Our ancestors made machines and the machines destroyed the earth, causing earthquakes and volcanoes that killed men by the hundreds of thousands. That is why the Spirits decreed that the making of machines was an abomination.
– John Christopher, The Prince in Waiting (1970)
Imagine when the holocaust comes and these places are all deserted and there are thistles growing on the motorway … and there’s grass growing over the jukebox … and honeysuckle coming out of the espresso, yeah … and tadpoles swimming in the ladies.
– Steven Poliakoff, Strawberry Fields (1977)
For Howard and Barbara Kirk, the academic couple at the centre of Malcolm Bradbury’s novel The History Man (1975), life should be perfect. They live in a renovated Georgian terraced house in the south-coast university town of Watermouth. Their walls are lined with books and African masks; their shelves overflow with bottles of wine. Their kitchen is a temple to the organic fashions of the day, full of French casseroles and earthenware dishes; ‘the long table is scrubbed pine, the shelves on the walls are pine, there are pine cabinets, and pine and rush chairs, and rush matting on the floors’. As a fashionable sociology lecturer and media don, Howard is the darling of the town’s left-wing party circuit, while Barbara is ‘a cordon bleu cook, an expert in children’s literature, a tireless promoter of new causes’. They even look ‘the way new people do look’: Howard with his Zapata moustache, white sweatshirts, ‘hairy loose waistcoats’ and ‘pyjama-style blue jeans’; Barbara with her ‘frizzled yellow hair’, green eyeshadow and long kaftan dresses that show off the fact she is not wearing a bra. They are busy, popular, fashionable people, at the cutting edge of cultural life. And yet they are always looking back to the past, to the undelivered promise of the 1960s, to an unfulfilled ‘hazy dream’ of ‘expanded minds, equal dealings, erotic satisfactions, beyond the frame of reality, beyond the limits of the senses’. ‘Do you remember,’ Barbara asks her husband, ‘when things were all wide open and free, and we were all doing something and the revolution was next week? And we were under thirty and we could trust us?’ ‘It’s still like that,’ Howard protests. ‘Is it really like that?’ she asks. ‘Don’t you think people have got tired?’1
Laments for the lost promise of the 1960s were a common theme of bohemian life during the age of stagflation. By the time Malcolm Bradbury wrote his brilliant satirical novel, the emblematic boutiques of Swinging London had conceded defeat in the face of surging rents and recession, while the underground press, once associated with so many idealistic dreams, had largely collapsed amid plummeting circulation and bitter factional infighting. Radicals liked to claim that the counterculture had been broken by the ‘establishment’, citing the Oz obscenity trial in the summer of 1971, when the underground paper’s three editors were briefly imprisoned and had their hair forcibly cropped after being prosecuted for showing Rupert Bear in various pornographic poses. A year later, when a group of anarchists were found guilty of the Angry Brigade bombings, which had targeted banks, embassies, shops and the house of the Home Secretary, Robert Carr, it did seem that the state had crushed the spirit of rebellion. But the truth was that even without those landmark trials, the counterculture was doomed, as its look and style were appropriated by mainstream enterprises and its rebellious energy drained away in the economic crisis of the early 1970s. As early as January 1971, John Lennon gloomily told an interviewer:
The people who are in control and in power and the class system and the whole bullshit bourgeois scene is exactly the same except that there is a lot of middle-class kids with long hair walking around London in trendy clothes and Kenneth Tynan’s making a fortune out of the word ‘fuck’. The same bastards are in control, the same people are runnin’ everything, it’s exactly the same. They hyped the kids and the generation.
We’ve grown up a little, all of us, and there has been a change and we are a bit freer and all that, but it’s the same game, nothing’s really changed … The dream is over. It’s just the same only I’m thirty and a lot of people have got long hair, that’s all.2
Lennon was a bitter man, but his sentiments were not unusual. ‘The feeling of community that was about to emerge three years ago has shattered and split,’ wrote the radical activists Edward Barker and Mick Farren in 1972. ‘Flower power’s failure’, they concluded, proved that society was ‘not even prepared to tolerate the existence of any minority who attempted to live according to other principles, no matter how peaceful or self-contained their culture might be’. A tiny minority, like the Angry Brigade, reacted by falling for the supposed glamour and efficacy of violence, like their far more effective and dangerous international comrades in the Baader–Meinhof Group and the Red Brigades. But most turned inwards, whether wry and wistful or sour and disillusioned. And while some historians argue that the early 1970s were ‘the real Sixties’, it did not seem like that at the time. What had once called itself the ‘underground community’ broke up; as one writer puts it, ‘squatters became home-owners; local activists became adventure playground leaders; utopians joined the Labour Party’. Certainly by 1972, with the underground press in ruins, the counterculture was effectively dead. When police broke up the illegal Free Festival in Windsor Great Park in August 1974, arresting 220 people amid scenes akin to a pitched battle, many saw it as the requiem mass for an era of freedom and experimentation. ‘The Isle of Wight, Glastonbury, these were the great manifestations of the alternative culture of love, dope, sounds, macrobiotic food, tripping, instinctive anarchism, youth, the new life-style,’ wrote the jazz musician George Melly in an obituary for the 1960s in the Observer a few days later. ‘The last bastion of all that was that free festival in Windsor last week and … the law moved in with truncheons and shut the whole thing down … My spirit mourned for Windsor, the pathetic and perhaps the last manifestation of peace and love.’3
Perhaps the best barometer of the changing mood was the theatre. Where once radical playwrights, inspired by the likes of Harold Pinter, Joe Orton and Kenneth Tynan, had looked forward to a brave new world, they now looked back in anger. As the critic Michael Billington puts it, in the early 1970s ‘there was a sense of hopes dashed, of things winding down, of individual lives confronting intractable problems’, so that the abiding themes of the new generation were ‘disappointment, disillusion and a pervasive sense of despair’. In Trevor Griffiths’ play The Party, which opened at the National Theatre just after the announcement of the three-day week in December 1973, a group of revolutionary socialists plan the way forward during the Paris disturbances of May 1968; yet all the time, we know that there will be no revolution, that the future does not lie with the radical left, that their dreams will turn to ashes. Howard Brenton’s play Weapons of Happiness (1976) makes a similar point: when a group of well-meaning radicals stage a sit-in at a London crisps factory, their naive utopianism comes over as reckless and self-indulgent rather than brave or admirable. And in his friend David Hare’s play Teeth ’n’ Smiles (1975), suggestively set in the last year of the 1960s, a radical rock band see their dreams literally go up in smoke after a farcical gig at a university ball, their idealism deflated by sharp reality. ‘The fringe has failed,’ Brenton observed in 1974. ‘Its failure was that of the whole dream of an “alternative culture” … The truth is that there’s only one society – that you can’t escape the world you live in. Reality is remorseless. No one can leave.’4
And yet across the national landscape – from the communes of mid-Wales to the antique shops of Camden Lock, from the squats of Notting Hill to the Victorian enclaves of university towns across the country – the 1960s had left a deep impression. Like Howard and Barbara Kirk, most of the young men and women who had seen themselves as bohemians or freethinkers in the late 1960s ended up older, wiser, mildly disillusioned but still fiercely idealistic residents of what might be called the counterculture belt, in the leafy streets of gentrifying urban villages, in run-down Georgian squares, in renovated Victorian townhouses and Edwardian garden flats. In 1974, the journalist Mary Ingham, who as a girl had expected to be married with children by her mid-twenties, found herself, aged 27, still sharing a shabby flat with a group of university friends in a dilapidated Regency crescent overlooking a park. One of her flatmates had gone back to university, two worked in publishing, another was a polytechnic lecturer and the fifth worked for a homeless charity. They lived in amiable squalor ‘among books and pieces of flowered pottery’; they argued late at night about ‘entry to the Common Market, Marxist politics, astrology’; they mingled with ‘fringe theatre actors and media people at noisy parties overflowing with wine, garlic bread and vegetarian delights’; they went to encounter-sessions with feminists and social workers in their ‘platform-sole boots, long peasant dresses and baggy trousers’.5
At that very moment, Jonathan Raban was observing the lives of his neighbours in the scruffy yet increasingly upmarket neighbourhoods of north and west London, a world of Japanese lampshades, white paint and stripped-pine stereo systems. ‘Here children play with chunky all-wood Abbatt toys,’ he noted; ‘here girl-wives grill anaemic escalopes of veal; everyone takes the Guardian.’ They worked in ‘journalism, publishing, TV’; they ‘cooked out of raggy Elizabeth David Penguins’, smoked pot, listened to Pink Floyd and earnestly discussed R. D. Laing and Michel Foucault. Visiting Ceres, a macrobiotic restaurant on Portobello Road, he imagined the life of one of ‘the girls who drift about the store, filling wire baskets with soya beans, miso and wakame seaweed’: her seriousness, her narcissism, her sense of ‘inner virtue’ and her ‘latent violence’. In her room, he thought, she might drink honey and grape juice and eat brown rice. On her shelves, he imagined the rows of paperbacks: Slaughterhouse 5, Steppenwolf, The Macrobiotic Way, The I-Ching, the poems of Rod McKuen and Leonard Cohen, and ‘Louis MacNeice’s coffee table book on astrology (an awkward Christmas present from her father)’. And if she read a newspaper, of course it would be the Guardian, which later caught the tone of semi-bohemian middle-class life so well in Posy Simmonds’s cartoon of Wendy Weber, the well-meaning feminist former nurse, now married to a bearded polytechnic lecturer called George. They wear ‘soft, frayed, patched, ethnic, woolly comfortable old clothes’; they eat lentil curries and vegetarian quiches; they drink expensive wines from Marks & Spencer. As a sociologist told Punch in 1977, theirs was the world of muesli and au pairs, discussion groups and nut salad, ‘wholemeal bread, encounter therapy, finger painting, dabbling in the occult, nudity’.6
And while they no longer demonstrated about Vietnam, as they had as students in the late 1960s, there were plenty of brave causes left. In the middle-class dinner party described in Margaret Drabble’s novel The Middle Ground (1980), a group of lecturers and journalists talk over the cheese of ‘the simple life, of communes in Wales, of modern technology and solar heating, of Wordsworth and the romantics, of nature and Rousseau’. They were the kind of people who subscribed to The Ecologist and joined Friends of the Earth, who read The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down, who called public meetings to stop the extension of the M3 or the development of Covent Garden. A decade before, writing about the Festival of Britain, Michael Frayn had captured the world of the ‘radical middle classes – the do-gooders; the readers of the News Chronicle, the Guardian, and the Observer; the signers of petitions; the backbone of the BBC … who look out from the lush pastures which are their natural station in life with eyes full of sorrow for less fortunate creatures, guiltily conscious of their advantages, though not usually ceasing to eat the grass’. He called them the Herbivores. And never had the name seemed more fitting than in the early 1970s, the years when green was good and small was beautiful.7
In 1971, the Yorkshire Post gave its annual award for non-fiction to a title that must have struck fear into the souls of all who read it. Written by the science journalist Gordon Rattray Taylor, The Doomsday Book begins ominously with a long quotation from the Book of Revelation. On the very next page, Taylor warns his readers that mankind is facing an ‘eventual population crash’, an ‘apocalypse’ that will probably wipe out a third of humanity. Thanks to ‘crowding, pollution and a disturbed balance of nature’, the planet itself is at risk. The land has been over-farmed, the seas have been over-fished, the air is full of chemicals, and ‘Spaceship Earth’, with its fragile crust of land and thin band of atmosphere, is on the brink of collapse. The temperature is steadily rising; the icecaps are melting, the seas are rising, and as man releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, so the planet is getting hotter and hotter. Even more worrying than global warming, however, is the threat of global cooling: scientists are already warning that the Earth stands on the brink of an ice age, and the distinguished British scientist James Lovelock has predicted a drop of 4 ºF by 1975 and ‘the start of a new ice age well before 1980’. But the time has long since passed for arguments about numbers. The priority, Taylor argues, is ‘to stabilize world population growth’. Britain should adopt the ‘realistic target’ of halving its population in fifty years, aiming for 30 million people in 2030. ‘Man’, he concludes, ‘has reached a turning point in his history.’8
With its apocalyptic tone, scattershot approach and wild warnings of a coming ice age, Taylor’s book was a quintessential product of the early 1970s. But although environmentalism is often thought to have been born in the age of oil shocks, coal strikes and communes, the truth is that Britain’s green movement has a long history. The first society to protect ‘Commons, Open Spaces and Footpaths’ was founded as far back as 1865, while the National Trust, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Fauna Preservation Society, the Metropolitan and Public Gardens Association and the Camping Club were all founded between 1880 and 1910, during the heyday of late Victorian and Edwardian conservationism. And although the twentieth century is often seen as the century of the city and the car, groups like the Ramblers’ Association, the Council for the Preservation of Rural England and the Pure Rivers Society were set up in the 1930s, the Attlee government set up the Nature Conservancy, the first agency dedicated to protecting wildlife, in 1949, and more than 200 local societies dedicated to the environment had been established by the late 1950s.
But it was in the decade that followed, as the high-minded middle classes turned their attention to the spread of factory farming, the growth of suburbia and the blight of pollution, that conservationism began to acquire a genuinely significant following. Membership of the Ramblers’ Association (obviously a form of leisure, though a green-tinged one) doubled between 1962 and 1972; meanwhile, coverage of environmental issues in The Times increased by 280 per cent between 1965 and 1973. Of course, these were not yet issues that concerned the great majority of the population. Ramblers, conservationists and early eco-activists tended to be middle-class couples working in the professions, the arts and (as per the stereotype) teaching. All the same, as early as the mid-1960s there was a palpable sense of momentum and enthusiasm.9
As a reaction against modernity, industrialization and big business, and as a celebration of the pastoral, the organic and the small-scale, the environmental movement naturally appealed to the youngsters who made up the counterculture of the late 1960s. But the counterculture did not ‘give birth’ to environmentalism, as is often thought. Not only did the green movement come first, but it appealed to plenty of people who were not hippies at all. There had always been a strong strain of pastoral romanticism in English culture (and the American historian Martin Weiner, in a book beloved by Thatcherites but derided by many scholars, even argued that the High Tory suspicion of capitalism lay at the root of Britain’s economic problems). What is certainly true is that by the mid-1960s plenty of people were becoming worried about the social costs of economic growth. In his book The World We Have Lost (1965), for example, the historian Peter Laslett evoked an age before ‘progress’ and industry, a vanished English landscape in which ‘the whole of life went forward in the family, in a circle of loved, familiar faces, known and fondled objects, all to human size’. Two years later the LSE economist E. J. Mishan published The Costs of Economic Growth, warning that the pursuit of progress led only to ‘the waste land of Subtopia’, a world with less and less room for individualism, religion and the family. ‘Growthmania’, Mishan warned, was ‘more likely on balance to reduce rather than increase social welfare’; in the meantime, the ‘rich local life centred on township, parish and village’ had been cruelly destroyed. And at the same time, the economist Barbara Ward published her groundbreaking Spaceship Earth, in which she asked readers to imagine themselves as the crew on a precarious space voyage, depending ‘for life itself’ on their fragile earth, which was being ‘contaminated and destroyed’ by man’s reckless arrogance. She drew her central image from the pictures astronauts had sent back of the beautiful blue-green Earth hanging in space; it was to prove a lasting and highly influential metaphor.10
It was one of Ward’s friends, however, who published the best-known green manifesto of the 1970s. Born in Bonn just before the First World War, Fritz Schumacher had emigrated to England in the late 1930s and worked for a time as a statistician at Oxford before becoming chief economic adviser to the National Coal Board and a part-time adviser to the Labour Party. He was a strange, contradictory man, with a brilliant mind, an impatient manner and a sharp tongue, as well as a vague sense of spiritual yearning that became increasingly intense as his career seemed to stall. For much of the 1950s, as his ideas for the future of Britain’s coal industry were ignored by the Coal Board, he felt frustrated and aimless, and he began to pour his energies into a succession of eccentric hobbies, from astrology and yoga to Eastern religions and organic foods, which were nowhere near as fashionable then as they would be ten years later. In particular, Schumacher found comfort in gardening, which he approached with his usual fierce energy. In 1950 he bought a house with four acres of land in rural Surrey, and he began to cultivate the land, not with the chemical-intensive techniques popular at the time, but with organic methods, which most people had long since abandoned. For support he turned to a small fringe group called the Soil Association, and in 1970, the year he retired from the Coal Board, Schumacher became its president.11
It was not Schumacher but his editor, Anthony Blond, who came up with the title for his book, which was originally called ‘The Homecomers’. Struck by the power of the fashionable catchphrase ‘Black is Beautiful’, Blond suggested Small is Beautiful – a phrase that not only captured Schumacher’s ideas very nicely, but seized the imagination of the emerging environmental movement. For although Schumacher’s book was really just a compilation of lectures and articles, through it ran a constant thread of anti-modernist radicalism, urging a retreat from the industrial and the large-scale, and a realization that ‘man is small, and therefore small is beautiful’. He had flirted with Buddhism since the late 1950s, when he had been sent as an adviser to the Burmese government, and argued for what he called ‘Buddhist’ economics, celebrating ‘the joy of work and the bliss of leisure’. Britain’s decline, he thought, was rooted in spirituality as well as economics. The nation had sold its soul for the promise of ever-expanding abundance; it needed to rediscover the pleasures of small-scale farming, of tending the soil, of looking after animals, of thrift, balance and self-sufficiency. There was nothing inherently wrong with technology, or even with industry itself; but if the breakneck rush towards massive industrialization continued much longer, the world was heading for catastrophe. Yet Schumacher was neither a pessimist nor a doom-monger. By taking action in their own small way, he argued, millions of ordinary people could change the world; by switching to organic farming, for example, or by keeping their own animals, or merely by leading quieter, more modest lives. ‘Everywhere people ask: “What can I actually do?” ’ he concluded. ‘The answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order.’12
It was not surprising that Schumacher’s vision struck such a chord with readers in the early 1970s. ‘England is the country, and the country is England,’ Stanley Baldwin had famously said half a century before, evoking what he thought to be timeless images of Englishness: ‘the tinkle of hammer on anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill’, something that would ‘be seen in England long after the Empire has perished’. But he was wrong about that. For when visitors to the countryside looked out across the rolling acres of English farmland, they now saw a landscape utterly transformed.
Farmers were far more productive than ever before (the average cow produced 200 gallons more milk than she had in the 1950s, while the typical hen laid twice as many eggs) and during the 1970s they became expert at lobbying for grants and tax breaks, as well as picking up an estimated £1.5 billion in subsidies from Brussels in just seven years. Once mocked as backward and reactionary, they grew fat on the proceeds of the Common Agricultural Policy, which encouraged production regardless of cost or quality, and they used their large profits to invest in fleets of combine harvesters, tractors and Land Rovers. But they seemed to have lost something of their souls in the process. Small farmers were steadily being driven out by ambitious businessmen like Jack Eastwood, the broiler-chicken millionaire who owned 12,000 acres in Northamptonshire, or Bernard Matthews, the Norfolk turkey tycoon, famous for his ‘Bootiful!’ catchphrase. In 1971, one writer recorded that there were now barely 350,000 farm workers left in Britain. Soon the typical farm would ‘consist of a farmer, his wife and a lot of machinery’. Farmers were no longer husbandmen; they were factory managers, often working for a pension fund that had bought the farm and leased it back to its original owner. And even at this stage, they had become dependent on the market for convenience foods, producing vast quantities of peas and beans for Birds Eye, Findus and Marks & Spencer. ‘Processions of pea-picking machines like mechanical dragons roar into the quiet farms of East Anglia,’ wrote Anthony Sampson, ‘racing from one field to the next, working all night under arc-lights to devour their quota.’ Farmers already had to produce ‘always the same width of pea, the same fat-content of pork-meat, the same size of apple all over the country’. As one bitterly remarked: ‘You can farm against the weather, but you can’t farm against Birds Eye.’13
Efficiency came at a heavy cost, not just to the traditional relationship between the people and the countryside, but to the landscape itself. It was not merely the vast fields of sugar beet and oilseed rape; as the historian Robert Colls writes, it was the ‘bulldozed hedgerows, the cut-down woods, the conifer plantations, the nitrates, pesticides and dubious feedstuffs, the battery cages and broiler sheds, the slurry tanks, the giant machinery, and the sheer emptiness born of planning policies designed to prevent smallholders from repopulating and reworking the land’. Encouraged by subsidies and supermarkets to turn the land into a gigantic industrial operation, farmers tore down anything that stood in the way of profit, from hedgerows and woodlands to meadows and wetlands. With Whitehall handing out grants for this very purpose – a classic example of modernization gone mad – farmers were ripping out more than 10,000 miles of hedges a year, indifferent to the cost in beauty and wildlife. And as woods and hedgerows disappeared, so the countryside lost much of its variety: the birds and butterflies, the roaming animals and wild flowers that had been there for centuries, sacrificed to the insatiable demands for cheap food and instant profit. By 1980, when Marion Shoard, a former official at the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, published her broadside The Theft of the Countryside, Britain had already lost a staggering 24 million trees, 150,000 miles of hedgerow and a third of its woodlands, meadows, streams and marshes. Norfolk had lost 45 per cent of its hedges, Devon 20 per cent of its woodlands, Suffolk 75 per cent of its heathland, Bedfordshire 70 per cent of its wetlands. The landscape was ‘under sentence of death’, she wrote. And the executioner was not ‘the industrialist or the property speculator’, as city-dwellers often assumed, but ‘the figure traditionally viewed as the custodian of the rural scene – the farmer’.14
But while the 1970s were tough years for rural England, its landscape violated, its villages increasingly deserted as post offices were closed and bus services cancelled, they were not much better for towns and cities. When many people got up and looked out of their bedroom windows, they saw not the brick and stone contours of settlements that had developed organically over the centuries, but wildernesses of concrete and tarmac, utopian post-war visions that had gone horribly wrong. Take the nation’s second city, Birmingham, once a beacon of enlightened Victorian town planning, but rebuilt in the early 1960s as a monument to modern brutalism, its city centre dominated by a vast inner ring road and the huge slab of the Bull Ring, earning it a national reputation for choked flyovers, soulless towers and rain-sodden concrete. At the time, the travel writer Geoffrey Moorhouse praised it as ‘the most go-ahead city in Europe’, yet as early as 1972 The Times was lamenting that while the old city centre had had ‘a quality and warmth of its own’, the new was like a ‘large and chaotic building site’ with all traces of history and distinctiveness suffocated by a ‘wave of concrete’. It was no wonder that four years later the BBC used its flyovers and underpasses as the backdrop to Philip Martin’s gritty series Gangsters (1976–8), which broke new ground in its depiction of the seedy corruption, organized crime and casual racism beneath the surface of the modern British city. As one local woman put it when she wrote to the local paper about the redevelopment of Paradise Circus: ‘Where could another Paradise be found that is so completely and utterly soulless?’15
While Birmingham was justly notorious for its concrete bleakness, other towns and cities fared little better. In Margaret Drabble’s state-of-the-nation novel The Ice Age (1977), a woman arrives in the Yorkshire town of Northam to find that ‘the developers’ have done their worst: as she steps out of the station, she sees ‘an enormous roundabout, the beginning of a flyover, a road leading to a multi-storey car park, and an underpass’, but no signs of human life. She struggles through the underpass with her bags ‘in the stink of carbon monoxide, shuffling through litter, walled in by high elephantine walls, deafened and sickened’, only to emerge on a traffic island, cut off from the distant shops by four lanes of roaring traffic. ‘This was an environmental offence as bad as a slag heap,’ she thinks, feeling a surge of hatred towards the people responsible. Among them, as it happens, is her own husband, a successful property developer. In a nicely caustic passage, Drabble shows him contemplating an architect’s model of a new concrete building, conscious that ‘the grass would be covered in dog shit, that the trees would be vandalized and killed’ – but not caring, because ‘that would not be his fault, or the fault of his property company. It would be the fault of the people.’16
Of course this was a caricature. At the time, most planners saw themselves as pioneering social engineers, using the proceeds of growth to banish the cramped and insanitary slum conditions that had blighted working-class lives for generations. As disciples of Le Corbusier’s dictum that ‘to save itself, every great city must rebuild its centre’, they did not see themselves as reckless vandals. In their own minds they were progressive egalitarians, tearing down what another of Drabble’s characters calls the ‘mucky little alleyways’, and putting up bold, clean blocks, wide avenues and generous car parks. And yet Drabble’s caustic portrait was a highly seductive one, for by the mid-1970s developers and planners were almost universally loathed. ‘The answer to the terraced, two-up, two-down house is a grey skyscraper with its head lost in the clouds; to the crowded street, a stretch of unbroken grass big enough to fight a war on; to the corner grocer’s, a yawning shopping plaza,’ wrote Jonathan Raban in 1974. ‘Behind all these strategies lies a savage contempt for the city and an arrogant desire to refashion human society into almost any shape other than the one we have at present.’ Even the chief planner of the Greater London Council, David Eversley, conceded:
‘The Planner’ has become a monster, a threat to society, one of the most guilty of the earth-rapers. Suddenly he has become a breaker of communities, a divider of families, a promoter of neuroses (first noticed as ‘New Town Blues’), a feller of trees and bringer of doom by noise, visual intrusion and pollution, a destroyer of our natural heritage, a callous technocrat razing to the ground a large proportion of Britain’s historic buildings. He is regarded as a dictator, a technocratic law unto himself, outside the processes of democratic control.
Indeed, if anyone doubted that planners were the root of all evil, they needed only to listen to Douglas Adams’s radio series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978), in which Arthur Dent’s intergalactic adventures begin when the Earth is demolished to make way for ‘a hyper-spatial express route’. As the Guide itself puts it, the alien race responsible, the Vogons, are ‘one of the most unpleasant races in the galaxy. Not evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous.’ Typical planners, in other words.17
If there was one building that symbolized the damage done to British cities in the heyday of modernist planning, it was the high-rise tower block. Conceived as a cheap way to get people out of their run-down tenements and into clean, safe council accommodation with all the latest amenities, tower blocks were heavily promoted by both Conservative and Labour governments in the 1950s and 1960s. Crucially, they were quick and easy to build, which meant immediate results for politicians and planners alike; equally importantly, they were seen as a progressive alternative to the sprawling suburban estates that were steadily devouring the countryside. So when Harold Wilson promised voters that Labour would build half a million new homes a year by 1970, tower blocks naturally filled the gap. Between 1964 and 1968, local authorities built, on average, almost 40,000 high-rise flats a year, with the biggest concentrations coming in Greater London, Glasgow, the West Midlands and the North-west. In London alone, there were more than 68,000 high-rise flats by the time the boom ended. In Birmingham there were 24,000, in Liverpool 19,000, in Leeds 12,000, and in Glasgow, where city authorities prided themselves on building bigger and taller than anyone else, high-rise flats constituted a staggering three-quarters of all new housing built in the 1960s. By the time the planners lost faith in high-rise solutions – thanks partly to the gas explosion at Ronan Point in 1968, but also to the fact that funds were running out as the economy tightened – more than 1.5 million people, generally in some of Britain’s poorest urban areas, found themselves looking out of a grimy window ten, twelve or twenty storeys in the air.18
By the turn of the decade, the newspapers were already full of stories about the nightmarish experience of high-rise living. To working-class families used to living cheek by jowl with their neighbours on crowded terraced streets, or to couples who had long dreamed of their own little house and garden, the brutal concrete reality of estates like Glasgow’s Red Road, Sheffield’s Park Hill or Hunslet Grange in Leeds came as a deep disappointment. A survey for the Department of the Environment in 1973 found that high-rise residents suffered from more health problems because they were less likely to go for walks or exercise, while other studies found that the elderly and children were more likely to get respiratory infections from being trapped inside all day. The infirm and disabled lived in terror of the lifts breaking down, as they often did; parents lamented that their children had nowhere to play; residents of all ages complained bitterly at the lack of a garden, the absence of shops and the culture of teenage bullying, drug abuse and gang violence. Vandalism was a constant problem: shut up inside all day, many teenagers almost literally had nothing better to do, and as early as the mid-1960s almost one in three high-rise residents complained that graffiti, litter and damage were everyday problems. At the Avebury estate in Southwark, vandalism was so bad that just four years after the blocks were finished, they had to be repaired at a cost of £2 million, a sixth of what they had cost to build.
On top of all that, many system-built flats were shoddily and cheaply put together. Their concrete walls were soon stained with rainwater and damp, growing lichen and fungus and sometimes developing deep structural cracks. Built with undue haste and a cavalier lack of care, they proved enormously expensive to maintain: on one Portsmouth estate where water had leaked behind the concrete cladding panels, it cost the local authority a cool £1.5 million to repair just two towers. And in a survey of sixty local authorities at the end of the 1970s, the architecture writer Sutherland Lyall found that almost all had been forced to spend vast amounts of money repairing cracked cladding, leaking roofs and damp walls that were barely a decade old, coming to a total of at least £200 million. But while architects insisted that they were hard done by, blaming the local authorities for not spending more to maintain the blocks and the tenants themselves for treating them so badly, it was of course the residents who suffered most. As many as four out of ten told researchers they felt lonely and cut off; in London and Sheffield, half of the residents interviewed said they would move immediately if they had the chance.19
By the early 1970s, the tower block had become a powerful metaphor for the shattered ideals of the post-war consensus, associated in the public mind with graffiti, drug addiction, unemployment and crime – as well as with the arrogance of middle-class planners, infected with the spirit of social engineering, who had tried to force design solutions on working-class families without bothering to find out what they actually wanted. And when writers and reporters visited high-rise estates in the early 1970s, they did so with a sense of sadness and horror. Arriving in the Millbrook estate in Southampton, ‘a vast, cheap storage unit for nearly 20,000 people’, Jonathan Raban found a dismal scene of glowering concrete blocks, deserted service roads and poorly maintained grassland ‘patrolled by gangs of sub-teenage youths and the occasional indecent-exposure freak’. Inside, most of the people he interviewed complained of theft and vandalism; even their milk bottles and milk-money regularly disappeared, and many admitted that they would not risk hanging their clothes in the communal drying areas. Of course Millbrook was still a long way from the world imagined by J. G. Ballard in his dystopian novel High Rise (1975): a futuristic forty-storey housing complex containing a swimming pool, a supermarket, even a school, in which the residents turn on one another, forming aggressive clans, fighting brutally for territory and food, withdrawing into a degenerate society of murderous, cannibalistic hunter-gatherers. Even so, in an age of growing anxiety about public violence and family breakdown, Ballard’s vision was still too close for comfort.20
For although Britain’s high-rise utopia had not yet degenerated into cannibalism, it had nonetheless become a potent symbol of social breakdown. In the autumn of 1976, the journalist Christopher Booker visited Sir Denys Lasdun’s groundbreaking sixteen-storey Keeling House in Bethnal Green, completed two decades before. Architectural handbooks often hailed it as a masterpiece, their pictures showing ‘its concrete gleaming white in the sun’. But Booker found it hard to imagine that he was looking at the same building: a ‘tatty and forlorn’ council block, ‘its concrete cracked and discolouring, the metal reinforcement rusting through the surface, every available inch covered with graffiti’. Inside, only one lift was working; ‘piles of old cigarette packets and broken bottles’ lay in the corners; and throughout there was an overwhelming ‘stench of urine’. If this was the best that architectural modernism could do for London, then it was no wonder that just five years later the GLC began a programme of demolishing its least popular tower blocks, some of them barely ten years old. The high-rise utopia, as the distinguished geographer Alice Coleman wrote a few years later, ‘was conceived in compassion but has been born and bred in authoritarianism, profligacy and frustration. It aimed to liberate people from the slums but has come to represent an even worse form of bondage.’ It was meant to be ‘a form of national salvation’. Instead, it had become ‘an all-pervading failure’.21
In August 1972, the diarist James Lees-Milne spent a pleasant weekend visiting a variety of upper-class friends, artists and fellow historians in the Dorset countryside, one of the least spoiled landscapes in southern England. ‘All the people we met this weekend’, he noted when he got back, ‘were highly intelligent aesthetes, all deeply apprehensive about the dire threat to the landscape, in fact to the whole earth.’ Yet these people, who to him represented ‘the highest standards of civilisation’, were ‘powerless to stop the devastating flood of spoilation’, which he blamed on ‘the vast mindless, faceless majority with no principles but personal greed’. Six months later he made another trip, this time to Shropshire, where he was horrified to find the countryside ‘dotted with modern bungalows’. He was particularly depressed by the sight of Bridgnorth, looking out from ‘its delightful acropolis’ over ‘an ocean of factories and horrors’. As always, though, his aesthetic judgements were seasoned with a heavy dose of snobbish contempt. ‘The conglomeration of wires, pylons, ill-placed factories and execrable villas is so horrifying that I utterly despair of the landscape,’ he recorded.
I know that people say there has always been change which is resented by the old. But never, never has there been such devastating change as in my lifetime, change always for the worse aesthetically, never for the better. The public en bloc are blind to hideous surroundings. I prefer to stay at home in my ivory tower and never go on expeditions rather than be affronted at every familiar turn with a substitute architectural monstrosity.22
Lees-Milne was quite wrong about ‘the public’. Just a few weeks later, taking the new Poet Laureate, Sir John Betjeman, on a trip to inspect the architectural ‘horrors’ inflicted on the city of Bath (‘one’s vision of hell’), he was taken aback by the warmth of their reception. When they went for lunch, the waitresses immediately recognized Betjeman; so did the staff in the bookshop they visited next, the attendants in the Pump Room and the cashier in the Midland Bank, who immediately rushed to get the manager. ‘Just as well I had not told the Bath Preservation committee that he was coming,’ Lees-Milne recorded sourly, ‘for he would have been mobbed.’ No doubt this owed a great deal to Betjeman’s accessible, witty verse, to his cuddly teddy-bear television persona, and to the natural charm and humility with which he treated his admiring fans. But it also owed something to his reputation as Britain’s leading champion of conservation: the man who had fought vainly to save Euston Arch and had kept St Pancras alive, the man who had savagely punctured arrogant redevelopment in his poem ‘The Planster’s Vision’, the man who gave his time and energy in the early 1970s to save Southend Pier, Liverpool Street station and Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Street. It was partly thanks to his reputation as the man who had stood up to the bulldozers that Betjeman got an unprecedented 6,000 letters of congratulation when he was made Laureate. And whatever Lees-Milne thought about the public’s attitude to modern architecture, the fact that Betjeman got some fifty letters a day on ‘threatened buildings, redundant churches, old market places, Victorian town halls, etc.’ tells a rather different story.23
In previous decades, conservation had been regarded as a faintly cranky pursuit, the province of artists, eccentrics and intellectuals, three groups to whom most right-thinking people gave a very wide berth indeed. But as the demographic make-up of inner cities and rural villages changed, so the articulate, affluent newcomers began to raise their voices. Many were children of the mid-1960s, brimming with self-righteous passion. Unlike their predecessors, they were not content merely to form discussion groups; they wanted to make a difference. There were early signs of this new spirit in the 1960s, when middle-class pressure groups blocked two deranged schemes to build a relief road across Christ Church Meadow in Oxford and a tunnel underneath the centre of Bath; the location of these protests gives a clue to the kind of people attracted to conservationism. Not surprisingly, it picked up plenty of recruits in the gentrifying enclaves of London at the turn of the decade: in Gospel Oak, for example, where residents fought to save their nineteenth-century artisan houses from demolition, or in De Beauvoir Town in Hackney and Railton Road in Brixton, where residents preserved their Victorian streets from the bulldozer. Near the British Museum, long-held plans to demolish the area between Great Russell Street and Bloomsbury Way were finally abandoned in 1975 after years of bitter debate. So was an even more demented scheme to level and redevelop Covent Garden (the market having closed in 1974, although its last days are wonderfully captured in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Frenzy, made two years earlier), which collapsed only after a vociferous protest campaign spearheaded by the Evening Standard’s Simon Jenkins. And most famously of all, a seventeen-year battle raged over the fate of Tolmers Square, just west of Euston, a cluster of run-down Georgian buildings that had been lined up for redevelopment as a gigantic and highly lucrative office complex. Squatters, Asian immigrants, trade unionists and even students from nearby University College London joined the crusade against the developers; in the end, though, both sides lost, with Camden Council turning it into a particularly soulless council-flat complex.24
In the meantime, not one but two schemes to build a new London airport had come to a sticky end. In January 1971, the Roskill Commission announced that a site had been selected in the Bedfordshire village of Cublington, well placed for access to motorways, the Midlands and the north of the capital. To get this far had taken four years of hearings and well over £1 million, but the scheme lasted only six weeks. Not only would the airport destroy a thirteenth-century church, a Georgian rectory and acres of perfect farmland, but it also threatened the country house of the Conservative political hostess Pamela Hartwell. She pulled some strings, various Tory MPs were persuaded to come out against the report, and within two months it was dead. So the government adopted a new site: Maplin Sands, a stretch of mudflats off Foulness Island in the Thames estuary. In characteristic Heath style, the plans were suitably ambitious: two runways by 1980, with two more built in the next decade; an eight-lane motorway into the heart of the City of London; a ‘brand new jet city’ of 300,000 people with the airport at its centre; even a high-speed railway to whisk passengers at 125 miles an hour through the Essex marshlands. The council backed it; so did the trade unions. But the locals were not so sure: one group, the ‘Defenders of Essex’, distributed posters warning of ‘Jackboots over Essex’. As projected costs surged, Maplin began to look increasingly far-fetched, and in January 1974 the government reluctantly admitted that the plan was back under review. When Labour returned to office two months later, the new Environment Secretary, Anthony Crosland, who had mocked the scheme as ‘Heathograd’, wasted little time in scrapping it.25
But it was not just in the capital that conservationists won significant victories. In Berwick-upon-Tweed, an alliance of the local historical society and the Chamber of Trade overturned a scheme in 1970 to knock down part of the town’s Elizabethan walls, calling themselves ‘the authentic voice of the people’. Two years later, near Dumbarton, the fifty-five households of the little village of Dullatur – a high proportion of them professionals, clerical workers and university lecturers – defeated a plan to destroy their ‘bucolic isolation’ with a giant housing estate. In Coronation Street’s Weatherby, residents even organized an Action Group in February 1974 to stop the planned redevelopment of their beloved street. And across the land, conservationists whispered the name of their new folk hero, John Tyme, a lecturer in environmental studies at Sheffield Polytechnic. Almost no hearing or new motorway scheme went ahead without Tyme’s rumbustious presence, striking fear into the heart of planners everywhere. In December 1974, he disrupted a hearing on an extension to the M16 in rural Essex. A year later he appeared as the star witness in a melodramatic hearing on plans for a four-lane road through the Aire Valley, which was eventually suspended after scenes of ‘shouting and scuffling’, a first for a planning inquiry. And in February 1976, after the hearing had been restarted, he was on hand to watch dozens of protesters fight their way through lines of stewards and occupy Shipley Town Hall, which was surely the most exciting thing to have happened in that corner of Yorkshire for decades.26
Perhaps the most colourful scenes, though, came at Winchester during the baking summer of 1976, where Major General Raymond Edge, the planning inspector, convened hearings on a planned M3 extension that would slash through the city’s beloved water meadows. ‘From the start,’ reported The Times, ‘it was clear that most of the 800 or so people crowded into the sweltering Guildhall had no intention of allowing the inquiry to proceed. Throughout the morning and afternoon they kept up a constant barrage of boos, handclaps, cheers and stamping of feet.’ At one point, in a rare moment of solidarity between sailor and soldier, the town’s excellently named MP, Rear Admiral Morgan Morgan-Giles, tried to intervene from the balcony, but he was shouted down. Meanwhile, Major General Edge’s voice was constantly drowned out by chanting and singing, and when he tried to order television cameras out of the hall, fighting broke out between police and cameramen. The high point of the drama, however, came when the hearing resumed two weeks later. On this occasion, when Major General Edge refused to let John Tyme read a statement objecting to the inquiry on procedural grounds, all hell broke loose, with the crowd roaring, chanting and clapping, while the beleaguered Major General spent the next half-hour ‘pointing at individuals, asking them to be silent, and, when they refused, ordering the stewards to eject them’. Order was restored only when Tyme got to read his statement after all, but, as The Times reported, pandemonium broke out again that afternoon when ‘Mr Tyme burst back into the room. His shouted message was drowned out in cheers and applause, and police reinforcements were called.’ In an extraordinary climax, the crowd started singing ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ while Major General Edge implored them to leave. At last, the police had to clear the building, dragging some of the audience with them. Among them, the press noted delightedly, was John Thorn, the headmaster of Winchester College. ‘I will be back!’ he shouted at Major General Edge, like some public school Terminator. Not even the chaotic planning inquiry in Tom Sharpe’s novel Blott on the Landscape (1975), the hilarious and very timely story of Lady Maud Lynchwood’s battle against the fictional M101, could compete with that.*27
What lay behind many of these protests was not just a love of the countryside or a fascination with Victorian architecture, but a revulsion from technological modernity and a renewed love affair with an idealized national past. At one level, conservationism was an exercise in nostalgic escapism, a way of banishing the depressing headlines about strikes, terrorism and inflation, and returning to a supposedly more settled, orderly age, when Britain still ruled the waves, the lower orders knew their place and tower blocks did not yet blight the horizon. But since so many gentrifiers read the Guardian and voted Labour, it was less a form of reactionary conservatism than simply yet another consumer fad. For much of the 1960s, at least until the hippy craze that set in from about 1967, cultural fashion had been bound up with visions of the future, with optimistic projections of the coming Utopia, with the glamour of the Space Age. But with the shock of the Vietnam War, the collapse of Harold Wilson’s modernization programme and the new vogue for resurrecting the Victorians and Edwardians, the future fell out of fashion. And by the early 1970s, with man’s horizons shrinking and even the space race running out of steam, modernism itself seemed out of date. White heat was passé; rustic romanticism was the latest thing.28
The cult of the past found expression in a huge variety of ways. Local and family history societies, industrial archaeology groups, oral history associations and amateur history ‘workshops’ thrived; so too did museums, despite the entrance charges levied by the Heath government in 1970. Often seen as a product of the Thatcher years, the heritage industry was alive and well long beforehand: these were boom years for the manufacturers of china figurines, the sellers of artfully distressed-pine furniture, and the National Trust shops offering historically themed trinkets and toiletries to weekend visitors. These were good years, in fact, for the National Trust, full stop. Having been put onto more business-oriented, commercial lines at the end of the 1960s, it experienced astonishing growth in the next decade, with its membership rolls expanding from a healthy 158,000 in 1965 to 539,000 in 1975 and more than a million in 1981; as David Cannadine puts it, this was unquestionably ‘the most successful recruitment drive ever undertaken in Britain in peacetime’. Country houses had never been so popular: when the government refused to accept the palatial Mentmore Towers in lieu of inheritance taxes, with the result that it was sold at auction in 1977 to the deeply disreputable Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the public outcry was loud and long. Where country houses had once been associated with shiftless aristocrats lounging around on the backs of the poor, they were now popularly linked with a lost golden age of social order, deference and decorum, a far cry from the hooliganism and pornography of the present. Intellectuals often winced at the stunning commercial success of books like Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House (1978), and above all Edith Holden’s The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady (1977), perhaps the most unlikely bestseller of the decade. But as Roy Strong perceptively remarked after staging the enormously successful ‘Destruction of the Country House’ show at the V&A in 1974, ‘in times of danger’ Britain’s ‘environmental heritage … represents some form of security, a point of reference, a refuge perhaps, something visible and tangible which, within a topsy and turvy world, seems stable and unchanged’.29
Both high and low culture seemed saturated with nostalgia in the early 1970s. In poetry, Geoffrey Hill’s magnificent Mercian Hymns (1971) looked back to the eighth-century kingdom of Mercia under the Anglo-Saxon Offa; in pop music, nominally ‘progressive’ bands like Yes, Genesis and Led Zeppelin evoked an imagined past of Arthurian knights, Pre-Raphaelite maidens and perilous quests, subjects that would have seemed downright bizarre back in the days when ‘Telstar’ was number one. On the high street, shoppers queued to buy gentle autobiographical tales by the rural Yorkshire vet James Herriot (later televised as All Creatures Great and Small), no fewer than eight of which featured in the bestseller lists in 1976, or to place orders for Portmeirion’s bestselling ‘Botanic Garden’ range of Victorian-themed pottery, which was so popular that shops ran out of stock. In the cinema, audiences revelled in the nostalgic escapism of The Railway Children (1970), based on E. Nesbit’s popular children’s tale, the film that endeared Jenny Agutter to thousands of furtive middle-aged men. There were tales of patriotic derring-do like The Eagle Has Landed (1976) and The Thirty-Nine Steps (1978, which bears almost no relation to Buchan’s original but became famous for the splendid scene of Robert Powell hanging from Big Ben), and Agatha Christie adaptations such as Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and Death on the Nile (1978), which were conceived, the EMI studio boss admitted, as an antidote to ‘all the gloom and doom in the country’. And then there was Peter Hall’s Akenfield (1974), an adaptation of Ronald Blythe’s bestselling oral history of a Suffolk village. Made with only a skeleton script and a cast of 150 amateurs, Akenfield was an astonishingly beautiful and evocative depiction of rural life from courtship and marriage to education and work, based around a young man’s dilemma about whether to leave behind the familiar rhythms of the countryside after the First World War for a new life in Australia. Unsparingly honest and austere, this was more than uninformed nostalgia. Yet the public loved it: almost 15 million tuned in when Akenfield was shown on ITV in January 1975. The next day, even Hall’s taxi driver told him how much he had enjoyed it.30
On television, evocations of the past were enormously popular, from The Six Wives of Henry VIII and The Long March of Everyman to Colditz and I, Claudius, from Pennies from Heaven and The Duchess of Duke Street to Dad’s Army and Last of the Summer Wine, reflecting not merely the BBC’s unparalleled skill at making costume dramas but also the public appetite for depictions of a quieter, happier age. When the BBC launched The Pallisers, a stunningly elaborate 26-part version of Anthony Trollope’s novels adapted by the rakish novelist Simon Raven, the on-screen world of Victorian elegance and courtroom drama made for a stark contrast with the political headlines of the day – for this was January 1974, with the papers full of the three-day week and the death throes of the Heath government, when some commentators were gloomily pondering a future of authoritarianism or revolution. But as the Radio Times explained, The Pallisers was set in a very different world, when ‘the political affairs of the nation were frequently conducted in the luxurious, and sometimes frivolous drawing-rooms of London Society’. Past and present collided, however, when strikes at the BBC meant that the last two episodes were not finished in time; in the end they were shown five months later, rather undermining the impact of the series.
In general, though, viewers seemed reluctant to draw contemporary lessons from series set in the past. After the ninth episode of the hugely popular The Onedin Line, a family drama serial based around a Victorian shipping line watched by tens of millions in the early 1970s, researchers asked viewers if they thought James Onedin’s ‘commercial struggles’ had ‘any relevance to the industrial problems of today’. Most saw no link at all: ‘I enjoy the drama and don’t look for hidden meanings’ was a typical response. A similar kind of escapism lay behind the success of perhaps the most successful of all the costume dramas of the 1970s, LWT’s Upstairs, Downstairs (1971–5), a lovingly detailed portrait of Lord Bellamy’s household in Edwardian London, a vision of Britain as a stable hierarchy in which the lowliest servant had her place, just as the richest aristocrat had his. Yet even in Upstairs, Downstairs, reality has the cruel habit of breaking in: the series ends with the General Strike and the Wall Street Crash, two moments anticipating the industrial conflict and economic crisis that would have been so familiar, and so worrying, to contemporary viewers.31
Even the clothes people wore often reflected the retreat from modernity into an idealized version of history. When Brentford Nylons, once advertised with unrelenting frequency on ITV by Alan Freeman (‘All right? Stay bright!’), went bust in February 1976, it seemed to set the seal on a period in which the synthetic future of the 1960s had been rejected in favour of a much more organic, folksy, flowing look. In fashion and cosmetics alike, the space-age look was dead, replaced by a druggy pastiche of Pre-Raphaelite beauty which in turn gave way to a succession of retro styles from art deco elegance to Joan Crawford film noir, at once nostalgic, escapist, elegant and camp. For Biba, the emblematic London boutique of the early 1970s, it always seemed to be the day before yesterday, a world of elaborate art nouveau patterns, of muted, swirling mulberries, browns, plums and purples, of impossible glamour and unspeakable decadence. When Biba took over the art deco Derry & Toms department store in Kensington High Street, the result was a vast fun palace of nostalgic escapism, ‘a free ticket to a 1930s Disneyland dropped suddenly in the centre of London’, as one newspaper diarist put it when the store opened in September 1973. ‘It’s like seeing old Hollywood movies on a Sunday afternoon,’ said one shopper, a student from UCL. ‘I can just imagine Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire dancing over the marble floors.’
Ominously, though, she had come out without her chequebook, adding: ‘It’s best seen and not bought.’ That was precisely what most people thought about the new Big Biba, and explains why it lasted less than two years. By contrast, perhaps the most influential designer of the decade always kept a close eye on the pounds, shillings and pence, and became a rare symbol of British commercial nous. ‘Her clothes possess precisely the qualities demanded by a certain sort of customer who might once have been considered a bit strange and arty crafty but is now a recognized mainstream in fashion,’ one fashion writer observed in 1972. ‘[Laura] Ashley clothes fit in with hypo-allergenic cosmetics, milk face washes, ethnic dress, conservation and home grown food, and there is no reason why they should go out of style any faster than the ideas they seem to complement so well.’32
For some people, looking backwards was not enough. Like the hippies of the late 1960s, they wanted to escape inwards and outwards, to slip the bonds of rationality and modernity, to leave behind all reminders of a flawed, compromised, polluted world. In academic enclaves and urban villages, semi-hippyish writers such as Carlos Castaneda, Erich von Däniken and Robert M. Pirsig, with their accounts of prehistoric shamanism, ancient extraterrestrials and the relevance of Zen Buddhism in a technology-obsessed world, all enjoyed brief and highly undeserved bursts of success. By the mid-1970s, no fashionable household was without a copy of at least one of them, often ostentatiously displayed alongside the pot plants, semi-erotic prints and obligatory recording of Tubular Bells. Even more popular, though, especially in the long run, were the works of a writer who had grown up in a world very different from that of macrobiotic restaurants and progressive rock, yet became an inspiration for millions of romantic dreamers not just in Britain but across the world.
As a distinguished Oxford philologist during the middle decades of the century J. R. R. Tolkien had cut a deliberately tweedy, nostalgic figure. Yet when he died in 1973 his fame had spread well beyond the literary-academic circles in which he was most at home. He had begun work on his Middle-earth stories while recuperating from wounds suffered during the Battle of the Somme: even then, his influences, from William Morris and Richard Wagner to the neo-medievalism and mythological revival of the Victorians, were themselves backward-looking. Yet as early as 1968 – just over ten years after he had published the last part of The Lord of the Rings – his worldwide sales had hit 3 million. By 1979, the Evening News estimated that only the Bible had sold more copies worldwide than The Lord of the Rings, and a year later his total sales exceeded 8 million. And contrary to myth, his readers were not all Californian hippies lost in a fog of marijuana smoke. In January 1972, the Sunday Times reported that the paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings was selling a steady 100,000 copies a year in Britain alone. Not even death could diminish his appeal: in 1977, when Allen & Unwin published The Silmarillion, a compilation of Middle-earth legends written for Tolkien’s own amusement, the initial print run of 600,000 copies was a record for a British hardback. But the publisher’s vision was rapidly validated: as they had anticipated, The Silmarillion went straight to the top of the bestseller list.33
Tolkien’s books would never have been so successful if they had appealed only to the strange coalition of sweaty male teenagers, pale-faced girls and lank-haired prog-rock songwriters with which they became associated. As Tolkien’s Times obituary noted in 1973, his little hobbits ‘embodied what he loved best in the English character and saw most endangered by the growth of “subtopia”, bureaucracy, journalism and industrialization’. As a quiet pastoral people, at home with the land and their pipes, the hobbits made perfect heroes for a generation who distrusted authority and self-aggrandizement, while his portrait of evil – Saruman with his ‘mind of metal and wheels’, the Orcs with their love of ‘wheels and engines and explosions’, the blackened land of Mordor, with its industrial slag-heaps, its air filled with ash and smoke, its Dark Tower dominating the horizon – is a blistering indictment of modernity, industrialization and the contemporary urban nightmare. For Tolkien, as for the environmentalists of the early 1970s, there were few greater crimes than the rape of the landscape. When the corrupted wizard Saruman turns from good to evil, he symbolically cuts down the trees around his fortress to make way for machines. Similarly, when the hobbits return home, they are horrified to find the Shire turned into a modern wasteland, with even their beloved old mill pulled down and replaced by a brick monstrosity, used not for grinding grain but for some unspecified industrial purpose. It was little wonder that green campaigners loved the book: when Greenpeace sailed into the French nuclear testing zone in 1972, one of their activists noted in his diary that he had been reading Tolkien, and ‘could not avoid thinking of parallels between our own little fellowship and the long journey of the Hobbits into the volcano-haunted land of Mordor’. The Lord of the Rings ‘is at once an attack on the modem world and a credo, a manifesto’, wrote the former literary enfant terrible Colin Wilson in 1974. ‘It stands for a system of values: that is why teenagers write “Gandalf lives” on the walls of London tubes.’34
The only book that rivalled The Lord of the Rings as both a bestseller and a ‘manifesto’ was another work of fantasy written for personal entertainment. Its author, Richard Adams, was an Oxford-educated civil servant in (appropriately) the Department of the Environment, who originally made up his story of talking rabbits to amuse his two daughters during a long car journey to see Judi Dench in Twelfth Night at the RSC. Eventually, he decided to write it down and sent it to thirteen different publishers, all of whom rejected it. Only the one-man publishing house of Rex Collings agreed to take it, and even Collings had his doubts. ‘I’ve just taken on a novel about rabbits, one of them with extra-sensory perception,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘Do you think I’m mad?’ But when Watership Down appeared in the shops in November 1972, its success was phenomenal. Early reviews were ecstatic: the New Statesman’s critic wrote that he found himself ‘checking whether things are going to work out all right on the next page before daring to finish the preceding one’, while The Economist declared that if there was ‘no place for “Watership Down” in children’s bookshops, then children’s literature is dead’. To Adams’s surprise, his book picked up not only the Carnegie Medal but the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, while Penguin immediately snapped up the rights and brought out a Puffin paperback for children and then a Penguin edition for adults. By 1974, when the Sunday Times bestseller list first appeared, Watership Down was Britain’s fastest selling book; by the end of the decade, this epic story of rabbits searching for a new warren, originally written for children, had sold more than 3 million copies – most of them to adults.35
Like The Lord of the Rings, Watership Down resonated with readers in the early 1970s precisely because its themes – the individual against the collective, the small against the great, the organic against the machine, the natural world of fields and woods against the man-made one of roads and bulldozers – seemed so timely. What sets the narrative in motion is the destruction of the rabbits’ home to make way for ‘high class modern buildings’, as a sign puts it, and everything man-made – cars, roads, traps, gassing devices – seems alien and threatening. As Christopher Booker put it, the book offered ‘escape from the unspeakable, inhuman world we are creating for ourselves with technology’, and a ‘dream of getting back to a simpler, natural world’. As in The Lord of the Rings, however, the novel’s eco-politics came with more than a hint of old-fashioned conservatism, showing how the emerging green sensibility blurred the lines between left and right. The critic Alexander Walker called it ‘a cosy idealisation of England’s past … where everyone had their place in the warren and kept to it, women were thought to be satisfactorily defined by their role as home-makers, and the Welfare State had not yet turned hardy individual initiative into marrowbone jelly. In short, a High Tory myth.’ But of course there was more to the book than political symbolism, not least an exciting story that entertained readers of all allegiances. In the midst of juggling briefs on the planned Sex Discrimination Bill, the new government’s plans for massive industrial intervention and a bitter battle about pay-beds in the NHS, Labour’s Barbara Castle retreated to bed one Saturday in July 1974 with a copy of Adams’s bestseller. ‘It was bliss to give in and to be able to read something other than an official document,’ she recorded. ‘I found great comfort in Watership Down.’36
Most writers of the mid-1970s, however, portrayed nature in a much darker light, emphasizing its propensity to fight back against human exploitation, even to destroy mankind itself. In 1976 alone, two competing pulp thrillers, Richard Doyle’s Deluge and Walter Harris’s The Fifth Horseman, showed Britain being engulfed by monstrous floods. In the latter, in good science-fiction style, the terror has been unleashed by man’s own arrogance, with North Sea oil drilling (then a topical subject) having destroyed the seabed and brought a tidal wave crashing over Britain’s shores. As one character sagely puts it: ‘Nature abhors a vacuum … We’re taking out oil and gas, and putting nothing back.’ But the book that really set the standard for nature biting back was James Herbert’s gory blockbuster The Rats (1974), whose terrifyingly graphic vision of feral black rats swarming across London, leaving a trail of mutilated corpses in their wake, drew ferocious criticism from shocked reviewers. As the writer Alwyn Turner points out, while the murderous rats obviously tapped readers’ ‘folk memories of Pied Pipers and plagues’, they were also inspired by contemporary headlines. There had been fears of rats running amok during the council workers’ strike of October 1970, when bags of rubbish lay uncollected in the streets. Five years later, after an unofficial strike in Glasgow left more than 50,000 tons of ‘rotting garbage’ in the city’s streets, some in piles twenty feet high, the army had to be called in to deal with the infestation of vermin. Perhaps it was no coincidence, then, that giant rats featured as deadly adversaries not only in The Rats, but in television adventure series such as Doomwatch (‘Tomorrow, the Rat’, 1970), The New Avengers (‘Gnaws’, 1976) and Doctor Who (‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’, 1976). In Turner’s words, nothing better symbolized ‘the inability of science to deliver a brave new world’ than the rearing figure of a giant rat – even if it was played by a glove puppet.37
Television played a central part in framing the new environmental concerns of the day, especially through the semi-fantastic adventure series that were so popular with children and adults alike. Doomwatch was a particularly prescient example: first broadcast in February 1970, it was partly conceived by Dr Kit Pedler, the head of electron microscopy at the University of London’s Institute of Ophthalmology. As the unofficial scientific adviser to Doctor Who, Pedler had co-created the Cybermen four years before as a way of articulating his concerns about the effects science and technology would have on man’s essential humanity, but now he wanted to take a more realistic approach. As his long-term collaborator Gerry Davis told the Radio Times, they wanted to create a series that would investigate ‘what was happening in the world’, questioning the narrative of ‘scientific progress’ that had dominated the headlines in the 1950s and 1960s.
Doomwatch follows the activities of the Department for the Observation and Measurement of Scientific Work, a government unit set up to appease the green lobby, but which acquires more teeth than its sponsors expected. Its director, Dr Spencer Quist (John Paul), worked with the Americans on the atomic bomb during the war, but has become a haunted and brooding man after his wife died of radiation poisoning. Meanwhile his deputy, Dr John Ridge (Simon Oates) is a Jason King-esque playboy with extravagant shirts, a Lotus Élan and a penchant for slapping his female colleagues on the behind. Each week, more than 12 million people tuned in to watch them confront the latest man-made menace, from a plastic-eating virus in the first episode to chemical waste, computer brainwashing, factory pollution and nuclear weapons. Thirsty for profit and indifferent to the ecological costs, big business never emerges in a good light; neither do the government nor the civil service, both of which try to obstruct Doomwatch at every turn. A thick but enjoyable streak of paranoia ran through the programme, epitomized by the moment in the third series when Ridge, driven to a breakdown by the government’s refusal to tackle pollution, steals some phials of anthrax and threatens to hold the world to ransom, presenting viewers with a rare chance to see an eco-terrorist in a cravat. Needless to say, the press loved the show: while the Mirror’s television critic initially claimed that Doomwatch was ‘unbelievable’, the global pollution scandals of the early 1970s gave it a sense of context, and before long Davis was telling the Daily Mail that it was ‘a staggering coincidence that many of the programmes we put out turn into reality a few days later. Of course we do our research in scientific journals but that does not explain everything.’ The Mirror even set up its own ‘Doomwatch’ unit to investigate environmental issues. ‘Call in Doomwatch!’ the paper urged its readers. ‘They are ready for action!’38
Since Doomwatch shared not only many of its writers but its cast and production team with Doctor Who, it was perhaps not surprising that the older series also became an unashamed champion of the new environmentalism. The very first Doctor Who story of the 1970s, ‘Spearhead from Space’, introduces us to an alien enemy that infiltrates the plastics industry, bringing shop-window dummies to life with murderous effect, and soon Jon Pertwee’s Doctor finds himself working with a United Nations team to fight off weekly threats from mad scientists and alien invaders. But while this era of the programme’s history owed much to precursors like Quatermass, it also reflected the cultural concerns of the early 1970s. Barely a week went by without the Doctor infiltrating some top-secret research establishment, often in defiance of the government and the military, and discovering a terrible elemental threat to the world’s existence, unleashed by mankind’s heedless meddling. As the critic James Chapman astutely remarks, it is telling that the Doctor’s foes in these years tended to be green-skinned organic monsters – Silurians, Sea Devils, Axons, Ogrons, Draconians – rather than the silver metallic robots that had proliferated during the years of ‘white heat’. In ‘Doctor Who and the Silurians’ (1970) and ‘The Sea Devils’ (1972) the threat even comes from the planet itself, as it is revealed that the Earth once belonged to two highly intelligent reptile species, who retreated into hibernation hundreds of millions of years ago and have been awakened by – surprise, surprise – a nuclear power research centre. Indeed, given that the series was initially conceived as a way of educating children about science, it is striking how badly scientists come out of Doctor Who in the 1970s. If they are not drilling to tap the power reserves hidden beneath the Earth’s crust, releasing a toxic slime that turns people into hairy lunatics (‘Inferno’, 1970), then they are leading ill-fated geological expeditions in the far future and infecting themselves with anti-matter (‘Planet of Evil’, 1975). Disaster always ensues, but they never, ever learn. ‘Listen to that!’ the Doctor yells at the mad scientist in ‘Inferno’. ‘It’s the sound of the planet screaming out its rage!’39
As in Doomwatch, the succession of ecological disasters inevitably takes its toll on the morale of the Doctor’s friends. In ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ (1974), the Time Lord finds modern London deserted after an infestation of very poorly realized dinosaurs, who have been brought through time by a group of radical environmentalists. It transpires that this is all part of Operation Golden Age, a plan to return the Earth to ‘an earlier, purer age’ before it was soiled by technology and pollution, and the conspirators include not only a group of renegade scientists, but an ecologically minded government minister and the Doctor’s friend Captain Mike Yates, who has become obsessed with the dangers of industrial development. Despite the havoc, the Doctor has some sympathy for their motives, but insists that the best answer is to ‘take the world you’ve got and try to make something of it’. And when his more literal-minded ally Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart suggests that the conspiracy leader must have been mad, the Doctor retorts: ‘Yes, well of course he was mad. But at least he realized the dangers that this planet of yours is in, Brigadier. The danger of it becoming one vast garbage dump inhabited only by rats … It’s not the oil and the filth and the poisonous chemicals that are the real cause of pollution, Brigadier. It’s simply greed.’
But by far the most radical Doctor Who story of the era, as well as the best remembered, was ‘The Green Death’, broadcast during the summer of 1973. This time, the Doctor and his assistant Jo investigate some strange goings-on at a disused coal mine in South Wales, where a miner has been found dead. (‘It’s exactly your cup of tea,’ the Brigadier points out. ‘The fellow’s bright green, apparently, and dead.’) The cause, it turns out, is toxic waste from a local chemical factory, which has not only given birth to a poisonous green slime that kills all who touch it, but is also breeding terrifying giant maggots. No doubt many viewers had already guessed that the factory was up to no good when its managing director appeared at the beginning of the story promising a group of unemployed miners ‘wealth in our time’, but they surely could not have guessed the chilling reality behind the façade. For, as the Doctor discovers, Global Chemicals, the multinational corporation that owns the factory (motto: ‘Efficiency, productivity and profit’), is actually run by a megalomaniac super-computer, the BOSS, indifferent to ecological damage and human life. To defeat it, he has to forge an unlikely alliance with a group of environmentalists based in the local Wholeweal commune. Their leader, Professor Cliff Jones, is a Nobel Prize-winning biologist; the Doctor has been looking forward to meeting him, but is taken aback when Professor Jones turns out to be a long-haired, denim-clad hippy, now working on a fungus substitute for meat. In a clear victory for the forces of environmentalism, however, it is precisely this fungus that kills the toxic slime. Meanwhile, the Doctor’s ditzy companion Jo has fallen head over heels for Professor Jones’s ecological message, insisting: ‘It’s time to call a halt, it’s time that the world awoke to the alarm bell of pollution instead of sliding down the slippery slopes of, of whatever it is.’ At the end of the story she announces her intention to marry him, rubbing salt in the wound by telling the Doctor that ‘he reminds me of a sort of younger you’. Capitalism, chemicals and computers have been defeated, the hippies have won the day, and the Doctor drives off disconsolately into the night, alone with only the memory of a hearty fungus meal to console him.40
Most ecological fantasies of the 1970s were rather less heart-warming. With the headlines full of pollution and the bookshelves groaning with predictions of disaster, unutterable catastrophe tended to be the order of the day, especially in stories for children. In John Christopher’s trilogy The Prince in Waiting, Beyond the Burning Lands and The Sword of the Spirits (1970–72), we find ourselves in a future England that has reverted to medieval customs and superstition, a bloody, paranoid world of walled cities in which dabbling with machines is a crime punishable by death. The landscape is littered with relics of modernity – one character ties his horse to a piece of wood on which are painted the words ‘RADIO TV DEAL’, ‘something that meant nothing’ – but it is also full of the casualties of science, such as ‘polymufs’, people disfigured by genetic mutations, who are treated like menial slaves. People in this neo-medieval future live in small wooden houses, conscious that their ‘ancestors had built in stone and metal, their houses hundreds of feet high, and had died under the rubble of their tumbled pride’. But it transpires that the priestly Seers, who preach anathema towards machines, are secretly preserving the wisdom of the ancients, and have a bunker full of machines beneath Stonehenge. In the climax to the first book, they explain to the youthful hero that ‘the earth itself rebelled’ against the scientific arrogance of their ancestors: it ‘shook and heaved and everywhere men’s cities tumbled and men died in their ruins’.
The worst of it did not last long, days rather than weeks, but it was enough to destroy the world of cities and machines. Those who survived roamed the shattered countryside and fought each other for what food there was.
Gradually they came together again … They returned to their old places, at least to the villages and the small cities. Not to the large ones which were left as rubble. They did as they had done in the past – grew crops, raised cattle, traded and practised crafts and fought. But they would have no truck with machines, identifying them with their forefathers’ ancient pride and the reckoning which had followed. Anyone found dabbling with machines was killed, for fear of bringing down fresh destruction.41
Hatred of machines was a popular theme of apocalyptic fiction in the 1970s. The BBC series The Changes (1975), adapted from Peter Dickinson’s novel The Devil’s Children, imagines a future in which mankind is filled with an overwhelming revulsion against modernity, smashing machines and banning even the mention of technological terms as society reverts to a brutal, pre-industrial order. In its chilling opening scenes, all kinds of machines – televisions, radios, toasters, cookers and cars – suddenly give out a strange, unsettling noise, filling people with an unstoppable urge to smash and destroy them. This time, however, there is a rather more upbeat conclusion. The programme’s young protagonist, a secondary school girl called Nicky, decides to find out what lies behind this Luddite madness, and traces its origins to a quarry deep in the mountains, where miners have disturbed a rock identified as ‘the oldest on Earth’, a living entity that has been disturbed by man’s industrial activity (just like the Silurians in Doctor Who, although here the stone seems to be an incarnation of the legendary Merlin). Only when she has begged the stone for forgiveness – and received by telepathy some home truths about man’s greed and pollution – is the terrible process reversed, the world apparently having been restored to ‘balance’ between nature and machine – although what that means is anybody’s guess.42
In April 1975, only a month after the conclusion of The Changes, the BBC showed the first episode of what would become the last word in eco-catastrophe dramas. Thanks to its terrifying global-pandemic opening, its earnest back-to-the-land message, its endless shots of Volvos trundling down country lanes, and its cast of balding men in parkas and feisty women in dungarees, Survivors captured the spirit of the mid-1970s better than almost any other cultural product of the day. It follows the adventures of three plucky survivors – Greg, an engineer, Abby, a middle-class housewife, and Jenny, a young secretary – in the aftermath of a devastating pandemic that has wiped out the vast majority of the world’s population. In the opening titles, we track the progress of the deadly virus from a Chinese laboratory, where a scientist has become accidentally infected (do they never learn?), across the Western world. And in ‘The Fourth Horseman’, the show’s first and arguably best episode, we watch as society crumbles in the face of what appears at first to be merely flu. When we first meet Abby (Carolyn Seymour), she is playing tennis in her Home Counties back garden against a serving machine. When she leaves the court, the machine continues to pump out balls, but we know it will stop eventually – as will all other machines on the planet, although for very different reasons. And as Abby cooks her husband’s dinner, listening to the news of the illness striking London, she muses prophetically on the fragility of civilization. ‘I never thought what happens to a city if it all breaks down, all at the same time,’ she says. ‘There’s no power, no lighting or cooking. And food, even if you get it into the city, you can’t distribute it. Then there’s water, sewage, ugh! Things like that.’
Soon afterwards, Abby falls ill; when she awakes, not only is her husband (Peter Bowles, in pre-bounder days) dead, but so is everyone else in the village. Together with a handful of like-minded survivors, she faces the overwhelming challenge of eking out a decent life in a world without electricity or running water, without government or police, without televisions or telephones, supermarkets or hospitals. In this Hobbesian world, the very concepts of affluence and technology have lost their meaning. And while the little group of survivors establishes a rudimentary commune in a country house, they are not fleeing the modern world from choice, like the hippies of the early 1970s, but because they have no alternative. The cities have been reduced to cesspits: when Jenny flees London, she is leaving a city collapsing into anarchy, the streets jammed with traffic, the hospitals choked with corpses. Later, when the survivors visit a supermarket in search of provisions, they find it crawling with rats; from the ceiling hangs a corpse, a sign around its neck reading ‘LOOTER’. When they make it back to London in the second series, they find a city haunted by vermin and disease: although a little commune survives at the Oval and still has heat and light, it has to maintain an electric fence to keep the rats out, and is ruled by a fascistic despot. The future lies not in the city but in the countryside; as the series progresses, the survivors become increasingly self-sufficient, giving the lie to Abby’s despairing claim that they are ‘less practical than Iron Age man’. Indeed, by its third season Survivors often seemed like a how-to guide for viewers expecting an imminent apocalypse, patiently following its characters as they teach themselves gardening and medicine, grow wheat and make soap, and even set up a rudimentary government, with its own approved currency. There is even a happy ending, as they rediscover the means to generate power: a sign that the narrative of human progress, for good or ill, can begin again.43
In interviews to promote the first series of Survivors, the show’s creator Terry Nation claimed that the idea had come to him long before the oil shock of 1973. But in an age when petrol pumps seemed in danger of running dry and the next power cut was always just around the corner, his series struck a powerful chord. In particular, its fascination with self-sufficiency took up one of the most fashionable and popular themes of the day. Previewing the show in April 1975, the Radio Times advised its readers that ‘in a survival situation, the only things we would have to rely on would be our hands and our muscle power’. Helpfully, the magazine recommended a couple of good reads on how to provide for a family in the event of disaster: ‘Food for Free [by Richard Mabey] is literally that: plants you can pick up in the hedgerows. And John Seymour’s book on Self-Sufficiency actually tells you how to kill a pig – and how many of us would know how to do that? Dismiss the technical approach and think primitive!’
Thinking primitive was all the rage in the mid-1970s: the Radio Times piece, for example, was illustrated with a montage of other exciting titles, from The Vegetable Garden Displayed and The Rearing of Chickens to The Small Commercial Poultry Flock and Soil Conditions and Plant Growth. When Terry Nation showed his interviewer a carved wooden ornament and asked: ‘Who cut the tree down? Who made the steel to create the saw to cut it down? Who dug the coal to feed the furnace to make the steel? Who dug the iron ore out of the ground?’, he was merely echoing the ideas of one of the gurus of the self-sufficiency movement, John Seymour, who liked to ask audiences to work out the processes behind even the most basic household items. And when Nation’s survivors were shown painstakingly learning crafts from scratch and building up a body of knowledge to pass on to the next generation, they were following all the principles of Seymour’s manifesto, Self-Sufficiency. No doubt they would have benefited from a trip to the Centre for Alternative Technology, which had been founded in a disused slate quarry outside Machynlleth two years previously, opened its doors to the public in 1975 and soon became Europe’s most successful eco-centre. And if only they had had a subscription to the magazine Practical Self-Sufficiency, founded in the same year, then they might have picked up all sorts of useful tips. ‘The country faces grave economic difficulties and the likelihood of severe shortages,’ an editorial in the first issue began ominously.
Rapid inflation, unemployment, soaring food prices, chemically adulterated foods and the increasing dehumanising of our Society have all contributed to a growing awareness of the need to be more self-reliant – to grow more of our own food – to make less demands on a welfare state which can no longer cope with the needs of its citizens … The need is for direct experience of the whole and natural life, irrespective of the situation in which we find ourselves – whether it be in the centre of a city or in a commune in Wales. This is of paramount importance, not only for us, but for our children – for knowledge and experience gained in childhood are never lost.44
The founders of Practical Self-Sufficiency were a husband-and-wife team, David and Katie Thear, who had started running an organic smallholding in rural Essex after David was made redundant. But it was another husband-and-wife team, Tom and Barbara Good, who were to become the poster children of self-sufficiency, thanks to the great success of the BBC sitcom The Good Life, which began life just two weeks before Survivors. In less skilful hands the show might have become painfully worthy, but thanks to the accomplished writing of John Esmonde and Bob Larbey, and perhaps even more to the performances of Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal, it became one of the fondest-remembered comedies of the decade. One of the keys to its appeal was that unlike the characters in Survivors, the Goods never take themselves too seriously and are actually not very good at self-sufficiency. Although they set out with the best of intentions, Tom throwing up his job as a Surbiton draughtsman designing the plastic toys in cereal packets, their failures are more notable than their triumphs: their goat is always escaping, there are all sorts of mishaps with their pigs and chickens, and their beloved peapod burgundy is practically undrinkable. Their relationship with their next-door neighbours Jerry and Margo, the souls of suburban respectability, affords plenty of opportunities to poke fun at middle-class conventions, but it must have been a rare viewer who did not, from time to time, have a sneaking sympathy for poor, beleaguered Margo. There could, after all, be something unbearably self-righteous about even the most well-intentioned defender of the planet. The feminist paper Spare Rib reported the case of ‘an ecologically orientated’ mother who ‘chews up her baby’s food for him rather than use the blender that she has been given. She believes that turning on the blender contributes unnecessarily to the pollution produced by electric power plants.’ Not even Tom and Barbara were that bad, although the series did have one or two detractors. ‘Saw Richard Briers in a comedy series,’ recorded Kenneth Williams after watching the second episode. ‘It was terrible. Not a laugh line in it.’45
Although self-sufficiency was never more than a minority interest, composting, recycling and tending allotments did enjoy growing and sustained popularity. Even the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition eagerly jumped aboard the bandwagon, with displays showing the homeowners of 1975 how they could make wall lights from empty tin cans, rugs from old cardigans, a lamp from cigarette packets, a chair from drainpipes and a table from corrugated iron sheeting, which was surely carrying recycling to post-apocalyptic extremes. For some people, however, growing one’s own vegetables and saving on electricity were not enough: as Gordon Rattray Taylor had shown in The Doomsday Book, the situation was so desperate that only collective action could stave off disaster. One such group were the members of the Conservation Society, which had been founded in 1966 (by James Lees-Milne, among others) after a series of letters to the Observer about the dangers of massive population growth. During the next few years, the society devoted itself not only to population policy, family planning and abortion reform, but to water conservation, national parks projects, the problems of disappearing hedgerows, the urgent need for recycling and the campaigns against Concorde and the Maplin scheme. With fewer than 5,000 members in 1970, it was hardly a mass movement, but two years later it scored a notable triumph by exposing cyanide dumping in Warwickshire, a coup that paved the way for the Deposit of Poisonous Waste Act. By the beginning of 1973 its membership reached more than 8,700, but then it began to decline – not because of any defects on the society’s part, but because another group had captured the limelight.46
In February 1971, the environment reporter of The Times alerted his readers to a new publication, The Environmental Handbook, which had been produced by a small group of young activists in a little office space in Covent Garden. It was ‘a good 40p’s worth for all do-it-yourself environmentalists’, he thought, quoting its message to readers: ‘Be as subversive, clever, radical, yet constructive as you possibly can.’ Its authors certainly lived up to their own injunction. On 10 May, sixty young members of Friends of the Earth (inspired by a similarly named association across the Atlantic) marched from Pall Mall to Schweppes House in Connaught Place, demanding that the company change its policy of having non-returnable bottles. When they arrived at the firm’s headquarters they listened to a poetry reading, as was then obligatory at protest marches. But it was what they did next that caught the attention of the press, as they ceremonially dumped some 1,500 glass bottles on the doorstep, with the warning that more would follow unless Schweppes gave in. It was a brilliant public relations coup (aided by the fact that, amazingly, not one of the bottles broke): the next day, The Times reported, ‘supporters of FOE’s campaign kept the telephone ringing in the group’s tiny office’.47
From a small band of radical students (the British branch’s founder, Graham Searle, had been vice president of the NUS just a year beforehand), Friends of the Earth mushroomed into one of the largest and most influential green groups in the country. Within barely a year, The Times was calling it ‘the most effective pressure group probably since the days of Shelter under Mr Des Wilson’. In 1971, Friends of the Earth had eight local branches; by 1976 there were 140, and by 1980 there were 250, with 17,000 people having registered as supporters. It succeeded because it was daring, irreverent, clever and often funny; crucially, it was also highly decentralized, allowing local activists to set their own tone. It was a new kind of organization, assertive and dynamic rather than nostalgically conservationist, aiming not just to preserve what was left of nature, but to roll back the tide of industry and pollution. It produced pamphlets on everything from roads and pollution to uranium mining and the whaling industry; it stopped Rio Tinto-Zinc mining for copper in Snowdonia, and lobbied the government for a ban on imported products made from endangered species. Funnily enough, though, the one thing it did not do was to persuade Schweppes to change its policy on returnable bottles.48
A common criticism of groups like Friends of the Earth was that they were merely opportunities for spoiled middle-class do-gooders to get together and indulge their bleeding hearts, and that they offered nothing to working-class households who supposedly had neither the time nor the money to worry about footling issues like the future of the planet. Trade union leaders, for instance, tended to be highly suspicious. ‘My members have achieved decent living standards and they want further improvements,’ boasted the electricians’ leader Frank Chapple. ‘They can identify with the advance of new technology and its benefits, not with the muesli-eaters, ecology freaks, loony leftists and other nutters who make up the anti-nuclear brigade.’ But perhaps the fiercest critic was Labour’s shadow environment spokesman, Anthony Crosland, whose obsession with economic growth meant that he was virtually blind to the campaigners’ argument. In a sense, Crosland was still dining out on his reputation as the rising star of the 1950s; as he grew older and wearier with the disappointments of office, his thinking became coarser, more rigid, closed to new ideas. Conservationism, he told his wife, was ‘morally wrong when we still have so many pressing needs that can only be met if we have economic growth’. The environmentalists suffered, he thought, from a ‘middle-class and upper-class bias’ (which was a bit rich coming from the Highgate public school boy who had set out to smash the grammar schools), and they were ‘kindly and dedicated people, but were usually affluent and wanted to kick the ladder down behind them’ (ditto). Invited on television to debate the point with representatives of environmental groups, Crosland ostentatiously dropped off to sleep during a short film about the dangers of development; afterwards, he claimed that he had merely been ‘resting his weary eyes’. Perhaps it was not surprising that, as one of his fellow MPs told him, he was ‘more hated by environmentalists than any man I know’.49
In some respects, though, Crosland’s analysis was not far short of the mark. Environmentalism appealed above all to the well-meaning, well-educated middle-class professionals who throughout Britain’s modern history had written letters to the press, signed petitions and attended public meetings. A survey of people who read the new magazine The Ecologist in 1971, for example, revealed that 59 per cent belonged to the professional middle classes, with a very high proportion of teachers and scientists, and a further 33 per cent were students and sixth-formers. Indeed, in many respects the ecology movement was the natural successor to CND, which had fallen from fashion after the nuclear test-ban treaty of 1963 and the rise of détente. Not only was there a strong social and cultural affinity between CND and environmentalism – what might be called the Guardian–folk music–chunky knitwear tendency – but there is some evidence that many people moved instinctively from one movement to the other, following the tides of political fashion. They were the heirs to the dissenters and Nonconformists of old, the kind of people who had once inveighed against bishops, slavery, armaments and empire – which automatically invited the suspicion of well-heeled politicians like Crosland who fancied themselves as tribunes of the working classes. When one of Crosland’s old Oxford pupils went to a Friends of the Earth meeting in December 1977, for example, he was impressed by their enthusiasm but disturbed by their bourgeois leanings. ‘They were an overwhelmingly middle-class group,’ recorded the former Viscount Stansgate, now plain ‘Tony’ Benn. ‘They appeal to some radicals and dissenters, but I felt they could be drawn into the mainstream of establishment opinion without actually making any difference to the way in which society was run.’ He advised them to ‘turn your mind to the power structure’ – which, given that Benn was then Secretary of State for Energy, was precisely what they had been trying to do all evening.50
One of the remarkable things about environmentalism – confusing to some, refreshing to others – was the way in which it blurred the traditional ideological division between left and right. While both the Tories and Labour made growth and modernization their central objectives, environmental groups’ challenge to modernity made it hard to locate them within the conventional spectrum.* A good example was the magazine The Ecologist, which was launched in July 1970 by Edward Goldsmith, known as Teddy. Born into a wealthy banking family and the elder brother of the ruthless financier James Goldsmith, Teddy was a rich man, free to travel the world indulging his passion for anthropology and his fascination with what he called ‘tribal peoples’. He became convinced not only that tribal societies were being wiped out by economic progress, but that the human race itself was at risk, with man’s basic nature as a hunter-gatherer having been eroded by centuries of decadence. By the end of the 1960s, Goldsmith had decided that it was time to fight back, and so he invested £20,000 of his own money, as well as £4,500 of his brother’s, in the new magazine. More funds came from rich friends like the eccentric casino owner John Aspinall, who ran Mayfair’s Clermont Club, kept a tigress and two brown bears in his private zoo, and spent his spare time fantasizing about a right-wing military coup. And the first issue of The Ecologist was apocalyptic to say the least, with a cover story warning of world famine, urgent appeals for population control and a public sterilization drive, and a suitably melodramatic editorial by Goldsmith himself. It was ‘only a question of time’, he wrote, before the planet’s resources were exhausted, and then ‘that already tottering technological superstructure – the “technosphere” – that is relentlessly swallowing up our biosphere, will collapse like a house of cards, and the swarming human masses, brought into being to sustain it, will in turn find themselves deprived of even this imperfect means of sustenance’.51
The Ecologist was a big fish in the pond of the early green movement: as the historian Meredith Veldman remarks, it was a ‘slick, well-produced and expensive publication’, and ‘brought an air of professionalism to a movement often beset by amateurism’. Many of its themes – the dangers of nuclear power, the threat of motorway expansion, the folly of supersonic aircraft, the blind brutality of industrial farming – reflected what other green groups were saying in the 1970s, and the magazine was rarely less than provocative. On the other hand, Goldsmith’s obsession with the ‘hunter-gatherer’ ideal and his insistence that tribal societies were ‘the normal units of social organization’, which in almost every issue were obediently echoed by his assistant Robert Allen, struck more than a few readers as downright odd. In its respect for nature, its fascination with community, its rejection of materialism and its obsession with a lost pre-industrial golden age, The Ecologist was not so different from other green groups, or indeed from The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down. But when Goldsmith demanded an immediate end to immigration, or ferociously condemned welfare programmes that interfered with the ‘natural controls’ of infant mortality, or denounced women’s liberation, he seemed less like a nostalgic idealist and more like a cranky arch-reactionary.
In some ways, indeed, his magazine blurred the lines between two very different kinds of groups in the early 1970s: the middle-class conservationists and environmentalists fretting about the state of the world, and the discontented Mayfair playboys muttering about toppling the government and turning the clock back. And on occasion, its obsession with hunter-gatherer medievalism produced positively bizarre results, such as when, in July 1975, Robert Allen produced a wild encomium to the Khmer Rouge, who had just had forced Cambodia’s entire population to march into the countryside in a bloody attempt to build peasant Communism from the ground up. ‘They seem to be doing their best to ensure that urban parasitism cannot reoccur,’ Allen wrote, commending them on their decision to close the factories, smash up the banks and destroy the towns’ water supplies. ‘They deserve our best wishes, our sympathy and our attention. We might learn something.’52
For a brief period, however, The Ecologist genuinely set the tone of environmental debate in Britain. Its undoubted high point came in January 1972, when the magazine published a special issue billed as a ‘Blueprint for Survival’, which sold out immediately, was then published as a book by the small imprint of Tom Stacey, and was finally picked up by Penguin. As usual, its guiding lights were Goldsmith and Allen, and the message, laid out in detailed bullet-point form, was as doom-laden and melodramatic as ever. Much of the world would run out of food ‘within the next 30 years,’ it warned; the reserves of all but a few metals would be gone ‘within 50 years’, and ‘the breakdown of society and the irreversible disruption of the life-support systems on this planet’ would come ‘within the lifetimes of our children’. Not unpredictably, Goldsmith advised his readers that only a ‘stable society’, abandoning pretensions to material progress, but embracing man’s hunter-gatherer instincts, could save the world. Industrial development must cease; population must be tightly controlled; and people must live in self-sufficient units of no more than 500 people each, with the political system conducted on a largely local basis. And in some ways the Blueprint’s vision sounded distinctly authoritarian. ‘There is no doubt that the long transitional stage that we and our children must go through will impose a heavy burden on our moral courage and will require great restraint,’ it warned, adding that ‘legislation and the operations of police forces and the courts will be necessary to reinforce this restraint’.53
If nothing else, the Blueprint was a brilliant public relations coup. Before it was published, Robert Allen asked thirty-six eminent scientists and conservationists for their approval, including Peter Scott, Sir Julian Huxley, Professor C. H. Waddington, Professor W. A. Robson and Sir Frank Fraser Darling, a member of the Royal Committee on Environmental Pollution whose Reith Lectures had done much to arouse public anxiety about environmental damage. Allen then printed their names on the inside front cover, giving careless readers the impression that they had written the Blueprint themselves. He also managed to get Sir Frank Fraser Darling to chair a press conference on the day the magazine came out, ensuring yet more publicity: indeed, the next day saw reports in almost every national newspaper, including on the front pages of both The Times and the New York Times. Even in his wildest dreams, Goldsmith could hardly have hoped for better coverage. In the Guardian, Anthony Tucker compared the Blueprint’s impact to that of the Communist Manifesto; in The Times, a long leader concluded that its thesis was ‘too plausible to be dismissed’; in the Sunday Times, Lewis Chester wrote that it was ‘nightmarishly convincing’; and even the Daily Mail thought that its ‘prophecy of a world blindly careening towards self-destruction remains profoundly disturbing’, and that ‘the prophets of doom deserve to be heard with as much respect as those who continue to worship the Gross National Product’. If that were not enough, a week or so later 187 scientists, including nine Fellows of the Royal Society and twenty university professors, signed a letter to The Times explaining that though they were unable to sign the Blueprint because of its errors of fact or emphasis, they welcomed it as a ‘major contribution to current debate’ and a reminder that only population control, conservation and recycling could save the planet. ‘Now letters are written daily to The Times,’ recorded James Lees-Milne, a great admirer of the Blueprint, ‘and everyone who thinks at all realises that the future of the earth is literally at stake.’54
Although the Blueprint was, perhaps fortunately, never put into effect, there is no doubt that it caused a considerable stir. In the Commons, the junior environment minister Eldon Griffiths called it a ‘quite remarkable document’, and Goldsmith even got to present his ideas to the Environment Secretary, Peter Walker, at an informal meeting in February 1972, although nothing really came of it. All the same, environmentalism seemed to be on the march. In January both the Lancet and the British Medical Journal published letters signed by dozens of doctors demanding immediate action to halt global over-population, while on the very same day that The Ecologist published the Blueprint for Survival, the American ecological doom-monger Paul Ehrlich addressed a capacity crowd at Westminster’s Central Hall, telling them that Britain held ‘the key to the entire problem’, and that ‘educated people look a great deal to England to lead the way’. In radical environmentalist circles, it was hard to miss the feeling of millenarian excitement, of ‘high euphoria’, as one of Goldsmith’s colleagues later remembered. In the very near future, it seemed, all politics would be green.55
It was in Coventry, of all places, that this new mood bore concrete results. Towards the end of 1972, a group of friends started meeting in a local pub to discuss their shared interest in environmental issues, and in the New Year four of them – Tony and Lesley Whittaker, who were both solicitors, an estate agent called Michael Benfield and his assistant Freda Saunders – decided that it was time to do their bit. (Revealingly, Tony Whittaker was a former Conservative activist, and had already tried to interest the mainstream parties in environmental issues, but with no joy.) On 31 January, the Coventry Evening Telegraph carried an advertisement inviting support for a new political party, PEOPLE, with the goal of winning power by 1990. By later standards, their message was both uncompromising and thoroughly bleak, calling for an end to economic growth, strict measures to limit population and the radical levelling of social distinctions through a National Incomes scheme. It also bore the heavy imprint of Teddy Goldsmith, who merged his own abortive Movement for Survival with the new group, and whose austere views influenced their first manifesto. Their goal was to field 600 parliamentary candidates at the next general election; in the event, partly because it came more quickly than they were expecting, they actually fielded just five and won a mere 4,576 votes. It did not help that their first colour scheme, coral and turquoise, came out as red and blue on their cheaply printed flyers; or that the press, assuming that they were yet another left-wing sect, consistently called them the People’s Party. When a second election was called for October 1974 they did even worse than before, winning a feeble 1,996 votes. At this stage they might easily have collapsed. The Whittakers decamped to the West Country to start a new life of self-sufficiency, but in their absence the party changed its name to the Ecology Party and in 1979 managed to field 55 candidates. To almost universal surprise it picked up almost 18,000 votes, not bad going for a party with just 500 members. The Green Party – as it was eventually called – was on its way.56
In many ways the green movement of the 1970s was a failure. It never dislodged economic growth from the forefront of the political agenda; indeed, as the economy lurched close to the abyss in 1974 and 1975, environmental issues faded from the headlines, not reappearing until a decade or so later. To some extent, environmentalism was a middle-class fad, as its critics had claimed, and its strident, apocalyptic tone, so redolent of protest movements in the early 1970s, meant that it never attracted a mass following. The young man who placed a personal ad in The Ecologist in March 1974, hoping for a partner to ‘share the remaining years of industrial civilisation’ and experience the ‘end catastrophe’, may well have found a girlfriend eventually, but it is hard to believe that he was a very jaunty date. Even Jonathon Porritt, the Old Etonian baronet who chaired the Ecology Party in the late 1970s and became one of Britain’s best-known environmental campaigners, conceded that ‘there was too much doom and gloom in the early seventies, and there’s a limit to how much people will take’. They may have laughed along with Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal, but most were too attached to their comforts to contemplate a life of self-sufficiency, and while they may have enjoyed watching Survivors on Wednesday nights, they had no desire to re-enact it themselves.57
And yet there is another side to the story. The green movement may have disappeared from the headlines, but environmental concerns continued to seep into the mainstream, with consumer groups and publications like Which? taking up issues like pollution and over-packaging. In cities and town centres, there was no return to the unchecked philistinism of the 1950s and 1960s. Although development continued, it was more sensitive to the historic landscape, and attempts to knock down much-loved Victorian or Edwardian buildings typically provoked angry public debates. Industrial agri-business still ruled the countryside, but in 1978 Labour introduced a conservation bill that was inherited by Michael Heseltine and eventually passed as the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981. The Ecology Party slowly picked up recruits, Friends of the Earth went from strength to strength, and more established groups like the RSPCA, the RSPB, the National Trust and the Council for the Preservation of Rural England attracted millions of supporters and acquired a more assertive, even mildly radical edge. And in a piece entitled ‘How people have been made to care about their surroundings’, The Times noted that by the summer of 1975 there was already a vast array of unsung little groups and societies: ‘organizations for the preservation of ancient monuments, birds, canals, friendless churches, green belts, rights of way, steam engines and village ponds; for the promotion of archaeology, tree planting, light railways, public transport and road safety; and opposed to airports, motorways, Concorde and much else’. They might not win every battle; they might even lose more than they won; but the revealing and heartening thing was that they were fighting at all.58
And there were other legacies, too. Thanks to Elisabeth Beresford’s wonderful characters, a generation of children were converted to the joys of recycling by the Wombles of Wimbledon Common, who first appeared on television, making good use of the things that they found, in February 1973. Meanwhile, it was thanks to the conservationist, backward-looking spirit of the early 1970s that traditional country crafts – basket-weaving, pottery-making, iron-working – were saved from extinction, and that the antique shop became such a familiar and much-loved fixture in the alleys and back streets of little towns across the country. It was thanks to the well-meaning muesli-eaters of the 1970s that macrobiotic restaurants and wholefood shops became common sights in big cities, gradually evolving into the vegetarian restaurants and organic cafés that later generations took for granted; and it was partly thanks to the sandal-wearing members of the Campaign for Real Bread that the sliced white loaf did not destroy traditional baking for ever. And it was thanks to the Campaign for Real Ale – founded in 1971 by a stereotypical group of bearded do-gooders, one of whom, Roger Protz, was expelled from first the Socialist Labour League and then the International Socialists for being too left wing – that keg beers like Watney’s Red Barrel and tasteless lagers like Skol and Hofmeister did not kill off the traditional ales of England, and that British drinkers could hold their heads high in the beer halls of the world. These groups were much mocked at the time, and indeed there was often something faintly ridiculous about them. But it is only a slight exaggeration to say that whenever a modern Briton eats brown toast for breakfast or has a pint of proper beer after work, he ought to mutter a quiet thank-you to those real-life Wombles of the early 1970s.59