Here Comes the Sun

Architecture and Public Space in Twentieth-Century European Culture

Ken Worpole

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9781861890733
• eBook ISBN: 9781861898272
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Here Comes the Sun looks at how social reformers, planners and architects in the early twentieth century tried to remake the city in the image of a sunlit, ordered utopia. While much has been written about architectural modernism, Worpole concentrates less on buildings and more on the planning of the spaces in-between – the parks, public squares, open-air museums, promenades, public pools and other public leisure facilities. Life in the open was of particular concern to early urban planners and reformers, with their dreams of release from the confines of overcrowded, unsanitary slums. Picturing youthful working-class bodies made healthy by exercise and tanned by the sun, they imagined an escape route from cities. Worpole demonstrates how open-air public spaces became sought-after commissions for many early modernist architects in the early 1900s, resulting in the transformation of the European cityscape. "...a fascinating account of the political idealism that informed urban planning for the first two-thirds of the twentieth-century...full of insights into how public space influences a sense of belonging and ownership."— The Guardian "This is one of those books you stroke lovingly. Open it, and there is page after page of beautiful photographs...this book combines history, society, politics, environment and place in a well-written and emotive text. The strength of the book is the way it crosses these traditional boundaries and disciplines."— Town and Country Planning "Drawing on architectural theories, philosophy, literature and even film-making, Worpole's book is wide-ranging and erudite and should be of interest to the layperson as well as to the urban planner. It is also elegantly written and complemented by a mixture of black and white and colour photographs to provide a visual emphasis to the points he raises."— N16 Magazine

1 Here Comes the Sun:
Port Sunlight, Town Planning
and the New Life

The late-nineteenth-century idea of the garden city is the starting-point for our story. This was an extraordinary vision, combining political ideals, a strong sense of human agency and a radical sense of spatial relations and connections in the fabric of human life. Ebenezer Howard’s pioneering plan for a new model of urban housing, Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, was originally published in 1898, setting in motion the Garden City movement, still active today. Howard, who founded the Garden Cities Association in 1899 (renamed the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association in 1909, finally becoming the Town and Country Planning Association in 1941 and still extant), had himself been influenced by several earlier experiments in creating model communities, notably Port Sunlight, Cheshire, and Saltaire, Yorkshire, and had been challenged – as had William Morris in different ways – by Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward (1888). He would also have known of earlier Chartist attempts to establish model communities – O’Connorville in Hertfordshire, Lowbands in Worcestershire, Charter-ville in Oxfordshire, Snigs End in Gloucestershire and Great Dodford in Worcestershire in the 1840S and of Ruskin’s involvement 20 years later with the Guild of St George, which supported four model communities based on a form of agrarian socialism.¹ There were also anarchist communities at Clousden Hill and Norton, and Tolstoyan colonies at Purleigh in Essex and at Whiteway in the Cotswolds.² The utopian origins of all of these attempts to establish new communities was, and remains, a continuous strand in town planning.

The most innovative housing experiment of Howard’s era, however, was Port Sunlight village (illus. 6), started in 1888 by the industrialist William Hesketh Lever. Port Sunlight was a model community (or (company town’ for those of a cynical disposition) established for the workers of Lever’s soap-factory near Birkenhead, complete with allotments’ meeting-rooms, swimming-baths, parks and bandstands, and which survives to this day, even being described by the designer Theo Crosby in 1978 as (the first and only good housing estate in England’.³ There were no pubs, for temperance reasons. In this period social reform was very much allied to the Temperance Movement, even more so in Scandinavia than in the UK, with some unusual connections between the two. In the Fife coalfields in the first decades of this century, for example, there was a chain of pubs run by the Gothenburg Public House Society that imported the Swedish idea of operating pubs which attempted to turn customers into teetotallers. The interiors of the Society’s saloons and bars (were deliberately made plain and uncomfortable’; profits, which, oddly enough, these pubs continued to make, ‘went towards the construction of wholesome amenities such as libraries and bowling-greens’.⁴

6 The Lyceum in Port Sunlight, built between 1894 and 1896 and used as the first village school. Architects: Douglas and Fordham.

The influence of Port Sunlight was widespread, and its impact abroad was largely disseminated through the writings of Hermann Muthesius (1861–1927), an architect attached to the German embassy in London between 1896 and 1903, whose book Das englische Haus was published in three volumes in 1904–5 and highly regarded, especially in Northern Europe. For Muthesius,

Port Sunlight will always be honoured with the highest recognition. For it is here that the gates of a new world were first opened; in place of the dismal appearance of utilitarian buildings we were shown a new vision; in the place of the misery associated with the barren rows of workers’ terraces we find joyfulness and homeliness.⁵

Yet the Garden City movement in the UK – inextricably linked with Ruskin and Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement – was often interpreted as anti-urban, although its founders had genuinely believed they were planning for a new generation of cities. In practice Garden City ideals too often became garden suburb developments of low-density housing, each unit with its own garden, surrounded by hedges and tree-lined streets, creating a semblance of a rural idyll, even within the sound of the factory sirens. The model was emulated everywhere. Within a decade of the construction of Port Sunlight and soon after the publication of Howard’s revised tract, Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902), George Benoît Lévy, the French social reformer and disciple of Le Play, Ruskin, Morris and Tolstoy, had set up the Association des Cités-Jardins de France in 1903 and published La Cité-jardin in the following year.⁶ In Germany the Gartenstadtgesellschaft was set up in 1902, bringing together (anarcho-socialist, literary and reformist movements’,⁷ although more imbued with the spirit of the Volk rather than the urban proletariat, and Bernhard Kampffmyer published Aus Englischen Gartenstadten in 1910. The Russians quickly followed.⁸ There is no doubt that the British had been busy proselytizing the virtues of this new invention, for in July 1904, the British Garden City Association convened the first International Garden City Congress in London, also taking delegates on a tour of Port Sunlight, Bournville, Letchworth and some London County Council (LCC) suburban estates. In 1913 the International Garden Cities and Town Planning Association was founded at a congress in Scheveningen in The Netherlands.⁹ Reproductions of the Port Sunlight cottages were erected at international exhibitions in Paris (1900), Glasgow (1901) and Brussels (1910).

Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire was designed by Barry Parker (1867–1947) and Raymond Unwin (1863–1940), both teetotal socialists who had set up in business together as architects and planners. Unwin had attended Ruskin’s lectures in Oxford, was a friend of Edward Carpenter, had met William Morris and had contributed to Morris’s socialist journal, Commonweal.¹⁰ Central to the layout of the Letchworth houses – work started in January 1904 was the creation of a living-room that ran from the front to the back of the house, providing opportunities for sunlight at both ends, whatever the orientation. Sunlight was (looked upon as an absolute essential, second only to air-space.’¹¹ Each garden city was to be surrounded by sufficient agricultural land to feed the population. A year after starting Letchworth, Unwin was appointed planner of Hampstead Garden Suburb in north London.

Unwin’s influence on housing design in the UK and beyond has been incalculable, even though his followers sometimes diluted his ideas to the point of mediocrity. To a large degree, Unwin – a genuine intellectual with a keen interest in sociology, aesthetics, history and social reform – invented the profession and practice of town planning. However, he also had a personal dislike of apartment living or high-density urban lifestyles, as well as a penchant for rustic interiors. His pamphlet Nothing Gained by Overcrowding, published in 1912, and in favour of low-density housing, (was later to produce some of the UK’S dullest housing estates from the drawing boards of local authorities and speculative builders in the inter-war years’.¹²

Unwin’s favourite interior detail was the inglenook hearth, a thorough-going symbol of the domesticated privacy that he thought represented the ideal life, an almost monastic withdrawal from society. Yet the country cottage motif was paradoxically a direct inheritance from the pages of Morris’s News from Nowhere and late-nineteenth-century socialist versions of the Simple Life.¹³ In a lecture given in Vienna in 1926 he had argued that ‘we must give the individual a place in which he can live, and meditate, retire from the bustle and noise of life, and live what I call a human life.’¹⁴ It seems particularly ironic that such sentiments should have emerged from someone who earlier in life had been deeply attached to a political philosophy founded on the notion that (Fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death.’

ORGANICISM AND MODERNISM

Giant though he was in many respects, on some matters William Morris was decidedly wrong and his influence ill-advised. I share Elizabeth Wilson’s scepticism about him, especially his refusal to come to terms with the psychology of modernity.¹⁵ To a marked degree Morris seems to have cleaved to an ideal of a world beyond difficulty and conflict, a version of hard but rewarding labour in the fields, homely fare, storytelling, and early nights after a discussion at the Labour Club. Anybody who could argue so vehemently against the hard-won complexities and psychological explorations of literature, as Morris clearly does in the canonical News from Nowhere, is in denial about the reality of human affairs. In News from Nowhere, first published in 1888, the characters are already in that second childhood he thought the world should try to realize. What Morris yearned for was a world without tragedy or human despair, in the very era that writers such as Balzac, Conrad, Ibsen, Strindberg, Synge and Zola (not to mention Marx and Freud) were exploring the development of that irredeemably modern, fractured consciousness that was developing in the teeming cities, and which never again could be captured and reinserted into a medieval romance.

In News from Nowhere’s utopia, the beautiful Clara, firm and well-knit of body (could it be otherwise?), proudly discourses on a world that has become too beautiful to need, or benefit from, books of any sort:

As for your books, they were well enough for times when intelligent people had but little else in which they could take pleasure, and when they must needs supplement the sordid miseries of their own lives with imaginations of the lives of other people.¹⁶

She then rails at length against the tendency of fictional characters to manufacture a long series of (sham troubles (or mostly sham) of their own making, illustrated by dreary introspective nonsense about their feelings and aspirations’. It is the (dreary introspective nonsense’ that in the end turns one wholly against Morris, and the sheer regressiveness of the project to deny or seek to strip out the memory-haunted, fraught nature of human consciousness, which was developing in the second half of the nineteenth century and came to fruition in the twentieth. ‘To argue for the better surely exacts a full look at the worse,’ argued Conrad with greater insight a few years later. The argument between a collectivist organicism and a more individualistic modernism has continued down the years.

Other battle-lines were drawn, particularly between the decentralist town-planning tradition exemplified in the Garden City movement, and the urbanism of the Jane Jacobs school, which has often been interpreted as being primarily about housing densities, street culture, modes of public transportation and the siting of industry. In reality it has probably had more to do with the cultural differences between those who favour settlements that emphasize the primacy of domestic life and the architectural details of domestic settings, and those who remain mesmerized, as in their turn Defoe, Dickens, Baudelaire, Benjamin and the Situationists were, by the deracinated vitalism of the unruly city – a vitalism that also, according to Elizabeth Wilson, offered women new opportunities for greater personal freedom and pleasure.¹⁷ W. R. Lethaby once formulated this dilemma quite simply, and with greater pre-science than his mentor, Morris: There is a champagne and a late-night supper ideal, and a brown bread and dewy morning ideal, and in the end, just for the sake of our health we chose the latter.¹⁸ This is more honest, and describes a fault-line that runs right through architectural and planning discourses in the twentieth century, often with particular individuals simultaneously aspiring to both.

The success of the Garden City ideal in the UK in many ways embodied, but also itself shaped, a uniquely British distaste (although a number of architectural historians exclude Scotland from this equation) for Continental apartment life and forms of tenure. In Ebenezer Howard’s original vision, a feature of these new model communities was a high level of provision of shared or collective services laundries, meeting-rooms, public baths, libraries, parks, theatres and schools – which there were at Letchworth and to a lesser extent in Hampstead.

The first Russian garden city, at Kazan, had its own theatre, hospital, TB asylum and rest-homes together with other collective facilities, and later Russian developments provided even more services in common.¹⁹ The plan of 1918 for a Greater Helsinki that the architect Eliel Saarinen presented was financed by a city politician and businessman, Julius Tallberg. Known as the Pro Helsingfors Plan, it was one of the earliest known adaptations of the Garden City principle to an existing city. Its influence on planning in Helsinki has continued to this day. Unfortunately, the rapid transit system proposed by Saarinen has not been built, and the new outlying communities, with the exception of Tapiola, are mere dormitory suburbs, without the community centres envisaged by the architect.²⁰ This problem has been replicated in many other cities throughout the world. Once residential areas have been left sequestered, unconnected to the main urban centre and its facilities and without social amenities of their own, they often become very inward-looking places in which to live. When large-scale unemployment or some other catastrophe strikes, such places are easily vulnerable to social disintegration.

Over time, the Garden City influence became ubiquitous, yet also over time many of its collectivist or communal aspects were lost. In 1946 a new edition of Garden Cities of Tomorrow was published in the UK, with an introduction by Lewis Mumford. Mumford felt the need to restate quite categorically that Howard’s original vision was not a ‘loose indefinite sprawl of individual houses with immense open spaces over the landscape: it is rather a compact, rigorously confined urban grouping’. More than that, constellations of such cities in close proximity could a...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• The Body and the City: An Introductory Essay
• 1 Here Comes the Sun: Port Sunlight, Town Planning and the New Life
• 2 Our Northern Hearts: Architecture, Design and the Art of Right Living
• 3 Live Out of Doors as Much as You Can: The Architecture of Public Health
• 4 Bring the Landscape into the House: Housing for the New Society
• 5 Parks, Pleasure Gardens and the Democracy of the Open Air
• 6 Summer in the City: The Cult of the Lido
• 7 Limits to Growth: Nature and Society Restored
• Coda: Beneath City Skies: New Parks in Europe
• References
• Index
• Photographic Acknowledgements