Nothing Is Too Good For Ordinary People

But these projects catered for the middle classes. It took a progressive aristocrat, the ninth Earl De La Warr, to introduce the benefits of Modern architecture to the wider community. He held a competition to build a ‘modern’ pavilion in the south coast resort of Bexhill-on-Sea. The competition was won by the German Erich Mendelsohn and Russian Serge Chermayeff, whose De La Warr Pavilion opened in 1935. Shortly afterwards, in 1937, Maxwell Fry’s Kensal House- the first modernist social housing project in Britain- opened its doors for the first time.

And in 1938, Berthold Lubetkin designed the Finsbury Health Centre. His famous words “Nothing is too good for ordinary people” betrayed his communist sympathies and emphasised the growing acceptance of Modernist architecture in Britain. Sited in one of the country’s poorest boroughs, the Health Centre was at the forefront of advances in the delivery of public health services. Opened only one year before the outbreak of World War Two, Finsbury Health Centre hinted not just at the coming post-war consensus on social policy, but also confirmed the arrival of Modernist architecture in Britain.

2.3 POST-WAR OPTIMISM 1945-1960

A New World

Britain emerged from World War Two a different country to that which had entered the conflict six long years previously. Financially ruined, physically exhausted, and facing a massive housing crisis, the British people did not have their problems to seek in 1945. But the end of the war also engendered a tremendous sense of optimism in the country, a feeling that the need to rebuild Britain was also an opportunity to build a new nation, and to rectify the worst mistakes of the past.

For Modernist architects, this was the opportunity they had been waiting for. Whereas during the 1930s they had struggled to convince the authorities and the general public that their theories on building and town planning could solve Britain’s divisive social problems, suddenly they found themselves in a nation desperately searching for ambitious solutions to chronic problems and eager to embrace modern life and modern ideas.

This enthusiasm for the future could be seen in the 1951 Festival of Britain, a populist attempt to lift the spirits of the nation in the difficult post-war years. Originally scheduled to mark the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851 the Festival became instead a giant paean to a better, modern world. Only the Royal Festival Hall remains from the original site. It remains one of the most popular modernist buildings in Britain to this day and is still the centrepiece of the arts complex which has grown up along the South Bank since the Festival ended.

The Welfare State

As well as the success of the Festival, two Parliamentary Acts facilitated the post-war embrace of Modernism: the Education Act of 1944 and the New Towns Act of 1946. By the mid-1950s, 2,500 schools had been built and ten entirely new towns were either under construction or were on the drawing board. Town planning and the requirements of constructing a large number of functional buildings in as short as period of time as possible opened the door for Modernists to begin reshaping the appearance of British towns and cities.

Two of the most prominent young architects of this era were the husband and wife team of Peter and Alison Smithson. The Smithsons were ferociously intelligent and theorised about architecture as much as they practised it. As well as being active in avant-garde cultural groups like the Independent Group (which ushered in Pop Art), the Smithsons also fought their corner at CIAM congresses in the post-war years, eventually breaking away from this group in 1956.

The couple’s reputation at this time rested largely on their Secondary School at Hunstanton, Norfolk. Heavily influenced by Mies Van Der Rohe, the school’s exposed steel structure, rigid lines, and acres of glass garnered much favourable comment when it was completed in 1954. The Secondary School’s many imitators over the years have not diminished its striking appearance.

New Towns, New Country

But it was the attempt to create, by government act, entirely new communities which gave modern architects their best chance to realise their utopian vision, in which their rational, planned architecture would deliver British city dwellers from the dark failures of Victorian housing to a bright new world of clean, functional towns. In 1955, the designation order was signed for Britain’s last New Town- Cumbernauld in Lanarkshire. Cumbernauld was a utopian attempt to build a New Town that was genuinely new. Strict zoning, acres of motorway, and a town centre encased within an heroic Corbusian megastructure, ensured that the architects who worked on the town felt like genuine pioneers. At last, the opportunity to build a new country was within their grasp.

2.4 DOUBTS (1953-1961)

Vision of Utopia

Modern Architecture has frequently been blamed for a catalogue of social ills, and images of rundown housing estates and tower blocks have become synonymous with social decay and breakdown. That the public reputation of the architectural profession remains low can be attributed to the perceived failures of much of Britain’s post-war housing. Architects do, however, have a defence. Many of the offending tower blocks were ‘system-built’, i.e. they were constructed with prefabricated sections bolted together on site, according to a set enclosed instructions, and in a sense, architects were often hardly involved in their construction at all. Political pressure to build in the post-war years also meant that many non-system built blocks were constructed on the cheap, with cuts usually being made in the ‘service’ area of estates. Lack of adequate security and concierge facilities would prove fatal to many of the ambitious estates in the 1950s and 1960s. Against this background, it is perhaps worth noting that it was architects themselves who first expressed doubts about the impact the Modernist project was having on the community fabric.

Modernist town planning was heavily influenced by Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse plan of 1933, which promised a future of sunshine, fresh air and greenery for city-dwellers. One of Britain’s most successful public housing schemes, the Alton West Estate in Roehampton (1958), was a conscious attempt to bring the Ville Radieuse to Britain. Le Corbusier’s new city would consist of giant apartment blocks and green, landscaped spaces. This was a powerful vision of utopia in the immediate post-war years, when re-housing families from crumbling Victorian slums to clean, modern apartments was a political priority. The Ville Radieuse influenced CIAM’s Athens Charter of 1933, a document whose grand rhetoric and idealism similarly extolled the virtues of zoned cities and giant residential towers, and which cast a long shadow over town planning in the years after World War Two.