 1962.Footnote 57 Politicians from both parties attended the conference, as well as a veritable who's who of modernist planners and architects.Footnote 58 The minister of housing Henry Brooke's opening address argued that ‘if only the centre could be made attractive the whole town might begin to move into new prosperity’.Footnote 59 As the summary of conclusions of the conference put it, this would involve rebuilding for the motor-age: ‘The street layout in town centres is often completely out of date and unsuited to the motor age. It may be desirable to separate pedestrians from road traffic by the provision of vehicle-free shopping areas, pedestrian bridges and high-level pavements.’Footnote 60
A further Conservative pamphlet was Change and challenge by a committee appointed by Rab Butler in March 1960, to ‘consider what should be the aims of town and country planning in an age of rising standards of living, increasing leisure and modern industrial development’.Footnote 61 It was headed by the MP Sir Colin Thornton-Kemsley (who was then a trustee of the Town and Country Planning Association), and involved several Tory MPs (including Enoch Powell until he resigned on becoming minister of health), industrialists, local government figures, and the academic geographer Professor Martin Wise. The pamphlet had a broader canvas than Let our cities live, being concerned more generally with national planning mechanisms, but it was still concerned with the new types of cities it was felt were needed to deal with traffic problems. It predicted universal car ownership as inevitable, but this was seen benignly as a ‘symbol of spreading prosperity’.Footnote 62 Cars, however, made old towns impracticable:
What has finally shattered the old scene, both in small towns and large ones, during the past generation or two has been the arrival of the universal motor-car – with its threat of delay, distraction and death. The same street pattern still exists but it is now filled with a tangle of buses, taxis, delivery vans, private cars, cycles and pedestrians, both stationary and moving (or at least wishing to), delaying, harassing, injuring and even killing each other.Footnote 63
The conclusion made from this analysis was that redevelopment would have to be carried out comprehensively, so as to achieve segregation of vehicles both through vertical and horizontal means. They held up Coventry city centre as an exemplar.Footnote 64 The authors advised that urban motorways would have ‘an essential part to play in moving motor traffic in big cities’. They cited the American William H. Whyte's The exploding metropolis as a warning of allowing American-style suburbanization.Footnote 65
According to Conservative MP Richard Nugent, who had served on the Change and challenge and the Civic Trust committees, giving architects a broad canvas to work on through comprehensive redevelopment would vindicate modern architecture:
When one criticises architects for putting up hideous offices, and one attacks modern architecture in general, one should remember that, if architects are given a chance in a large enough area to use modern styles, materials and engineering, they can not only achieve excellent modern accommodation but the beauty of exciting lines, freshness and something which puts character into the life of a town. But the first essential is that they be given a large enough area in which to do it.Footnote 66
Nugent had also been chairman of the committee on London roads, which had argued that ‘We should like to see more schemes for keeping pedestrians and road traffic apart … we hope that similar ideas (the Barbican and the South Bank with upper level walk-ways, etc.) will be considered whenever large scale redevelopment in congested areas takes place.’Footnote 67
As minister of transport, Ernest Marples was another important Conservative promoting urban renewal during this period. He had made his name as Macmillan's parliamentary secretary during the housing push of the early fifties. He had a background in the construction industry, which was a cause of embarrassment and charges of conflict of interest, especially after the contract for the Hammersmith flyover was given to Marples Ridgeway.Footnote 68 Many Conservatives had similar connections with the construction industry and other interested parties, and the promotion of large-scale, state-led infrastructural projects provided business for these sectional interests. The Buchanan Report was commissioned by Marples after a concerted effort to deal with what he described as the ‘traffic thrombosis in the heart of London’Footnote 69 through a mixture of restrictive methods such as the first appearance of yellow lines and parking meters in Britain, and engineering projects such as the Hyde Park Underpass.Footnote 70
Keith Joseph was minister of housing and local government from 1962 until 1964. Though now best known for his role in the intellectual creation of Thatcherism, he was recognized at the time as one of the dynamic and modernizing ‘professional executives,’Footnote 71 along with figures such as Marples and Rippon, in the government. He had been a director of the construction firm Bovis, which his father had run. He would later be embarrassed by his time at MHLG, congratulating a new minister in the 1980s with the words: ‘Well done. You'll find lots of problems in your new job. I caused many of them.’Footnote 72 But at the time he boasted, in language reminiscent of the Architectural Review or a firm such as Chamberlin, Powell, and Bon, that his ‘vision’ was ‘to reconcile the town and its traffic, and create within the years to come, out of the squalor and shapelessness of so much of the past, a new 20th century urbanity worthy of the best in our history’.Footnote 73
People and cities, the report of a 1963 conference organized by the British Road Federation in association with the Town Planning Institute, to discuss the Buchanan Report, presents an opportunity of hearing discussions between planners, Conservative politicians, and developers. The planners who gave talks were amongst the most radical then practising: Walter Bor (ex-LCC, chief planner at Liverpool), Arthur Ling (Donald Gibson's successor as chief architect and planning officer at Coventry, later planner of Runcorn new town), Wilfred Burns (ex-deputy at Coventry, chief planner at Newcastle), and Hugh Wilson (chief architect and planning officer of Cumbernauld). These men were undoubtedly in the avant garde of their profession; nevertheless, their language and rhetoric was far less colourful than the statements made by the other guests.
Marples opened the conference with the extraordinary declaration: ‘I believe that the old Roman concept of a road, a pavement and a building – the way we have been building for over a thousand years – is now outdated.’Footnote 74 Sir Geoffrey CrowtherFootnote 75 saw the Buchanan Report as offering a separate path of development to Americanization: ‘unless we pay particular attention to [the Buchanan Report] it is the American state of affairs that we shall slip into’. He used a narrative of extreme crisis to argue for denser anti-suburban cities:
After all, we are not planning for Utopia; we are planning for the Black Hole of Calcutta. We must go upwards; we must stand on each others shoulders; we must try to dis-invent suburbia; we must try to find means of persuading people to abandon the habits of a century and come back to living, if not exactly over the shop, at least in the same part of town as the place where they do their work.’Footnote 76
The property developer Leslie Sydney Marler, who admitted that the public image of his profession ‘came out somewhere half way between Miss Keeler and Mr. Rachman,’Footnote 77 called for developers to be given the opportunity of comprehensively redeveloping areas on a vast scale. His speech was certainly brash, but it was also notably well informed about the planning philosophy of the period. He thanked architectural critic and teacher Robert Furneaux Jordan, planner Walter Bor, and LCC traffic planner Leslie Lane for informing his ideas. His vision was ‘the eighteenth-century idea [he had already mentioned Thomas Cubitt and the Grosvenor Estate] multiplied say, five times vertically but also five times laterally’. He illustrated his lecture with a scheme for three tower-blocks in Knightsbridge, prepared in conjunction with the LCC, which is one of the more grandiose schemes of the period. It was on a parcel of land that he boasted was equivalent to Trafalgar Square. Each of the three blocks, the tallest of which is forty storeys high, were to rise out of a podium roof, which cars would access via a ramp. Also included was a ‘pedestrian only shopping piazza’. He wished it had been bigger ‘but of course this, amongst other things, would involve the destruction of Harrods, and Harrods is Harrods; frankly, I have not got the nerves to suggest it’. Without working on such a vast scale, individual tall buildings would remain ‘twentieth-century buildings on nineteenth-century sites’.Footnote 78 This was an argument often used in planning circles.Footnote 79 He went on to contrast the ability of private enterprise to repair the war damage of the city of London ‘not always wisely … but repaired they have been’, with the Corporation of London failure in doing anything to the ‘vast acreage … of desolation round Barbican’.Footnote 80
The planner Arthur Ling, who was politically on the far left, summed up the conference in a way that highlights the fact that the Conservatives had taken much from the modernist project, but not its politics: ‘One thing has struck me in this conference is the few times that people have been mentioned, although the title is “People and Cities”. We have heard about planning for traffic, we have heard about planning for profit, but we have not heard enough about planning for people.’Footnote 81 Modernist architecture was nevertheless central to the self-presentation of the Conservative party in this period, acting as a Janus-face with the attributes of the country house, the grouse moor, or the golf course more conventionally associated with the Tories. What John Gold calls the ‘allure of scale’Footnote 82 was a central element of what Tories took from modernism, as modernist planning would provide ever-greater sites for profitable redevelopment. The engagement with modernism went further than this though, as it was used to give form to the future envisioned by the Conservatives through the mantras of prosperity and affluence. Modernism, despite its early connection with the socialism of the Bauhaus, is clearly as amenable to as broad a range of political symbolic meanings as any other style of architecture. As Colin Rowe put it: ‘Disraeli “caught the Whigs bathing and stole their clothes”; and something of the same kind has happened in the recent history of architecture, with the result that the symbolic trophies of an epoch of reform are now paraded by all parties alike.’Footnote 83
II
As Lawrence Black has argued, the Labour party was divided between modernizing and traditionalist impulses in the fifties, although as in the Conservative party reforming and modernizing ideas were gaining ground after the 1959 election.Footnote 84 Amongst the Labour party the results of the relative return to free market development unleashed by the Conservatives in the fifties, most visibly in the office building boom in the City of London, was widely contrasted with what was seen as the much more successful development by the more powerful and architecturally radical local authorities, especially Sheffield, Coventry, and the LCC. See for example Roy Jenkins in The Labour case:
There have been very few buildings of architectural distinction erected in Britain since the war, but those that exist are mostly in the public sector … Compare the L.C. C. housing project at Roehampton, which is a positive addition to the skyline of London, with any private residential scheme, for houses or flats, which has been envisaged.Footnote 85
Similarly, Anthony Crosland complained about a return under Conservative policy to private development:
Greedy men, abetted by a complacent Government, are prowling over Britain and devastating it… Excited by speculative gain, the property developers furiously rebuild the urban centres with unplanned and aesthetically tawdry office-blocks; so our cities become the just objects of world-wide ridicule for their architectural mediocrity, commercial vulgarity, and lack of civic pride. Encouraged by Tory policy, the private builder neglects working-class housing and builds for the middle classes; so millions still live in oppressive and overcrowded conditions, while green-tiled Tudor bungalows spread further into the countryside. The Conservatives have condoned the re-creation of all of the worst speculative horrors of the inter-war years, which in the glow of post-war optimism we thought were never going to be repeated.Footnote 86
He saw the more radical architectural work of the fifties as giving the blueprint for ‘a programme for reform in the 1960s’:
Under the lead of the LCC, Sheffield, and Coventry, there is now perhaps a slight improvement in municipal architecture and town planning … The New Barbican will be the most ambitious and distinguished piece of comprehensive redevelopment since Nash. The universities and the War Office, Liverpool and the City of London, are all recent converts to mid-twentieth-century ideas.Footnote 87
Crosland advocated large-scale comprehensive redevelopment to achieve cities ready for the motor-car:
Piecemeal redevelopment, block by block, may allow minor road-widening and some increase in off-street parking. But it freezes the existing road pattern, which in Britain is usually quite unsuited to the needs of the motor age. A comprehensive redevelopment would always include a major change in the road pattern and a complete separation of pedestrians and motor traffic in selected areas.Footnote 88
He was passionately anti-suburban, lamenting, in language appropriated from Ian Nairn's articles in the Architectural Review,Footnote 89 ‘the relentless invasion of the countryside by “Subtopia” and the gradual obliteration of the distinction between town and country’.Footnote 90 He advised building high to counter this: ‘Personally I should be prepared … to pay any subsidy to encourage more high buildings in cities in the interests of preserving the countryside – whatever the Sunday Express said about government waste, or the Economist about the “distortion” of resources’.’Footnote 91 He criticized the fact that vast super high-density, high-rise schemes such as the Barbican and High Paddington had not been built.Footnote 92
The Labour party policy statement Leisure for living had similarly argued that ‘Public indifference, private avarice, and, in some places, municipal ignorance are largely responsible for the growth of what has been nicknamed “Subtopia”.’Footnote 93 The pamphlet is remarkable for the level of its approval of modernist architecture, even praising ‘Anti-Ugly Action’, a group of students from the Royal College of Art who demonstrated in front of new traditionalist buildings. Also held up were the ‘courageous and forward-looking’ buildings by local authorities such as the LCC's Lansbury and Roehampton estates, Harlow, Peterlee, and Stevenage new towns, Churchill College Cambridge (‘a satisfactorily contemporary building’), Basil Spence's Coventry Cathedral, and the schools built by ‘progressive local education authorities’.Footnote 94 Also cited was the TUC headquarters Congress House, of which it was boasted that it was ‘uncompromisingly of the present age’.Footnote 95
Referencing the American economist John Galbraith's The affluent society, Labour party leader Hugh Gaitskell argued in 1962 that ‘a country gets the architecture it deserves’, and the last decade had been one characterized by ‘private wealth and public squalor’.Footnote 96 Rebuilding in the City of London had been ‘a national monument to mediocrity, the tomb of good taste, the greatest missed opportunity of the century’. He warned that ‘subtopia swallows more and more of the countryside’, and suburbia involved ‘the squandering of social life, a rubble of people and talent and leisure’. Exceptions included the ‘really fine examples of good development such as Coventry’ and the ‘imaginative, exciting comprehensive plans of Birmingham and Newcastle’. He promised comprehensive ‘positive planning, in which decisions are taken by those responsible about the shape that the whole life of a town should take’. He advocated a policy of ‘building high’ as well as further new towns to counter ‘the red brick rash and the suburban sprawl with all the congestion that follows’. Preservation was also important, so as to achieve for future generations ‘fine buildings, both ancient and modern, and green fields’. This would be expensive, but the community must be prepared ‘to pay for a civilised way of life’.
The 1964 Labour manifesto famously promised ‘A New Britain – mobilising the resources of technology under a national plan; harnessing our national wealth in brains, our genius for scientific invention and medical discovery; reversing the decline of the thirteen wasted years.’Footnote 97 Recreating cities for the motor-age in line with the Buchanan Report would be a central part of this:
Nowhere is planning more urgently needed than in our transport system. The tragedy of lives lost and maimed; growing discomfort and delays in the journey to work … the chaos and loss of amenity in our towns and cities – these are only some of the unsolved problems of the new motor age … Urgent attention will be given to the proposals in the Buchanan Report and to the development of new roads capable of diverting through traffic from town centres.Footnote 98
Following the unpopularity of the first Beeching Report, which closed down many rural railway lines in favour of an expanded motorway system, there was some attempt by the Labour party to present themselves as the party of public transport.Footnote 99 Nevertheless, universal car ownership was regularly presented as an egalitarian and democratic aim:
Higher living standards almost automatically have a socially equalizing effect. There is far less keenly felt difference between a rich man in a Cadillac and an ordinary man in a Chevrolet than between a rich man in any sort of a car and a poor man whom he sweeps into the ditch as he drives along the dirt roads of a subsistence level country.Footnote 100
For Tony Benn, ‘When we talk about the scientific revolution at political meetings, the vision conjured up in the minds of most of those who come to listen is of a car, or a new car, or a faster car, of their very own.’Footnote 101 Furthermore, restricting car usage or ownership was politically difficult in the early 1960s due to the risk of losing the votes of the 750,000 people working in the industry.Footnote 102
The Labour party directly produced two pamphlets on the subject of urban renewal in 1961.Footnote 103Signposts for the sixties argued that rebuilding ‘our cities so that they will be a source of pride’ could only be achieved through planning which was ‘bold, comprehensive and co-ordinated at the centre’.Footnote 104 The Fabian Society also produced a number of policy documents throughout the period dealing with questions of town planning.Footnote 105 Also worthy of note was Socialist Commentary's The face of Britain,Footnote 106 written by the sociologist Peter Willmott (joint author of Family and kinship in East London), the geographer Peter Hall, then engaged in writing a book imagining a fully motorized London,Footnote 107 and Malcolm MacEwan (the formerly communist editor of the Architect's Journal and the RIBA JournalFootnote 108).
During the period 1959–64, both parties appropriated a constellation of ideas from radical planners. A style of modernizing rhetoric was rife, practically unquestioned, and repetitively stated ad nauseam. In this, the period conforms to what Christopher Booker characterized as a pervasive culture of ‘neophilia’,Footnote 109 and Raphael Samuel argues was a ruling ideology that was ‘forward-looking and progressive’.Footnote 110 On the surface, whoever won the 1964 election, the outcome would be Buttskellite city centres, remoulded in the aspect of something like Coventry – a nation of shopping precincts. Nevertheless, consensus only went so far as these ideas were used to clothe different political agendas. The main difference in rhetoric was in how these transformations were going to be financed. The Conservatives promised a new prosperity through large-scale infrastructural projects and planning that would help to unleash private development, whilst the Labour party argued that the work of more interventionist public authorities provided a blueprint for the future development of cities.
III
It was not just in the realm of rhetoric that radical ideas were gaining ground, but, more seminally, in the machinery of central government itself. Although MHLG was only one of the departments to have a role in inner-city redevelopment, this section focuses on one aspect of MHLG's advocacy of modernist planning through the Urban Planning Group. In 1961, MHLG had set up this group to ‘guide and advise local authorities’.Footnote 111 An early report on the group wrote that it was partly set up in response to the rapid increase of central area redevelopment schemes in preparation, as well as to ‘a spate of outside activity and publications on urban renewal’, listing the Civic Trust conference, Let our cities live, Change and challenge, and the Socialist Commentary report.Footnote 112 The group comprised four architect-planners (including the head of the group, F. H. LittlerFootnote 113), an engineer-planner, a highway engineer, a research officer, and a traffic planner. On the administration side were an assistant secretary and a principal.Footnote 114 Unlike the Planning Advisory Group,Footnote 115 another group set up by MHLG, the urban planning group was not composed of well-known planners. One of the group's first actions had been to send a letter to all the heads of local authority planning branches, so as to accumulate ‘information about town centre schemes in various stages of preparation up and down the country’.Footnote 116 They created an exhibition, which was not open to the public but was intended for ‘the benefit of local authority councillors and officers visiting Whitehall’.Footnote 117
One of their roles was to provide ‘specific advice on particular schemes’.Footnote 118 They were interested in ‘schemes which tackle renewal in a progressive and unconventional manner’.Footnote 119 In meetings with planning departments, planners who were ‘very conscious of the traffic problems in the centre’, such as Norwich's H. C. Rowley, were asked by Littler to collaborate on the department's study of central area redevelopment.Footnote 120 Others, such as Berkshire's county planning officer, were given the suggestion ‘that it was undesirable to proceed … until soundly based replanning proposals were worked out over the central area at large’.Footnote 121 To guide them in the right direction, ‘The Newcastle approach of Burns was mentioned’, and they were sent off promising that they intended ‘to do some more thinking about this important aspect of planning’.Footnote 122 Occasionally, a planner would have to be reined back, such as with the ‘starry-eyed approach’ of Graeme Shankland (Liverpool's planning consultant), who advised an inner-city motorway for which government would have to contribute a 75 per cent share of funding. There was a recognition that although they had advocated Liverpool's grand thinking, financial constraints would be necessary:
we should maintain contact with Liverpool and not leave them too long to their own devices to produce a gold-plated scheme which might prove to be a considerable embarrassment to Departments. I can see that this might well happen since we have been constantly pressing on Liverpool the need to do something adequate and really saying that in the past they have not measured up to their opportunities. With a new and enthusiastic consultant … I think there is some possibility that if we do not keep track of the situation the Departments may find themselves presented with very expensive proposals.Footnote 123
The group's main function was authoring reports giving advice to local authorities on town planning issues. They were to be ‘the main medium for giving guidance to planning authorities on various urban planning matters'.Footnote 124 They include Town centres: approach to renewal (1962), Residential areas: higher densities (1962), Town centres: cost and control of redevelopment (1963); Town centres: current practice (1963), Development plan maps (1964), and Parking in town centres (1965). These set out a number of objectives for the replanning of towns and cities, under the banner of the term ‘Urban Renewal’ – ‘a new phrase for an age old process’ – which propounded the recognizable set of ideas, where ‘under the rapid social and technological changes more conscious action is needed to guide renewal processes’.Footnote 125 They were influenced by similar bulletins issued by the US federal government,Footnote 126 and by the publications of the Ministry of Education's building branch.Footnote 127 They foreshadow the interests of the Buchanan Report, where the ‘primary objective must be to sort out conflicting types of traffic and provide adequately for each – in particular to separate pedestrians and vehicles so that both can move freely and safely’.Footnote 128 They lamented that some
town centres are in little better physical shape than the slums which surround them … Old shops become unsuitable for modern retailing methods or too small for the number of customers. Old office buildings cannot be adapted to modern business methods. Old town halls cannot hold the staff needed to deal with the wide range of local government services. The components of the old town centre become outgrown and out of date.Footnote 129
Central to the vision was that private and public co-operation would be needed to achieve all this: ‘Town centre redevelopment is essentially a matter for co-operation between local government and private enterprise, and the bulletin has advice on how to secure this.’Footnote 130 John Delafons, who was a principal civil servant in the department at the time, argues that they also ‘reflected the growing concern about the impact of redevelopment on historic town centres’.Footnote 131
A proposed fictional exemplar of a ‘town map’ shows all of the familiar tropes of the period. Slums, noxious industry, and unsightly buildings were to be swept away, and, even in this imagined town, the town hall is deemed obsolete and inadequate for modern needs. Replacing this generic Victorian city was to be an archetypal modern one, with its central pedestrian precinct and shopping area, encircled by a bus and service road. Adjoining this central core is a ring of development for parking, offices, high-density housing (at the anti-suburban density of 100 persons per acre), and civic and entertainment zones. Encircling the whole inner area is an urban motorway in a loop.Footnote 132 Here was a replicable vision for a Macmillanite urban utopia. In line with Conservative party rhetoric at the time, the reports argued that renewal ‘cannot be carried through without private enterprise’.Footnote 133 Local authority involvement would be limited to unifying land ownership through the creation of comprehensive development areas, and in providing planning expertise that would ‘open up new opportunities for profitable redevelopment’.Footnote 134
The reports were anti-suburban, not just in their upholding of higher densities and the way they advertised such projects as Cumbernauld, the Alton Estate, or Gleedless Valley, but also in the belief that ‘Redevelopment gives an opportunity to attract people back into the centre to live, and there are signs that people would like to live there, given good conditions. This adds vitality to the centre.’Footnote 135 In Planning bulletin no. 4, Town centres: current practice, we find all the usual suspects of fifties urbanism: Harlow, Stevenage, Sheffield, Cumbernauld, and Coventry town centres. Even the then unbuilt megastructural project, Shankland's St John's Precinct in Liverpool,Footnote 136 is included and commended for showing the possibility of redevelopment ‘planned as essentially one great building in which all the different uses are inter-related and form part of the same architectural concept’.Footnote 137 This was a project at the forefront of planning thought, and was praised in 1963 by Peter Hall as displaying a ‘sophistication of the principle’ of vertical segregation.Footnote 138 It was also, perhaps better explaining its inclusion, the result of a private–public partnership between Liverpool's Conservative controlled city council and Ravenseft Properties.
The reports effectively gave the ministerial green light to such specialist, even avant garde, town planning concepts as comprehensive redevelopment, urban renewal, the need for higher densities, and pedestrian segregation. It sent a clear message to local authorities that this kind of language, both visual and conceptual, was the key to ministerial approval – which might help to explain the homogeneity in the plans of the following period. The bulletins are visually presented in the style commonly used for modernist plans of the 1960s, using bold colours, modern typography, and illustrations in the style of the influential architectural illustrator Gordon Cullen. The bulletins were presented with a succinct clarity, so that the effect must have been, as the Spectator put it, that even ‘the dimmest town councillors must feel, as they read the Ministries' illustrated bulletin, that they ought to have thought of this before’.Footnote 139 T. H. Carline's plan for the town centre of Folkestone directly proclaims the influence: ‘We were at one with the recommendations which the Ministry of Housing and Local Government were making to local authorities. We therefore tried to follow the general pattern which was being suggested in those Planning Bulletins which had been published at that time.’Footnote 140 Liverpool's city centre plan was also able to ‘embody much of the most recent professional and administrative thought’ as outlined in the bulletins.Footnote 141
In 1963, to deal with the Buchanan Report, the group was expanded to become the Joint Urban Planning Group (JUPG), now serving both MHLG and the Ministry of Transport, as well as the Scottish development department.Footnote 142 It had been decided early. At ‘our first talk about the Buchanan Report it was agreed that our two Departments would need to set up a joint unit to grapple with the impact of the report on the problems of urban planning’.Footnote 143 The group was to be ‘responsible for developing the techniques required for implementing the concepts embodied in the Buchanan Report and for other aspects of urban planning’.Footnote 144 However, the group would become increasingly involved in putting a brake on radical planning rather than stimulating it. This was certainly how Sharp advocated they should proceed with reference to Buchanan:
I got the impression from Mr Buchanan that he thinks that so long as he and his group continue with the sort of study he has been making it doesn't much matter what we do. His notion seemed to be that L.as. [local authorities] could take his report(s) and carry on from there. I would have thought he could not be more mistaken: that on the question: So, what do we do? The two Departments have got to bring the report(s) down to earth, to cost, practicability, priorities; and that on this there is all the way to go.Footnote 145
As will be seen, this would be the focus of the Group's activities in the coming years.
JUPG were only one of the elements impacting the way that inner-city areas were redeveloped, and their advice was enacted in various ways in local contexts, under the direction of different local authorities, planners, and financial pressures. British cities approached the redevelopment of their central areas with a multitude of locally orientated ambitions, as recent histories have shown. Other departments such as the Ministry of Transport and the Board of Trade, as well as non-governmental agencies such as the road lobby, also exerted influence on development. Nevertheless, the forcefulness with which a radical modernist agenda was pressed by MHLG in the early 1960s is striking. Looking at the advice given by the urban planning group can help to give a context for the homogeneity in the presentation of local authority plans in the early 1960s. JUPG were not particularly innovative in the planning ideas they propounded. Nevertheless, the fictionalized ‘Town Map’ appears to have been used as a blueprint, and tropes such as the pedestrian precinct and the motorway ring road would often be recycled as clichés in the plans written over the decade. As Alan Bennett parodied it in 1967,
How many times in the last ten years has one seen the same drawing: that spacious sun-baked piazza, the motor-cars tucked vaguely away somewhere, those fine flourishing trees, those outdoor restaurants, the whole thronged with Precinct People, a race of tall, long-headed men. Municipal Masai, who lounge about every architect's drawing in a languor presumably induced by the commodiousness of their surroundings. I wonder how many local councils have been gulled into demolishing their town centres by such drawing-board dreams.Footnote 146
IV
When Richard Crossman, MP for Coventry East, succeeded Keith Joseph as minister of housing, his first policy statement argued that ‘I want to emphasise that the rebuilding of old towns will become an increasingly important preoccupation of this Ministry.’Footnote 147 He was greeted by the planning profession enthusiastically; as Percy Johnson Marshall put it after hearing Crossman's inaugural lecture to the Town Planning Institute, ‘At last, it seemed to me, we had a politician in Parliament who understood our problems; and this made me feel really extraordinarily exhilarated.’Footnote 148 Although Crossman's diaries show mounting doubts, he was seen from outside as an enthusiastic supporter of Cumbernauld style planning, with the Sunday Times joking, ‘It's not surprising that Cumbernauld and Crossman should get on well together. They have similar personalities and similar prejudices. Both are brilliant, handsome and according to their critics, uncomfortable to live with.’Footnote 149
The obvious difference between the rhetoric of the two parties during the parliamentary term of 1959–64 had been in how redevelopment would be financed, with the Conservatives unsurprisingly giving more focus to the role of private development. Despite this maintained contradistinction between the two parties, within nine days of being appointed Labour's minister of housing and local government, Richard Crossman
went to dinner … to meet [Harry] Hyams, the millionaire director of Wimpy and a property magnate who Arnold [Goodman] thought was a possible adviser on housing or director of the housing drive … It was clear after we had discussed things for a long time that he was prepared with his million pounds in the bank, his house full of Rembrandts and Picassos, to try Labour politics as an extra.Footnote 150
The property developer, one of the millionaires who had become rich from the abolition of Building Licences in 1954,Footnote 151 behind the infamous development of Centre Point would become Crossman's adviser. Crossman would come to feel that, at least in terms of preservation, ‘local authorities are far worse than private developers. They will often destroy buildings and leave a huge open space for years afterwards because they have planned things so badly.’Footnote 152 As John Delafons argues in a discussion of the changeover from Joseph to Crossman, ‘it is a feature of the British political process that a new administration does not automatically jettison all its predecessor's policies and initiatives’.Footnote 153 The work of the Joint Urban Planning Group was easily co-opted by Wilson's ‘modernization’ agenda. Planning bulletin no. 1 was republished verbatim into 1965, down to the Tory ministerial introductions and advice on securing private enterprise, suggesting the continuity of approach between the two administrations.
One important thing linking the two parties in the period of 1959–64 had been that, whether it was in the spirit of Anthony Crosland's Future of socialism or of Macmillan's affluent society, there was a foundational ideological belief behind the planning philosophy that continuous economic growth would provide the basis for uninterrupted social progress. When the Buchanan Report had posed the question ‘how bold can we afford to be?’ the answer was that,
This is really a matter of faith in our own future as a nation. If we believe we have a great future then we must also believe that the standard of living will sweep steadily up, overriding the ephemeral fluctuations of economic life. The long-term view must surely be optimistic, a belief that we shall have the resources to remold our environment to our liking.Footnote 154
Such rhetoric echoed through the radical plans produced in local authority planning offices in the early 1960s. In his 1963 plan for Newcastle, Wilfred Burns argued as if economic progress was an assured fact just because it was part of government policy: ‘The national proposals for increasing prosperity give greatly added weight to proposals which aim at improving the standard of environment within the foreseeable future for a large number of people living in outworn or unsatisfactory parts of the City.’Footnote 155 Graeme Shankland's plan for central Liverpool was also based upon optimistic predictions of a steadily improving future of growing affluence:
People will have more free time … The population of the city region is expected to increase by 400,000 people by 1981. Rising incomes will give most people greater spending power and the growth of education could well lead to increases in intellectual and artistic pursuits.Footnote 156
As the decade progressed, such confidence began to appear increasingly naïve – with Crossman distancing himself from the more radical proposals of the Buchanan Report:
We have to find ways and means of making life in towns tolerable in traffic terms. I venture to say – speaking as a practical politician – that brilliant as the Buchanan Report was, it was a demonstration that the wholly desirable is financially impossible. Any politician who studies its implications has to face the fact that if this is the minimum we are not going to get it.Footnote 157
Buchanan would use his plan for Cardiff to warn of the ‘great difficulties’ that would result from the government's pronouncements, such as the national planFootnote 158 and MOT circular 8/65,Footnote 159 which did not present ‘a very optimistic outlook’, warning as they did of government's reluctance to provide significant investment for redevelopment.Footnote 160 When Minister of Transport Barbara Castle met Buchanan (‘a dedicated, rather shy person’ as she described him) for lunch in 1966, she found that he could not grasp the blunt fact that ‘one just can't find the money for his schemes’.Footnote 161 With government also financing a massive increase in the building of council houses, as well as the Mark II New Towns, public money for inner-city redevelopment was in short supply.
Given this context, it is unsurprising that MHLG's focus on town planning became less likely to deal with sweeping changes, and more likely to look towards conservation or rehabilitation. Even before the election there was a realization within JUPG that ‘it was unlikely that any major Buchanan-type road programmes could be put into effect [in the next ten to fifteen years] and yet the Government had to show that the problems involved are being tackled urgently’.Footnote 162 Two JUPG studies, both of which were initiated before the election, are determinedly unvisionary. A study of Deeplish, an area of Rochdale, suggested rehabilitation rather than renewal, with ‘a modest level of investment’ at least in the intervening period before renewal could be enacted.Footnote 163 This was despite what Crossman described as the ‘primitive, dismal life in Deeplish’.Footnote 164 The Reading traffic study, which started out with the objective of developing ‘the application of Buchanan concepts of primary road networks and environmental areas to towns as a whole’,Footnote 165 ended up, through the financial ‘need to avoid major works’, suggesting little more visionary than a one-way system and a number of traffic light interchanges.Footnote 166
The first plan to be released that included an integrated land use and traffic plan was for the city of Leicester.Footnote 167 Headed by Konrad Smigielski, the plan was an overblown version of the kind of tropes found in the Planning bulletin no. 1 map: it suggested pedestrianizing the entire centre, apart from electric rickshaw taxis, and encircling it with an inner-city motorway with several ‘traffic architecture’ style transport interchanges, composed of underground train-line, a monorail, eight floors of car-parking, and a helipad on top. JUPG, who made a report on the plan, were sceptical: ‘It is extremely doubtful if the concept as propounded is tenable, particularly as regards the interchange car parks.’Footnote 168 They saw it as having been ‘prepared more for publicity purposes than as a technical document’,Footnote 169 and were especially damning about its financial viability: ‘In the present financial climate it seems hardly realistic to plan for an expenditure of £3·2 million per annum over the next ten years in a town with a population of 273,000; the present rateable income of Leicester is £5·7 million.’Footnote 170 A benefit of the Leicester plan was to make JUPG think more seriously about public transport: ‘The Leicester planners let their fancy roam and suggested a monorail, different types of taxi and a re-arranged bus service. But the essential point is that even on this plan – which must be regarded as grossly over-estimating the amount of capital Leicester can expect over the foreseeable future – public transport was still needed on a substantial scale.’Footnote 171 For Leicester, JUPG advocated a public transport solution, and a type of rhetoric that had been largely absent from discussions about traffic in the early 1960s finally reached the agenda: ‘A public transport solution would, incidentally, give a better service to the young, the old and many of the disabled. It must seriously be doubted whether a town which provides badly for these substantial groups can be called really civilised.’Footnote 172
Leicester may be an extreme case, but the experience of having to rein back the more radical aspects of plans, due to government inability to finance schemes, was typical. Take for example Haringey's three-dimensional scheme for Wood Green, presented to MHLG in 1966. It received short shrift:
Because of the present economic situation the Government is restricting capital expenditure on central area redevelopment schemes of this kind. The Ministry officers have criticised the scheme as being too ‘elaborate’ and are not prepared at this stage to indicate that a pedestrian deck system would be approved. They have pointed out there may be difficulties in financing the deck structure where government grants are concerned.Footnote 173
With central government backing out, it was left to local authorities to find the money through the kind of private–public partnership that had been advocated by the Conservative government before the election, as indeed Haringey did, carrying the scheme out in partnership with Electricity Supply Nominees from 1969.Footnote 174
The kind of language used from 1959 to 1964 advocating the radical renewal of cities did not totally disappear from political discourse as the decade progressed, but what did evaporate was the confidence about what could be achieved. A striking example of the loss of confidence can be found in the 1966 Labour party manifesto in which Harold Wilson continued the themes of 1964:
The Britain we want has yet to be built. Many of our cities and towns are bursting at the seams with growing populations. Those spawned by the industrial revolution grew without vision or plan. They are utterly inadequate to the needs of today. But whether planned or unplanned, all our towns are choked with traffic, and their population overspill threatens the unspoiled countryside around.Footnote 175
However, there was less economic confidence that this could be achieved, and the spirit of 1959–64 was beginning to appear wildly over optimistic:
In their pre-election boom the Conservatives gave the impression that money, resources and skilled labour were available to meet any and all of these demands simultaneously. It is now plain that the grandiose plans they announced were uncosted and mutually inconsistent. The industries concerned – building and civil engineering – cannot expand without limit when other demands of the economy are taken into account. Although their efficiency is being improved and their output increased, demands will outstrip resources for years ahead and there will be a constant shortage of skilled labour. Moreover, the resources available are strictly limited. That is why, in this crucial field of physical reconstruction, priorities must be clearly defined and strongly enforced.Footnote 176
The high-water mark of confidence in a modernized environment had already been passed by the mid-1960s, and a more pragmatic and conservationist ethic was beginning to find favour. From the perspective of central government, this switch was initially the result of the need for financial stringency rather than because of a significant ideological switch against the tenets of modernism. The Labour party was forced to backpedal from the ambitions of the early 1960s, and, ironically considering their rhetoric in the early 1960s, presided over many inner-city schemes completed by the kind of public–private partnerships that had been advocated and developed under the Conservative party. A focus on the role of central government therefore adds to our understanding of the ‘collapse’ of urban modernism in the 1960s. Historians have tended to focus on the public and cultural reaction against large-scale renewal, often told through high-profile examples from the late 1960s and early 1970s such as Covent Garden, the London motorway box, and the collapse of Ronan Point.Footnote 177 Looking at the period through the lens of central government, however, the loss of confidence in large-scale renewal, and a movement towards a more conservationist ethic, was already under way by the mid-1960s. This was not initially or primarily due to a reaction against the tenets of modernism, although perhaps it developed in tandem with such a reaction, but came about because of a realization that government could not afford to provide funds for such projects in the darkening economic climate.
This article has made three arguments. First, that central government, through the vocal advocacy of both politicians and civil servants, played a formative role in the adoption of radical modernist ideas in inner-city urban renewal. Second, it is common to associate the modernist architecture of the 1960s with leftist politics, but in the 1960s the radical ideas that proposed the reshaping of cities were being promoted by the Conservative party as much as by Labour. In the years running up to the 1964 general election both Labour and the Conservatives were appropriating the visual imagery of modernist planners, accommodating them to their broader ideological visions. The contradistinction between the parties was in how these transformations would be funded, with the Conservatives unsurprisingly advocating a larger role for private development. Finally, it has been argued that following their 1964 election victory, the Labour party were unable to realize the ambitions of directly funding large-scale renewal in a darkening economic climate. Faced with this inability, central government scaled back its planning ambitions and began to turn towards a more conservationist ethic, whilst also, paradoxically considering earlier Labour rhetoric, continuing to preside over the kind of public–private partnerships that had been central to the Conservative approach.Footnote 178
The way that central government approached town centre redevelopment in the early 1960s displays the political culture in microcosm, with visions of large-scale modernization based on an ill-founded economic optimism. In this, the rebuilding of British inner cities ought to be seen not just as something that played out in isolated local contexts, or as the result of a purely architectural discourse, but also as part of a larger history. The physical planning of British cities shares much with the 1960s planning moment generally, as it has been described by Glen O'Hara, relying as it did on the presumed continuation of an economic golden age, which in the end was unsustainable.Footnote 179
