Re-forming Britain

Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction

Elizabeth Darling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134314966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

Re-forming Britain considers the nature and practice of architectural modernism in inter-war Britain in a new light. Bringing hitherto little considered protagonists and projects to the fore, it argues that rather than being an imported idiom, the new architecture in Britain formed part of an ongoing attempt to make a modern nation.

Spanning the period 1925-42, the book focuses on the key sites from and through which architectural modernism emerged in the UK. Part one considers the main arena in which a will to modernize Britain developed in the 1920s. In parts two and three the author documents, contextualizes and explains how this modernizing will was given modernist form, discussing the work of architects such as Wells Coates, Maxwell Fry, and Connell and Ward, and their allied ventures with likeminded reformers in other fields. These collaborations produced 'narratives of modernity': buildings, projects, exhibitions and books, through which, the book argues, modernist reformers were able to persuade politicians, and those with influence upon them, that modernism was the means to re-form the nation.

Re-forming Britain offers the first in-depth analysis of well-known modernist schemes such as Kensal House and the Pioneer Health Centre but also brings previously little studied or unknown activities to light. This important work invites a new understanding of the nature of architectural modernism in inter-war Britain and the ways in which it ultimately gave form to post-war Britain.

Part 1

A New Spirit

Part 1

Introduction

In 1931, signs that something was afoot in the normally peaceable world of British architecture began to be seen in the pages of the architectural press. In March, The Architect and Building News reported the careful defence of the ‘new architecture’ which had been presented by Frederick Etchells at a debate entitled ‘Tradition in Relation to Modern Architecture’.¹ Acknowledging that this was an ‘admittedly immature movement’, he nevertheless noted that a growing number of architects saw in it ‘a new hope for their art’. Concluding, he rejected the claims of his fellow speakers that this new architecture, in its adherence to function, was therefore ‘purely utilitarian engineering’, and merely a ‘stunt’, and declared his conviction that

There could be no doubt that there was growing up, through a thousand crude and doubtful forms, through a thousand immature experiments, a common state of mind in architecture, and this was the birth of a style, and therefore of a living tradition.

A few months later, his theme was echoed in even more vehement tones in the pages of The Architects’ Journal. In his introduction to a special issue devoted to ‘The New Materials’, Wells Coates wrote of ‘the new forces’ which, he stated, ‘the properties of steel, steel-concrete and glass’ had unleashed.² These forces, he believed, had brought British architects and architecture to a turning point. He wrote:

It is for architects to realize the possibilities of our lives now, in an age of Science, when life could almost immediately become free, that is to say, ordered, and refined, for all classes. Imprisonment (with torture) in the strait-jacket of old forms, a pretence to beauty at second hand? Or liberation (with refinement and delight) into movement, balance, harmony, order from in outwards?

That is the choice; the use of the new resources of materials as the prisoners – the slaves – of old habits, old social prejudices, old visual prejudices; or as the means to new forms, new habits of life, a new vision. The time has arrived for architects to reflect and to create.

In the final pages of the same issue, Coates’ call to arms was reiterated. A transcript of a speech given by his contemporary and friend Serge Chermayeff, in this too was made a connection among new materials, new sciences and the need for an appropriate expression of the contemporary spirit. Likewise it noted a shift in architects’ sensibilities, opening with the proclamation: ‘Out of the twentieth century – our times and their own particular conditions – there is growing a new spirit and idealism.’³

The words of Etchells, Coates and Chermayeff demonstrate how at least some architects in Britain were thinking as the 1930s began, but the idea that a new movement was under way, and giving birth to a new style or tradition, was still relatively novel to British ears. It would not be too long before this tendency formed a coherent and manifest architectural presence, as the later chapters in this book will show, but at the time that these men were writing it was as yet glimpsed only fleetingly and in certain arenas. It is, therefore, with this particular phase in British architectural history that Part 1 of Re-forming Britain is concerned. It seeks to show how Etchells’ ‘thousand immature experiments’ first emerged, and how they subsequently coalesced into the British movement.

In charting this process, the concern of Part 1 is to expand and revise the traditional ‘story’ of modernism’s entry into the British architectural scene, and to elaborate the contention made in the Introduction that rather than ‘coming’ to England, modernism was, in many respects, already here. The chapter’s focus, therefore, is on the work of those who had been attempting since the early 1920s, in fields relative to architecture, to create, or agitate for, the modern forms and spaces which would better meet the demands and conditions of the post-war age. Two locations are proposed as having been of particular significance in this process. The first is what might be characterized as ‘sites of campaign’, and the discussion commences with a consideration of the Design and Industries Association, and continues with a consideration of the new breed of voluntary housing associations formed in London in the 1920s, and the pages of the architectural press. Attention then turns to ‘sites of encounter’, the moments when the major protagonists of the British movement first met, and the clubs and sitting rooms of Bohemian London and Cambridge in which they socialized.

It would be through their encounters with the narratives of modernity formulated by those who occupied or created these sites, that members of what would become the British movement would be educated in new ways of thinking and practising. From these lessons and liaisons, Coates, Max Fry and others would forge first a modernist sensibility, and then a modernist identity.

Chapter 1

The Conditions for an Architecture for To-Day

It must be conceded that, measured in actual achievement, the twenties were a barren period in British architecture; they should be judged rather by the study and planning which bore fruit in the thirties.¹

Noel Carrington (1976)

A central premise on which this book rests is that the ultimate hegemony of British modernism can only have been achieved because it was rooted in existing attempts to work out the place and role of architecture in a country experiencing profound change. The processes through which, as Wells Coates put it, ‘the conditions for an architecture for to-day’ were formed, are therefore the subject of this chapter.² Such a discussion requires first, however, a consideration of the new Britain to which both the British movement, and those on whose shoulders its members stood, were trying to adapt.

Modernizing Britain

While there is not space here to enter into a detailed analysis of the Britain that some, at least, were trying to modernize in this period, it is important to outline the most significant economic, societal and political shifts which inaugurated this will to create new forms.³ Central to this, was the fact that although Britain had won the Great War, the euphoria of victory could not mask the reality of its declining presence on the world stage. The overwhelming impression of Britain in the 1920s is, therefore, of a nation trying to make sense of itself as it was overwhelmed by profound structural changes.

The industrial growth which had made Britain the pre-eminent world power in the nineteenth century was, even before war broke out in 1914, being eclipsed by competitors in continental Europe, Japan and, in particular, the United States. So while Britain’s share of world trade had been a third in 1870, by 1914 it was one-seventh, and its economic growth in the period between 1900 and 1913 was just over half what it had been before 1900⁴ The war complicated its position even further. Although the war effort sustained Britain’s main industries, and also stimulated the development of newer ones, the fact that this ‘progress’ was paid for by loans from the US meant that Britain entered the post-war era a debtor nation, tied to the fortunes of its former colony. War also led to a decline in Britain’s export trade as it lost its markets to neutral powers.

Britain’s eclipse became all the more palpable in the 1920s. An economic boom inaugurated by the Armistice collapsed in 1920. By June 1921, nearly two million people were unemployed and the country entered a period of stasis and ‘sitting tight’.⁵ Conservative methods to control the economy, such as returning to the gold standard in 1925, were counter-productive. They increased the value of the pound abroad and made British industries even less competitive globally. This had a particular impact on the industries on which the economy had been founded: steel, shipbuilding, coal and textiles. With higher costs exacerbated by greater competition in the export market, these foundations were fatally undermined.

Yet at the same time as the Britain of heavy industry and empire was ebbing away, there were signs that a rather different country was emerging and that, in some places, a journey towards a new phase of modernity was being embarked upon. Underpinned by the advances in technology occasioned by the Great War, new forms of manufacturing were developed: car making, pharmaceuticals, light industries. By the thirties, new methods of manufacturing would also have been introduced, informed by the Fordist techniques developed in the US. These industries, however, were located not in the traditional manufacturing areas of Britain but in the Midlands and south-east of England, and their emergence gave rise to an increasingly geographically and economically segregated nation. This saw the areas which heavy industry had dominated such as South Wales, Yorkshire, the north-east of England and Clydeside sink into despair and distress, while the south of England began to prosper. It is no coincidence that the majority of the projects discussed in this book are located in or around London, for that was where the money was.

If new forms of industrialization were one manifestation of a new phase in Britain’s modernity there were others too. Chief among these was the emergence of a mass democracy. In 1918, all men over 21, and women over 30, were enfranchised, the latter’s voting age subsequently lowered to 21 a decade later. This had two significant ramifications. First, it created a generation which required education in the rights and responsibilities of citizenship if democracy were to flourish, and the revolution and social disarray seen on the continent avoided in Britain. Second, since it brought political empowerment to the working class as a whole for the first time, it meant that the demands and needs of ‘the workers’ would henceforth be less easy to ignore. In this respect, the concomitant political maturation of the Labour Party, which became the official opposition in 1922, would, in the longer term, bring their voice to the heart of government.

Alongside its acquisition of the vote, this ‘mass’ also began to acquire another power: spending. While this was necessarily governed by geographies of progress and decline, the majority of the population experienced a growth in net income in the inter-war period.⁶ This, in turn, spawned the beginnings of a mass market in Britain for consumer goods such as household equipment and furniture. It also provided the money to pay for new technologies of fuel and lighting. Although this market would not develop fully until after the Second World War, more people bought more things in the inter-war decades than they had previously: expenditure on consumer durables rose from £169.6 million in 1910–14 to £332.2 million in 1929–34.⁷ A further significant acquisition for many Britons in the same period was access to new forms of information and entertainment. In addition to the popular press, the inter-war decades saw the growth of cinema, women’s magazines, the paperback novel and, above all, radio which brought information to a mass audience as never before; by the late 1930s eight million radio licences would have been issued.⁸

Such a modernity, as Marshall Berman has shown, required, indeed necessitated, a response and an expression.⁹ In inter-war Britain, it would occasion reactions both positive and negative, and ones which changed over time. Politically, the late 1910s and 1920s, the period with which Part 1 of this book is principally concerned, can be characterized as a time when successive governments did their best to keep such change at bay, mitigating it only when absolutely necessary. Otherwise, as Paul Addison has noted, there prevailed ‘a consensus to prevent anything unusual from happening’.¹⁰ This approach reflected the ideology of a Conservative government, under Stanley Baldwin, reluctant to move too far away from a policy of laissez-faire, and a Labour government, under Ramsay MacDonald (which was in minority power in 1924), more concerned to demonstrate the party’s eligibility for governance than enact radical legislation.¹¹ By the 1930s, as the discussion in Part 2 will show, this stasis would begin to shift. Fuelled by economic recovery, a more constructive attitude would emerge across the political spectrum.

In the meantime, the consensus against the unusual did not go unchallenged. There were those who saw in these unsettling shifts the beginnings of a better Britain. These people, who are the subjects of this book, were not paralysed by the prospect of a new age. Rather they sought accommodation with it, celebrated it, and, in so doing, anticipated the formation of a nation which could, once again, lead the world.

The attempts of the first generation to harness technology, the democratic spirit, and innovative means of communication in order to push the process of modernization along are documented in this chapter. These men and women spent the 1920s taking the first tentative steps towards the development of the new types of form and space which would accommodate emerging modes of modern life. At the same time, they also began to develop novel modes of operating, creating institutions and formulating media through which the unusual would be made acceptable. In Berman’s terminology, such people are to be understood as ‘pastoral modernists’, those in pursuit of ‘infinite human progress’ in all fields: industry, politics and culture.¹² For them, progress was to be achieved through a process of assimilation: bringing together the worker, the artist, the industrialist and the politician in pursuit of a mutually beneficial goal.

The term ‘pastoral modernism’, while it conveys well the motivation and modus operandi of the protagonists under discussion, nevertheless sits slightly uncomfortably with the forms and spaces which they would produce. Here, therefore, they will, more simply, be called, ‘moderns’, in order to make clear the contrast between them and the generation of men and women – the British movement – which followed. It would be the latter who were able to achieve a complete expression – social, spatial, technological and formal – of the new age. We might understand them, therefore, as ‘programmatic modernists’ or, again more simply, modernists. For them, ‘modernity’ was a project, something inherently ‘new’.¹³ Their concern was to liberate and emancipate, something which could only be achieved through fundamental changes to space and form.

It is, then, with this transition from the modern to the modernist, and the locations in which it took place, that the rest of this chapter is concerned. Through a rather whistle-stop jou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustration credits
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1 A New Spirit
• Part 2 Rhetorical Modernism
• Part 3 Towards a New Britain
• Bibliography
• Index