The Design of British Public Library Buildings in the 1960S

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE “New Beauties”: The Designprovided of British by Illinois Digital Public Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship... Library Buildings in the 1960s Alistair Black Abstract In 1960 the architectural correspondent of London’s Times news- paper praised contemporary architects for having evolved what he called “new beauties”: attractive, modernist buildings created out of new techniques and approaches to style and structure. This study features a particular set of these “new beauties”: public library buildings of the 1960s, both large and small. In the 1960s, public library design finally broke free from its Victorian heritage. The new library buildings that appeared in this decade, clothed as they were in the architectural modernism of the time, reflected an age of optimism and intended modernization, when faith in the postwar welfare state was at its height, when hopes for technological and economic renewal were running high, and when the outlook of professional librarians was becoming increasingly progressive. Introduction: From Old to New In 1960 the Royal London Borough of Kensington, a salubrious district of central London, opened a new central library (Kensington designated “Royal” in 1901, fulfilling a wish by Queen Victoria to honor her birth- place) (Official Architecture, 1960, pp. 506–509). The library’s architect was Vincent Harris, who a generation earlier had designed the simpli- fied-classical Manchester Central Library (1934). For Kensington he pro- duced a substantial library in an “English Renaissance” style, in keeping with the Borough’s esteemed status (fig. 1). At the time, the building was the largest public library in London. The previous year, in response to the Kensington design, students from the nearby Royal College of Art had formed a protest group called Anti-Ugly Action (AUA). They had marched on the Borough’s town hall and the new library chanting “it’s an LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 60, No. 1, 2011 (“Library Design: From Past to Present,” edited by Alistair Black and Nan Dahlkild), pp. 71–111. © 2011 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois 72 library trends/summer 2011 outrage,” wielding placards saying “Fake Buildings Are A Sin” and “Britain Builds Blindly.” They held a public meeting at Kensington Town Hall to gain further support against the library’s pseudoclassical style (Daily Tel- egraph [1959, January 26; 1959, February 5]; Manchester Guardian [1959, February 5]).1 The AUA also involved itself in the campaign opposing the planned new library in Guilford city center, a stone-clad, neo-Georgian design—in keeping with nearby Jacobean buildings but out of step with the rise of modernism. Yet, illustrating that not everyone was a convert to modernism, the AUA was itself the subject of criticism from those who ad- mired the Guilford Public Library plan and who lambasted the students’ preference for “acres of glass and concrete” (in the context of architecture, the words modernism and modernist are used in this article rather than the word modern, which carries the connotations of design that is merely new, up-to-date, or recent) (Mervyn, 1959). The design of Kensington Central Library was in marked contrast to the many contemporary libraries being built or planned at the time. The majority in the worlds of both libraries and architecture would have viewed the Kensington design as backward-looking, its “opulence and heaviness . suggest[ing] a wealth we have come to dissociate from the building of our affluent age” (Platts, 1967, p. 475). Commentary on the new library was offered by the architectural correspondent of the Times who wrote, shortly after the library was opened, that it was “a manly type of building”; it was an example, he opined, of dignified architecture, its neoclas- sical idiom having been “forcefully handled” by a veteran architect “who was designing important buildings in similar style almost half a century ago.” However, within this apparent compliment lurked a hidden slight. Indeed, he went on to comment that the dressing up of an admittedly well-planned, modern, steel-framed building was “somewhat ridiculous,” especially in light of how much contemporary architects had done “to evolve new beauties [my emphasis] out of new techniques and structures” (“New Library,” 1960). This study features a particular set of these modernist “new beauties” of the 1960s—public library buildings, both large and small. Breaking free of their Victorian design heritage, the new public library buildings of the “Swinging Sixties” (Sandbrook, 2006) reflected an age of optimism and modernization, when faith in the postwar welfare state was at its height and when the outlook of professional librarians was becoming more progressive. The Modernization of Britain: “White Hot” Technology and the Welfare State The election of a radical Labour government in 1945 resulted from the “equality of sacrifice” of the war years and the promise of egalitarian reconstruction that accompanied it (Addison, 1975). A welfare state was “new beauties”/black 73 Figure 1. Kensington Central Library (1960), rear view. Reproduced with permis- sion of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. forged out of the pragmatic needs of a warfare state. Writing in 1945, the industrialist and politician Ernest Simon, famous for his slum-clearing work in Manchester, expressed the belief that in twenty years Britain could be rebuilt: “Let us be inspired with enthusiasm for a great national plan of reconstruction. Let us determine to plan and build healthy and pleasant cities, the finest the world has known, and a monument to the ideals and to the efficiency of British democracy” (Simon, 1945, pp. 7, 223). In 1942, the Fabian Socialist G. D. H. Cole wrote of the “fundamental resolve to rebuild our nation in the spirit in which we [effectively] began fighting the war in 1940” (p. 12). The spirit of reconstruction spilled over into the library world. The desire to rebuild the public library system was encapsulated in a landmark survey and report in 1942, researched and authored by Lionel McColvin, Britain’s most prominent librarian of the time. In terms purely of bricks and mortar, it was recognized that “the destruction by bombs of the Cen- tral Library at Coventry, and the similar destruction elsewhere, raises the problem of rebuilding our libraries after the war . whether they be de- stroyed by enemy action or not, they will have to be moved into new buildings or radically enlarged and reconstructed in the near future” (“Library planning,” 1942). 74 library trends/summer 2011 However, the regeneration of Britain’s library buildings, including the central library in Coventry (more about this later), was something that had to wait for a generation after the war. The desire to build a better postwar world soon manifested itself in the construction of a welfare state comprising the nationalization of key sec- tors of the economy, a commitment to Keynesian demand management to avoid the mass unemployment of the past, the provision of a national health service free at the point of use, fair welfare benefits, an expanded public education system, and a large-scale program of state housing (Hill, 1993; Lowe, 2005). Regarding the last, local authorities were given new powers to clear slums and bomb-damaged areas, and expand public in- vestment in urban regeneration as well as in the construction of entirely new settlements, the “new towns” (Maxwell, 2004, p. 1361; Saint, 1988). All this was inaugurated in six short years before the return to power, in 1951, of the Conservatives who, although scaling down government expenditure, nonetheless accepted many of the previous government’s reforms and established a consensus around the need for a welfare state of some kind (Kavanagh & Morris, 1989); even if later Conservative ad- ministrations sought always to contain it and adapt it to Conservative val- ues (Glennerster, 1995). In design terms, the intended modernization of the nation—the aim, literally, of “building a better tomorrow” (Elwall, 2000)—had been flagged during the war by posters issued by the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, which disseminated educational material to the armed forces to prepare those serving for the postwar world. Three posters, designed by Abram Games, depicted the new Britain for which people were fighting. Each carried the image of a modernist building: a block of flats (the influential Kensal house design, 1937), a college, and a health center. In 1951 came the Festival of Britain (mainly staged on the south bank of the River Thames in London), which aimed to promote better-quality design in the redevelopment of Britain’s town and cities. The Festival, held as a “tonic to the nation” (Elwall, 2000, p. 10) at a time of severe aus- terity, was a key moment not only in postwar aspirations for meaningful reconstruction but also in postwar architecture, a moment “when modern design as a whole was introduced to a more or less accepting public as a matter of daily routine” (Powers 2005, p. 231). By the mid-1950s, modern architecture was no longer the exclusive interest of a small elite group of pioneers. It had won broad acceptance and even approval. Although modernism had made in-roads before the war, it was now fully established and had become a symbol of postwar reconstruction, in particular of the phase of modernization that got underway in the years approaching 1960 (Bullock, 2002). Arguably, however, the authentic “modern times” that the Festival an- ticipated did not arrive until the early 1960s, years that saw the emergence “new beauties”/black 75 of a vibrant “pop” and youth subculture, a general opening up of social mores, and a restored faith in technology and science: the birth control pill became widely available in 1961; the Beatles went to the top of both the single-play and long-play popular music charts in 1963.

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