Reconstructing modernity

Space, power and governance in mid-twentieth century British cities

James Greenhalgh

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781526114143
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526114174
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: History

Reconstructing modernity assesses the character of approaches to rebuilding British cities during the decades after the Second World War. It explores the strategies of spatial governance that sought to restructure society and looks at the cast of characters who shaped these processes. It challenges traditional views of urban modernism and sheds new light on the importance of the immediate post-war for the trajectory of planned urban renewal in twentieth century.

It examines plans and policies designed to produce and govern lived spaces— shopping centers, housing estates, parks, schools and homes — and shows how and why they succeeded or failed. It demonstrates how the material space of the city and how people used and experienced it was crucial in understanding historical change in urban contexts. The book is aimed at those interested in urban modernism, the use of space in town planning, the urban histories of post-war Britain and of social housing.

1

Fantasies of urban futures

In 1945, in common with many other British towns and cities, Hull and Manchester produced comprehensive, detailed redevelopment plans. Unlike pre-war plans, which tended to be somewhat piecemeal, usually dealt with specific areas of cities and were rarely published, a significant number of the post-war plans for cities and larger towns were printed in impressive books, garnering much press attention and were accompanied by well-attended public exhibitions.¹ These Plans were a spectacular mix of maps, representations of modern architecture and ambitious cityscapes that sit, sometimes uneasily, alongside detailed tables, text and photographs (see figures 1.1–1.10 and 2.1).² Though never realised to any great extent, the Plans appear to represent a time when British cities gazed at the limitless possibilities of the post-war world and imagined a better, healthier, fairer self.

Looking at the Plans 70 years on they are extraordinary documents that contain a huge amount of often confusing information. Manchester’s runs to 274 pages and Hull’s 92, although with the Hull Plan being 36 x 28 cm compared to Manchester’s 31 x 25 cm the two are closer in size than merely counting the pages seems to indicate. Manchester’s Plan has 260 separate images, including 112 photographs, 72 maps and 30 architectural drawings of various types. Hull’s has 150 images, including 88 photographs, 10 architectural drawings and 52 maps, of which 12 are large fold-out maps over 70 cm in length. Both Plans are impressively visual and contain imaginings of new buildings and streets, which are rendered in a variety of inks and pencils. Though displaying the influence of a range of different traditions, including familiar domestic takes on Classical and Beaux Arts, most of the illustrations display a recognisably British, moderate version of architectural Modernism.³ The Plans also illustrate their technical expertise through a very large number of information-heavy, often full-colour maps which included redesigned city centres, new housing estates, population distributions, locations of road accidents, bomb damage and land-use zoning proposals.

It is hard to do justice to quite how ambitious the Plans seem to a twenty-first-century eye. They are total plans that seek to deal with the entirety of cities and the totality of the urban environment in a way that has rarely been attempted since. The most salient elements of the Plans were exhibited for the public, in Manchester’s case across ten rooms in the city art gallery, whilst both were accompanied by models of the proposed estates, glimpses of which survive in Hull’s archives and the Manchester Corporation promotional film A City Speaks.⁴ Both the radical and high-profile nature of the Plans has meant that they have fared poorly in popular imaginings of the period. These memories rest heavily on an image of planners as high-modernist despoilers of Victorian and medieval heritage, hell-bent on realising multi-storey nightmares in drab concrete and steel. In 2013, for example, the BBC News website ran an article entitled ‘Secret plan to demolish Manchester Town Hall revealed’.⁵ This rather dubious article – a twice-printed book and abridged pamphlet, accompanied by press coverage and a public exhibition that attracted 125,000 visitors can hardly be described as ‘secret’ – made the unqualified claim that Manchester’s ‘much-loved Neo-Gothic town hall’ could have been demolished had planners ‘got their way’.⁶ The character of this piece is typical of a set of persistent, popular narratives that recall the Plans as symbols of the hubristic failure of planners to deliver the bright new Britain that they had claimed their mastery of urban space and architecture would produce.

With a few exceptions though, academic historians have been rather less hyperbolic in their treatment of the Plans and have tended to utilise them as part of a wider examination of the character and effects of post-war planning practice. The Plans, though ‘rarely influential as planning documents … underpinned a growing consensus, which looked to social improvement through a root and branch approach to the existing urban fabric’.⁷ This body of work has demonstrated the obstacles raised by a plurality of economic and social influences that largely frustrated the realisation of the Plans in the rare cases where any serious attempt was made to implement them.⁸ The majority of historical work from the 1990s onwards has tended to point out how few of the Plans were actually considered for completion in their entirety. In doing so, historians have tempered accusations from earlier analyses that planners were either tyrannical modernists who obliterated built heritage and fragile urban ecologies or did not go far enough in their project.⁹ Importantly, perhaps only Corelli Barnett’s generalised critique of national planning and a number of studies of housing have come close to equating the kind of visionary utopianism seemingly evidenced in the Plans with the actual built outcomes in British cities.¹⁰

Examinations of the Plans have instead tended to treat them as one of a host of post-war documents that formed part of a ‘new rationalist response’, indicative of a moment when the ‘rational use of space and the grand design were amply catered for in a spate of legislation which followed the beginning of peace’.¹¹ As Peter Mandler demonstrates, the Plans have consequently been framed as a product of a wartime consensus around social reform and planning, which encouraged planners to try and overcome their historic weakness within British policy through grand demonstrations of their expertise.¹² A problem arises though because too often, despite few believing the Plans were meant for realisation, they have been taken as ‘a utopian blueprint for a perfect city’ and thus the material embodiments of a single, holistic (if unrealistic) scheme.¹³ The Plans studied here though were far from unified, single-voiced documents; rather, they were amalgamations of differing views and priorities and need to be examined as such. They were the work of a number of authors and artists who produced material that was often antagonistic or internally contradictory.

Examining the Plans against planning schemes from the inter-war period, whilst considering the use of wartime rhetorics of civilian sacrifice, starts to disrupt the coherency of the Plans as single-voiced documents. Understanding which elements of the Plans were new, what was merely repackaged and who produced them begins to open up potential conclusions about local government, the effects of the war and the importance and character of urban modernism. The close attention to continuity and change, as I suggested in the introduction to the book, is thus deployed here to slightly skew our historical perspective to facilitate an unpacking of the various influences upon the Plans. The Plans performed a number of different functions and contained the remnants of older plans, which created tensions between text, maps and illustrations. These tensions reveal the competing influences on the Plans, and also point to how we might usefully interpret these rich documents.

Planning theorists and historians have emphasised the need to go beyond simple analyses of implementation and completion, as a means to better understand the differing influences at work in the formulation of plans.¹⁴ This approach draws distinctions between those parts of the Plans that were intended for completion – especially where they were merely repackaged existing schemes – and those parts that were fantastical, though still profoundly functional. Frank Mort has suggested that the Plans cannot be judged merely against their enactment as actual schemes for the redevelopment of the city, nor seen as documents produced wholly through rationally judged professional and political initiatives, because they also drew upon a ‘wide range of cultural visions, which are assembled out of an expansive repertoire of intellectual meaning systems about city life’.¹⁵ Closer examination, then – particularly of the visual representations and maps contained within the Plans – points us to a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of their purpose, the discursive environment that produced them and their importance in shaping the future city.¹⁶ The Plans here emerge as tools for examining how the notion of post-war modernity – in the sense that the perception of what ‘modern’ meant was translated into buildings, maps and drawings – functioned in shaping approaches to planning and the city.¹⁷ The chapter thus attempts to understand the interplay of modernity and ideas of modernism and their importance for the post-war city, building on work which has sought to disentangle aesthetic modernism from more mundane and functional expressions of modernism as a planning practice.¹⁸

The chapter begins by exploring how narratives of reconstruction and the experience of war served to create the conditions in which the Plans might emerge, showing how the content of the Plans reveals the genesis of the documents in the discursive context of the war.¹⁹ Narratives of civilian sacrifice and the barbarism of the war produced a discursive environment in which the Plans were presented as an attempt to establish a clean break with perceived planning mistakes of the past. It then goes on to show how planners and local governments alike attempted to manipulate the powerful idea of expert planning to establish their right to control and plan the future city against a background of competing voices. As Mandler has argued, the ‘neat land-use maps … with their concentric circles of population densities, neat segregated uses and geometric traffic grids’ implied that the ‘whole country could be redesigned scientifically’, serving to promote planning as a discipline.²⁰ Yet, whilst largely agreeing with Mandler on this assertion, I want to go a step further and suggest that by understanding the content of inter-war planning policy at the local level we can also see that the Plans evidence the ambition of local governments in a period where their power base was under threat. As chapter 2 will show, local government approaches to space in the post-war period sought to control the city on a detailed, holistic basis. Here we begin to unpack the Plans themselves to better understand the reasons that, as Larkham and Lilley have noted, these seemingly radical documents actually contained so many planning schemes from before the war.²¹ The first two sections of the chapter thus illuminate the role of local government and the importance of the war in providing a framework in which long-held desires to control and shape the city might begin to be expressed.

The final part of the chapter also develops several debates about town planning, modernism and modernity by examining the visual and textual material in the Plans as multi-authored, fragmented ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Fantasies of urban futures
• 2 The functioning metropolis
• 3 The city and the suburban village
• 4 The spaces of everyday life
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index