Architecture, Citizenship, Space

Architecture, Citizenship, Space: British Architecture from the 1920s to the 1970s PROGRAMME AND ABSTRACTS Oxford Brookes University, Headington Campus, Gipsy Lane, Oxford

How did individuals and groups concerned with architecture and the built environment respond to, and seek to shape, the challenges and opportunities of twentieth-century life? Engaging with themes such as democracy, citizenship, leisure, culture and new subjectivities, and showcasing scholars at the forefront of emerging methodological approaches to architectural history, this conference considers how key aspects of British modernity informed architectural form and space between the 1920s and the 1970s.

The conference theme takes as its starting point the words of Jennie Lee, the newly appointed Minister for the Arts, who, in 1965, spoke of her wish for a Britain that was ‘gayer and more cultivated.’ Lee’s comment accompanied a substantial increase in state funding for the Arts, distributed via quangos such as the Arts Council and the Council for Industrial Design, and addressed a wider context in which certain forms of cultural and recreational activities – and the architectural settings for them – were deemed to have particular value. The idea was especially marked among the political left but represented a consensus: Labour’s 1959 manifesto was entitled Leisure for Living, while the Conservatives that same year published The Challenge of Leisure. Such questions seemed particularly significant given the widespread belief that technological developments would soon result in a shorter working week and an increase in leisure time. In these circumstances, communal high-cultural, educational and sporting activities were possible counterweights to individualism, materialism, and (a perceived) malign American influence.

The mid-century concern with culture, leisure and new forms of space had its roots in nineteenth-century ideas of ‘improvement’, particularly as re-worked and refined in the interwar decades, and took place within a wider context in which certain approaches to design and cultural production were favoured. We can thus distinguish a clear attempt to ‘re-form’ Britain in a new, modern (‘cultured’) image which drew in part on apparently sophisticated European practice but which, as the Architectural Review’s ‘Townscape’ campaigns shows, also drew on consciously ‘British,’ or at least ‘English’ precedents. There was, in effect, an expert-led, ‘technocratic’ approach to modernity, in which the British would be steered in a particular direction through design, architecture and urbanism, and by a range of individuals and groups including not only national and local authorities, but also voluntary organisations and societies. The city emerged as a particular site of debate, with architect-planners creating lively images of a new communal urbanity in terms which paralleled the wider stress on community and leisure. Not only would the result be a transformed citizenry, but also a new image of Britain. Furthermore, as exhibitions such as ‘Britain Can Make It’ (1946) demonstrated, the agenda was also to ensure Britain’s prominence on the world stage.

This conference explores how these themes were manifested in architectural discourse, form and space. Its concern is architectural production in the widest sense, encompassing not only completed buildings and unbuilt projects but also texts and the media. The conference addresses an emerging ‘historical turn’ in twentieth-century British architectural history away from primarily formalist accounts of style to something akin to the deeper-rooted, more sophisticated histories of modern art and literature. This new architectural history is rooted in the archive and asks how cultural production functioned as a vehicle through which to explore such ideas as modernity, identity and community. In essence, architecture is conceived as a commentary on these ideas, whether by embracing or resisting them.

The conference is supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Research Fund of the School of History, Philosophy and Culture, Oxford Brookes University, and is convened by Elizabeth Darling and Alistair Fair.

Programme

Day One: 15th June 2017

10.30 Arrival and coffee 11.00 Welcome – conference chair, Dr Elizabeth Darling

11.15 Session 1: The Pivotal Decades: Re-thinking Architecture and Nationhood 1918-1939. Theme: This session explores the re-evaluation of the purpose and nature of architecture as Britain entered full democracy. It will consider the development of new idioms of space and form to accommodate this shift.

Chair: Professor Elizabeth McKellar (Open University)

Dr Elizabeth Darling (Oxford Brookes University): Spaces of Citizenship in inter-war England Dr Jessica Kelly (University for the Creative Arts): Debating Architecture in the Pages of the Architectural Press Dr Neal Shasore (University of Westminster): 66 Portland Place: Refashioning the Profession for a Democratic Age

1.00 Lunch

2.00 Session 2: Educating the Nation after 1945 Theme: A modern nation required an educated citizenry. Kickstarted by the Education Act of 1944, and a baby boom, the post-war years saw a dramatic expansion in educational building.

Chair: Professor Mark Swenarton (University of Liverpool)

Dr Roy Kozlovsky (Azrieli School of Architecture, Tel Aviv University): School architecture and the emotional economy of postwar citizenship Dr Catherine Burke (Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge): 'A place which permits the joy in the small things of life and democratic living'. School design for young children in the post - war decades. Professor Louise Campbell (University of Warwick): ‘A background sympathetic to young and energetic minds’: educating modern citizens at the University of Sussex

4.00 Tea and coffee

4.30 Roundtable & Discussion: Architecture, Citizenship, Space – beyond the Academy Municipal Dreams, Manchester Modernist Society, Verity-Jane Keefe (The Mobile Museum). Chaired by Dr Alistair Fair

5.45 Close – Reception

3 Day Two 16th June 2017

9.15 Session 3: Where and How to Live Theme: By 1939 a consensus had emerged that British cities were inadequate to the task of accommodating modern life. Architects and architectural students increasingly sought to promote new models of urban form and dwelling.

Chair: Professor John Gold (Oxford Brookes University)

Dr Otto Saumarez Smith (University of Oxford): Building for Community in Post-War Britain Dr Christine Hui Lan Manley (Leicester School of Architecture, De Montfort University/Woods Hardwick): Frederick Gibberd and Town Design in Practice: Hackney and Harlow Ms Ruth Lang (School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University): The London County Council: A Plan for the Model Community

10.45 Coffee

11.15 Session 4: Culture and Democracy Theme: The proper use of leisure was a key theme in post-war Britain, with both Labour and Conservative administrations turning their attention to the subject. Chair: Dr Robert Proctor (University of Bath) Dr Alistair Fair (University of Edinburgh): Culture, Leisure and the Modern Citizen Ms Rosamund West (Kingston University): Replanning Communities through Architecture and Art: the post-war London County Council. Dr Lesley Whitworth (University of Brighton Design Archives): The Council of Industrial Design: Good Design for a Better World

12.45 Concluding Discussion & Goodbyes

4 Abstracts

Session 1: The Pivotal Decades

Spaces of Citizenship in inter-war England Elizabeth Darling

This paper explores how architectural production functioned as a vehicle through which to explore ideas such as modernity, identity and community in a period which saw the expansion of suffrage to all men and some women (1919) and then to all men and women over 21 (1928). Taking a range of sites in its purview, its concern is to consider how particular notions of an English citizenry as (inter alia), cultured, healthy, productive, engaged, was constructed spatially and materially. That these sites were intended as exemplary both to their intended users and to a larger constituency - that is, socio-architectural models to be adopted at a wider national scale – is also to be discussed.

The paper will focus on sites commissioned by private enterprise, local authorities and philanthropic/voluntary activists, including BBC Broadcasting House (1932) Kensal House (1936), the Finsbury Health Centre (1938) and Finsbury Plan (of which it formed part) and, in particular, the Pioneer Health Centre (1935). The purpose-built Centre was opened in 1935, and designed by Owen Williams to house the so-called Peckham Experiment initiated by Drs Innes Pearse & George Scott Williamson in 1926, a project predicated on the idea that if people were placed in particular types of environment those with innate potential would respond and interact and begin to improve themselves. The spaces of the Centre, and what the doctors called ‘instruments of health’ which included the building, some basic medical care (primarily birth control), but more so particular types of amenity within it – a swimming pool, gymnasium, movable furniture - would combine to create a setting for people to be enabled to realize their own modernity. The doctors wrote, ‘it is essentially a building designed to be furnished with people and with their actions.’

The Pioneer Health Centre was one of the most popular buildings among architecture students in the later 1930s (and, indeed, after the war), and the paper concludes by considering the longer story of the sites considered and the concept of organization they embodied. We have here projects called ‘House’ and ‘Centre’; the latter, in particular, becoming a key term in this period (not just a Health Centre, but a Building Centre, and the idea of a Community Centre). What did the use of the term Centre connote? What did Centres achieve that other forms of building did not?

Debating Architecture in the Pages of the Architectural Press: from Tyranny to Ardour: architecture, architects and public taste at The Architectural Review Jessica Kelly

The Architectural Review (AR) was founded at the end of the nineteenth century on the principle that architecture was part of a broad landscape of cultural activity. This meant that the discussion of architecture should seek to reach beyond architects and the allied professions to engage with artistic practitioners and writers, as well as government and planning officials, patrons and other interested and appreciative laymen. The editors and many of the contributors to the AR understood their role (and the role of the magazine) to be that of a cultural guide. From 1927 the AR was reinvented as a ‘Modern’ publication, experimenting with new forms of visual communication, content and tone, but these prior concerns remained consistent. This

5 paper will explore how the magazine approached and presented its ‘guiding’ role in culture both on and off the printed page.

The appointment of J.M. Richards as editor of the AR in 1935 further aligned with magazine’s founding principles with the current interests of Modern architecture. Throughout the 1930s the magazine consistently addressed a ‘public’ readership. This was not because the magazine had a broad public audience, but because it was increasingly preoccupied with questions of how to present Modern architecture to the public, how to discuss the role new role of modern architects. This imagined audience shaped the tone and content of much of the magazine. This paper will consider how the pages of the magazine and the spaces in which they were produced (the AR’s office and the homes of Richards and his friends and colleagues), were sites for the negotiation and definition of the ideas of Modern architecture in Britain; specifically, how Modern architecture conceived of its relationship to the public.

The paper will explore how the debate between the expertise of the modern architect and the taste of the ‘public’ was both gendered (public ambivalence to Modern architecture was discussed in terms of untamed ‘feminine taste’ or uneducated female consumers) and class specific (the middle class educated public were targeted for persuasion and conversion, while the working class public were abstracted and spoken on behalf of, or ignored). Using articles published in the magazine and key players behind the production of the magazine, this paper will explore the negotiations at the AR between modern architecture and what one contributor labelled ‘the tyranny of public taste’.

66 Portland Place: Refashioning the Profession for a Democratic Age Neal Shasore

66 Portland Place (opened in 1934), the headquarters of the Royal Institute of British Architects, has often been derided by members of the profession as having the pretentions of a gentlemen’s club – opaque, exclusive, masonic. To some contemporaries, the building was also an exemplar of the period’s characteristic (and anodyne) balance between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ forms.

This paper, however, will look at the other side of the story. It will argue that the building’s style was of interest mainly as a strategy of communication and public relations (typically interwar concerns), rather than an actual recreation of the more ideological and theological Victorian battle of the styles. It will also argue that 66 Portland Place in fact resembles something much more like a town hall in plan and ornamentation – a civic building to bring together different constituents engaged with architecture, not only members and lay administrative staff, but also the curious public.

Grey Wornum’s building for the institute has a complex but fundamental place in the history of architectural practice and professionalism. The RIBA was, for the duration of this conference’s chronological scope, a central institution for those engaged in the fashioning of the built environment, and ever more anxious to preserve that status. Portland Place was the nerve centre for architects serving an expanded public, with whom they had – after years of infighting and professional disunity – formed a new and enduring contract of civic service in the form of the Architects Registration Acts (1931 and 1938), which perfectly frame the building's chronology and initial occupancy. This coincidence, rarely observed, has been under-explored. In fact, the unification of the profession and the emergence of the monolithic professional body was clearly and sometimes problematically mediated by aspects of the building’s programme, form, and ‘paratext’.

6 66 Portland Place shows us how the RIBA in the interwar years attempted, not entirely successfully, to refashion itself for a democratic age. The war and other pressures fundamentally altered the brass-plate professional paradigm which flourished in the 1920s and 1930s – but whereas the interwar years have been considered moribund in terms both of design and its prevailing model of professional practice, 66 Portland Place vividly embodies how the profession actively grappled with how to engage its growing body of new clients, the public, at this time.

This paper will also bring to light new research on the network of agents that brought the building together, in particular the architect Grey Wornum and his team of artisan collaborators, most notably his wife, the artist and decorator Miriam Wornum.

Session 2: Educating the Nation

School architecture and the emotional economy of the postwar citizen! Roy Kozlovsky The immediate postwar decade initiated a self-described effort to 'humanize' state institutions that cared for the welfare of the population. In respect to the reconstruction of the education system, architects, teachers and administrators criticized traditional educational environments as being 'institutional', with the effect of 'stunting' the emotional development of children, and advocated for a new kind of educational space that would be perceived by children as intimate and sheltering, while at the same time, stimulating and open to the world.

This paper examines the schools built according to these principles and assumptions on the emotional economy of the child as documents of emotional history. It draws upon the methods and concepts developed by the field that studies emotions historically, to contextualize the claims for emotional affect of spatial and material features of architecture within the emerging social democratic "emotional regime". When examined together with other postwar childhood environments such as playgrounds or children's hospitals, the school is interpreted as a mechanism that shapes the future citizen's self through spatial and bodily practices that train children to activate desirable emotions and overcome undesirable ones, especially fear. The paper argues for the centrality of the experience of war and evacuation for understanding the postwar investment in the emotional economy of the citizen in the making, and fashioning an "emotional public" through a shared concern for the emotional welfare of the child.

'A place which permits the joy in the small things of life and democratic living'. School design for young children in the post - war decades. Catherine Burke

Education was regarded as a vital component of the strengthening of democracy in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. In England, the extensive school building programme embarked on soon after the end of hostilities involved a generation of architects and educators committed to public engagement. The idea was to see how far it was possible, through the opportunities of national school building renewal, to (without discouraging teachers who preferred traditional methods), encourage those teachers who were exploring approaches that more fully utilised space and equipment. Characteristics and trends in primary education that architects David and Mary Medd pioneered with their colleagues first at

7 Hertfordshire (1946-49) and then at the Ministry of Education Architects and Buildings Development Group (1949-1972), sought to enhance will be presented.

Among their key principles were: schools that were light, airy, modern and economical; where moving from place to place was designed to be a pleasant experience; where no two learning spaces looked the same and there was a range and variety of spaces provided to reflect as far as possible the range and variety in children; where storage was integrated in furnishings and fittings to cater for the capacities of children and their teachers; where children had their own work-space with their materials to hand; where they had their own home bay with toilet and cloakroom close by; where all spaces were utilised as learning and teaching spaces including halls, corridors and outside areas (often covered with verandas)

This presentation will explore some of the major influences on the international effort to design the modern school, fit for purpose in the post war decades. It will examine the particular influence of Crow Island School, Winnetka, north of Chicago, USA on European school architecture and education.

‘A background sympathetic to young and energetic minds’: educating modern citizens at the University of Sussex Louise Campbell. Basil Spence wrote of the University of Sussex campus that 'the buildings should help sixth- formers over the fence into manhood and womanhood.' The university was designed for the recipients of an egalitarian post-war educational system, and its academic structures were deliberately non-hierarchical. It was part of the Welfare State’s concern to nurture the young; nurture included architecture and culture as well as education and health. Here, at a rural campus far from metropolitan cultural centres it was hoped to inculcate students - some of whom were the first members of their family to enter university - with humanist values. This paper considers the architecture of Sussex in the context of both this project and of Britain’s attempt to reinvent itself as a modern nation. Spence’s achievement at Sussex (as in his work elsewhere) was to devise a seductive new imagery with which to fill the void left by the evaporation of Britain’s imperial identity. Rather than emulating the crisp idiom of Mies’ work at IIT, he envisaged a university whose architectural sources – ancient Rome, ancient Greece, arcaded Italian piazzas – were the buildings of the Mediterranean basin. The resulting monumental ensemble underlined the flagship status of Sussex as the first of the seven new universities created in the 1960s, and the need to give it gravitas. Its broader context is still more significant: the university’s design - evoking a shared cultural heritage - was finalised just as Britain, distancing itself from the United States, began to align itself with Europe in preparation for entry to the Common Market.

Roundtable: Architecture, Citizenship and Space: Beyond the Academy

Municipal Dreams John Boughton

Municipal Dreams is a blog which celebrates the reforming achievements of local government from the late nineteenth century with a particular focus on housing. The blog tells the story of council estates across the country, some of them famous but most seen as ordinary. It examines the political and architectural ideas which inspired estates but, most importantly, it recounts the lived experience of those who moved to and lived in them. The mistakes, contradictions and complexities of the public housing are fully acknowledged but the blog also challenges the crude, often demonising, stereotypes from which council estates and their communities have 8 suffered. In particular, it places their history in the wider social and economic context which has determined residents’ varied experiences and within the political debates which have shaped policy and perception. In this way, it acts also as a corrective to the narrowly architectural focus of much writing on the topic.

It’s an unashamedly ‘political’ blog but not a polemical one. My academic background – I have a PhD in Social History – as well as my politics suggest a balanced analysis makes for a more plausible and persuasive defence of state housing. With well over 200,000 views and 130,000 readers a year, it’s proved popular – among academics in the field and housing specialists but also, and most importantly to me, among the people whose story it tells. At peak, council housing accommodated around one-third of the population so this is a large and, in my view, historically neglected group. At a time of housing crisis, especially in London and the South- East, the blog has achieved wider resonance as people have come to question current practices and re-evaluate those of the past.

I’m grateful also to a number of guest contributors who have contributed fine posts on their own areas of expertise or local interest and would love this to be a continuing feature of the blog which I hope will be regarded as a significant and comprehensive record of council housing history.

My book on the social and political history of council housing will be published next year. You can read the blog at https://municipaldreams.wordpress.com/.

Verity-Jane Keefe The Mobile Museum

Verity-Jane Keefe conceived The Mobile Museum as a living, mobile archive for the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. Housed in a former mobile library van, the Museum is used as a vehicle for exploring methods of classification, through commonplace library, museum and archiving standards. The aim, over the course of five months, was a new museum collection for the borough – gathering information, collecting, cataloguing and making. along the way and offering a new insight into contemporary Barking and Dagenham, and its place within London and the wider Thames Gateway.

Starting out empty in Becontree, which when built was the world’s largest purpose built housing estate, The Museum worked its way around the borough, gradually filling up with found, deposited, mythologised and made objects and ephemera. Contemporary cultural activity across the borough was documented, mapped and deposited in the collection; from galleries, to photography clubs, reading groups, knitting circles and jigsaw making clubs. All will be classified alongside the formal cultural activity across the borough, such as Eastbury Manor House, Studio 3 Arts, Valence House Museum, creating a new cultural taxonomy and map of the area.

An accompanying series of fanzines was produced and distributed, one for each estate.

The whole of The Mobile Museum’s 5-month-long journey will be documented in a new filmwork surveying the borough’s varied housing stock, the residents’ stories, and a slice of contemporary life that will represent a moment in the area’s rich housing and cultural history.

Verity-Jane has worked on various art projects in Barking and Dagenham over the course of the last decade. Her work looks closely at the role of the artist within urban regeneration and how 9 this can affect those living or working through it. She is interested in the role that The Museum can play in contemporary art practice and as a tool for engagement through real and imagined histories and futures. https://www.themobilemuseum.co.uk

Manchester Modernist Society

Founded as The Manchester Modernist Society in 2009 by Jack Hale, Eddy Rhead and Maureen Ward, The Modernist Society is a creative project dedicated to celebrating and engaging with twentieth century architecture and design, through publishing, events, exhibitions and creative collaborations.

These have included: regular walking tours, lectures and archive film screenings; Manchester Kiosks - a sound commission by Ailís Ní Ríain funded by Arts Council England – composer Ailis Ni Rain’s sound piece was integrated into one of the few remaining K6 Telephone kiosks in Manchester City Centre; CAMPUS – where we became uninvited artists in residence at the former UMIST campus and unilaterally declared it to be a Conservation Area; Toastrack – a year-long artist residency at the soon to close 1950s Hollings Campus (Toastrack building); Making Post-war Manchester – an exhibition featuring archive material and newly generated 3d renderings of the unrealised plans for 1960s Manchester.

By 2015 requests from other cities had begun to come in for additional branches of the Society, and starting with Sheffield these new 'chapters' are now being developed. (Including Liverpool, Birmingham and Croydon).

Our publishing arm 'The Modernist' was established in 2011, initially publishing as a quarterly printed magazine. The Modernist is now developing into a small press, publishing limited editions about 20th century architecture and design. Published material includes The Modernist – a quarterly print magazine; Metro-Modern – a map using the free city centre mini-buses of central Manchester as the basis of a C20th city guide; Sacred Suburbs – a publication about C20th places of worship in Greater Manchester; Decades – a publication about post war Manchester architecture; and the soon to be published Manchester Modern – a field guide to 111 post war Manchester buildings.

Although some projects have received Heritage Lottery funding, much of our income derives from devising and selling products and artefacts related to C20th architecture. The project is largely carried out by volunteers and through creative collaborations. http://modernist-society.org/

Session 3: Where and How to Live

Building Community in 1950s and 1960s Britain Otto Saumarez Smith

‘Architects have to be sociologists.’ (Geoffrey Powell, Architectural Association Journal, April 1957, p. 223.)

British physical planning and architecture of the post-war period has often been attacked for having been blinded to the needs of communities by Modernist Corbusian dogma – a line of argument which continues to be used when discussing policy approaches to buildings of this 10 era. This paper argues that the planning and architectural culture of the period was infused by attempts to understand, mold and design for communities. I will focus on the debates around residential density, seeing it as key for understanding the forms buildings and cities took during the period – with consequences for everything from the design of the individual dwelling to the form of a whole new town. It will follow the evolution of how communities were conceived over a twenty-year period in architectural and planning circles: from the village ideal embodied by the neighbourhood unit: through to the belief that high densities and radical architectural forms might create the physical propinquity out of which community could flourish; and finally in new less spatialised concepts for how communities functioned under the influence of affluence and new means of transport and communication. Through this discussion I will argue that to understand the physical changes to the environment in this period we need a frame of reference that goes beyond the architectural culture of modernism. The conception of society and how communities could be stimulated is key to understanding the approaches taken.

Frederick Gibberd and Town Design in Practice: Hackney and Harlow Christine Hui Lan Manley

Frederick Gibberd was a pioneer of modern architecture in Britain during the inter-war years. By 1936, he had completed Pullman Court, one of the first International Style flat blocks in the country; he was also elected to join the elite Modern Architectural Research (MARS) Group. After the Second World War, however, a shift in architectural discourse was evident; the impact of war coupled with the demise of the British Empire prompted some architects to consider how architecture and town planning might reflect our national identity, rather than the International Style perhaps more associated with the United States and Continental Europe. The editors of the Architectural Review (AR) played a significant role in the development and promotion of a distinctly English form of modern architecture and planning, chiefly through their ‘Townscape’ campaign, reflecting on Picturesque Theory and believing that Britain should once again assert an influential national point of view as it had done during the late eighteenth century. In parallel, as his diaries show, Gibberd developed his own ideas about ‘visual planning’ and what he called ‘a sense of urbanity’ (a visual town-like quality), capturing the Englishness illustrated by the AR’s campaigns.

Gibberd was commissioned to design two significant, but very different projects after the war, which presented the ideal opportunity to put his visual planning ideas into practice. In Hackney, he designed Somerford Grove (built in 1947-9), a pioneering housing scheme on a 9 acre site; it was hailed by the AR as the ‘visual planner’s essay in mixed development’. In contrast, in 1947, Gibberd was tasked with designing the new town of Harlow for a target population of 60,000. Differences in scale and context offered him the challenge of further developing and refining his ideas of urbanity. This paper therefore aims to examine Gibberd’s development and application of the concept of urbanity at Hackney and Harlow to demonstrate that he was at the forefront of the development of post-war visual planning ideas; furthermore, he was instrumental in the establishment of a softer English version of modern architecture and town planning.

London County Council: A Plan for the Model Community Ruth Lang

The aspirations set out in the publication of the County of London Plan in 1943 established the breath of the architectural challenges they aimed to address in building a new post-war society. 11 The spatial and programmatic rationale underpinning the model communities proposed for the New Towns beyond the County boundaries to help alleviate the pressures of industry and residential congestion - and tested in the designated Redevelopment Areas such as Stepney and Poplar - aimed to produce “a new type of citizen, a healthy, self-respecting, dignified person with a sense of beauty, culture and civic pride… [with] a spirit of friendship, neighbourliness and comradeship.” (Silkin, Lewis. 1946. New Towns Bill : Order for Second Reading. Vol. 422.)

In their intentions to build a “good citizen”, they questioned how they could be good architects too. The ethos of building for the communal rather than the individual is apparent in both the dream and the delivery. Operating across scales and between disciplines, consideration was given for both the material (architectural and infrastructural) and the immaterial (economic and legislative) structures required to build a new form of society. The resulting specific agency with which the architects were imbued enabled them to implement aspirational strategies and develop experimental architecture beyond the capacity of private practice.

This paper questions the extent to which the interpersonal and spatial relationships the architects of the LCC sought to construct through architectural means were paralleled by the architectural practices put in place to deliver them. Drawing upon oral histories, bureaucratic documentation and contemporary publications, it seeks to reveal the processes by which their architectural practice was built, in order to better understand the architecture built as a result.

Session 4: Culture and Democracy

Culture, leisure, and the modern citizen Dr Alistair Fair, University of Edinburgh

In October 1964, the MP Jennie Lee became Britain’s first Minister for the Arts. Lee saw her role in fundamentally transformative terms: ‘we have only accomplished half a social revolution,’ she told The Times. As she saw it, ‘too many people are culturally semi-literate, through no fault of their own […] I believe it is one of the duties of a Socialist government to change that.’ Lee went on to prepare a Parliamentary White Paper, which led to a significant expansion of the system of public subsidy for the arts that had been introduced in the late 1940s.

Lee’s view of the arts reflected wider debates, especially on the Left, in which certain forms of recreational activity were deemed to be particularly beneficial. As the historian Lawrence Black has put it, ‘Socialists had definite ideas about the appropriate uses of leisure and culture’, which in practice meant ‘traditional elite culture, liberal and inclusive in purpose’. The issue was amplified by a sense that Britain was increasingly affluent, and that technological advance would soon lead to an expansion in leisure time. The challenge, therefore, was to ensure that ‘appropriate’ kinds of recreation were easily available as a counterbalance to the temptations of lowbrow entertainment or the pub. As far as theatre was concerned, the main beneficiaries of public subsidy were the country’s Repertory theatres, which presented a mixed diet of classic productions and new work.

That the arts might be transformative was, in fact, a widely held view. The Gardner Arts Centre at Sussex University, for example, was conceived as ‘a magnificent opportunity to repair the omissions of the old’ in which ‘more and more students have been brought up in homes from which there is not only an absence of beautiful things, of records, of books, but from which there is also lacking – though the responsibility for this is that of a wider group than the family – any tradition of respect or appreciation for such things.’ Similarly in the late 1960s, Theatr 12 Clwyd in Mold was intended to ‘ensure that children from the earliest age will be nurtured in the arts’, being a ‘veritable power house for cultural activities’ that would ‘have a tremendous effect on the people’. The discussion hinged in part on individual development but also on the potential for the arts to promote a sense of enlightened community, or, as Lee put it, a Britain that was ‘gayer and more cultivated’.

This paper will begin by outlining the debate before continuing by exploring some of the ways in which it informed the conception and design of the new wave of publicly-subsidised theatres of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. These buildings, whether conceived as prominent standalone civic structures or integrated into other developments, be they leisure centres or shopping malls, made a clear statement of the role of culture and leisure in forming the modern citizen.

'Replanning communities through architecture and art: the post-war London County Council.’ Rosamund West

During the London County Council meeting of 2nd November 1954, Sir Isaac Hayward was asked by a Mrs. Bolton to comment on the council’s acquisition of art. Hayward replies, “I am strongly of the opinion that the Council has both a cultural and an educational responsibility to do what it reasonably can to encourage and assist in the provision of works of art.” Through the acquisition of artworks set within housing schemes, the London County Council were attempting to bind these new environments to the established communities (re-)housed within them. Many of these artworks referenced the history or culture of the specific part of London in which they were sited. Through the 1943 County of London Plan, its authors John Forshaw and Patrick Abercrombie and the London County Council set out the re-planning of London. The London County Council aimed to solve the defects of modern London through planning, paying close attention to existing neighbourhoods and communities. The plan for London was communicated to Londoners through film, publications and an exhibition at County Hall. This communication speaks to them through the acknowledgement of their culture and their voice, sometimes literally in film. In this paper, I shall examine why the London County Council spent much time and money (£20,000 a year from 1956) installing artworks within housing schemes, and how this informs the wider aims of the London County Council to not only improve housing, but to improve the overall quality of Londoners lives through access to education and culture. I shall examine the fate of these artworks, and the housing schemes they were set in, to examine the legacy of the LCC’s ‘educational and cultural responsibility’.

Good Design for a Better World

Lesley Whitworth

In recent years it has become fashionable to lament the hegemonic taste-making activities of a metropolitan elite, especially, perhaps, when underwritten by funding derived from the state, and hence from the taxes of ordinary people. This paper will take issue with this characterisation of an early recipient of such criticism, the Council of Industrial Design (later Design Council), formed, I will suggest, with extraordinary prescience in the dying moments of the Second World War, to pave the way for peacetime economic re-orientation, and popularly anticipated brighter tomorrows.

13 Examining the radical agenda drawn up by the CoID, the cast of politically engaged characters transforming this into action, and the range of spaces of many kinds that the Council both occupied and desired for others, the discussion will aim to rescue, and perhaps celebrate its motivation. This is not to ignore the practical challenges faced by the organisation, its failings, or the ways in which its methodologies were mutable in the face of changing funding regimes and political climates.

Utilising records held in the Design Council Archive at the University of Brighton Design Archives, ‘Good Design for a Better World’ seizes on the early postwar dynamic of change, national rehabilitation, and popular engagement, to demonstrate what might have been, amongst other things, an enormous fillip for consumer education, product standards, and improved domestic environments.