Rebuilding Britain's Blitzed Cities

Hopeful Dreams, Stark Realities

Catherine Flinn

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350067646
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica moderna

Many British cities were devastated by bombing during the Second World War and faced stark economic dilemmas concerning reconstruction planning and implementation after 1945. How did politicians, civil servants and local authorities manage to produce the cities we live in today? Rebuilding Britain's Blitzed Cities examines the underlying processes and pressures, especially financial and bureaucratic, which shaped postwar urbanism in Britain. Catherine Flinn integrates architectural planning with in-depth economic and political analyses of Britain's blitzed cities for the first time. She examines early reconstruction arrangements, the postwar economic apparatus and the challenges of postwar physical planning across the country, while providing insightful case studies from the cities of Hull, Exeter and Liverpool. By addressing the ideology versus the reality of reconstruction in postwar Britain, Rebuilding Britain's Blitzed Cities highlights the importance of economic and political factors for understanding the British postwar built environment.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: A BLESSING IN DISGUISE, OR AN OPPORTUNITY SQUANDERED?

Hitler at least has brought us to our senses. We, the British public, have suddenly seen our cities as they are! After experiencing the shock of familiar buildings disembowelled before our eyes – like an all too real Surrealism – we find the cleared and cleaned up spaces a relief. In them we have hope for the future, opportunities to be taken or lost.

– Max Lock, architect and town planner (1943)¹

You have, ladies and gentlemen, to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.

– Charles, Prince of Wales (December 1987)²

Rebuilding after war is a huge challenge faced by many places over centuries of destructive human action. In the Second World War, the German air force heavily bombed British cities. Although this campaign – popularly called ‘The Blitz’ – was less devastating than the Allied or German bombing on the continent, for many cities the damage was not insignificant. From early in the war effort was made around the country and in central government to plan for reconstruction. Materials and funding were promised. Legislation was passed on compensation but also eventually to require all areas to make plans, whether bombed or not. The rise of expertise in urban planning and the growth of the planning profession were important results of these factors. Plans produced were modern, optimistic and forward-looking. Yet, despite the optimism, none of the plans was fully implemented. This book examines why.

Despite frequent praise in the contemporary press, later opinion on what was built in the 1940s and 1950s has been quite negative. Since the 1980s the postwar built environment in Britain has been condemned mainly as a failure. However, blaming architects and planners for this fails to consider the context in which rebuilding happened. This perception of failure looms especially large in light of the huge gap between what was hoped for and what was realized. Such judgements are mainly shaped by recent values, tastes and expectations. During and after the war those who created plans for the future focused on hope and potential, publishing modernist visions of new city centres.³ Planning is supposed to shape the urban environment for the better, and it is therefore important to study its impacts, but in the postwar period many plans never went much further than the paper they were drawn on. And if the rebuilt city centres were indeed failures, we need to look deeper than just appearance to understand why.

I.The Challenge of Rebuilding

The scale of the challenges facing Britain in 1945 was largely understood at the time. Although the Great War left behind huge amounts of physical destruction in 1918, most was on the European continent – mainly in France and Belgium. The Second World War saw the advent of a widespread use of aerial warfare and regular attacks on civilians, factories and dockyards in addition to military targets.⁴ Though Britain avoided invasion, German bombers inflicted a huge amount of damage on the physical environment, mainly in cities. ‘The Blitz’ lasted through the years 1940 and 1941, even though bombing did not cease completely until 1945. From the start of the Blitz, citizens and local officials were thinking and talking about plans for reconstruction. Additionally, some cities – such as Coventry – had been planning for modernization and redevelopment of their centres for many years prior to 1939.⁵

Planning for the future was certainly a way to stay positive about fighting the war and to visualize potential victory. Local and national governments were aware of this and many encouraged planning from early on, as with the oft-cited example of Lord Reith, who – as Minister for Works and Planning – famously told officials to ‘plan boldly’ for their city’s future.⁶ In many places the bombing was discussed as ‘a blessing in disguise’ – an event that would help transform cities by removing outdated cores and allowing new and better infrastructure to arise.⁷ Churchill even called it an ‘opportunity’.⁸ However, there was a marked lack of pragmatism and little discussion around who would pay for these updated street layouts and shiny new buildings.

Within the new planning ministry, as well as among local authorities, the expectation that not just priority but specific and direct assistance would be given to cities was apparent. In 1943 a ministry official wrote: ‘[T]‌here will be no lack of capital for building reconstruction which will be, together with basic industries [and “housing” added by hand] the first to receive quotas of materials and labour.’⁹ However, while cities were praised during the war for their fortitude, the promises of preference were not kept. Indeed, despite the plans made, these cities soon became a rhetorical footnote. After the war the profession of town planning had taken off, in part due to the need for plans; in part because of new legislation that compelled every county and city borough to create and submit plans; and in part due to the rise of the expert alongside new or expanding programmes to train planners.¹⁰ It is striking, therefore, that cities most affected by the Blitz only partially implemented the plans they made. In fact, as mentioned, none of the plans were implemented completely. The following chapters tell the story of what happened instead.

British postwar plans also are intriguing to compare with European examples. Today many cities in Poland and Germany, as well as a number of other European cities, are well known not just for the scale of destruction but also for their restored appearance. Warsaw and Dresden particularly come to mind. Why – with a few exceptions – did British cities stick to modern plans and build modern new buildings, rather than reconstructing historic city centre streetscapes in the same way several places in continental Europe did? After all, cities such as Dresden, Gdansk and Warsaw are well known for their ‘preserved’ (or really, restored) sense of history. In the many records examined for this study, British officials showed little to no inclination to do the same. Planning in Britain was modernist, forward-facing and vehicle-oriented, while tourism was largely ignored.

As we know, Britain’s urban environments – like others around the world – have been created through actors (city councillors, developers, etc.), circumstances and myriad external factors such as national and local economics, political machinations and more. To understand the world around us, and perhaps to judge it in a kinder way, we can look at examples in postwar Britain and learn more about ourselves, our sense of belonging and our true heritage: but not just the ‘heritage’ that has created an industry around our past.¹¹ This is about our heritage of everyday life and everyday politics, of local desires and priorities as they played out after one of the most destructive conflicts ever seen on British soil.

Postwar reconstruction is particularly important to study because the uniqueness of wartime destruction followed by rebuilding has affected – and will surely continue to affect – so many places: from the Great Fire of London to Hurricane Katrina to the tsunamis and earthquakes of 2004 and 2011 to the current destruction of historic sites in the Syrian conflict.¹² All nations and/or cultures deal with the aftermath of disasters, both man-made and natural. What can we learn from post–Second World War Britain about this process, particularly in its immediate aftermath?

As part of this study we need to examine various aspirations for the rebuilding of cities. Also, we need to ask how various cities coped with conflicts between ambitions and priorities. In this postwar period there is a greater role of central government, and this is more directly important in shaping local aspirations across the country than ever before. There are also significant issues around constraints: many barriers existed to block either, and sometimes both, sets of objectives. Within central government problems were caused by the shortage of resources, which also meant political wrangling over those scarce resources. Both politicians and civil servants had to work on balancing physical reconstruction needs against the wider needs of the economy – and the pressures of the growth of the welfare state – even more during the peace.

The postwar period was also one of tensions between central and local governments over priorities for reconstruction. Within the cities themselves – as will be demonstrated in the examples used here – there were further struggles. As the agenda of physical reconstruction evolved, competing and conflicting interests arose or were highlighted by the rebuilding process. Among these conflicts were factors such as the resurgence of the property sector, the desire for modernization of cities, the protection of heritage (or lack of) and topping all these perhaps were individual vested interests such as local property owners and businesses. We need to understand these national and local conflicts with their individual interests and aspirations to better appreciate how today’s cities have evolved.

II.Background

Since the 1980s, historians have been paying increasing attention to post-1945 urban reconstruction. This has produced an important body of work, but also left some important questions unanswered.¹³ We have since learned quite a lot about planning the postwar world, but know rather less about the process of implementing the plans made. Most of the published work on physical reconstruction is made up of local studies with a few histories having a national focus. Several histories have used case studies to investigate issues in some of the larger blitzed cities and have revealed the importance of local politics and political players, and of the relationship between local authorities and central government, while using postwar planning as an example.¹⁴ These histories analyse a number of individual cities, draw out a number of stories around the plans of the 1940s and 1950s and have provided crucial pieces in building our understanding of postwar city planning. Yet looking for answers as to what was implemented and how, as well as why the plans were often shelved, there are details still to be uncovered in order to move towards a more complete assessment of postwar cities.

There are also a number of histories that have contributed to our understanding of the political and economic context of the reconstruction. While not studies of physical planning, these histories show us that as rebuilding went forward priorities quickly shifted to focusing on economic – rather than physical – reconstruction.¹⁵ Physical reconstruction seems to have become an afterthought for central government. Urban historians, while not specifically addressing reconstruction itself, have also examined some of the social and cultural contexts of reconstruction. For example, past work has helped locate societal changes and priority shifts within planning, policy and development, as well as some of the impacts of changing demographics and expectations of everyday citizens.¹⁶

In a different genre but similar vein, there are histories of business in the postwar era that have contributed to a further understanding behind the physical growth of cities after the war. Such writing tells us about the kinds of players, particularly large multiples and property development corporations, who were responsible for actually building new shops, offices and other city centre institutions.¹⁷ We also know quite a lot about planning and building design in the immediate postwar era. Responses to demand for both public and private work, changes in building technology, influence from outside Britain carrying forward from prewar trends, as well as changing ideologies and priorities in the postwar world – these are additionally enlightening in understanding postwar urban change.¹⁸ Work in this area has also helped us learn where early ideas originated and about the people involved in the designs and plans and their responses to the new demand for literal – rather than vague – plans for cities.¹⁹

Still, our understanding of physical reconstruction in the immediate postwar period has mainly existed within the realms of ‘planning’ history. Rebuilding Britain’s Blitzed Cities brings additional external factors into its investigation of the built environment, where most historians have mainly examined the visual. In 1999 a small but important piece of work by Peter Mandler asked for a wider scope of enquiry, similar to Gold’s ‘In Spite of Planning’ cited in the Preface. Mandler attempted to push discussion forward by reminding us that postwar rebuilding should be seen within a broader picture. His chapter ‘New Towns for Old: The Fate of the Town Centre’ in Moments of Modernity takes note of the ‘surprisingly limited’ role of the planner and planning, and he argues that thus far historians have not produced integrated studies of urban development and that they therefore treat events beyond planning as ‘epiphenomenal’, or secondary.²⁰ His awareness of the role of politics as well as economics, and the actual process of development, points towards a clearly evolving understanding, if not of the process itself then at least of the need to expose the process. His vision of the outcome and its ‘modernity’ understands postwar Britain to have been led by a market-driven model, a political response to public needs tied with consumer demands, or – in his words – a result of the ‘unexpected consequences of “consumer sovereignty”’.²¹ Of all the work by planning and urban historians of the past fifty years, this approac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Persons and Affiliations
• List of Illustrations
• Preface: In Spite of Planning
• Chapter 1 Introduction: A Blessing in Disguise, or an Opportunity Squandered?
• Chapter 2 Considering Reconstruction, 1940–45
• Chapter 3 Treasury Mandarins: The Apparatus of Postwar Economic Planning
• Chapter 4 Central Control? The Challenges of Postwar Physical Planning
• Chapter 5 Local Constraints: The Cities of Hull, Exeter and Liverpool
• Chapter 6 Postwar Rebuilding: Hopeful Plans, Different Realities
• Conclusion: Rebuilding Blitzed City Centres, Despite Planning
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page