Dirty Stubs to Rich Spikes
The great grey stubs of the tower-block boom which ran from the fifties to the late sixties litter most of urban Britain. Never has newness turned dark so quickly. Rarely has revolutionary optimism been so quickly and abjectly confounded. This revolution was born, like others, on the European continent and imported to Britain a generation after the prophets of concrete modernism had spoken. Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Auguste Perret and Walter Gropius were idealists of the twenties and thirties who dreamed a new world of light, tall, glass-covered buildings springing up to free humanity. This was about more than architecture. It was to be social revolution accomplished with concrete and prefabricated steel, bringing hygiene and sunlight to the masses who had lived and worked in the dark, grimy and above all messy streets of industrial Europe. With the arrival of the Nazis many of the idealists fled, particularly to the United States, where their towers would glorify not socialism but American capitalism in its age of triumph. Some, however, came to Britain. Berthold Lubetkin designed beautiful white modernist structures for London, early multi-storey concrete flats, a famous health centre and the Penguin Pool and Gorilla House at London Zoo. Erno Goldfinger on the other hand went for vast towers to house human gorillas and managed to offend Ian Fleming sufficiently to be used as a Bond villain’s name.
In other circumstances, avant-garde artists from Germany, Russia, France and Switzerland might have had limited impact in Britain, a country whose architecture had see-sawed between classicism and revivalism, and where the prefix ‘mock’ was not a term of mockery. But from the end of the Second World War through to the seventies, the shortage and foul quality of much older working-class housing meant a desperation for speed and short-cuts. Scotland alone had 400,000 homes without indoor toilets in the mid-fifties. Glasgow’s slums were so bad they had been formally denounced by the Roman Catholic church as inhuman. The great industrial cities of the Midlands and the North of England were in almost as bad a way. Politician after politician promised more new houses, ever faster. Britain would end up building a higher proportion of state-subsidized houses than almost any comparable country – beating, in fact, most of the Communist-run countries of Eastern Europe. The idealist architects offered scale and speed – huge streets in the sky, thrown up fast. The local bosses of British cities seized these foreign dreams with both hands. There is a photograph from the late fifties and sixties endlessly reproduced. Actually, it is many photographs, taken in different cities at different times. But they all show the same thing: eager, powerful men in suits staring down, or pointing, at a small-scale model with cardboard blocks set across it.
The architectural visionaries and the scores of ambitious, modern-thinking British architects who worshipped them, drew their towers set against rolling fields, surrounded by trees, on sunny spring days. In Britain’s cities, the municipal bosses were generally hostile to decanting populations out beyond their borders to entirely new settlements where they might have more space. People would want to stay in their own communities, they reasoned. Also, they wanted to keep the tax base and the votes. So instead, the towers tended to go up right in the middle of towns, on waste ground, or where old Victorian terraces had just been bulldozed. From 1958 councils got a central government subsidy for every layer over five storeys, a straightforward bribe to build up, not out. The new towers, which were only ever a minority of the total new housing, offered working-class families real benefits, though – fitted kitchens, underfloor heating, proper bathrooms, enough space for children to be able to stop sharing beds. The more ambitious and refined tower-block plans rarely got built: shortage of money and haste, plus a lot of local corruption, favoured quick-build thrown up by local companies.
Once, the different regions, counties and countries of Britain had boasted their own architectural traditions. Glasgow had her red sandstone tenements, London her ornate dark crimson brick apartments, Manchester her back-to-backs. Now, under the influence of a single modern aesthetic, identical-looking towers appeared, often bought off-the-peg from builders. The architect Sheppard Fidler recalled a boozy day out with Birmingham’s Labour boss, the ‘little Caesar’ Harry Watton, when they went to inspect a prototype tower-block by the builder Bryant. It gives a flavour of the time: ‘in order to get to the block we passed through a marquee which was rolling in whisky, brandy and so on, so by the time they got to the block they thought it was marvellous…As we were leaving, at the exit, Harry Watton suddenly said, “Right! We’ll take five blocks” – just as if he was buying bags of sweets! “We’ll have five of them…and stick them on X” – some site he’d remembered…’ Watton was a right-wing, anti-immigrant, pro-hanging Labour boss (not lord mayor, but chairman of the key committee in Birmingham). He was not corrupt but he was autocratic and self-righteous. There were Wattons everywhere. Some, like Newcastle’s T. Dan Smith, working with the massive architectural practice Poulsons, were corrupt. Others, like the puritanical socialist Bailie David Gibson of Glasgow, were certainly not. One of Gibson’s colleagues remembered him as frightening: ‘white-faced, intense, driving idealist, absolutely fanatical and sincere…He saw only one thing, as far as we could see: how to get as many houses up as possible, how to get as many of his beloved fellow working-class citizens decently housed as possible.’
Scotland and the North of England saw the most dramatic examples of the prefabricated mania. On the outskirts of Dundee, under the city’s controversial Bailie J.L. Stewart, more new housing was thrown up per head than anywhere in Europe, including the vast hexagonal nightmare of the Whitfield estate, built by Crudens. Under Gibson in Glasgow, the huge thirty-one-storey Red Road flats went up, the tallest in Europe, and at astonishing speed. As time went on, lessons were learned and more dispersed, varied and decorated concrete developments appeared. Newcastle had a late example, the giant wriggle of the Byker Wall, as if the emperor Hadrian had turned residential developer. Mostly, though, the stubby blocks were much the same everywhere. West Ham or Kidderminster, Blackburn or Edinburgh – who could tell? And everywhere the same problems quickly began to crop up. Dispersed local communities did not easily reform when stuck vertically in the air. The entrance halls and lifts, so elegantly displayed in architects’ watercolours, were vandalized and colonized by the young and the bored. Asbestos, it was discovered too late, was dangerous. Hideous condensation problems appeared. Walls were too thin for decent privacy. Shops were too far away.
In many cases, blocks were popular and well run in the early days, when people were proud of their new homes. The deterioration was human as well as concrete. A single drunken, fighting family could spread misery throughout many floors of a block. Two or three could wreck it. Councils who simply crowded tenants in, without considering problems such as those caused by having large numbers of children high up in the blocks, were at least as much to blame as Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe. It is true that some of the prefabricated, hurriedly flung-up blocks were dangerous. In May 1968 part of the Ronan Point tower block in east London, built with concrete panels, simply collapsed. Since the four deaths then, nobody else has been killed by a collapsing tower block and the craze to condemn them as inherently unstable matches the original craze to throw them up everywhere. Just as the slimy brick slums of the forties and fifties were blamed for producing hooliganism, so the new vertical slums were blamed for the vandalism of the sixties and seventies – even though some were being vandalized well before they were finished and open. Perhaps the bleakly uncompromising shadows they cast did have a demoralizing effect. You would have to be a very naive rimless-glassed modernist to love those dully repetitive lines.
Opinion began to turn against the towers, even among architects. Smaller-scale projects came into fashion during the seventies except in a few isolated and well-managed cities, such as Aberdeen. Tower blocks began to be blown up. Rochester destroyed all of its blocks to improve the look of the town. Later, Birmingham promised to do the same. Even Glasgow’s Red Road flats were being discussed for demolition. In other places, such as Wandsworth in London, the blocks were repackaged, covered with brightly coloured panels and given a more decorative silhouette. Left-wing councils, which in the sixties had championed the blocks, began to champion cottage-style housing instead. Council house sales meant blocks in the most favoured areas began to be improved from the inside, by their new owners. Many were sold to housing associations, others were left to house asylum seekers, drug addicts and the most desperate of the poor. Through her history, Britain has seen many building crazes, most notably the vast sprawl of brick terraces during the industrial revolution and then the ribbon-development suburbia of the interwar years. Yet not even they have marked so much of the look of Britain as quickly and nastily as the tower block revolution. The concrete jungles have become the most easily despised, most universally rejected aspect of the British experiment in modern living.
So it is worth remembering that some survived with contented tenants. It is worth recalling that even some graffiti-stained tower blocks, if they have heating, hot water and working lifts, may be better places to live than the leaking, rat-infested terraces, with outside toilets and small gas fires that they replaced. We can add to the small credit side that had Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester and London not built high then much less of the countryside within fifty miles of these cities, and others, would exist today. The new homes had to go somewhere. Tower blocks were said to be good because they prevented ‘sprawl’ – the very shabby-Tudor ugliness deplored in the thirties. And some sprawl certainly was stopped. Today, it seems, we are wiser. Architects are as keen on high density as ever but now want to devise street patterns, squares and low-rise homes on a human scale. By the early eighties Britain’s housing shortage was, in general terms, solved by the concrete boom: some 440,000 homes were created in tower blocks alone. But migration and the break-up of families since then have created a new housing crisis and once again skyscrapers are coming back in fashion. They are different now. From Manchester’s new forty-seven-storey Beetham Tower, with its queasy-making overhang, to plans for a 66-storey shard-shaped London Bridge Tower, these are chic palaces for the urban rich, not upended slums. They are as close to Harry Watton’s off-the-peg blocks as the drug habits of supermodels are to the ravages of heroin in prison. Architecture matters; but it does not matter as much as class.