THE NATIONAL LIFE STORY COLLECTION

INTERVIEW SUMMARY SHEET Title Page ______

Ref. No.: C467/22 Playback No.: F5868-F5876 ______

Collection title: Architects’ Lives ______

Interviewee’s surname: Hollamby Title: Mr

Interviewee’s forenames: Edward

Date of birth: 8.1.1921- 29.12.1999 Sex: Male ______

Date(s) of recording: 21.08.1997; 12.09.1997; 26.09.1997

Location of interview: Interviewee’s home

Name of interviewer: Jill Lever

Type of recorder: Marantz

Total no. of tapes: 9 Type of tape: 60” cassette

Mono or stereo: Stereo Speed: Normal

Noise reduction: Dolby B Original or copy: Original ______

Additional material: ______

Copyright/Clearance: Full clearance ______

Interviewer’s comments:

______Edward Hollamby C467/22/01 F5868A Page 1

F5868 Side A

Interviewing Ted Hollamby on the 21st of August 1997 at his home, the Red House, Upton, Bexley. Interviewer is Jill Lever, and this is tape One A.

And we’re going to start, Ted, as far back as you wish to go.

Well as far back as I wish to go, is to some extent as far back I suppose as I can memorise. I can memorise some things intensely when I was very very young, like walking, so it seemed to me, a long distance, along the cliffs to Brighton with my mother, I always think I was about four or five then, remembering that. My mother had a tremendous influence on me, so I tend to remember things often through her. But my grandparents, with the exception...well, all my grandparents really were an absolute mystery, an absolute mystery in the case of my paternal side because I didn’t know them at all. In the case of my maternal grandmother, she lived with us at Hammersmith, in Ravenscourt Road, and she was an incredible lady. We had an interesting old cottage there, with a big garden for a cottage, and with a coach-house, and she lived in the coach-house adjoining, and it was always a mystery place that, because it was...weren’t always allowed in there, and when I could go in there, I had to be well dressed and behave myself, and it always seemed to me to be immaculate. And that was the strangeness of her. Her life is a mystery. She ran off, so we believe and understand, with a batman from the Army, from a very good family in Buckinghamshire, her family. She was expelled or something from the family. She had two or three liaisons. She was a real lady. But she had strong principles, and not about her sort of personal life in that way, I suppose, but about the way she dressed, the way she behaved, the way she brought up her children. So that even during the war, the First World War, when I learnt more about what she did, because she even told us about that, she had to take in washing to support the children, she could do that, and yet she could appear to be the grand lady as well. So she impressed me enormously. But she was always a great mystery. But my mother was, as I said, had an enormous influence on my life. My father was a policeman, a kind, dear man, but reserved; went right through the First World War in every one of the most terrible battles, and survived the lot. Would never talk about it. And... But she, especially when I was a young student, would sit up late at night, and we would talk and talk Edward Hollamby C467/22/01 F5868A Page 2 until one o’clock in the morning, she was marvellous in that way. And so, I, as a young boy, how did my interests grow? I’ve asked myself often, it’s curious that. I know, and I always remember, that it was about thirteen that I said I wanted to be an architect. I was very interested in woodwork, in craft work, as a child, and used to make both models, I used...I was a pretty good model-maker, model aircraft maker, and...but also all sorts of craft work that I used to do in wood, and it was perhaps that that somehow made me think of architecture, I don’t know. But I can always remember that it was when I was thirteen years old that I decided I would love to be an architect, not ever believing that I would ever be able to be such a person. In those days architects very largely came from a class who, maybe not even then were so highly paid, but nevertheless were from well-to-do or middle-class, upper-class families, or so it always seemed. However, I did at school get a scholarship, and was able to go to the School of Building and Arts and Crafts, which was, the junior section of which, from the scholarship, was known as the technical school, and there my interests of course broadened and deepened. I learnt not only normal conventions of language and literature and history and so on, but a great deal about using your hands and technique and making things. And then, from then I went on into the senior school, with the idea of becoming an architect, and was...so this was in the...by that time it was about the late Thirties, ’36, ’37 I suppose, May Morris had lectured and taught at the school, but she had left just a few years before that, but I didn’t know of Morris then. The School of Building and Arts and Crafts was marvellous, because it was both...it did what Morris had so much recommended; it taught widely over the whole span of the arts and the crafts, from figure painting and figure drawing to bricklaying and carpentry, and I learnt all the building crafts there.

All of them?

All... Ah. Bricklaying, plumbing, painting and decorating, joinery, machine woodwork; not plastering.

How did you learn, did you go on site and do it?

Edward Hollamby C467/22/01 F5868A Page 3

We did go on site, but much of this was done in workshops at the school, you built walls, you made joints and windows and doors and things like that, all in the workshops in the school.

And was this part of an architect’s training, or was it a general...?

It was a general training, from which you could go into becoming a craftsman, or you could go into becoming an architect, or...and any one of the other professions that were related.

What, surveying or...

Surveying, yes. And building managers and so on. Anything in that direction. So it was quite a wide span. But there was a section of it which was for architectural studies, and the tutor was Alwyn Waters, and Alwyn Waters was a wonderful man, what a tutor to have. He was, I suppose, a very late Arts and Crafts architect himself, trained at the Academy Schools, but he was such a wonderful teacher. He would... We were to go our own way, but whatever we did it was to be well done, was his primary, the lesson I learnt from him. But he was, God!, when I remember the beautiful drawings he used to make in chalk on the blackboard of construction details, it was absolutely incredible, they were like those beautiful drawings you see in the early books on building construction, but he would draw them in the morning there so that when we came in, there they were, beautifully drawn, and he could explain it all to us, and there it was, just like a beautiful drawing, all in chalk on the blackboard.

And did you sit down and copy it?

We sometimes did. In fact frequently would do that, yes. But we would also be lectured, or could ask questions about how it would be made, and how it would be done. So, that was the early part of my life there. And then...

Can we sort of slow down a bit, because I think you’re sort of...we’ll be at the end. How many schools were there like that in London? There was Brixton wasn’t there?

Edward Hollamby C467/22/01 F5868A Page 4

There was Brixton.

Was that similar?

There was I think also, in north London was... Oh there was Woolwich Polytechnic, but I’m not quite sure whether Woolwich had building studies. Brixton was the oldest one of those.

Yes.

But...and...but it was a very different sort of school in many ways. It was much more, I would have said less revolutionary.

Mm.

That seems...

But going back to your first school that you went to, you would have been about five.

Ah, well of course I missed that, my primary school?

Mm.

Yes. Well I first went to a school where nursery classes were held, it was infants, an infants school, and indeed... Now...yes. Yes, at the infants school in Paddenswick Road, there was a Miss Foxall and, I’m sure that was her name, as I remember her, because for some reason or other she remembered me, and we even had a connection in the early days, right here at Red House, as a mature man, long after the war, she had remembered me, and as much as I perhaps remembered her, but I always remembered her, I loved her. I stole the flowers in the garden of the Ravenscourt park caretaker’s lodge, beautiful tulips, to present to her, I remember. I can remember that so clearly, that was a period I suppose when I had the most wonderful, peaceful, gentle, loving life as a child.

Edward Hollamby C467/22/01 F5868A Page 5

Mm. Did you have any brothers and sisters?

I had a brother, he was two years younger than me. Grandma loved Derek very much. Derek, my brother, was rather prone to childish problems when he was young, he was in a wheelchair for a year. We always say now it was all put on, but he was rather made a fuss off, he was the younger boy. We had great adventures together, I suppose I could call them that; I was in the Scouts, he was...and he was also I think in the Cubs, Wolf Cubs, and then in the Scouts later on, but in the earlier years we used to go camping. I was always given responsibility for him you see, so... I may say, we are on the most closest and most friendly and loving terms today as we ever could be, but I know I always used to have such trials with him. Those same cliffs that I can remember from my very infant childhood, I can remember from Rottingdean, walking to Brighton with him, and he wanted to go on the bus or the tram, the bus I think it would have been, and not walk, and I said, ‘No, you’ve got to walk.’ We were all to join, go for a sea voyage at Brighton. And then he ran over to the cliff edge and sat on the cliff edge with his legs dangling over it. Now I can remember things like that. And I had to agree that he could come on the bus before he would get up and... So, he was a great trial to me in many ways as a boy. But that was part of an experience perhaps of life, giving me some degree of responsibility, which I sometimes didn’t recognise then, especially when I had to make sure that he took his pills, which he didn’t take, and...but all that was that childhood. The school then I went to at that time, the primary school would be called now, was St. Peter’s Boys C. of E. School, Church of England school, in, just virtually on the riverside at Hammersmith, and on the whole that was a very happy time also of my life.

Were you a church-going family?

Well, both Derek and I were in the choir of the...

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

Holy Innocents?

Edward Hollamby C467/22/01 F5868A Page 6

Yes. How do you know? Holy Innocents Church, which is a very fine church. It was rather High Church. And, I think my mother was keen that we should go as children, as we did. I was the second boy soloist in the choir; my brother, typically, was in, of the younger boys, led a strike of the younger boys, because their wages were not high enough, he thought, as compared with ours. One...on an occasion, I don’t know why I was called Beelzebub, prince of all these wicked boys by the organist, so I must have been rather naughty myself as well. But the church vicar was a Mr Eden, a very nice man, and he seemed to, I think, take to us rather. I always remember he had a yellow Morris with a dicky seat, and we used to go to camp with the church down in Sussex where his brother had a large estate, and he would drive us down, Derek and I, in the dicky seat in his yellow Morris, we loved that. So we...that was quite a, we played quite a significant part in the church, until the stage at which, I suppose it would be, we would be about eleven or twelve or something like that, and then we didn’t after that, we began to have other interests, and moved away from it. But I always remember it as such a magnificent church, it is I think one of the, an important listed church in Hammersmith now.

Did your mother work?

No. No. She... My father would have utterly disapproved of the idea of my mother having to work. He had a secure job. And she was a very good and efficient housekeeper and, on what was a modest income, she, every year we had a holiday and would go down to Ramsgate or Margate or the Kentish coast somewhere for a holiday, which she would have saved to ensure that we did. And that brought, that reminds me of another thing about my father which was so extraordinary. He was such a reserved man, so non...he wouldn’t intrude into a conversation or anything like that, and yet he would love parties, and we used to go for rides on the horse breaks, eight horses, two storey breaks, like buses, open at the roof, in the evenings, for drives across the downs, they were wonderful. And my father used to lead the community singing on those buses, on those horse-breaks. It always puzzled me that, that he could be those two sorts of persons.

Do you think it was because, being a policeman meant that he had to have a rather controlled life and attitude, and when he was on holiday he could be different? Edward Hollamby C467/22/01 F5868A Page 7

I think it may well have been that. Yes, it may well have been.

Did it affect you, that your father was a policeman, I mean did the other children...?

No, no, no.

They didn’t tease you or...?

No, no. No. No. No, there was never any problem about that, that, it was just that that was his job, and... I suppose one thought of him, that he was really rather an important person as a child, one tended to think that.

Was he always a constable, or did he become a sergeant?

No, he was always a constable. He would not seek promotion, because that would have taken him away from his nice police station to the Hammersmith Central Station, and part of the police bureaucracy, and he had his own little corner, which I think he had learnt from the war. He earned the Meritorial Service Medal in the war, and I think he did the most incredible things, even... But that personality of his, of being able to sort of squat down in a bunker, or sort of, to keep quiet, must have been a factor which enabled him to survive, and he took into the police force much much later, but it does explain that. I had a nasty accident here in Red House Lane, and crashed the car, smashed my jaw and leg and, on a Sunday morning I think this was, and I was laying in the road, and word was taken down to...my father was staying at Red House. He came along the road, he didn’t hurry, he walked with that measured walk which I had known so well as a policeman. So it was fundamentally a part of his character, that he never got excited, or in a state of...well I suppose, excitement at a crisis or anything like that; he would bear it all with complete equanimity. But going back. So my mother was much closer to me because of that I think. It was only later that, particularly when he lived here with us, at Red House, after my mother died, and Doris really took her place with him, and I got to know him actually much more closely then.

Edward Hollamby C467/22/01 F5868A Page 8

Did you find out about his background at all?

His father, and I think this explains a lot about him, he was at once, he could be...he was a disciplinarian to a degree, but not harsh. He had very strong personal habits, he was regular in everything that he did, this is all part of this same thing of proceeding with a measured step sort of thing. But he did tell me of his father, and it was awful. His father used to beat him terribly. And that must have been something that he remembered so strongly, and he would not talk a lot about it but he did tell me, and I think that he must have learnt of cruelty then, so that he...it was never a part of his nature.

Was his father a Londoner?

No, they... Well, the Hollambys virtually all came from Tunbridge Wells, there must have been a Nordic settlement that got stuck in the ice there or something or other. One finds so many Hollamby names there now; very few elsewhere. But I think that’s where they originally came from. But his father, I think, at one stage anyway was a railway worker, and lived at Battersea, but they also lived down in Surrey where the Army had large encampments there; now that may have been somewhere at the time...oh no, it wouldn’t have been as late as the First World War, it was much earlier than that, it was when he was a boy. Because he then went up to live in the Midlands with his sister, who was very kind also. It’s strange, this man, this father produced the children that were such nice, kind people. But that was his background. Going on again, my mother, as I said, was this most significant influence in my life, and encouraged me in all the things I wanted to do. So, in that way, as I said I think before, I was much closer to her. And then later, I went on, as I jumped up into the Thirties, into my school days and then the later senior education that I had...

Did you take whatever the 11-plus was in those days?

There was a junior county scholarship, and I took that, but at the same time, this is my memory of it, the junior technical, was it the technical scholarship came up as well, or was it just soon after I think perhaps, and I took that, and when I knew the result of that I decided that’s what I wanted to do. Now I think that was...I’m not a sort of Edward Hollamby C467/22/01 F5868A Page 9 academic, and I think that was because of this early interest, well it was certainly this early interest I had in making things, in using my hands, and so that no doubt influenced me a great deal, and my mother just thought that was right for me. And I can remember the interview I had with the principal of the school, the school at Hammersmith, Mr Mole, and he actually lived in the same road as we did, he was a structural engineer, but he was very remote, nothing like Alwyn Waters, in relation to the students. So, I’m not quite sure where I got to before.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

Was your family interested in politics in any way?

Not really, not at all, I don’t think. Well not in the early days when I was a pupil and a student. That’s not entirely true; by the time I had become a student I had become frantically left-wing, and as many of the tutors at the School of Building and Arts and Crafts at Hammersmith I talked about, these Modernist young architects, were, and my mother was very interested. She was not in the sense of being a politician, being in politics then, but of being interested in the fact that all these strange ideas were all coming out. She was a member of the Co-operative Women’s Guild, and to that extent was, had some connection with the Co-operative political movement, but she wasn’t a politico. My father most certainly not; he was a Conservative, always voted Conservative, until, this was after the Second World War, and he then became a Labour voter. My mother however was secretly we believe a Labour voter when my father, when they went to the polls and my father voted Conservative. But we never talked about politics as such until, as I say, until I was, must have been about eighteen, and then, there was nothing but politics, and... But, my father didn’t take much notice of me at all at that stage, I think that was the easiest course for him, otherwise he would have found it profoundly disturbing and strange that this son of his had these idiot ideas. But my mother was deeply interested. And then of course I met Doris, my wife, very young. We really met when I was sixteen, and she was the same age. So I was at school.

How did you meet her?

Edward Hollamby C467/22/01 F5868A Page 10

Well I first met her, first met her much earlier than that, in Ravenscourt Park, in the rose garden, with friends. She had been brought up by her grandmother in the country, and she only used to come up for short periods to her parents’ house, her father had been unemployed for many years, and so she was a country girl, and she used to come up, and with the boy friends and the girl friends then that were in those streets there, I met her. As I say, I first met her in the rose garden at...and I can remember that still, and then, much more seriously when I was about sixteen. And, I think we must have formed an attraction, and we used to study all sorts of things, and, we used to read the most romantic books you could imagine, Jeffery Farnol, and... But we would talk together about them, so we had a lot of common interest in that way. And then, she came to London to live with her parents then, and she worked locally for the Gold...not Goldsmiths Company, Evershed & Vignoles, they used to make all sorts of things, they were a very old firm. And then we, I suppose, went to lots of things together, we would go to milk bars together, and we used to go for country walks together.

End of F5868 Side A Edward Hollamby C467/22/01 F5868B Page 11

F5868 Side B

Tape One B.

Doris and I became very close, and interested in so many of the same things. We used to go to milk bars together and we used to walk in the countryside together, and indeed we, her aunt at Wimbledon who has only just died in fact, but who we loved dearly, who was so good to us... Doris’s mother felt I was...she was jealous no doubt, because she hadn’t had her daughter for so long with her. And indeed later on she was to become very kind when we married and it was all formal and settled. But in those days I was an intruder and taking her daughter away from her, I think she felt. But her aunt was quite different. She had taught Doris at school in the country, she had come up to London and married and was a teacher, and...but she used to invite us over to Wembley where she lived, and then we used to...I can remember Wembley Town Hall being built, Moderne, very impressed with that I was at the time. And we... So there was this coming together at a very early age, we did so much together, not in gangs at all or, which perhaps would be more typical today, I don’t know, but, I wasn’t part of a whole boyhood thing, and she wasn’t part of a girlhood thing. So very young we were I suppose becoming mature in a way. I always remember one stage, it was a bit later than this, because it was actually in the early part of the war when I worked at, up in Liverpool on the Kirby ordnance factory, which was being built then, and the school at Hammersmith had had to close the course down, and she came up and stayed for a while I remember, and I can always remember we went to somewhere one afternoon, and on the bus, top of the bus coming back I read to her the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Bolsheviks, and she took it all in. And I couldn’t help thinking only the other day about this, I was thinking I was the...of Burne-Jones, when Morris would be droning away at her, and there he is sitting there listening to it all and going off to sleep, and I thought, poor Doris, she must have taken it... But we had that sort of relationship, and we very much, we became, so it’s back to the politics thing, we became, we both became members of the Communist Party, and we...very youthful members of it I may say, but were very active in it, going to meetings and demonstrations. Well there weren’t any demonstrations then in the war, no; meetings, and taking part in all the discussions and things. So, that went back into the home, and that’s when there was, the only Edward Hollamby C467/22/01 F5868B Page 12 occasion that I can remember a confrontation with my father, who was so tolerant, because he was a policeman, and to have somebody like me in his family running around with ideas which was considered to be the worst ideas that you could possibly have at that period, the beginning of the war. It was so confusing. At the one time, one felt that I was like the fire-fighting, when there was, the bombs were falling, and Derek and I remembered we...saving some houses locally that, where the fire-bombs had fallen into them and putting it out and so on. And yet at the other side, at the same time, talking in terms as though that war wasn’t the war that, certainly it later became to us, one of anti-fascism and of fighting for a good cause. In fact, it’s extraordinary, I must have grown up so much in that period, very short period, and...but... And Doris and I shared, shared that, and...

What was it that attracted you towards communism?

Oh I think it was the ideas that we developed, that I developed in architecture for example, the idea that architecture should be for the people, ordinary people. It was that, also that there were... It seemed so exciting, so...a world which was a new world, and we were I think quite early able to see the world that Britain had become part of, that Chamberlain represented in so many ways, and felt ashamed of that, and felt that was, there was something wrong with it. We hated Nazism, and we...we were looking to an ideal, we saw a dream, and believed that there was a part of the world where that dream was coming true, and that was a wonderful thing to us.

Was there anybody locally who was in inspiring? I mean can you remember people who were party members perhaps?

There were... I’m trying...I can’t remember their names now, so they couldn’t have been all that inspiring. The most inspiring to me were those young men who were the tutors who had worked in Maxwell Fry’s office and with Gropius and...

Were they actually Communists?

And they were, yes.

Edward Hollamby C467/22/01 F5868B Page 13

They were?

And they... So there was that connection with architecture, with it being a new world.

What...did you conceive of it on an intellectual level, or was it a gutsy, I’m from the working class...?

No it wasn’t that. It was the intellectual level of trying to conceive of a society... We were very much aware of how, the awfulness of the mass unemployment. Doris’s father had been unemployed for years and years and years; we were lucky because my father was a policeman and had a regular job, but alongside us there were people who we knew, there was... I always remember a boy at St. Peter’s there, and we used to take them things at Christmas and things like that, but they were things, food parcels, because he sometimes had only ragged shoes. It was that, we were against that. And therefore, felt that was part of a world that was, had no place in the future, and we wanted to change it. And intellectually, the way to change it seemed to be to turn it into a world where co-operation and working together for ideals, for...making life for ordinary people better, seemed to be the right thing. It wasn’t intellectual in the sense of, I think in...it wasn’t intellectual really in the sense of Marx, except that one learnt about what Marx thought, and certainly in the sense of understanding the dialectics, and that has always been a very important thing in my life.

Could you explain dialectics to me, I’ve never...?

Well, dialectics are a philosophy in which there is always a contradiction. There is...the positive aspect itself contains a negative aspect, and these two things are in collision. And the logic of this was always that capitalist society had this collision, and that dialectics explained how it was producing the very things which would create the new society, and yet it was also suffering from the conditions and the situations which were of the past. So, it was conflict and the resolution of conflict. And I shall get in a muddle myself if I go on too much like this, because it’s a long while ago. But I know it was a very important thing, and I think has always been quite an important...understanding, having some understanding about that has always been a very important thing in my life. And I think it has helped me enormously in my Edward Hollamby C467/22/01 F5868B Page 14 career, because I’ve been able to see the way in which, resolution out of situations which were, to many people would have seemed, there would seem no answer to, I could see a way through. I believe that was because I had this understanding of conflict, and out of which resolution came. But, I don’t know, I don’t think I’m a very good person at looking at myself really, and I shall get into deeper and deeper water I’m sure if I go on about it. But that is what I understood of dialectics. But I wasn’t, as I said, so...I wasn’t academically intellectual; I was intellectual about it, about the purposes of that movement, but not, not in the sense that... I think that many of those who were well educated and yet, and wrote their treatises, were often very academic about it, so that, well we can perhaps see that more clearly, easily today than we could when I was so young. However, that was a period in which, I’m not quite sure whether I should move on now...

Yes, but, if you could just give me a picture of you and Doris, now members of the Young Communist Party or whatever.

Yes.

What...would you go to meetings every week?

Yes. Yes.

You would read literature and you would discuss things?

We would read masses amounts of literature, and we would go to meetings, and there would be, and we would be supporters when there were street meetings. Very much like when Morris used to do exactly the same thing in Hammersmith. And so, to that extent, though I don’t know whether we probably had thought it out that way, but to that extent we were doing what we had learnt about him. It seemed part of our appreciation of fairly recent history, and of a man who we came more and more to admire. But then, he was also a man who was I suppose perhaps, I mean he had this, an intellectual understanding of Marxism, but he wasn’t an academic in that way at all either, and...I don’t know. One is speculating so much about one’s past; partly one remembers it vividly, you remember events vividly; the sort of workings in between Edward Hollamby C467/22/01 F5868B Page 15 are vague. I don’t know whether that’s a common thing, but certainly with me there are whole periods where I can remember what happened then, and then later, some other thing happened, but in between times and what caused one thing to go to go with the other, I can’t remember that very clearly.

Well one of the things that’s rather nice is that you make Hammersmith seem rather like a village in some ways, you know, that you lived there, your father liked his local police station and you went to the local school and then you went to the college and so on.

Yes.

Was it like that, was it a London village?

I think it was. I mean, it wasn’t as small as a village, it was an urban village, because there were... Perhaps it was more than one. There was the, certainly the artists’ village, it was the alternative to the Kensington...

Chelsea, yes.

Chelsea. But it was the sort of lower working end of that. And in fact right up through my early life there remained very much like that. I mean I’ve mentioned the people who lived in the Square with us, that, and that was the riverside area, and that was Morris’s home as well, but... And then there was the...there was...where we lived, there were these cottages, and long gardens, and it was a point of change of course, on the opposite side of our road there were more cottages.

What was your road called?

Pardon?

What was your road called?

[BREAK IN RECORDING] Edward Hollamby C467/22/01 F5868B Page 16

Was it a rented cottage?

Yes, yes.

Do you remember how much the rent would have been?

No, no.

Perhaps it changed over time.

I only remember that we left it for the maisonette that, modern, relatively modern maisonette, post-war, post First War modern maisonette, of an estate, on the edge of Hammersmith with Acton.

So this was a council...?

No, no they were private. And we did that because...

What did they look like?

...the rent went up of the cottages.

Yes. What did the cottages look like? I mean, I’m just trying to see the early architectural influences when...

Yes. Yellow brick, sliding sash windows, slate roof.

What, late 19th century or Edwardian?

Oh no, much earlier than that. It would have been 1860s, something like that, 18... Perhaps a bit later than that, perhaps about 1880, something like that. But there was a mingling, because there were more modern streets which were Edwardian, also which Edward Hollamby C467/22/01 F5868B Page 17 came... Wingate Road, now I can remember that one, was one of them. What the devil was the name of our road?

Oh don’t worry. Was it... So, basically it was kind of lower middle class, upper working class sort of area?

Yes.

And the borough generally was...there was some rich people living there, weren’t there, after all, because...

Some...?

Rich people, because of the river frontage.

Oh yes, yes. Yes. It was...

I always think of Hammersmith as being rather, it has a Labour Council doesn’t it?

It has certainly at the moment, yes.

And hasn’t it always tended to be rather left-wing?

It always tended...oh it always tended to be.

So I’m wondering whether you weren’t brought up in an area that tended to be socialist, communist, left wing?

I would think that would probably be so, because actually that communist branch was quite a strong one, and there were at least four councillors who were members of it, and their wives. I can’t remember their names now, but they were very influential, and...because they were authoritative, you know, they were...they were councillors, and so, there was a sort of degree of respectability as well as there being... And they were very experienced as well, enormously experienced, they’d been in the Labour Edward Hollamby C467/22/01 F5868B Page 18 movement a long while. But Napier’s you see was nearby, the works, it was just on the edge of Hammersmith, that was the great engine works. It was actually in Acton, because that was the edge of the borough there. But the Napier workers were recognised as being the most militant and highly organised trade unionists, and that was very well known. C.A.V. Bosch was the other industrial firm that I was aware of close to there, but it was Napier’s workers who were certainly, they were mostly local but highly skilled, highly skilled people, and very strong trade unionists, they were recognised for that, and would be known. The other thing that used to happen was that, a lovely thing actually, every year there was a parade, I can’t remember who organised it now, but there was a parade throughout Hammersmith of all the organisations, all their banners, so, and all their bands, brass bands, everything. It was actually a marvellous thing, it was really...and we loved that, and that used to come up Paddenswick Road at the end of our road there. And I suppose that was an expression of that community of strong interests, but which now I suppose, you would talk about the, I don’t know whether it’s for the same reasons but the carnival in...

Notting Hill.

I don’t know. I’m not...I’m not familiar with that, except that it’s a, perhaps it’s a much more polyglot London-wide thing. The Hammersmith, the other thing that I’m talking about was just Hammersmith, they were all trade unionists from Hammersmith, or the Co-operative workers, the schools, they all took part in it. But I can’t remember who organised it.

Mm. Oh well not to worry. How long did you go on being a member?

Until, certainly until the, I think it was the Czechoslovak crisis, which was well after the Second World War.

Mm.

Well, long after.

Well there was Hungary, 19... Edward Hollamby C467/22/01 F5868B Page 19

There was Hungary. But Hungary I...I stomached in some way or other, and in fact wasn’t sure that...that...I didn’t see myself quarrelling with it so much, except it was a an uneasy[??] feeling.

Mm.

But then it was followed by the Czechoslovak, and I had been to Czechoslovakia a year or two earlier, and I thought it was absolutely wonderful. In fact indeed it was the international...it was the architects’ international conference? No, what would it be called? Union of Architect...

I.U.A. or U.I.A.

I.U.A. conference.

Yes.

And, I went with Robert Matthew, did I? No, that was later on, I’m getting muddled. I’m awfully sorry.

No, don’t worry.

But I went to that, to Prague there, and was fascinated with it. It seemed most romantic. And also there was...it was extraordinary the... I remember going on a long tram journey and not knowing the way, and asking the tram driver, stopping at the corner, jumping off, taking me round to show me the right tram to get on. That all seemed to be what it was all about. A year or two later, a few years later, and Dubcek, and it was very different, and so I was beginning to feel then, it’s all gone wrong, that power has corrupted, and that made me then feel that, though I could never shed the feeling that I wanted a society which was one in which things would be beautiful, à la Morris, and which would also be fair, and cruelty and brutality would be taken out of it. It seems odd that, because when you think of the war and... And yet I do think of the war, and I think of all those Russians that died in the war, Edward Hollamby C467/22/01 F5868B Page 20 believing in it, and also believing in their country and sorted in that way. I was firmly anti-fascist, and indeed, when I was in Ceylon with the Far East fleet, I was...because I served in the Marines during the war, and in fact in the Marines I was very active and known as a Communist, and...but I wasn’t...I mean, people were fascinated by it, and many others were sympathetic or supporters or members. And I can remember in Colombo, the students there, seeing the film Jewel in the Crown just recently made me think of it again, the...those Indians who felt, why do we want to support you against the Japanese? And I can remember going to debates in Colombo with the students there, Colombo University, and they were very friendly, we used to have lovely meals together, and a nice time together, and yet they would say to me, ‘But why do you expect us to fight for you?’ And I found myself saying, ‘But you’re not. You’re fighting for you, if you’re fighting, and you will find, whatever you say about the British Empire and what it has done,’ and it had done an awful lot of good things in Ceylon, ‘that Japan is a very very different imperialism.’ So, was that exercising a different look at communism? I don’t think it was; it seemed to me that that war was so absolutely right, which I hadn’t been sure of at the beginning, and that we had got to destroy fascism, and I think anti-fascism became...it was the most positive, powerful force in my feeling about society then, because we were just so threatened by it. And of course, I was separated from Doris for several years, and she continued, and she was still a party member also, and a trade unionist. But, I think it was at the same time, perhaps earlier than me, that she began to have her feelings that power was corrupting and taking over, and that this was a battle of power titans rather than a war for a better life. But it wasn’t entirely so, you know, it’s difficult...you can’t precisely say, it was like this. It was muddled.

Mm. I was wondering if you ever found it a disadvantage in your career to be a Communist Party member. Did it ever...did it become an issue?

I don’t think it ever did. I always remember at County Hall there was an occasion where... Because there were quite a number of us there. But I always remember there was an occasion.....

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

Edward Hollamby C467/22/01 F5868B Page 21

You were saying there were quite a few party members at County Hall.

Oh at County Hall, oh yes. And, a lot of them in the architects’ department, young architects in the...

Why do architects respond to...?

Because, I believe because they were wanting to build a better world. You see they weren’t... Of course almost everybody that became anything, came into the L.C.C. Architects’ Department, it became so, such an attraction, and many of those just passed through, but there were many who felt that it was giving their work, they were giving their work to the greatest cause in the world, and that they...that they couldn’t conceive of working in any other way. I mean, we... It was the most wonderful place to work in, we had the most wonderful work to do. We had a Council that wanted to do the most, as we all thought, wonderful things, and the sheer opportunity to do them, and that was where those ideas of making a better world, we thought we were actually doing it. So, I think it wasn’t strange that it would be among young architects in particular that they would feel like that. But of course there was a period when there was, I think it was in the mid-Fifties, or no, later than that, late Fifties probably, mid to late Fifties, when there was the...I think there was, intended to be, a purge in the Civil Service and various places like that, of people who were known as Communists, and there was a threatened purge I think in the L.C.C. It never came to anything, and... But I can always remember then, there was some strange thing happened to me, and I was called down to the administration, but I was never allowed in, and they hadn’t known who I was, because I was very junior then. That must have been quite early in the Fifties. And they and I could never understand how I had been called down, but never brought in, nobody wanted to interview me. I always got the impression, but of course it may have been that in that situation, all the things you think of are all the standard sort of stories of, oh well that’s the secret police, or it’s...but it probably was the C.I.D. who had come to see the administration there, but who knows? But I always remember that, there was a funny uneasy feeling. But all that passed. And I think many of the...well I mean, many of our, those who were Communists, and there were those who weren’t Communists but very sympathetic to Edward Hollamby C467/22/01 F5868B Page 22 them, they were amongst the leading people there, and there was no secret about it, and I think that was one of the important, a good thing.

Mm. And what sort of people were they? People that I would know perhaps?

Oh Lord! yes. Yes.

Are you prepared to name names, or is this too unkind?

I don’t really think I should. I think they are the ones to be asked.

Yes, OK.

I mean you don’t know whether.....

End of F5868 Side B Edward Hollamby C467/22/02 F5869A Page 23

F5869 Side A

Interviewing Ted Hollamby, tape Two A.

Apart from that sort of, that incident, in a period when it seemed that, as a result of the intensity of the Cold War, I think it was the time of the Berlin airlift actually, that there were those who were seen to be communists, or even left-wing, were thought of as the enemy. That is incredible to somebody like me, who had served in the Royal Marines as part of the...willingly, not an enslaved person, and many many others. But...but for most part, apart from that short period, I can’t remember, well certainly my career was never threatened, because at the L.C.C. I made a career there that was a fairly considerable one, and without it ever being I think in any way compromised by that at all. And I don’t think anywhere else. I can’t really remember having to feel, my goodness, I’ve got to be a secret man, you know. I didn’t. I was never...I never went around with a banner all the time shouting, but I never kept my views a secret. I thought, indeed, I mean if you did that, I think that that was, as I would have thought then I’m sure, playing into the hands of the enemy, because that would have been just what the picture is of what we were about. I...I don’t think that, as I’ve said, I don’t think that I can conceive of any way in which my career... Well it certainly wasn’t affected by it at all, I mean it’s self-evident, the career, and it was only, it was when I had my serious doubts that I left, and that is when many others did of course. But not leaving, not leaving the ideals.

Mm. Just not paying your subscription any more, or...?

I think more than that. Being much more questioning, much more... When you’re young you...whether you’re a born-again Christian, or a Communist, or whatever, I think the young easily, or more easily, fall into what seemed to be exciting patterns of life. As you get older, you question more, you question the world and you question yourself much more. That’s a good thing and that’s, I think that is normal life. It’s the story of the rebellion of your children, and whatever, that’s part of life, and I think that that probably happened to me, and Doris, and... But...but it didn’t suddenly collapse, but it collapsed when we saw that it wasn’t the sort of world...it wasn’t... Edward Hollamby C467/22/02 F5869A Page 24

Whether...whose fault it was, was another matter, but it wasn’t the sort of world that we were looking for.

Mm. Well, can we go back now to when you were at Hammersmith?

Yes.

And, you were in the kind of, the junior part of the Hammersmith School of Art and Crafts.

Yes. And then I...

And then, and how...

Then I went into the senior school.

Senior school. How old were you when you went into the senior school?

That would be sixteen I think.

Right.

Yes. Yes, sixteen.

And was that what most of the children did, or would the boys... Presumably it was boys only?

There were girls in the art school. So it wasn’t boys only. It was certainly boys only in the building section.

Yes. So, I’m just trying to get a picture that, would you have gone there when you were eleven, or when you were thirteen, or when you were fourteen?

Edward Hollamby C467/22/02 F5869A Page 25

No, no. It must have been fourteen that I went there. Yes, I think it must have been fourteen.

So you...

No, it couldn’t have been fourteen, it could...it must have been earlier than that.

You were at the C. of E. sort of infant and primary schools.

Yes.

From about five, probably to eleven.

Yes.

Do you think? Or...

No, I think... It certainly wasn’t...I wasn’t as young as eleven, no, my goodness no. It must have been...

Because the school leaving age then was probably about fourteen, wasn’t it?

I think it was fourteen. I must have gone at fourteen then.

Mm.

I’m sure I must have done.

Yes.

Because, sixteen I can remember clearly, but that...

So when you were in the junior part, were you having a general education, or was it all specifically...? Edward Hollamby C467/22/02 F5869A Page 26

It was both. It was both a general education, but not academic, and technical, crafts.

But when you say a general education, that would have included, did you do French for instance?

No.

No.

No, we didn’t do languages, that was...that is the one clear exception that was quite different. No. But we did English, and we did maths, and we did...what else is general education?

Geography and history, did you do geography...?

Pardon?

Geography and history?

Geography and history. I always loved history.

Some science.

And science, much more science. We did physics, chemistry and mechanics, a lot of that. For me, never enough history. I can always remember I loved history, and I used to read and read and read like anything. But there wasn’t...it wasn’t sufficiently emphasised in that curriculum at all.

Mm. At that stage I suppose if you went to school, there were sort of secondary modern, was there secondary modern schools?

No.

Edward Hollamby C467/22/02 F5869A Page 27

Technical schools.

No. There were technical schools, and there were grammar schools, and there were children who left school and went to work.

Yes.

And the technical schools had been brought in by a progressive L.C.C., and were of great reputation across London, and they were interesting architecture too, mostly Arts and Crafts architecture. The Lime Grove School, the school of Arts and Crafts was... There were others that were rather like them as well.

So, then, then when you were sixteen you moved on to the senior school?

Yes. Well then, I was able to go to work, so I went to evening school, senior school, and my first job was for the Dolcis shoe company, which had an architects’ department under Mr Simcock. And we were all, just like me, young architects-to-be, but it was very good experience, learning on the job, doing the Dolcis shoe shops. And from there, I went to...

How long were you there for?

I must have been there for a couple of years.

Mm. And what was the drawing office, where was the drawing office?

That was at Borough High Street. And do you know, I can remember, that was the other side of London from Hammersmith, and yet I can remember walking home to save the fares.

Mm. Do you remember how much you were paid?

Yes. I was paid 17s.6d. a week, and that was considered rather good. I had previously... Edward Hollamby C467/22/02 F5869A Page 28

Did you give your mother some of this?

Yes, yes.

How much did you give her?

I can’t remember. I can’t...I honestly can’t.

Mm. And how...what...did she have...?

Probably ten shillings or something like that. It would have been, oh perhaps less than that. I would have had my fare, and for lunches, we used to go to the Lyons nippies, where they had waitresses, and you could have a lovely lunch there, I don’t know what, it must have been so cheap. But I wouldn’t have had anything much more than that. In fact so little that when Doris and I would go to the cinema, we would go in the front row which I think was fourpence if I remember rightly, but when she paid we could go in the sixpennies.

And what did you wear to the office?

I wore a smock in the office, but I wore a suit.

Mm. Did they provide the smock, or did you provide it?

No, no, my mother made it. Yes. In fact, when I was at the L.C.C. I had a smock, not all the time, but in the early years there I had a smock, we all had smocks.

And did you have to provide your own T-square or did they provide that?

No, they provided all that, drawing-board and T-square.

But your own drawing instruments, or did they provide those?

Edward Hollamby C467/22/02 F5869A Page 29

No, you took your own drawing instruments, yes. Because I had won a school prize, one of my school prizes was a T-square you see. And the other one, now what was the other one? I registered it the other day. It was, certainly, it was given me by the.....

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

.....laboratories, and the engineer-architect of the Wembley swimming pool, now what was his name? Good Lord! Now how I forget that, I don’t know.

Don’t worry, somebody else will find this out and they’ll... Yes. OK, so you had...does it mean you had two T-squares, or two...?

Well I had my own one at home you see.

Yes.

But the T-square was part of the office equipment. T-square and drawing-board, but you took your own instruments.

What, with your initials on no doubt, on the case?

I can’t remember. I don’t think so. No, wouldn’t have thought of that. That... No. No.

So, you were two years at Dolcis, and meanwhile you were going to evening classes at Hammersmith.

Yes.

So how many evenings did you go?

Oh, that was I think four evenings a week, yes.

Edward Hollamby C467/22/02 F5869A Page 30

And what, for how many hours was it?

Mm, that would be three hours I think.

So the office hours would be what, roughly?

Well they would be nine I think it was till half-past five, something like that. And an hour for lunch.

And then you’d walk home.

And then I’d...oh I didn’t walk home always, no, no. I had, I did do that sometimes, but, I have always thought it so remarkable that one could actually walk that distance.

Yes, quite, yes.

But, no, one would use the tube, and... And then go...I think I would go straight to, I would have gone straight to school then.

Mm. And then, and then you would have had to do a certain amount of work at home presumably.

Oh, lots of work at home. And every weekend would have been lots of work, and visits, and measured drawings. Chiswick House was fairly near us, and I got to know that very very closely, did lots of drawings there. In fact, in a way our courting, a lot of our courting was done, Doris used to come and sit in a deckchair while I was measuring and drawing there, and other places. But Chiswick House was particular, that had so much to give to being near, and yet at the same time a very very important piece of architecture.

I wouldn’t have thought it was your kind of architecture though.

No, but there was a romantic feeling about it then. Partly because the, well the landscape itself was very much my sort of landscape. I was always interested in Edward Hollamby C467/22/02 F5869A Page 31 nature and the landscape and in gardening, and the principles of Kent’s landscape were very much, in spite of the fact that there’s the classical architecture, the romantic, and that was because of the war, and lack of upkeep, there was...it was even more romantic, and what would have been clear paths were ones you had to fight your way through. So, in that sense the setting of the houses was, I don’t think would have been of a sympathy that was different to any that I had. But I did have indeed for Chiswick House altogether, I mean, even when we were married and when we had our first child I can remember, I’ve got photographs of us, we would always walk to Chiswick House, and we loved that place. Now that’s extraordinary isn’t it.

Mm.

I would think...I wouldn’t dislike it now of course at all, but I feel quite differently about it now, and yet in some way, oddly, I don’t know how to explain this, I can’t help feeling, perhaps it’s because it forms so much a part of my early life there, not only the professional and technical in the sense of being a place where we could go to measure drawings and learn about things, but also as a place where Doris and I had such intimate moments, and also where, there were the swans and the, who chased me, and you know, and the baby, we took there, we’d walk along the river to Chiswick House. It was part of our life.

Mm.

So, perhaps that’s a contradiction.

Mm. Well, when you were working at Dolcis, that must have been mostly shop fitting presumably.

Yes. Yes.

So you would have gained an expertise in drawing out, for the joiners?

Yes. Yes, yes. Yes. And then I left there and went to work for an architect called Smart, Sharp... Smart, Sharp. Edward Hollamby C467/22/02 F5869A Page 32

What kind of work was that?

That was potentially very interesting, but it was quite near to the, must have been about ten months I was there, I wouldn’t have thought much more than that. Perhaps it was a bit more. But, that was a very similar office in that way. There were a lot of offices like that, staffed by young men who were... I beg your pardon, I’m wrong, I didn’t immediately go there. I went to the office of what was known as an architect and surveyor’s office, which was a Mr Curtis in Regent Street, Lower Regent Street, and that was doing housing under the... There was a sort of state-subsidised private housing that was done then, and Curtis was a surveyor himself, but he had an architect as an assistant. And I got the job as a junior in that office. And that was a marvellous opportunity for me, I learnt so much there, very largely because I was given so much to do that in a bigger, more organised office I would never have been given. And I think that, well in fact I’m sure, Mr Curtis, who dressed in a prim suit, and was quite different to anything you would think of as an architect’s office, but he I think respected me in a way, in some way, perhaps I could do things that he couldn’t do, or bring to his office things that he couldn’t do. I was...I think he liked the imagination. Was a bit afraid of it as well, but I was given great opportunities. And they did work at Welwyn Garden City, and Letchworth and places like that, and I went out and I learnt how to do land surveys, which I’d never done before, and the whole range of work that you have to do when you’re a very small office, and do everything. So, that was a great experience for me. I mean, he was so tolerant to me as well, because I mean, he gave me these opportunities, all sorts of things happened. I remember there was, it’s ridiculous this, but there was an electricity substation had to be part of one of these things at Welwyn, and I said, ‘I’ll design it, with a reinforced concrete roof and everything.’ Well I got my calculations all wrong, and the roof would have supported about 20 storeys or something like that on it. And the local building inspector laughed his head off. But Curtis didn’t...he saw the joke as well. And then, I was... One of the main clients was a Mr Bornstein, and his niece I think it was, was either an architect or wanted to be an architect or something like that, but it was approaching war then, and the idea of refugee camps was... And there was a national competition for it. And so, they decided to go in for this national competition, and asked me to design it. And I think that was a recognition of the fact that they could do more than Edward Hollamby C467/22/02 F5869A Page 33 the everyday work because I was there, and they...and so I was I think appreciated for that. Certainly, after the war he wrote to me and asked me to go back with him, which I thought was very nice. I couldn’t then, but... But that was a very happy period when I learnt a tremendous amount. And I’ve always believed, and disagreed with Leslie Martin, when the profession was straining to establish full-time schools, because I felt I had learnt so much by both learning in practice as well as learning in schools and theory, and so much so that I mean, when I was able to determine it, when I was at Lambeth, we had a major input of pupils who would come half-way through their course, spend a year with us, a lot of staff, and they would learn, and those who were good would come back and we would want to have them back, and one... It was good for them and good for us. A very important part I’ve always thought of architectural education.

Was that part of the general year out scheme, or was it something that was particular?

At Lambeth, that was part of the year out scheme, and, I think we used to take ten people a year, which for an office of that size was quite a considerable number.

Mm. When you were working for Mr Curtis, doing things, detailing perhaps, things at Welwyn Garden...

Yes.

Did you have to do it in a neo-Georgian, and was that...was there a style in the office?

It was... No. Well I suppose it was. I can only say it was Garden City style.

I was wondering if there was a really...

Louis de Soissons is what comes back to me, and that was I suppose, I wouldn’t call it neo-Georgian as such, because it was, it also had a sort of Edwardian feel about it.

Mm. Well it’s like... Edward Hollamby C467/22/02 F5869A Page 34

And an Arts and Crafts feel as well.

Yes. What I was wondering was, was there any conflict between what you were learning in the evening classes at Hammersmith and what you were required to do in the offices?

Yes. Yes, that’s right. I can remember now. Because I could feel, and I can remember talking about it in the office, I felt that I’d got to bring modern architecture into the office in some way or other, because it wasn’t modern architecture in the way that I was learning about it at school. Yes, no that’s absolutely right. But that... I was also able to I think understand that the clientele was also what determined the architecture, so...I don’t know. You see when we did that, the competition, they were modern building, that, so it was accepted for that, the architecture that I thought was right should be applied. And in fact I think, I can remember there were designs, I don’t know whether they were ever built, that I produced in that office, for other housing, which wasn’t so significant or big as a job as the Welwyn Garden City and the Letchworth ones, in which I produced modern designs, but I’m not quite sure whether they were ever built, but they weren’t...they were...they weren’t regarded as hostile, with hostility; slight sceptical amusement perhaps, at this young man with his big ideas sort of thing. But, no, I think that I had to do that sort of Welwyn Garden City architecture, but.....

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

.....in the office.

Yes.

I don’t think one should make too much of this, because at that time, with the exception of a small number of offices of modernists like Rosenberg and Maxwell Fry, Lubetkin, Tecton, there weren’t, for most of the young men who would be able to go and work, there weren’t places where they would be able to go in and both learn about modern architecture and carry it out under those who would be there already Edward Hollamby C467/22/02 F5869A Page 35 teaching them. So you would have to accept working in an idiom which intellectually you thought was wrong, but which was, you were earning a living. So there was an element of that to it. But I...it would be...I think it would be wrong to... I didn’t feel that this was an unpleasant chore, if you like, at all. So...

Did you choose the offices that you worked in carefully in order to get the kind of experience that you felt you needed?

Not then.

No.

I didn’t choose them. But...

Who chose them?

Well, really, A.B. Waters.

Right.

Who, the school would get offices who would ask for assistance to be interviewed, and Muddy Waters as we called him would know whether he thought you were the sort of person to send for an interview for them, and if he thought that that was the sort of office that would be a good one to work in. So really, it was chosen by the school in that sense. But you had to accept whether you took it or not, and I suppose very largely I did accept it. Yes, well I did. But then, with Curtis, and the war, that’s right, the threat of the war, and all this subsidised housing in the garden cities, ended, so there wasn’t any work. And that’s when I got the job with Ronald Sharp I think his name was, fairly well known, he’d done factories on the Great West Road, but he had some very expensive, luxurious housing schemes to do, and what you were referring to earlier really came up there. I had such quarrels with him, because the houses were very expensive houses, in beautiful woodland in Surrey if I remember rightly, and I was designing what I thought were modern houses. They weren’t Modernist houses in the sense, they were much more like the modern houses that I advocated much Edward Hollamby C467/22/02 F5869A Page 36 later, where...because I always believed the pitch roof was sensible in modern architecture, and Mary Crowley was one of my, the people that I always admired so much for that, because, at Curtis’s office I was given a Christmas present there and it was the modern house in England. So that, you know what I was saying about it, that that reflected the way they thought about me, and there was Mary Crowley’s, and I always remembered her mono-pitch tiled roofs, I always thought, there’s an architecture that hasn’t forgotten about the past; it was the Arts and Crafts movement again but it’s modern. And so, I never felt the same about the ideology of flat roofs, and... So, but these were modernist, not modernist, modern houses I was designing, and he thought this was absolutely appalling, and he would lose all the work if I went on doing this sort of thing. And we used to have deep quarrels. Well it didn’t last very long, because that job ended and it closed down, the office, and so I was out of work. And I went then back to college, senior school, as day school. It was a fairly fluid sort of course as well, because I used to go to art classes as well as the architecture classes, until that itself had to close down quite early in the war.

How could you afford to do that, if you had been working and earning money and going to evening classes, how could you afford to become a full-time student?

Well I think I got unemployment pay. I think that...that’s all I got, and my parents of course, who... Oh, one just...you didn’t have, I didn’t have, I can’t remember us having in those days, great needs, you know, that required money to buy a lot of things, we didn’t do that. So, no, we managed it. Yes, I suppose we must...I must have got more from my parents than I can immediately remember.

End of F5869 Side A Edward Hollamby C467/22/02 F5869B Page 37

F5869 Side B

Interviewing Ted Hollamby on the 12th of September 1997 at his home, The Red House, Upton, Bexleyheath. This is tape Two B, and Jill Lever is the interviewer.

Ted, where do you want to begin this time?

Well, I remember we...I was just about finishing the job with Robert Sharp last time. That job came to an abrupt end, just as it did for many offices, their work just ceased. And I went back to Hammersmith School of Building and Arts and Crafts, and went back into full-time studying, for a fairly short period, over the winter. And then, in the spring, or late spring of 1940 Alwyn Waters, through him I went up to Liverpool where the Kirby Royal Ordnance factory was being built, to work on site in the drawing office there, making all the detailed, or many of the detailed drawings, with others of course, who were...for the building of the factory all around us.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

Right. Well at Kirby, I suppose that lasted about six months, because I seem to remember I came back to London September/October, some, that sort of time. Whilst I was up there, I did all sorts of interesting things, apart from the rather dull I suppose, doing details for the actual structural building of the Ordnance factory. But one of the interesting jobs was, because, they seized on it, because I could sketch and draw and so on nicely, they asked me to do a whole series of sketches which were for the Home Guard. The Home guard was to... Please Doris.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

Yes. So, I made sketches showing objects and their measured distance so that in fact it was possible for the Home Guard to properly aim the right distances for the enemy approaching the Royal Ordnance factory. I also joined the Home Guard, though not on the factory site; I used to go into Liverpool for that where it was at the docks, and there I used to stand as a fierce sentry, and, I had learnt how to fire a Lea Enfield rifle. We hadn’t got any ammunition, but that didn’t seem to matter. And by I suppose a Edward Hollamby C467/22/02 F5869B Page 38 month or so after all this, as I said earlier I was returning, returned to London, that job came to an end. I should say also that it was, for me as a young man then, going up, away from London, away from home, away from school, all of the things that had been familiar to me, going up to Liverpool was quite an adventure. I mean this would be silly I think to say that to young people these days, but it was. And I...the country round there was so beautiful, I used to go for long long Sunday walks, all the way round the city and through it. And I made friends there as well, which lasted for many many years after the war as well. So, I came back from Liverpool. What to do? I went back to college, but fairly soon afterwards I got a temporary job at Hammersmith Borough Council, where believe it or not they were still doing the detailed drawings for a housing scheme that Mr Fowler, the architect to the Council had designed. So I was working on those. In fact, a curious number of people, there was Polly Ling, Arthur Ling’s wife, was working there with me, and a number of other well-known people were all, all got jobs like that, temporary in-filling. And that went on until, I was called up then in August 1941.

You never thought of volunteering?

I did. My brother did, and...a bit later of course, he was younger than me. I did, but my father, perhaps with his experience of the terror and horror, terrible horrors of World War I said, ‘Don’t volunteer my boy. You’re going to have to go.’ And I followed his advice, and waited till my turn came up. I think also it was affected, well in fact I know it was affected by that whole period which was the Phoney War when nothing seemed to be happening anyway. So I, as I said, waited for my turn.

I was just wondering whether, a) you might have been slightly a pacifist, and b) whether being a Communist worried...it would have been a factor in not volunteering.

Well I wasn’t a pacifist. And... No, the... I can see what you’re asking me, and I’m trying to think back. I don’t think, although it’s true that the Communist Party official line then was, because of the way in which the Soviet Union and Germany had carved up, presumably the Soviet Union thought that was going to be their defence, by carving up Poland, I didn’t...carving up Poland didn’t worry me very much, because Poland in history had always been carved up, it expanded and retracted, and it was Edward Hollamby C467/22/02 F5869B Page 39 also I thought such an awful place anyway – I don’t mean a place, I mean political regime, I wasn’t really concerned with that. I don’t think I felt... On the other hand... So, I can’t say I felt there was an immediate patriotic problem. But I think Dunkirk certainly made me aware that it wasn’t just a phoney war, and as I said you see, I joined the Home Guard. My instincts were, not sort of reactionary patriotic, but they were that Nazi Germany was the enemy, and it was against everything I believed in. The politics of this world often puzzle one, and the politics of that period must have puzzled a tremendous number of people. The Communist Party was sort of half in and half out so to speak, against fascism, against Nazism. After all, they had been so strongly against the line of the British Government over Spain, with the Civil War, which of course only ended just at the beginning of the Second World War, which was another factor as well. I didn’t mention it before, but amongst the tutors you see at Hammersmith, there were these youngish architects who were left-wing, and at that time we all felt so strongly about Spain. So, the anti-fascist element was really stronger than any other one. Anyway, I had not politically strongly identified myself with the position of Britain, but it did come home, the idea that Britain was alone. And there was something about that that was both inspiring as well as horror... And of course, Winston Churchill so brilliantly later managed to echo what was I think a very considerable public mood. So that, as best I can, thinking back, is the very mixed sort of feelings and motives that I must have felt at that time. So, your question about, why didn’t I volunteer, wasn’t anything to do with politics at all; it was with my dear old dad’s experience of the horrors of war and, don’t rush into it my boy, and how right he was. Eventually, when I was called up for the Royal Marines, I went off like every other young man. In fact, in a way, to answer your question even better, at that time the...of course, by then the issues had become clearer. There was the...Germany had invaded the Soviet Union, and that in itself I suppose politically clarified so many of the issues that I must have felt, and indeed throughout the political structure. But it was really... I’ve lost myself.

Well, I think you’ve explained why you didn’t volunteer. When you were called up, did you have any particular branch of the Army or the Navy or the Air Force that you were particularly interested in, or did you let them decide?

No, I let them decide, yes. Yes, no that’s absolutely so, I let them decide. Edward Hollamby C467/22/02 F5869B Page 40

What did you do, did you turn up at Hammersmith, was there a recruiting place, or...what was the system then?

Oh they wrote to you, I just had a little note to say I was to report to Eastney Barracks, which I did, and there one very quickly, extraordinarily quickly... Doris always says to this day, after all the mothering and soft life that she said I’d had as a, with my mother and with her, that, it must have been a terrible shock to go into Eastney Barracks and be submitted to all the harshness of instilling discipline into a whole group of oddities who were brought together. I should have mentioned of course earlier that in the intervening time I’d married. I married in May 1941. And that, thinking back now you see, back your further...of course that was another factor that, I wasn’t going to be rushing into the services when I was also rushing into marriage. However, Eastney, I wasn’t there very long, I don’t know, perhaps two or three months I suppose, I don’t think it was as long as that in fact, but it was square-bashing and spit-and-polish, cleaning one’s...blanco, that was the thing, I hated blanco, and drill. There was also educational sessions, and I always did very well at that. I always remember with a great deal of glee how when the colour-sergeant used to...they were very interesting questions, many that he asked, he would even ask about how many republics there were in the Soviet Union for example, questions like that. And I could give him an answer, you know. And so I got a bit of a reputation for being rather smart. I also got a bit of a reputation I’m afraid, because I’m terrible in the mornings, and I was always late, which didn’t please the colour-sergeant of course very much at all. However, we used to do our marching and drilling, and we’d march out... Oh they did... There was still a lot of, well with the...the idea of the esprit de corps is very very significant in the Marines, and that was the thing I think that they tried most of all to strongly instil, you had this loyalty to the corps. And we used to march out with the band, mace-bearer, through the, out of the barracks, the mace- bearer used to throw the mace over the arch and catch it on the other side, there were all the old ladies crying because they thought we were going off to war. And out we used to march, round the adjoining streets, and then the band departed and the mace- bearer departed, and we dragged our way back, no band, no mace-bearer, no old ladies or anything. And we used to do this several times. Then, I got sent to Hayling Island to join the M.N.B.D.O., which was the Mobile Naval Base Defence Edward Hollamby C467/22/02 F5869B Page 41

Organisation, and that was being prepared to be sent out to the Far East, to protect the naval base at Trincomalee in Ceylon. I didn’t know that then of course. But at Hayling Island there was again a short period, I remember it was beautiful weather, a short period of rather intensive field training, jumping over barbed wire and allowing people to climb over you and all that sort of thing, learning how to use weapons properly. And then we were sent to Bentworth Hall at Alton in Hants, Hampshire, and that was to be built...both arriving there, which was over that winter which was a terribly harsh winter, under canvas, and building a camp which was, a hutted camp, which was the assembly of the number of the M.N.B.D.O. elements which were eventually to go somewhere. And that was what I was doing. So I got another, I had another job, my skills as a draughtsman, and I was doing the various, relatively easy sort of drawings that were needed for the layout of the camp and the building of these standard huts and so on. But for that, Bentworth Hall, I needed a drawing office, and couldn’t do that under canvas you see, so, Bentworth Hall had a most lovely room looking out, I remember, over its gardens, so I had this as my drawing office. And I had got a sort of serviceman’s new-found cunning, I began to realise that I could manipulate a bit, so, I got myself another room there, furnished, all very cosy and comfortable, open fire, when all the rest were under canvas and freezing. And I used to be visited by the chaplain and the company commander and other officers, and long chats in the evening in front of the open fire. But the sergeant-major eventually found out and banished me back to the corrugated iron huts that we’d been building for, we were building for ourselves, and that’s where I landed up, there. Until, in the spring of ’82[sic], very early spring, we were all lined up and we were then told that we were going overseas. I remember trying to phone Doris. I jumped over the wall, I can remember it so clearly, that surrounded part of this site, because I knew the telephone box in the village was at the end of the little lane, or a little track on the other side of the wall, and ran, ran down there, behind the wall, so that I couldn’t be seen, because nobody should have got out you see, to ring her up. And of course, the telephone had been disconnected. So, I remember the feeling of, oh my God! oh dear, how sad, I’ll never be able to speak to her again, perhaps. And then, we moved off, oh, interminable rail journey, because everything had to be moved at night when all the various important things were being, manufactures[??] and that were being moved by day, up to Liverpool, where we were to be assembled to go off. And we were dropped off and had to go into a most dreadful old warehouse, God knows what it had Edward Hollamby C467/22/02 F5869B Page 42 been used for, but it was absolutely filthy and stinking, and we...there was a near riot – well there wasn’t a near riot, but there was a strong protest that we were having to be housed in this place, we couldn’t...it was so disgusting. We were provided with all our tropical kit then, so we knew we were going to where it was hot, and those of us who knew about what was happening in the war knew, well that was going to be the Far East. So, we protested, and we were then able to go on board our transit ship, which was a very modern liner, the Cape Town Castle, being fitted out as we went on board, so we were, we were very lucky to be able to get on board as quickly as that and out of that awful warehouse. But it...then of course it became quite heavily crowded with Army, Air Force, as well as us Marines. But it was, in a way it was, considering there were so many people on board, and all these rooms all being, all on bunk beds and that, it wasn’t all that uncomfortable. And when we set off out from Liverpool, out into the Irish Sea, I suddenly realised how...this enormous convoy. Hadn’t realised then before what we were going to be part of, it was this enormous convoy, which set off down through the south Atlantic, and then down to Africa. There were some exciting rumours, because it was a time after the collapse of France and the Vichy regime, the French fleet had set out and was going to attack the convoy. There was always rumours like that in the service of course. And we sailed down as far as Freetown in South Africa – not in South Africa, in West Africa. Very wide river, and we anchored in the centre of the river there. For me, as well as for, all my comrades I suppose, it was fantastic, it was so beautiful, so rich, almost like emerald greens I remember. And all these canoes all coming out, filled with all these colourful people, all bringing things out to sell to us, and, it was something....I suppose I had read of Africa and that, but I’d never really come up against anything as colourful as that. It was absolutely marvellous. And I suppose after taking on water and all sorts of other essentials there, we, the convoy set off again round the Cape and up to Durban, where we had two or three weeks ashore. And that was again very comfortable. It was nice weather there of course, though we were in a camp. But we were able to explore Durban, we had grand marches through Durban, with all the population cheering there, young heroes and all the rest of it. And I couldn’t help thinking how awful it was in many ways, especially when we were invited, some of us, a few of us, up to a place called Kloof, and we went through the Valley of a Thousand Hills to get to it. A beautiful garden, and there was a garden party we’d been invited to go to. And you know, to think, up in North Africa and the Edward Hollamby C467/22/02 F5869B Page 43

Mediterranean there were humiliations, defeats, a terrible war going on, and here we were, having a life of luxury, in fact it was like a world cruise. And that was somehow in some ways very disconcerting. But I also remember the other thing about it is that, because of my beliefs, and I was horrified to see, we went into a milk bar, it was actually an Indian milk bar run by Indians, and they all got up from their seats to offer them to us, because we were white. And we said to them, ‘Good Lord! no.’ And that surprised them, as much as it had surprised us to think that people were being made inferior by their colour in that way. And I always remember on the steps of the city hall, clearly, a little boy, black boy, pestering, trying to sell something or other I expect, and a big white man kicked him. And I was so angry with this man, I said, ‘Don’t you let...I never want to see anything like that again. What do you think we’re doing here?’ But these memories come back like this. It’s probably not precisely accurate, the way I described it, but it was a time in my life in which I think that I was absorbing so many new scenes, new aspects of life, that I was growing up very very quickly. So we set off again, past Madagascar and up into the Indian Ocean, eventually to Bombay, and we had a fairly short while in Bombay. But I was fascinated by the architecture of Bombay, so much was familiar. The great railway station, buildings by Gilbert Scott and other Victorian architects, and...but with, at the same time, a quite different sort of street atmosphere of all these darker faces and colourful saris. It was again a tremendous impression, so colourful, so brilliant. And then we set sail again, but this time no longer on the luxurious Cape Town Castle, the world voyage had come to an end, and the most terrible stinking, horrible former cattle ship, a tiny boat, just to take, just the Marines out to Ceylon. We were accompanied with a little tiny sloop. The Indian ocean seemed to be at its fiercest, most of the time you couldn’t see the sloop behind the waves and that. It was so awful that nobody could go below decks. Fortunately the weather seemed wonderful, we all laid out on the deck, and in the night, torrential rain came down to wake us up. That was the only time, I was quite a good seaman, it was the only time I’ve ever been seasick, that was a terrible journey, that. We were so relieved to arrive in Colombo. And Colombo, a very civilised city, we were there for some weeks or months before moving up to Trincomalee and the naval base. And there, so we had some time for looking round and seeing the place, as well as the usual drill duties and the various seemingly unnecessary things that when there is nothing to do in the service, there is always that to do; designed I suppose to keep your mind occupied, though most of it Edward Hollamby C467/22/02 F5869B Page 44 you could do without using your mind at all. And then we went... Oh, and of course some of it also was also in further training. And then we went up to Trincomalee, where we were to be housed in the grounds of Admiralty House. Trincomalee was a beautiful place, a great harbour, surrounded by wooded, slightly hilly, but not dreadfully hilly, enclosing arms, and an island that I remember well. But there we had to build a hutted camp for our future there in the grounds. But the main thing there was to start doing the structural works for the support of the fleet. But before then there were rumours that...a Japanese fleet approaching to invade. As we had gone out to Ceylon, the great ships, two great capital ships, the Renown and the Repulse, had been sent out, how anybody could have done this, without escort, towards Malaya, and they were sunk by the Japanese. And this was an absolutely terrible shock to the Navy and to ourselves, I remember it so vividly. And Trincomalee was then bombed. So it seemed as if there was to be an invading. And so, that early part of the time in Trincomalee was spent in preparing to defend it and exercises against a possible invasion. But that didn’t come about, and in fact the Japanese took another route into India.

End of F5869 Side B Edward Hollamby C467/22/03 F5870A Page 45

F5870 Side A

Tape Three A.

So you’re in Ceylon, and the Japanese decided to invade via Burma and India.

That invasion was not on apparently, and we settled down to the longish process of building up a naval base that was able to sustain the Far East fleet, so that in time it could become a major taskforce. Looking back, I’d...it’s extraordinary really, I suppose, that my life had so changed, when I look back even to that part of the war when I...Doris and I married, and we went to live in St. Peter’s Square in Hammersmith, was a very beautiful square, very fine houses round an open square, surrounded I seem to remember always by lots of lilac which Doris was always gathering. Life must have been such a tremendous change for me, in a relatively short period of time. I think I said earlier I was growing up like anything. I don’t know what life was like really for Doris, I suspect that she was very active and involved in all sorts of activities, both political, social, and her work, and she worked for, she was called up, as many of the women were, and she worked for the, at Napier’s, for the great engineer, aero-engine factory. I think she was a progress chaser or something like that. I think she was rather well-equipped for that. So I don’t know whether she...I don’t think, certainly don’t think Doris was lonely during the war, she wasn’t that sort of person, she wouldn’t be. Although, neither was I lonely during the war, and yet you had feelings, periods when you did feel lonely; long distance, when were you ever going to see each other again, that sort of thing. But then, as I said we were settling down to doing this, not routine work, I mean, for me it was enormously interesting, I was learning; I learnt how to become a diver, have a, to go and inspect underwater structures, and to build jetties and wharves, and I had to design and build an anti-submarine and control mine base, and all those sort of structures. One of the most interesting jobs actually I had was to design our officers’ mess, and believe it or not, I mean it’s so extraordinary, I was able to design a building with local stone, pan...I don’t know whether it was pantile, but it was something like a pantile roof, but they were local red tiles which are made locally, on the roof, with a big retaining wall and a terrace and all that. They had a splendid mess there. And quite recently a friend of mine who I’ve known since, well, since the war, but who used to live in Edward Hollamby C467/22/03 F5870A Page 46

Ceylon, was a civil engineer, and then eventually went back for holidays there, and he went to Trincomalee and took a photograph, and it’s now being used by the Sri Lankan Navy as an officer’s mess, so I, one of my buildings is still there, being presumably well used. But, so there were nice jobs to do, as well as learning so fast. I mean, I wasn’t a qualified architect then, I was learning, I’d been learning at school, I was half-way through I suppose, but my God! I learnt so fast, actually doing and being responsible. And it’s always influenced my view of architectural education ever since, I’ve believed it’s absolutely essential that actual practice is a part of the learning process, a vital part, and if it becomes too theoretical, it just becomes divorced from everyday reality. And also it’s not good for design, architectural design itself. Anyway, one of the lessons that I learnt, and Doris always, when anything happens, if I criticise, she says, ‘I just asked you to check and check again. That’s what you always told me.’ I learnt that. It was building this control mine base. It was in a small hillside, one side of the hill was the generating station, the power; the other side was the equipment for the control mine station in a building, and the cables connecting them had to run through the hillside. The depot ship to the fleet, the Maidstone, was to produce the cables, which they did, to the precise dimension on my plans, between one building and the other. What I hadn’t realised of course was that they would do that, and there would be no slack in it whatsoever. We had a great machine there, a digger, which was excavating, so that these buildings would cut into the hillside, because they were then to be covered and camouflaged. And then realised, when it had gone away, it had cut into the hillside, there was this wall of gravelly earth, that the cable wasn’t long enough to get into the buildings to be connected, more had got to be cut out. But this poor machine, which only travelled at about four miles an hour I thought a day, but it wasn’t slow as that, but it was jolly slow, was by that time way over the other side of the bay, miles and miles away, it would take days to get back. So, I had to get a...there was a company of Indian labourers who were in Trincomalee then working for the various services, so I had to get them to physically cut down and enlarge the space, reduce the space between the two buildings, so that in fact the cable would reach. And I never forgot that lesson, that if I had checked it carefully beforehand, it wouldn’t have happened. So, it’s part of what I was saying earlier, I was learning so fast. And that went on. But what was also possible was, because life became more routine, it was possible then to study the history of Ceylon, and its architecture, and I used to go on leave, and that in itself was Edward Hollamby C467/22/03 F5870A Page 47 fascinating, because Ceylon is a most beautiful island, I think probably the most beautiful island...I mean it’s a big, huge island of course, in that sense, but the largest...very beautiful landscape, jungle in the north where we were, and then, mostly coconut palms on the land just on the perimeter of the island, on the seaward side, going down to the centre of the island where it was like a huge rise, almost like a mountain but a cone almost, not an absolute regular cone of course, of levels which went up and up and up, and through those, all...first of all would be rubber plantations, then tea plantations. No, I’ve got it the wrong way round. First of all there would be rubber plantations, then rice, and then tea plantations, and then it became more, almost European, cool, and that was where the capital of Ceylon, the historic capital of Kandy. And what’s amazing is the town planning and architecture of, historically of it, long before it was occupied by Britain, because it had a long history of Portuguese and Dutch semi-colonisation, but an enormous amount of influence, before we drove them out and Britain occupied it as a colony. But there had been amongst the Singhalese kings this highly civilised State, which I became aware of, and so, Anuradhapura and the great Dagger Bar, then in Kandy itself, the great lake, and surrounded by magnificent buildings, temples, the Temple of the Golden Tooth I think it was called, of the Buddha, great figures of the Buddha in other places. It was absolutely incredible. I had time to be able to see all these things, and to study them, and that I think I was very lucky in. But I was also able to do something else that, because of my interest going round, in Colombo first and then in Kandy, and particularly in Kandy, up on the hillside, wooded hillside surrounding the lake on one side, was a beautiful modern house, and I photographed it. And I photographed these other houses as well. But I wondered, who did that? And many...well, no, not many years, it wasn’t as long as that, but after I had come back to England, I met Colin Penn, and I showed him these photographs and said, ‘I saw this marvellous architecture out there.’ He said, ‘That might be Andrew Boyd, I’ll introduce you to him.’ And he introduced me to Andrew Boyd, and indeed he had designed these houses that were there, and he had never seen the house in Kandy, because he had to leave with his Singhalese wife to come to England due to the war. We became friends, and until his untimely death very close friends, all because I’d been sent out to Ceylon in the war and was able to see what he had done, and then through...how does it happen, these things? Had found him through his work. I rather treasured that, and some years later I wrote the obituary to him in Keystone. He was older than Edward Hollamby C467/22/03 F5870A Page 48

I was. He was the son of a High Court judge in India, who had become a planter in Ceylon, and then had decided he was going to give that up, and he came to England to the A.A. school, trained as an architect, went back to Ceylon, and then designed these lovely houses. And then, after we met, when I came back after the war, and I’ve skipped something now in between I’ll have to return to, but I went back to Hammersmith, because my job I found was being protected, and so I had a job in the architects’ office there again, and lo and behold there was Andrew Boyd too, he had got a job, and he’d been working there during the war. So, we not only met up through his work in that, and through friendship, but also we worked together. And that then became a very permanent relationship which went on into the L.C.C., into the Miners’ Welfare where we both went together, and, to the L.C.C., and in my earliest years there he was my group leader, and we designed one of the first great comprehensive schools there together. So, it was rather wonderful that out of all this voyaging and being sent out to the other part of the world, and leaving a lot of my life behind me, and yet finding a new one in this way, new friends. I thought, well, I look back on it now and think, you know, it’s almost as though it could have been written as a scenario to happen, and yet that’s just how life happens to be. Well going back to Ceylon then, eventually, the whole course of the war was changing, we had invaded Europe, the Japanese were in retreat, and we were then sent on a whole lot of exercises in country which was very swampy and rivery, and we were all saying, where on earth are we going, what are they doing this for? Must be sending us to Holland or somewhere like that. And eventually we were enshipped, well back to Colombo and then enshipped for...to our great joy, back to England. We sailed off, and then after, I suppose probably... Of course we could go back through the Mediterranean then, by then the Mediterranean was safe and clear, so I had the experience of going through, seeing the porpoises jump out of the water, and the flying fish in the Red Sea, then up into the Suez Canal, to, was it Alexandria? I’m not sure whether it’s Alexandria, I don’t think it was Alex, it was the head of the Suez. Port Said. We were there for, I should think two or three days, and that was Christmas. And would you believe it, I mean, there we were in Egypt, and I can remember, I was wearing my great-coat, it was so cold. Christmas I remember is cold in Egypt. And then, from there, we were...we had a very...this boat that we went back on was a very fast motor ship, the Christiaan Huygens, and... But there we joined a huge convoy, which was being assembled, coming back from all of the Middle East Edward Hollamby C467/22/03 F5870A Page 49 areas, a lot of the servicemen coming back to the U.K. Proceeded through the Mediterranean, and the Mediterranean, that lovely, nice place to go for holidays, I remember that for the greatest storm I have ever known. It was, the waves were so enormous that this big ship would, the whole stern would come out of the water and then the waves would be way above the ship itself. And I...all servicemen were ordered to remain below, not on deck, but I was in charge of ship’s police, and so I could patrol the decks. So I had this wonderful exhilarating experience of being aboard this ship, almost without anybody with me at all, as though they weren’t with me, and it going up and down, the waves going up, the sheer exhilaration and excitement of it was absolutely wonderful. I always remember it. And then, we proceeded past, to Gibraltar, and up through St. George’s Channel, and then I remembered again the...I remember again how beautiful it seemed. It was partly emotional I suppose, but because of my job of being in charge of the ship’s police, I could go up onto the bridge, and I remember as we went up past, oh, the island off north Wales, the little island...

Anglesey?

Anglesey. Anglesey, I looked...we passed there, and it was bathed in sunlight, and it was so green, and the sheep were all in the fields. And, oh, it was quite overwhelming. And back to Liverpool. Liverpool then, eventual movement down to, now where it was? In Wiltshire. I think it’s Wiltshire.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

You were at Corsham.

Corsham, Corsham Court.

Mm, yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes, so, is it on again? Ah. So we were sent down to a quite extraordinary place, the Corsham Admiralty...the Admiralty have always had, since the war certainly, a large concentration of works of various kinds at Corsham. They Edward Hollamby C467/22/03 F5870A Page 50 had an underground factory, and we had a camp there in this area, close to Corsham Court. And that was another memory that, we all...those comrades who I came back with and who I’m still friends with and we meet, in fact, we Marines meet once every year as a reunion, they all say the same thing. We arrived late at night, early morning got up, and there were all these girls coming to work in the ordnance factory. And we looked at them, and we were staggered; we’d become so used to Asian women, small, and petite, and these women looked so powerful and strong, and we all gazed at them with amazement, is this the English? So, that was our homecoming. A period there, and then sent to various places. I came up to London at one stage, and that was very good, because I, although it was quite a journey, I used to get up at an incredible early hour in the morning, I was able to actually live at home and get back to the camp which, or the, where, the base where the Marines had been established, and we were assisting on the repair of bomb damage, which had been caused by the V-2s and things like that. And, I had about, several months doing that, and then was sent down to the Marines base down in Devonshire, and, I think I had one or two various different places, sent to, and was then eventually, had my demob. And that terrible demob suit, which I shall never forget.

What was it like?

Well it was grey, but not just a grey suit, it was a grey V, sort of tweedy thing, but it was such a horrible colour, and it was such a horrible shape, and, well I suppose I wore it for a few months, but only for a very very short time. So we were... One thing I should have mentioned, I think, of the sort of jobs that I had got. When I was in Ceylon, I’m jumping back now, because I’d forgotten to mention it, and I think it’s... The Bishop of Colombo became very concerned about the development of prostitution during the war with all the vast number of troops there, and it was a very real thing, and he launched a campaign to hopefully educate the troops and people about the evils of prostitution, and he and the services decided, there ought to be an anti-venereal disease campaign in, amongst the servicemen. So I was asked to do a poster for this campaign. And so, I did...I had a model, a young Tamil girl, I did...I had to think about this. It had to be slight, part imagery and part real. So there was his figure of this Tamil Indian girl in the background, a typical Page Three Daily Mirror foreground to it, and some message or other, with whacking great ‘VD’ Edward Hollamby C467/22/03 F5870A Page 51 somewhere involved in it. But I always remember that girl, she had her mother or some more elderly person with her, and she sat, but she was so good, she was so still, and so dignified. I’ve always remembered it so clearly. But, I don’t know what happened to the poster, it went off, our company commander took it off to the Bishop of Colombo or something, I don’t know what happened to it after that. But, that was another of these extraordinary jobs that, in that period in my life just sort of came my way. Back to England.

Well actually, when you were in Ceylon, didn’t you help set up some sort of architects’ group or something?

Oh yes, that’s right, of course. Yes.

I forget what it’s called.

It...I think it was Association of Service Architects of Ceylon, A.S.A.C. Yes, what happened was that, C.E.A.C. News, which was published by the very well-known journalist then, Frank Owen, he used to edit it, not publish it, edit it, we used to get C.E.A.C. News, and in it I learnt that an organisation had been formed in India by Percy Johnson-Marshall, who I didn’t know then, of service architects in India. And I corresponded with him, and as a result of that decided to set up a similar organisation for service architects in Ceylon. And so, set up this association, A.S.A.C., Association of Service Architects of Ceylon. And they were members...it was surprising how many architects there were in all the different sort of, the Army, the Navy, Air force, and so on, and we used to hold...we were even able to hold some meetings, but mostly it was by having a journal and correspondence. And we did that. And of course, at the same time also I was very much involved in what we were doing in the way of educational work amongst the service in the Marines. We had a, there was a civil engineer who was a sub-lieutenant in the Marines and he was made Education Officer for the company and I was his assistant. And we used to have debates, discussions, on all sorts of subjects, and we had a war newspaper which I edited. We had, we even had poetry readings, and there were all these Marines would turn up for poetry readings. It was an incredible time. When I look at the world today, I can’t help thinking, my God! it could have been so different. And that was Edward Hollamby C467/22/03 F5870A Page 52 highly successful. And it was, not in a popular sense, but very well attended lectures and discussions, and I think that... It was largely all about post-war reconstruction, the social developments that were taking place of course in the thinking about the post-war in amongst politicians at home and so on, all that we were able to bring out and discuss, and, I think that there was a level of understanding, and this probably happened in so many other military organisations as well, that was so much more than...well it must have had some bearing on that Election that eventually took place.

After the war, yes.

So, there was another part of life that I entered into, and I think was rather successful in. Coming back to England I suppose now, where were we? We were, I’d been.....

End of F5870 Side A Edward Hollamby C467/22/03 F5870B Page 53

F5870 Side B

Tape Three B.

OK, the war’s over now, you’re back in civvy street.

Yes. Well, when I, after a period of demob leave, and I thought about, what am I going to do and where am I going to go, and I found out very happily, looking back actually I must have known this beforehand, I didn’t find it out, that my job, the job I’d got at Hammersmith, which was for a short period, a temporary period during the war, that that had somehow got transferred on to the permanent staff and I was, I had a job. So, I went back to Hammersmith, and I’ve already referred to that when I spoke about meeting Andrew Boyd, who was actually working there and had been working there during the war. And other well-known people who, like Polly Ling and others, who I met up with again. I should mention you see that some of them lived in St. Peter’s Square, it was really, as that part of Hammersmith had always been, a sort of artists’ colony, not entirely that but where people like that tended to live, close by the river. Anyway, went to, back to Hammersmith, and there were Mr Fowler again. He was a Plymouth Brethren, and yet he was...I say yet, which I’ve always thought of as being rather a sort of strict sect, but he was such a nice, kindly man, but absolutely quite rigidly determined about what architecture was about, which was what it had always been with him, it hadn’t changed during the war or anything at all. And it was in a way the culmination and completion of housing schemes that he had started earlier, before and during the war. The interesting thing about it is, although they were...well they were very much like the L.C.C. housing of the early inter-war period, but rather better, better detailed. I would think rather more expensive, always very good materials. And what did impress me with them always, although they were sort of...they weren’t Georgianised, because they weren’t Georgian, but the bay windows he always had to the living-rooms, big bay windows with sliding sashes, which were...made them very nice rooms. So, there we were doing that, but, I didn’t want to do that for very long. And then I heard that the Miners’ Welfare Commission were seeking young architects and assistants for the very considerable expansion and starting up again of the programme for building pit-head baths and canteens and so on for the miners, which were started by the Miners’ Welfare Commission before the Edward Hollamby C467/22/03 F5870B Page 54 war. And so, I applied for a job there, and there the interview, met Kenneth Campbell, who was...I’m not sure, he wasn’t deputy, a man named Saise, John Saise, a very nice man, was deputy. But he was, must have been chief assistant or some such designation. I met him, and had an interview, and was offered a job. So, I gladly accepted, and my by then friend, Andrew Boyd, had also got a job there as well. I there met up with, and I’ve met very seldom since, my ex-students of before the war, but a young man then named Thorn[ph], he had got a job with the Miners’ Welfare, and we met up again there. But after that I never saw him again. But the Miners’ Welfare Commission was absolutely wonderful, it seemed to me. Its purpose was just what I wanted. Here we were, working for the miners, providing pit-head baths, providing canteens, where their wives, who had to receive them, coming home blackened and bathe them, were relieved of having that in the home. And also where in fact they could go to the canteens as well as their menfolk as well, and opening up their lives, and it seemed that this was a wonderful purpose. With the establishment of the Coal Board, it also expanded, and in fact I was given the job of designing a colliery extension at Lofthouse I think it was, if I remember rightly, in Yorkshire, so I designed a colliery, with all that went with the actual industrial development of the industry. That was marvellous in itself, but the office was so wonderful, it was made up of a number of groups, each one was a region of the coal industry, and every month there was an exhibition of the work of, not the professional work in the office, but some who were brilliant artists, some who were very good sculptors, photographers, and that, there would be an art exhibition of the work in the office every month. We also used to have debates and discussions as well. It seemed, this was the new world really taking place. Then bureaucracy stepped in. The National Coal Board, probably for the most sensible reasons from their point of view, thought, this strange outfit in Portland Place, Great Portland Street, not Portland Place, next to Portland Place, was too much on its own, and that each one of the groups which did work for a region should actually be located with the region. Well in many ways that made sense, but in other ways it didn’t. The whole ethos of the Miners’ Welfare Commission was destroyed, and one never really heard from then onward anything more about the work that was done in that period, and it must have been a considerable amount of work, but it lost the drive and the life and the excitement of it. And so, we were deciding to look elsewhere, many of us. Kenneth Campbell had gone to the L.C.C., and Andrew Boyd and I decided that that’s what we wanted to do Edward Hollamby C467/22/03 F5870B Page 55 as well, so we had an interview with Leslie Martin and we got a job in the L.C.C., in the Schools Division, at least I...yes, we were both in the Schools Division, and first of all working on a primary school at White City actually, in Hammersmith, again. And then Kenneth Campbell became, I think it was deputy schools, or principal schools architect, and he brought in the group system again into the Schools Division. And a number of what were...in order to sort of change the system from the old guard, one had to somehow leap over the staffing structure and the way of working that was the old L.C.C. that Robert Matthew and Leslie Martin were trying to change, and then... And so, Kenneth brought in what he called autonomous groups, and these were not as highly ranking or highly paid as the section leaders, which were the previous organisation, sounding more military, but which were independent, they had a smaller programme of work, perhaps... It was when the comprehensive schools of course were also being thought of. And Andrew was made one of the group leaders, and I went to work with him. And the King’s Park Comprehensive School we designed. I say...Andrew took the lead in that, together. And that was part of the, I suppose... That was good; it wasn’t as marvellous as the Miners’ Welfare Commission had been, but the L.C.C. became better and better and better, and in time, not a great deal of time, became a marvellous place to work with, I think because again of the enthusiasm of so many young people coming into it, the expansion of its work. The housing was transferred from the Director of Housing to the Architects Department under Robert Matthew, and so a whole housing division was created. Well in time I became group leader and did my own thing with, largely the...two schools at Hammersmith, which changed their name but that they were a curious hybrid. It was a comprehensive, and yet they were a boys and a girls school separately, and I felt somehow the idea of having this duality of a boys’ school and a girls’ school on the same site, next to each other, with a barrier in between, did really seem to be harking back to an earlier period in the 20th century if not the 19th. And I remember proposing to the Education Department that in fact some of the accommodation which they each had, they were both going to have a great assembly hall, so why shouldn’t one have an assembly hall which was designed for music, and another one which was designed for drama, so then they could share each other’s, the girls could go to the drama school, theatre, and the boys could go to the music hall, although they would be separate schools. And we designed the two schools so that they actually surrounded a, I think we called it a piazza. No, a courtyard, that’s right, Edward Hollamby C467/22/03 F5870B Page 56 round a courtyard, with the two major halls opening, and entrances opening onto it. So we broke down that division, and... Now this was at a time when materials were so heavily rationed that it was very difficult to get any steel; even materials like cement were in short supply. But, extraordinary, I was able to get mahogany, great chunks of mahogany up in Hackney, off the wharves there, and had them cut up. British Columbian pine, teak, so the roofs were made of... I should mention, I met Felix Samuely then, and he was the engineer for the schools, and he was a wonderful partner. He was much older than I was, and yet there was never any sense, except within me, of he being the superior. He entered into my enthusiasms, and with enormous enthusiasm himself, produced solutions to what had otherwise seemed impossible problems. Very inventive ones. And that was a very happy collaboration. So, we had these wonderful materials, mahogany, laminated beams, and the minimum of steel then for roofs.

Why were those expensive materials available, when others weren’t?

Well, the Empire hadn’t entirely disintegrated. And these were the, I suppose the timber importing firms, which had pre-war links with Burma and with the other countries in the East, and in the Americas, were able to resume. And there were those materials there then, so they were able to get them in. Of course later they increased enormously in price, that was the factor, they must have come in very cheaply, or relatively. Well they must have been, we were poor, weren’t we, my goodness. But I was also...do you...?

The other thing I wanted to ask is, who decides whether a comprehensive school is truly comprehensive, co-educational, and who decides whether it’s single-sex? I mean where would that decision...?

That was in the Education Department.

At the G.L.C., at the L.C.C.?

At the L.C.C., yes. Yes. The L.C.C. Education Department was a very powerful one in those days certainly, I think it always was, but was a very powerful one then in the Edward Hollamby C467/22/03 F5870B Page 57 post-war, because there was so much new thinking going on in education. But it was...

But the brief would have come from them?

The brief came from them. But the briefs were very, not highly developed ones. They would be schedules of accommodation, but interpretation of them was a matter which, in which the architect was able to have a tremendous influence, so in fact those early comprehensives, they were in many ways, the form in which they developed and appeared was very much the architect sensing the nature of the problem, responding in a way which was his imagination feeding something in. And the earliest ones were for very tall buildings, but at Hammersmith, I felt that in fact that was the wrong way to go about it. They were using steel and materials which were in such short supply, so it was very expensive. I thought we could produce much more economical buildings if we restricted the height, but it wasn’t the only thing, that was in the area of the White City estate there where in fact nearby were cottage estates, some of them very nice ones of the 1930s, and it seemed to me wrong that one should attempt to, on that site, build high buildings; they needed to be more closely integrated with their surroundings. Westway of course was one side, up a high bank, on one side of the site, which was the north side, and I suppose that became a different sort of boundary. But for these various reasons, we had come to the view that using the minimum of steel, but using it, as Samuely was able to do in such a clever way, pre-stressing and so on, we were able to produce buildings of very high quality and space standards, and which we thought should be much more economical. And indeed in the structure they were. It was calculated brickwork, no reinforcement, sliding sash, great windows of teak, as I said before the roofs of British Columbian pine, or, in some cases, and the mahogany to the great halls. And we also, and I say we, because at that time Bill Kretchmer, now he was my deputy in that group, and he had come to a school at Hammersmith with me, and he was a refugee from Europe, his family scattered by Nazism, his father killed, he with time spent, he went, got into Italy as a student at Milan Polytechnic I think it was there, and then Florence University, then he got into France when Mussolini started to crack down on the Jews, and he came over to England. One of his brothers went to South Africa, his mother and another brother or sister went to America, but he came to England, and he came to the School Edward Hollamby C467/22/03 F5870B Page 58 of building and Arts and Crafts, and we met up there. And he and I, the chemistry was right, and we became friends. We worked on things together, we did competitions together in the early post-war years. But in those early years as students we were together. Then, he became a close friend of the family during the period when I was away, and after the war, when I went to the L.C.C., after some little while, he came too. He had had an extraordinary career himself, he’d been put in prison, like most of the immigrants into Britain had been in the early part of the war, but then they found out he was a brilliant linguist and, particularly in Italian, and he was employed by the B.B.C. listening to all the broadcasts from foreign countries, and reporting on them. And he reported on the death of Mussolini from Italy. So, we became friends, and he came to work at the L.C.C., and he came and worked on that job with me, that’s why I said ‘we’. And we worked very closely together. And one of the things that we did was, we wanted to use good roofing material, but the cost seemed to be beyond us. Felt was specified, roofing felt, and I thought, well that really wasn’t up to what we were really after. Copper was what should have been used. So we studied the price of copper on the Rhodesian market, and we took a risk. We took a chance that the price, as production increased the price was going to come down, so that by the time we had completed our working drawings, it would be cheap enough for us to be able to use, and that happened, and we used copper roofs. And much to the envy of many of our colleagues, who thought, now how on earth did you do that? So, then, in the interior and decoration for the school, it seemed to me that because...and of course, I had only recently, and we’ll come to this again later, moved to Bexleyheath over Morris’s Red House, so I was very much interested in Morris’s ideas of decoration, and the way we had built the school was an Arts and Crafts school. It was mass brickwork, it was excellent materials; in every way it was calling on craftsmen. And so, I wanted to call it the William Morris School of course. But what I was able to do was to get the Morris wallpapers, which had, Sandersons owned all the blocks, and they had been forgotten about during the war, and the post-war period nobody was thinking of that sort of wallpaper design, and it was too expensive, they would have thought, block printing. So, but I found out about these in, they were I think in a corner, all the blocks, in a part of the factory at Perivale, and I wanted to have, use Morris wallpapers. Indeed, and did, and had numbers of them especially printed, did...up one staircase was two storeys of one of the very fine, the Hammersmith design, a big bold design going right the way up two storeys. Designed tiles myself, Edward Hollamby C467/22/03 F5870B Page 59 did all the things that I had read about that Morris said you ought to do, use your own hand. And so in many ways it was enormously influenced by, it was a modern building and yet it was enormously influenced by the ideas of Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. And so much so that these very beautiful interiors, or so it was thought, were...questions were asked in the House of Commons about the enormous cost of using these expensive and elaborate materials. And then... But I thought it was really quite marvellous then. Certainly the Education Department became very worried about this, and...but the Minister, and I’m trying to remember his name now...

Was it Henry Brooke?

Henry Brooke. He was not what one would have regarded as a progressive at all, but he took the opportunity to lecture the House of Commons on the importance, the educational importance of the surroundings to children, and that what had been done there at Hammersmith wasn’t expensive, it was part of the educational purpose. The Education Department suddenly thought I was marvellous after all. And I thought also it showed you once again, you can’t typecast people too much. There he was, apparent reactionary I’d thought politically, and yet with ideas which somehow could actually come to meet what my own aspirations had been. So, the school was established. And then, to my amazement, I met the school governors, which had then been appointed, and I mention my idea of the William Morris School, and they said, ‘Oh no you can’t do that because there’s already one.’ Which was quite sensible, there was. ‘But we’ve decided to call it,’ now what is it? ‘The Christopher Wren School.’ And my heart sank, I thought, what would Morris have said? The idea of, here, this Arts and Crafts, modern Arts and Crafts building, called Christopher Wren? And the other one called Burlington. So... There was a curtain being designed by Gerald Holton[ph], an appliqué curtain for the drama hall, and I talked to him about this, and I said, ‘Can’t we do something about this? Can’t we show what the contradiction is?’ And we thought, well, the curtain is actually to be seen from both sides, it was actually to draw aside so that you entered through it into the drama hall within a greater hall. And so, we thought, well what we’ll do, we’ll put Morris flanked by Burne-Jones and Rossetti on one side, turning their back on the spires of Wren on the other side. So we had our private joke. Nobody else I think has ever realised that it was a great joke. But we had that done to somehow ease our Edward Hollamby C467/22/03 F5870B Page 60 consciences, our hurt feelings, about the fact that its naming was an utter contradiction of the thing itself. And then another surprise, the headmaster was appointed, and he was Charles Boot, who was my maths master at the School of Arts and Crafts, followed by a whole series of those masters who had taught me, physics, chemistry, a number of other subjects. And I was asked to write an article, I think for the first school magazine, which was again so delightful an experience to have happen, and is so extraordinary, this way in which the past seems somehow to suddenly catch up with the present, and you never actually leave it behind. So, that was my work on schools. And then, I had another big schools job to do, but in the middle of that there were some new jobs in the Housing Department created under Whitfield Lewis and one was to establish a new group there, and I got the job. And the first job that I was given to do was a housing scheme in Bethnal Green. And that was really followed in much the same way as Christopher Wren and Burlington schools had, it was modern, yet it was...it was modern Arts and Crafts. It was the first one to have a pitched roof amongst the modern housing that the new Housing Division was producing. They all had these blocks of flats with flat roofs, and these awful great tank rooms sticking up out of them, and in those days, because it was, they all had open fires, chimneys all sticking up, standing on these flat roofs, and it was as though the architect had stopped at the cornice line. And I felt this was so absolutely wrong, and designed these with pitched roofs of slate, and the slate was grey, if I remember, Cornish... I’m not quite sure. Cornish was it, or delabole slates. I know they were very high quality, natural slate roofs. And Whitfield Lewis used to have pre-meetings with Mrs Dennington, who was the Chairman of the Housing Sub-Committee at the L.C.C., and he took me along to a pre-meeting that was going to look at this design you see. And she said, ‘Oh this is rather different, isn’t it?’ So Whit said, ‘Oh yes, well he’s a new one who’s just joined us.’ And from then onward I suppose I had a great rapport with her. She was a great ally to me in the work that I did there, and we became close, well reasonably close personal friends. And the... But during the course of building, I had got a balcony for the living-room, and also full-height windows on the joining corner, so there were views out all round, with a balconette, double. Somehow she got to learn of this. I was summoned to her office with Fisk, who was her chairman of the main committee, and there they had this...they said, ‘Why have you done this? This is very expensive, surely.’ And I trotted out my little story of, producing the best, and I said that the calculations had all shown, as indeed they had, that the total cost, which Edward Hollamby C467/22/03 F5870B Page 61 wasn’t just flat money cost, but was in fact measured by a deficiency which had to be made up on the rates, and the deficiency was lower than the average for all of the others produced by the Housing Division you see. So, I got away with that. And then afterwards I was given the major job that I had to do.

End of F5870 Side B Edward Hollamby C467/22/04 F5871A Page 62

F5871 Side A

Tape Four A. The Brandon Estate.

I was saying, I had already begun to think strongly about conservation, but most of the work in the Housing Division, the scheme that I did in Bethnal Green was in a way an exception, but it was a slum clearance site, and that was beginning to be important. But not only slum clearance, acquiring land in inner London. All of the work up to then of the Housing Division, most of it rather, had been on suburban sites, Roehampton and beautiful sites like that. So it was the beginning of moving into the urban area. And when you did that, then you were confronted with slums which needed to be demolished, good housing, housing which was architecturally appealing and nice, good streets, good urban streets, and yet with inadequate modern facilities. And it seemed to me that the technique which had been developed by the L.C.C., by my friend Percy Johnson-Marshall, who by then I had met up with again at the L.C.C., and who was in the Planning Division but in charge of the special comprehensive development area in East London, Stepney, Poplar, and there the technique was clearing vast areas of housing, and building anew. And that seemed to me to be absolutely wrong, that one should remove where it was essential, but should be able to develop new with the old, and the old modernised to be satisfactory housing. And that that way there would be a sense of growth and time which was more appealing, I believed, than the idea of vast tracts of sudden new eruption. So, my view was that in fact we ought to conserve all of the housing that was basically good housing, and modernise it, but weld that with new building. Well, Chris Whittaker, an architect in the Planning Division, had been experimenting also with the same idea, and he had actually produced a strategy for what was to be Brandon which was in fact that sort of strategy. So, in taking it over from the planning concept, instead of then turning it into an architectural concept which was completely out of step with that approach, I developed it, and to do that I needed to have the sort of staff to do so. So, I spoke to Whitfield Lewis and Cleave Barr who was his deputy about it. And there was at that time a very large section of the Housing Division called the Mods and Cons division, or section I think, it was very large, and it was dealing with all the older properties, modernising them, L.C.C. properties. But what it was doing was a sort of essentially building surveyors’ job, and it wasn’t conservation as I saw Edward Hollamby C467/22/04 F5871A Page 63 it, and I thought, you don’t have modern architecture, modern housing being produced in one part of the division, and modernisation of old structures produced in another part of the division, as though they were completely different entities; they should be brought together. So I was able to recruit a staff from them, who, of younger people who were also very eager, they weren’t necessarily architects, some of them were building surveyors, but very eager to have what they saw as a more interesting role in the planning and development process. And we then produced this scheme for Brandon, which was made up of eighteen-storey towers, and it was the beginning of moving in high buildings out of suburbia, Roehampton and elsewhere, into inner London, and there I felt that if you had a tower... Up to that time there’d been the idea of eleven storeys, which was the sort of limit that the London Building Act imposed, and I felt that that produced stumpy buildings. If you were to have towers, they should be taller, and they should be slimmer, or appear to be slimmer because they were taller. And produced a new sort of type plan with another young architect, who was to become a permanent, a friend of mine, David Gregory-Jones. And the combination of these towers looking over Kennington Park, with then a shopping centre, like a village, but which contained its pub, which contains the village hall, which was called a community hall, and a number of other building uses, formed a transition then to the residential area where there were streets of conserved houses, and sometimes short terraces of modern put in with them. There were existing squares, a new church was to be built in one of them, and replacing an old church that had been bombed. And the whole thing was to add up to a completely, hopefully a new community. One part of that way through into where the towers were, the open space overlooking the park, was underneath a block of flats, so that it was colonnaded and you walked underneath it from this village piazza sort of space. And part of that was tiled. And so, we thought, we wanted it to be, not just a piece of decoration, it was to be that, but it was also to have some historical value, and so of course we thought the great meeting of the Chartists, the Chartists who marched on, to go to Parliament but were stopped at Kennington Fields, that was the subject, and so our tile mural told the story of the Chartists and their march on Parliament for greater democracy. And all of this was carried out. We designed the pub, we designed the name, and the form of its advertising for, what do you call it, where...it was sort of, heraldry sort of thing. And then it was to be opened. And the Council were very proud of this I think, and so the...the Fire Brigade’s band came to a grand opening Edward Hollamby C467/22/04 F5871A Page 64 ceremony in this shopping piazza, and the band played, and people came from all over. It was a grand, very exciting moment. And that I think, that took some time of course, that was a major job in housing. I eventually then became, I got other jobs in housing, but also...and a major job in Deptford, overseeing the...

Could we just stop at the Brandon Estate for the moment.

Yes.

That’s the one that has the Henry Moore...

That’s right, sculpture, yes.

Was that...were you responsible for that?

Yes indeed I was. I felt...well, I also got appointed at that time, because of my interests, I think, Leslie Martin I think understood them, there was a body, a committee had been established which was for, to establish the arts in public places, and Leslie Martin was a member of that committee. And then, they wanted to appoint...there were two...it wasn’t just the L.C.C. I’m trying to remember, there was a state body I think that was part of it; there must have been Government representatives because it depended on grants. And there was to be appointed two people, one an architect, and one was a representative... It’s terrible this, I’ve forgotten her name now, but a representative of one of the public arts official bodies.

What, the Arts Council perhaps?

It wasn’t the Arts Council. Well it might have been the Arts... I think it may have been the Arts Council then. It’s such a long while away, I’m not quite sure whether it was the Arts Council or some other similar body that was functioning then. But we met up, and used to discuss things. And then, I had...I mean it was a wonderful job. All this was on the side so to speak. I did an awful lot of jobs on the side. The very first preservation order was made on St. Peter’s Square in Hammersmith, block preservation order that is, because, the then only single historical buildings assistant in Edward Hollamby C467/22/04 F5871A Page 65 the Town Planning Department, Bill Begley[ph], he and I used to talk a lot about history, and he knew that I lived in St. Peter’s Square, so I got the job of doing all the architectural detective work to provide information for designating that.....

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

Right, you’re talking about the preservation order on St. Peter’s Square.

Yes. So, that was just one of these jobs on the side so to speak. And so was this job, it was additional to my main job, of working for the patronage of the arts. And, well there were some very fine pieces that were, as a result, made available in housing estates and schools and parks in London through that. But part of that was also, or stemming from that, was Henry Moore, and I went to see him and meet him at his studio, and see all his works there, and talk about, in general what we were trying to do to him. And he showed his enthusiasm, and so, I asked him to produce us one of his sculptures for Brandon. And he agreed to do so at a much reduced price from the market price, but I remember, I think it was £7,000 or something then; well it sounds absolutely absurd now doesn’t it, but that was quite a lot of money in those days. But what was so terrific about it, it was at the time... We had to get approval of the Housing Committee, and it was at the time of the Cuba crisis, when everybody was very worried about what was going to happen in the world. And so I went to the Housing Committee and I had to get their support, approval, for spending this amount of money, and asking Henry Moore to provide this sculpture there. And, I always remember it, it was such an electrifying sort of occasion. It was highly emotional. And Peggy...oh, oh dear.

Peggy Middleton.

Peggy Middleton, who was one of the senior councillors of the L.C.C., on the Housing Committee there, and ultimately...she was very influential in Woolwich, and Woolwich Council offices are called Peggy Middleton House. But, I always remember her saying, talking about what I had said to them about what Henry Moore stood for and what his sculpture could mean, and she referred to the Cuba crisis and said, ‘At this time, when it seems that the world is facing the most appalling Edward Hollamby C467/22/04 F5871A Page 66 possibilities, for us to be able to think in that way.’ Now this was the sort of thing, it was wonderful working at the L.C.C., because you had this enthusiasm of members; there wasn’t that sort of cut-off of members and officers that often in local government existed; there was a lot of interaction. So the enthusiasm was thereby creative. And anyway, Henry Moore provided this sculpture, and I worked with him, designing the base for it, and, I always remember on my drawing-board, in fact, God! I do remember it, because, doing lots of sketches, and he would do lots of sketches, and all his sketches I used to throw in the waste paper basket. His sketches, Henry Moore’s. How innocent. One just didn’t know then, didn’t think then, well God! these things are of an enormous, will be of enormous value. They were just like, my sketches and his sketches, and like Samuely, it was just working on them and throwing away the things that weren’t immediately right, until we got it as we thought right. So, that was the story then. I suppose that was in a way a culmination of Brandon. But there was another aspect of it, which wasn’t...which stemmed partly from the idea of the patronage of the arts, but this was the idea of establishing two artists who were to work with the architects in providing decoration in the architecture of the housing in the Housing Division. It didn’t work in the...it wasn’t involved in the other divisions, but only in the Housing Division. I’m not quite sure who was responsible for it, but I have an idea it was Oliver Cox. And I was made responsible for south London, and he was made responsible for north London, and there were these two artists, George Mitchell and Anthony Holloway, and we worked with them. George Mitchell worked mostly for Oliver in north London and Tony Holloway in south London. So we were finding locations on buildings, parts of buildings, but also parts then to be incorporated in the design of buildings, of the work, which had to be done very cheaply. So they worked out all sorts of techniques, and one of the, I don’t know whether it was one of the first ones that were to be done, but I think was a very creditable one and one that surprises a lot of people. I can always remember at some committee at the R.I.B.A., my saying something about the programmes, public lavatories, and everybody looking at me as if to say, well what sort of programme is that? But in Vauxhall Park we were to build a new children’s lavatory; in fact it was to be with a new play, an exhibition centre. That didn’t come off. But a young engineer had been appointed, this was...I’m jumping forward to Lambeth now. I’ll have to go back again, but, it’s relevant to what I was saying. Ted Happold, who died recently, and he worked with me, he was in fact of Arups, was seconded to us at Edward Hollamby C467/22/04 F5871A Page 67

Lambeth, to work with us during all our, those earlier years. We designed this lavatory with curves and intersecting splayed roofs, and covered with the, just broken tiles, but which were...built up a picture, an abstract sort of picture, which Tony Holloway did. And that was the sort of thing that you could do. I mean, that, instead of an ugly little brick box, was actually then a significant piece of architecture, and actually something that didn’t deny what it was, but made it more real and more attractive. So, that was the work that we were doing throughout the Housing Division in the earlier days with Tony Holloway. And so, added, then, you could say to my experience there was this extension of the arts, away from...not away from, no, sorry. The patronage of the arts was, I mean there was Franta Belsky who did, for that housing scheme I did at Bethnal Green, he did Mother and Child there, and Henry Moore and others. These were rather fine pieces of work, special pieces. But the other work was to be decorative work, and they were complementary in that sense. So, this was all extending this range of...

Well on the Brandon Estate, even now some years later, the graphics are very good aren’t they, the numbers for the flats, of each floor level, and so on.

I’m very glad you tell me that.

Yes.

I’d forgotten what they were like.

No, well they’re rather, they’re rather of their period, you know.

Yes, of course.

Kind of Architectural Review and beauvem[ph] and whatever.

Yes, yes.

That sort of thing.

Edward Hollamby C467/22/04 F5871A Page 68

Yes, yes.

And also the landscape, although it’s worn out now, you can see that it was very carefully done.

Mm. Well...

I think, personally[??].

Well, I haven’t been there for a long while, so that’s...

What was your contribution to the design, the actual design at Brandon? What was your role?

Well I was the group leader.

Yes.

And when you become a group leader, of course there are...you’re involved in administration of the group, you’re involved in all of the architectural aspects of it, you’re directing a whole group of people who are all working and who are all making a contribution to it. So, it’s part educational role, you’ve got to enthuse them, and you have to have a group that is with you, which has your feeling, otherwise it’s just administration and I don’t think that makes any sense; I didn’t think that anyway. But also, I have always believed, and this has gone right through my work, that whatever level I was at, I should never depart completely from the fundamental role of designing on the drawing-board, even if it were only a small detail. And I can remember I did some of the full-size working drawings of Brandon, because, it’s important, otherwise you lose touch, you gradually become an overall administrator, controller, but you don’t...you don’t...if you haven’t got the skill, Morris taught that, you’ve got to do it yourself, to be able to enthuse others and get them to accept you as being part of, although you’re in charge, of the team. And I think, I think I was always quite good at doing that, but I think it was because I constantly would come down, and I mean there were some buildings that I would design, and then they would Edward Hollamby C467/22/04 F5871A Page 69 go into the group for the preparation of the working drawings. Others I would be criticising and commenting on. I had a marvellous deputy, who wasn’t a designer at all, he had come from, he was an architect, come from that outfit of the Mods and Cons, and he was absolutely marvellous at the, controlling the administrative work of the group and the discipline of getting work done and the right time, controlling costs. All of that sort of thing as well. So, I was very much assisted by having somebody like that, and I could be both leader in the sense of giving leadership to all of the others, and also make a design contribution of my own. I could make the drawings myself.

Did you do the drawings for the butterfly roof?

No. David Gregory Jones, I’m pretty sure, would have done those drawings. But the idea of the butterfly roof... When you say the drawings, do you mean the working drawings?

Mm.

No no no. But the idea of the butterfly roof, with the four patios around it, was what I sketched out, and...because, it was part of this thing that started at Bethnal Green, where I’d been talking about these ugly flat-roofed tops with the chimneys and everything coming out of them, and making something of the roof. And I always felt that the roof was a most important thing, probably the most visible thing on any building in an urban context, and the towers in particular always I felt, always towers must have a top to them which is sculptural, architectural. So the idea of the tanks and the machinery all being contained in those structures would have meant very high, very high structures, but the four patios around them made a more complex structure which brought it down to the scale of a, or the dimension of the sheer walls, and also were able to provide probably the most luxurious dwellings that any local authority was likely to provide anywhere, views all over London, a private, little garden, and those patios, those small dwellings, they also had roofs which were in concrete but splayed, following the shape. So the idea of that was...

Edward Hollamby C467/22/04 F5871A Page 70

But they were for single people weren’t they, because they have a single room, kitchen and bathroom.

That’s right, yes. Yes. I’m just trying to think of the name. Tim... Oh dear. Sorry, my memory’s gone.

Is he an architect, or...?

No, no no. Son of a very prominent lord.

Oh you’re thinking of Tom Pakenham?

Tom...?

Tom Pakenham.

Tom Pattenden[ph].

Pakenham.

Pakenham, that’s right.

He moved in there?

He moved in there.

With Mark Girouard.

That’s right. Fancy that. Yes. And there was a time when, I suppose at that time I knew them quite well, and actually I was surprised, I mean I was delighted to know he was going to be one of the tenants of...

Yes, because he was, his house was presumably redeveloped or something, I think that was why he... Edward Hollamby C467/22/04 F5871A Page 71

He lived in Paddington, wasn’t it.

Mm. His father’s Lord Longford.

Lord Longford, that’s what I was trying to think.

His family name was Pakenham.

Yes, that’s right.

And I think that his house was, the house that he was in, or flat he was in, was demolished, and so he was entitled...

Ah, that’s how he got housed.

Yes.

Yes. But, so I...I suppose I had a very good reference back from him. He had one of the flats... Because all of the flats we determined, there was the problem always of fire and access, so, and there was also the basic idea that there should always be an outdoor space for flats, which was part of the Housing Division’s general philosophy and the housing body that wanted blocks of flats always to have a balcony with them. But I thought that the continuous balconies was a thing that was possible, and that gave a sort of, an amenity to them, which was absolutely marvellous, because it was also a very very practical thing for access. Every single one could be accessed for maintenance without having to use scaffolding, and that was a very important thing. But he had one of those flats, and, yes we used to talk about it a lot in those days. So...

But if you think about housing and, you know, that initially Brandon Estate, some of the people who lived in that were people like Tom Pakenham...

Yes. Edward Hollamby C467/22/04 F5871A Page 72

But in recent years it’s become an estate which is difficult to let.

Yes.

Yes. Can you explain why, what happens?

Well... It’s not just Brandon, or not just...

No no no, but generally.

It’s everywhere that this has happened. I think there are more than one reason for it, and it’s rather complex, but, in those earlier days, the principle that Aneurin Bevan announced, that housing was for everybody, meant that there were no categories of class which would be re-housed, and in those days, before, particularly before great slum clearance schemes started, it was what was known as part five housing, which was housing, to provide housing; not housing for the working classes, housing. And so, anybody who was either on the Councils’ lists, or who were, where they were, as in the case of Tom Pakenham, demolishing for some other purpose, would be taken for re-housing. So you had a much more mixed population which was being re- housed then. And then, round about, what would that be? ’50...it must have been the fairly early Fifties, again, the big slum clearance drive took place. It was under the Conservative Government after the Labour Government had gone, so it must have been round about Brandon time, ‘53/54, something like that, you got slum clearance coming in. But of course that took some time to develop. But that meant priority to people who were being housed out of the slums. But that didn’t of itself automatically create a sort of class thing, because all sorts of different people had lived in what were then designated as slums. But then what happened was the idea that that...the...all people who were to be re-housed, irrespective of their background, which was regarded as being a very progressive social policy, should be housed together. And then... So you got a mix of all sorts of people. Then, along came Thatcherism, and buy your own house, and the beginnings of a, you live in a block of flats, you’re different to us, we own our own house, was, I think it might be re- established rather than established, because to some extent that existed in the Thirties Edward Hollamby C467/22/04 F5871A Page 73 as well. But what happened then, together with a decline in the standing of local government, decline in the amount of money that.....

End of F5871 Side A Edward Hollamby C467/22/04 F5871B Page 74

F5871 Side B

Tape Four B.

So, this by then more recent times, but not so recent you see, the reduction in the amount of money through grant that was applied to local authorities, and then even more recently by the capping of local authorities, which I think is an absolutely appalling thing to be happening to, as I say, to anybody, you are democratic, you’re free, you should be able to be responsible, and then say, but we won’t let you do it. However, all of that led to a progressive reduction in maintenance and repair of what were council estates. So, you got declining standards, people moved out to, who could get their own house, and you then got developing more and more, something that had existed, and which the original developments were to move out of, which was the sort of ghettos of people who were at the bottom of the heap. And then, those local authority estates, which were flatted estates, but not only those, because, I always remember there was often so much criticism made of them, and this was many many years ago, I don’t know whether you remember the R.I.B.A. conference at Sterling, that was many years ago, and there was then, and the Architects’ Journal printed photographs and had an article about it, the appalling condition of housing estates there, but it wasn’t blocks of flats or anything like that, these were houses. But particularly in the urban areas where you had these flatted estates, a decline in standards which has gone on and on, and which has made them, not entirely, and it depends where they are, but for the larger part progressively unattractive as places to live. Even Roehampton, I can remember the change there. My brother lived at Roehampton. When you see the...he ran the youth club or, no, he didn’t run it, he was one of those who ran it, and when you see the, as I saw, the graffiti all over this new building. Well, this is too complicated.

Mm, it is, yes.

It gets more and more complex as you go on, because it gets into that whole subject of freedom we were talking about a little earlier, and the way that people are today, and so on. But it is so sad that places that people were proud to live in, and at one time, and certainly even within the Thirties, certainly, if people lived in a council house Edward Hollamby C467/22/04 F5871B Page 75 they regarded it as being very high quality of life for them, they had a good home, good management, all the rest of it. That management was the thing that decayed, and was...gradually became less and less effective. Many of the ideas that were...is it N.A.C.R.O. that...a body, National Association of Crime and the Rehabilitation of Offenders. I can remember a conference I was speaking, for them, already the problem arising of, safe courtyards which we had designed for, so that children could play and be safe, being places which were utterly unsafe for children, and what were the ways in which, cul-de-sacs and so on, all of which had been private and nice and quiet, were suddenly threatening. Change...now this has gone on a long while, so it was quite a long way back, that. But gradually it’s...those places have been difficult to let, as you say.

Mm.

Very sad. Perhaps one day they’ll change round again.

I think so. And as you say, it very much depends where the estates are, doesn’t it.

Yes. Yes.

And Kennington is really becoming rather posh now, so...

Yes. Yes. Yes. Well Lambeth has always...it’s been...it always fascinated me as a borough, because although it was overwhelmingly working class, it was...they weren’t widely separated areas. They were very much mixed together. You would have a middle class square and a few streets around it quite different, and then it would change again. It’s always, always was like that, and I’ve always felt that that was one of the very better and more redeeming characteristics of it as an inner urban area. I don’t know whether it’s stayed like that now. But anyway, there’s a big problem which has been building up, because so many of these estates were built, and which...and now, are either being demolished, and that’s a very expensive process, and building again, or else they’re having to somehow get together enormous sums of money to rehabilitate them.

Edward Hollamby C467/22/04 F5871B Page 76

Mm. On the other hand some of them are quite old now aren’t they, so they would need some sort of rehab.

They would need that, yes, anyway, yes. Yes, that’s true.

So, you had done Brandon, and...

Yes.

You were talking about another scheme.

Well what happened, I was talking about Deptford, the Royal Naval Yard at Deptford, and by then I’d been promoted, Oliver Cox and I always seemed to have paralleled our careers in many ways, not more latterly, the latter period, but at the L.C.C., and he was in charge of north London and I was in charge of south London, as principal architects and liaison with the Planning Division. By then, a problem, the problem of planning being so to speak at one level of the intellect and then the architect at a completely different level, and no connection between them, we had begun to feel, this is a very real problem and we have to somehow make the planners aware of the architectural problems at their early stage of their work, and of conveying to the architects the intentions of the planners, so that one could get a great, a better continuity, and a better quality of work which would ultimately ensue from that. So, we had this rather special appointment, and that meant that we had to oversee design for the work of those groups which were in the two halves of London, and in south London which I was in charge of was this large area in Deptford which was just the...oh dear, what was it? I was saying before. It’s the Royal Naval Yard. And that was fascinating historically, because it was the home of Pepys, he lived there, a splendid house that he had, which was echoed by another one on the opposite side. The rum warehouses fronting onto the river, officers’ houses surrounding a square, the river of course itself a major frontage to it, and a canal which was actually terminating a river, the name of which I have forgotten for the moment, and which came I think from, way out from Croydon, south London somewhere, out to the Thames, but ultimately was channelled through Deptford through this canal. All of this was part of the environment that was there, to be made into a new, not a housing Edward Hollamby C467/22/04 F5871B Page 77 estate but a whole district; not a district, no, a neighbourhood. And there was of course, it was ideal, just the sort of job I would want to see, history and modernity, to bring them together. And at that time we were working on developing a new housing type, which was a tall building, and crossover maisonettes.

Scissor?

The scissor blocks. And David Gregory-Jones, who had worked with me at Brandon, he had developed this idea of the scissors. Colin Jones, another colleague, came to work on it too. And, at least, I’m not sure that, no, I think I’m muddling that up with something later, with Thamesmead. But there was a, two or three groups which were working on this area, so my job was to provide general direction to them, to ensure that conservation was developed equally with new build, and that they integrated, and overall to attempt to secure a new and very much more beneficial environment for people living. Potentially wonderful. So three towers were built, and the rum warehouses were converted, and they are marvellous accommodation, and Pepys’ house was converted, and I did the plans for those myself. The Pepys’ house, because they had such high storeys, one was able to take what was a great living-room, or a great room with a bay window looking up and down the river, and insert within it a bathroom cabin, with a runged ladder which went up, and on top of which was a bedroom, and on the other side of that so to speak was almost central into the room, giving an access into the room, and the living space there. And then, there would be a space which was the kitchen which had its outdoor window on that right-hand side. And I remember taking this to the Director of Housing, everybody thought, my God! what are we going to do now? The idea of having a bedroom space in the middle of a room and not a separate bedroom, nobody’s ever done that before, well of course they had, but... Anyway, the then Director of Housing was about to retire, but he responded with enormous enthusiasm to this, and so we carried it out. And as I say, also with the rum warehouses, converting those as well. Later on, nothing to do with me of course, but later on a friend of mine was housed in one of these, and in fact they ultimately bought it, so they own it now, she works out in, at Brussels, as part of the, I’m not sure whether it’s some government job, in connection with Europe; I’m not sure what he does now, but something similar. And they were always so enthusiastic about this home which they had, and which now of course is just a pied-à-terre for Edward Hollamby C467/22/04 F5871B Page 78 them. The rest of the estate was then developed with modern maisonettes, in taller blocks, following a sort of linear pattern, because there was a whole area which was not pleasant visually to look out of, and so that these were designed in order that they were, again using crossovers, meant that people had both the better view, as well as the lighting from both sides. The crossovers were expensive, and I don’t know whether they lived long after that period. But the other thing was also the canal, which was an important... And much to my dismay... Oh, and of course we built a bridge over the canal you see. Now the bridge is like a car park, and there is no canal at all, they’ve closed that canal, and, which is a ridiculous thing to have done. This was in the same spirit that later in Docklands I was to find, that they were attempting to close all the water areas there, in the process losing all the splendid environmental possibilities that water always provides. Anyway, so that that... That was the story of the, that major estate at that time. But that was one in which I got more personally involved in.

Yes.

Whereas many others I would be giving general direction to. And one thing that I did do in that period was, because it had become very fashionable to build tall buildings, every architect wanted to do a tall building, wherever it was, and I did get over the idea that you use tall buildings where they could have significant views, or you use them where they would significantly close vistas, but you don’t use them anywhere because that’s the fashionable thing to do, and that low building ought to be given a higher prestige. So I led a campaign to encourage low-rise housing, low-rise high- density housing. But that was that sort of work. And that eventually led to my carrying out the preparation of a scheme of development for the area which, it was part of what is now called Thamesmead, and which was a huge area, partly in Kent and partly in London, various urban district councils, and which the authority then, not of course a water authority then as it is now, was prepared to sell off land which they, which was a sort of catchment area. It was marshes, marshland, rather beautiful in a way. And so I had the idea to build very tall towers on platforms with housing all around them, like ships, standing in the marshes, with the marshes and the rivulets all going through it. And underneath the platforms all the car parking for the people living above, so there was no car parking over the landscape, and there were these Edward Hollamby C467/22/04 F5871B Page 79 marvellous views up and down the Thames. And that was accepted as being the way in which to carry out its development. Oh, the other thing was, with a great lake in the centre, and the great lake was...because it was marshland, and it was backed by high land sloping up, woodlands, all the water from that used to come down into the marshland. When the Thames Barrier was built this had to be controlled, you had to hold the water for a period and then let it out when the level of the Thames had dropped. And so, I can see the idea of having this great lake, which would be a lake which would contain the water, let it out when necessary, but would be big enough to do that without it significantly affecting the water level, and be a recreational water area as well, which I always think still now as part of Thamesmead is probably one of the most attractive features of it. And then, the possibility of the Royal Arsenal lands, which were adjoining, becoming available, were made up...were put forward, the valuers thought they could purchase them, and the idea then was, here we could make a, instead of a township which was I think for, that I’d been previously, is it 25,000 people, it would become a new town of something, 80,000 or 100,000 people. And at that time, was a time when it was the beginning of talking about the end of the L.C.C. and the establishment of a new London organisation with boroughs, and I think probably, one of the last major things I did then was, I sat down with a colleague from the, I think it was still called Department of Local Government, Housing and Local Government, I think it was still called that, and, Walter Bor, who was the head of the Town Planning Division then, he was going off to Liverpool and I was going off to Lambeth, and we sat down together, because one of the possibilities was that a...one was a new prison could be located there, and, I’d been on the Prisons Working Party previously, which had defined the need for a new prison in east London, and then...or alternatively a new power station, or alternatively it could be our new town. And we all came to the conclusion in the end, that’s what it should be. And so, Thamesmead was ultimately designated as a result of that. Whereupon, well I say whereupon because that happened then after I’d left, but that was my sort of final offering to the L.C.C., and Walter’s of course as well.

Where did the, your sort of ideas or concepts come from, what was the stimulus behind, say, your Thamesmead ideas, or what became Thamesmead? I mean, where had you travelled to, or who had you spoken to, or whose other work had you seen, that might have had an influence? Edward Hollamby C467/22/04 F5871B Page 80

Well I suppose you’ve got to go back quite a way. When I was...when I was in Curtis’s office, I got a copy of the, somebody presented, gave me it, a copy, and it must have been a Christmas present or something like that, a copy of The Modern House in England by Yorke, and I...in those days, I mean that was like a bible. I used to cycle all round London looking at these beautiful houses. Which I didn’t realise at the time, which were beautiful because they were so unique, and they were individual. Put them all together in a vast housing estate, just as good individually, and magically – not magically, but somehow they changed. That was something I had to learn. But I also learnt about what Gropius had been, and this was when I was a student who had been teaching, and also the housing work that had been carried out in Germany. So that was a very early influence on my thinking. Then, Yorke’s Modern House I got as well. But in The Modern House in England, there was one aspect of that that had a permanent effect, influence on me architecturally, and that was the houses at Welwyn which had been designed by...

Mary Crowley.

Sorry?

Mary Crowley.

Mary Crowley, that’s right. And these were houses with mono-pitch roofs.

You know that John Brandon-Jones helped her to detail those.

I didn’t know that.

And he was terribly against the mono-pitch.

Really?

Yes.

Edward Hollamby C467/22/04 F5871B Page 81

Now isn’t that...

But she would insist.

Well, I know Mary very well now, and she has been here, and we’ve talked about that, and... I instinctively felt that, here was a way of being modern and yet also continuing a tradition. So that has been a basic idea I think. I mean, I won’t say it’s absolutely consistently run through, because that doesn’t happen in real life; you veer and you come back and you...but it has been the most powerful probably idea that has gone through all the work that I’ve done. So it started, you could say, there. And then of course I had continued to...I was...at the school again, I was a student member of the MARS Group; Arthur Korn, who was one of the refugees that came with Gropius, taught me at Hammersmith, and he was a wonderful man. So, there I, the idea of, not necessarily his ideas, because I think his would have been quite different, but the idea of planning, bringing architecture and social developments, people’s lives, in urban situations, together, was brought into my understanding then. That, let’s see, how it went on. I’ve spoken you see, at the Miners’ Welfare Committee, it became more perhaps narrow architecturally, not really when you think of the social dimension I was always concerned with. The work that most influenced me, I was excited by Le Corbusier, I’d been to see the Unité d’Habitation, and one of his buildings that I never went to see, but always did fascinate me, was Rio, Rio de Janeiro, that tall...I’m not sure if it was an office or a residential building there, but I think with a church as a...and here was a sort of, two elements of history and modernity together, which, one was a foil to the other. I remembered that being, for a long while inspiring me, and I think that may have influenced my, the way I saw using high buildings, to some extent anyway. But, on the whole it was Gropius. With Gropius’ work, I identified it with the social purpose; with Corbusier I became more and more able...seeing that it was an artist pursuing an individualistic purpose, and imposing a pattern, which actually when one looks back on it, on some of these things, these skyscrapers with aircraft flying in between them and that, are terrifying; nothing could be more fascist than this absolute repetition of all these gigantic things in which people would be like ants. And that I’m sure did influence me enormously; by being against that, being for growth out of existing, and therefore muddle, but a creative and enjoyable muddle, which it seemed to me, looking at our historic towns, Edward Hollamby C467/22/04 F5871B Page 82 you see a great cathedral, and the close around it, and there they are, 18th century houses, 19th century houses: a huddle all round it. Ordered, and yet, grown, and that seemed to me to be the thing that we had to avoid. And it wasn’t easy really in the, our post-war situation, particularly when the great housing programmes were involved. The speed at which it all had to be done, I think made it much more difficult to maintain that attitude, and large scale, instead of accretive building, so often became the norm. I can’t say that I was absolutely against this, because some of the things I did were part of that, and had to be. But it was seeing Gropius’ work, and following it then through into seeing housing in its social dimension much more, than as an architectural and sculptural thing, I think that was a thing that influenced me most of all. And I would say without hesitation... And then Aalto, Aalto had a tremendous influence on me, especially when he built his own house, and the work he did at Säynätsalo I think it was, I felt there, there was a hand which understood the setting, which would respond individually to where it was, rather than would impose a conceived solution wherever it was. We used to have great debates of course in those days, earlier days, about this, and at the L.C.C. we really divided into two on it. You see it particularly in Roehampton, there’s, Roehampton East I think it is, which Oliver Cox and...oh dear...Rosemary Jones did, and the work at Roehampton West, which Bill Howell and John Partridge and others did. There were two schools, and there had existed earlier in the L.C.C. I wrote, with David Gregory-Jones I did a history of the L.C.C. Architects Department which was published in a magazine, architectural magazine which ultimately folded, but I was...we were able to interview actually some of those very early pioneer architects in the L.C.C. Architects Department, and the fascinating thing was in fact that there too there was the division which was between the Philip Webb school.....

End of F5871 Side B Edward Hollamby C467/22/05 F5872A Page 83

F5872 Side A

Tape Five A. Talking about Roehampton as an example of the two strands of thought that there were.

Yes.

And you traced it back to Webb, the equivalent in the early L.C.C.

In the early L.C.C. Architects Department.

Of Webb and Shaw.

Of Webb and Shaw .

Well which was...which was which though?

Oh, Roehampton East was Webb, and Norman Shaw, or show-off Shaw, was Roehampton West. And it wasn’t absolutely precisely in any way a parallel, but it was a situation in which, at its most creative two periods, the early period of the L.C.C.’s Architectural Department, it was...had the stimulus of a battle between two schools going on within it, and that was true of the period under Matthew and Martin as well. And so, in that way I feel that they were very comparable, and that those two schools of thought battling it out amongst each other, and actually carrying it out, the philosophies, instead of it being a standardised style, house style, was a much more creative way of, in a very large organisation, a degree of aesthetic freedom which was very positive, and brought the best out of people on either side. And so, I mean, it was never acrimonious in being an angry debate, but there was always the debate there, and the difference between them. And my friend Dick Toms[ph] for example, I mean we got muddled up, because my friend Dick Toms[ph], who was certainly not of that school, was in charge of Loughborough, where there were the sort of mini- Unités d’Habitations lined up, and which I know Leslie Martin used to delight in. He used to drive down, I think it was Loughborough Road, and I’m not sure whether that was the name there, and he would tell the driver to go back and drive down again Edward Hollamby C467/22/05 F5872A Page 84 because he so liked seeing these. Not that Leslie was an absolute overt Corbusian, but, I think he was more in that direction. Matthew was perhaps more in the direction that I felt was right. I don’t know...so it was echoed at the top. Not hostile, but sort of...but different and yet at the same time able to live with one another. I’m not sure whether I’m making this very clear, but certainly then...

Do you think that, as a designer and as a planner, that you worked from quite a strong intuitive angle?

I think so, yes. Well I think so, but and yet...yes, I think that must be so. And yet, also, there were...it wasn’t that there were...that it was lacking a philosophy so to speak.

No. I mean in town planning, what was...who was the influential person there for instance, for you?

Oh. Yes, it’s so...

You [INAUDIBLE] and you had Holford giving you lectures.

Holford was enormously influential.

Mm.

Not in his architecture, which was poor, but in his town planning ideas, and his ideas of this sort of civil quality of architecture, he was tremendously influential. But as I said before, the MARS Group you see, now there, Samuely had suggested putting the Thames in a great pipe you see. I mean there was mad Modernism, if you can call it Modernism. But there was also a collection of quite different sorts of Modernism amongst the people in the MARS Group there. And I was...and of course in those early days I knew Freddie Skinner very well and Lubetkin pretty well. I admired their work, and yet I didn’t feel that...now that perhaps is the intuitional thing.

Mm. Edward Hollamby C467/22/05 F5872A Page 85

But it wasn’t in the, cast in the Gropius mould, it was cast in the, if you like, and that’s certainly true of Denys Lasdun, in the Corbusier mould. There... I’m trying to think. It must have gradually developed, it wasn’t all there in so... And of course I read Pevsner you see, and Pevsner was very influential on my thinking, his, what was it, 1936 he wrote the modern...oh dear.

Pioneers of Modern Design. That came later.

Towards a new...no, no. There was a book he wrote in 1936, which was a very all- embracing one, and which also, and I used to... He became editor of the Architectural Review of course during the war, and during the war, courtesy of the Navy, I used to regularly receive my copies of the Architectural Review. And I can remember, you see now, then, reacting against poor... Nikolaus Pevsner hadn’t got lots of new buildings to be able to write about, and so inevitably a lot of what he did was very historical; some of it seemed to me to be a bit esoteric, but that was because also, there my mind was filled with the ideas of post-war reconstruction and looking ahead. Looking back seemed to be playful. And I can remember writing to him and saying something like this, which didn’t stop us becoming very good friends later, when I knew him better.

Mm. Of course what they did publish in the war were buildings in South America and in Switzerland, and in Scandinavia.

Yes, I remember the bridges of Maillart.

Yes.

The Swiss engineer.

Maillart, yes.

Yes. I remember those so clearly. They’d... And there the simple clear lines of them was a great influence on my sort of aesthetic thinking. And yet, that wasn’t the only Edward Hollamby C467/22/05 F5872A Page 86 influence you see, there were so many. There were different ones. And it was out of them, and I think you must... Mine is a very empirical approach. I learn as I go along, but I...and so there are...it’s rather like, I think I generally keep to a course which, certainly in my mature life was fairly consistent, but which deviates, it isn’t just a simple line. It certainly isn’t like Le Corbusier, that was absolutely simple with him. With me, I can see both sides. I think that’s always been true in politics as well. So it’s part of my make-up. So I don’t absolutely reject. I think that that is the only answer I can give, is really, I’ve learnt as I’ve gone along, but the learning has been to, not reject absolutely, but to reject those elements which didn’t seem to be the most constructive to me and the way forward. And the way forward primarily was one in which history was constantly present. I always thought that, I must say, I think from the beginnings that was a really important thing to me, that you...you wanted the revolution, but you wanted it to embrace history and bring it so that the revolution became part of history.

Mm. Do you think that architects like yourself in the public sector, in local government and so on, are a different sort of being to the architect in private practice, who is the principal architect in private practice?

I think we were. It virtually doesn’t exist as a question today.

Today, unfortunately not, no.

But I think in some ways, well in many ways, we actually complemented each other. But we were different I think in the sense that in that period of time, the social problems that faced local authorities, the architect was in a primary role to be able not only to answer in architectural terms the problems, but to help to evaluate them. And so his role was a much broader role as an architect than just the designer of the building. And I think local authority architects, not everywhere, where the local authorities had that, the sort of set-up that encouraged that, where they were most progressive, were in a position to most encourage. I mean, some of them, many of them of course, went over to becoming private practice, and...

Mm. Oh yes, you can say... Edward Hollamby C467/22/05 F5872A Page 87

Stirrat Johnson-Marshall, look at that marvellous development of schools when he was a local authority architect. In many ways I think he did more valuable work then than he did later on. And so many of, I mean, my...well, Leslie Martin himself, so many of the, what I regarded with great admiration, important architects, were ones who, in a private practice, who had if you like received a valuable schooling in their work in local authorities. But I can’t say that I ever felt the great need to move into that position, because I think I felt I would lose that sort of contact with, to put it crudely, you know, the people, with human problems, which I think the architect in private practice, except perhaps when they’re most accepted, or in a special role as a consultant sometimes can be, but on the whole I think that inevitably their path is drawn into designing projects which might be anywhere, it’s their business. Few of them can say, I want to work in London only, I want to be in Yorkshire in the Dales, or something like that; some do, there are very very few that can do that. Most of them, their business requires them to design wherever a client asks them to do so, and they can get an international reputation, so can design a building in France, in Japan, in Germany, in England. I think that is to a degree abstract. I’ve always felt it was very very important for me to, not precisely live amongst but design in the area where I worked, not...where I would know about it and its problems. So... Am I making much sense on this?

No I think that sounds absolutely right to me. I mean I would also suppose that in some ways an architect in private practice who has got quite a lot of work on and so on, is perhaps more self-consciously developed as a designer, because he can move his ideas and so on.

Mm.

Would you think? Perhaps that’s not fair. It’s just that they often come over as quite egotistical.

Who do, the...?

Architects in private practice. Edward Hollamby C467/22/05 F5872A Page 88

Really?

Yes.

[PAUSE FOR THOUGHT] Oh I think they can probably come over as egotistical wherever they are.

Yes.

I think architects can, and inevitably will be so. What are they doing? They are, whenever they are at their most creative, and valuable for that, they are looking ahead, beyond what Mr Everyman sees every day. And whether they’re in local authorities, or whether they are...not just local authorities, but in public authorities, I mean like Leslie Martin was in, not British Rail but, I think it was one section of what became British Rail, public bodies like that, that they...that I think they too are, or can be, if their clients are sensible enough and their governing bodies are sensible enough to use them in that way, they are trail-blazers. Now that makes them egotistical, and I think, however much you might think that modesty is a valuable characteristic, and that an over-egotistical social attitude can be repulsive, but that in thinking and in imagining, it has to be, I have had an idea. It’s the artist. And I think that whether it’s in local authority or wherever it is, I think the best that can be got out of the architect is when his client or his governing body encourages him to give a lead, and I think that is...I think it’s shown, you know... I mean, when I think what happened at the L.C.C., it was a tremendous, well, probably most of the highly successful private architects that are around, all went through the L.C.C.

Mm, yes.

Some of them, like myself, made longer-term careers out of it, and many were passing through, but all were influenced in some way by that organisation. And there have been other places like it as well. And for me, which is perhaps the next stage of our story at Lambeth, it was obviously a combination, but a tremendous opportunity to actually fulfil that role of being able, encouraged, to look ahead. I shall never forget Edward Hollamby C467/22/05 F5872A Page 89 when I was interviewed for Lambeth, Archie Cotton, the leader of Lambeth Council, asking me a question, ‘What do you think about that chap, Le Corbusier?’ And I was absolutely flattened, not flatted, knocked back is perhaps the expression. Here was what I thought of as a politician, local politician; would he know about...? He knew about Le Corbusier, and I was so impressed with that. And I don’t know what sort of answer I gave to him. Oh I know, that’s right, because he said, ‘Do you think we ought to ask him to do something here in Lambeth?’ And I remember saying, ‘No.’ [laughs]

Oh, spoil sport, why not?

Because he would be not bringing to Lambeth something which was essentially part of its history. He wouldn’t be interested in that. What he would be interested in doing is imposing one of his sculptures. And I didn’t think that is the right way to carry out architecture in a historical way of an environment. I mean if you’re starting from afresh at Chandigarh, a different matter entirely. Although I would have thought an Indian architect ought to have been able to perhaps do it. But no, that’s taking too parochial a view perhaps. But Lambeth was, like London, and other parts of London, is a place of...where it has grown and history is there, and it needs to be changed but changed step-by-step. I don’t know. But it was part, my reaction was certainly... I mean had he said Gropius, I mean, I think I would probably, almost certainly would have said, ‘Oh yes.’ Because when I look at those schools in Cambridgeshire that Gropius so influenced...

Impington.

Impington.

Yes.

I mean, there...

It lasted so well.

Edward Hollamby C467/22/05 F5872A Page 90

It lasted so well. And there, he was able to produce what was an English school. It wasn’t some foreign implant.

No. It suits the flats there.

It does, yes, mm.

Yes. When you went for your interview at Lambeth, was this part of a deliberate career change? I mean you had made up your mind that you had to leave the L.C.C.

Yes. Yes.

Was that it?

Well the L.C.C...

Was leaving you, was it?

At the R.I.B.A. I was Chairman of the Local Government Committee there.

Oh right, yes.

So... And had supported the idea that the L.C.C. no longer could be sustained for a political and social point of view as being the government of London; London was something far greater than that. And that if you were to have a government of London, it also had to be different. So, no longer could it, wonderful as the L.C.C. was, pioneering as it was in so many ways, you had got to change, so you needed this, a body which would look at London overall, strategically, which couldn’t be looked at from its parts, but its parts had to be powerful enough for them to be mini-L.C.C.s. And, I knew then that change was coming about, and it seemed to me that that was the point in my career when I was ready to change, and take a top job. And in fact, actually I was asked, invited, to the job of the, one of the new towns in Wales, I’ve forgotten the name of it now.

Edward Hollamby C467/22/05 F5872A Page 91

Livingston?

No, no that’s Scotland.

Scotland, yes sorry.

I’ve forgotten the name of the Welsh one. But no matter. But I didn’t think I wanted to do that. Robert Matthew suggested that I go to Livingston. And Lambeth had advertised for a new, what was a borough architect, and I was really uncertain about all of these things, except that I knew Lambeth, I knew it well, and it seemed to me, Scotland, I don’t know well, I’m...will I be able to function in the same way in an environment you don’t know well? Well maybe, probably. And also, oh that’s right, and also there was assistant chief architect post at the Ministry of Housing, Local Government, as it was then, and Oliver Cox had gone there. Oliver and I paralleled each other so much. And Cleeve Barr was Chief Architect then. And I was interviewed for that. I was quite tempted for that in some ways, but I was always chary of bureaucracy, and it seemed a bit too remote from the practice of architecture. And in any case, the Civil Service took too long; actually offered me the job but it was too late. And I went for an interview at Lambeth, and that’s what did it, it was that interview. I was so impressed with them. It was a huge meeting in the council chamber, I’d never had an interview like that before, which was typically in a way old council procedure. There’s a chief officer being appointed, so half the Council is there to interview him. But it was so inspiring. I was amazed that there were such interesting and progressive views that were being put out by the councillors.

What was the political complexion of the Council?

It was Labour. And indeed, I think apart from a short period, had always been Labour. But of course Streatham was to be added to it. But this was actually before the local, London Local Government Act had been passed, and it was very controversial. I think they messed it up in the end, because they didn’t have the confidence that the boroughs could be mini-L.C.C.s, and so you got this duplication of the same functions in the G.L.C. and the boroughs, and the G.L.C., instead of becoming a strategic authority, didn’t. It still went on as though it were a partly Edward Hollamby C467/22/05 F5872A Page 92 demolished L.C.C., with the result that it was speaking to the same people. It should have been speaking, looking at the whole of London in quite a different way. I think it was an utter failure. But... And of course, whether the boroughs could succeed or not, entirely depended on the nature of the politicians; would they get politicians who had imaginative minds, and rise to the occasion, and would they get staffing which was imaginative and able to respond? Well Lambeth did that. As I said at the interview, I was so impressed with them that I, I felt, this is the job I want to have. And, well, they made no bones about it, there and then I was appointed. And then, the most marvellous thing happened, to me it was, and it encouraged me in the thinking that I had formed at that interview. The Council was imagining, the London Government Act had been passed, and what powers it would have, and what would it be like, what sort of structure should it have? And they asked me to help them design the committee structure. Now, that was an unprecedented thing. No architect, no chief officer, had ever been asked, as far as I know, before, except perhaps the chief executive or the top officer of the L.C.C., or something like that, and I don’t think even then. And I was amazed. And the...one of the key figures in this, a councillor, who was to be chairman of the committee which had responsibility for housing, architecture, not housing as such, architecture, development, town planning if and when the powers were obtained, that he was so to speak assigned, or I was assigned to him, and we had to do much of this thinking from scratch, and I was able to propose a committee structure then in which there was...it was an enormously powerful development committee, planning and development committee, in which all, the whole process of planning to completion was involved in that one committee. And other committees would have representation on it, and they would, other committees would be responsible for their social programmes and what they wanted to do, but also that planning and development committee would feed into them its views about the strategy that should be pursued. So, out of that, the idea then of a department which was multi-professional, able to cope with town planning problems at the strategic, the borough strategic level, able to carry out all development control work, able to carry out architectural design work, able to carry out rehabilitation and conservation work, able to carry out topography, design, all the Council’s documents, that sort of thing. The whole design field. And for some years that worked very well. But we became very big, and then the inevitable process of, the biggest and most powerful has to be attacked; not so much attacked, because my old friend Harry Edward Hollamby C467/22/05 F5872A Page 93

Simpson, who was the Director of Housing, was a wonderful loyal ally, but there were aspects of the housing which we were perhaps too strong on, and went back to that committee, that was between committees, not between departments. And the Planning and Development Committee became a less powerful committee, but, and also was influenced then by what was the revolution in local government in the early 1970s. Of course in 1968 it became Conservative, and the fascinating thing, some of the most progressive social developments in the borough were carried out under the Conservatives, who didn’t also fundamentally change the direction of the borough’s policies, they were very empirical. And in fact one of the things that I’ve always thought.....

End of F5872 Side A Edward Hollamby C467/22/05 F5872B Page 94

F5872 Side B

Tape Five B.

Yes, well, somewhere or other I’ve either referred or should have referred to the considerable political changes that came about around about 1970, 1972 I think it was, when a whole influx of young Labourites came in from the universities particularly, who were very very different to the older councillors who had been, not always older, nearly always older, nearly always, certainly older, who had been so close to the people in Lambeth that they served. And of course in 1968 Lambeth had a Conservative administration. The Conservatives in Lambeth weren’t dogmatic, they were very empirical; they carried out most of the social programmes that Labour had been considering and was carrying out, and indeed extended some of them. And amongst other things, one of the projects that they instituted was one which I became very personally closely involved with, and that was the idea of a holiday home for the severely disabled at Netley near Southampton. I say at Netley, although when it was envisaged, it wasn’t envisaged, they didn’t know where. The problem was, the body was to, that Lambeth Council became the voice for in that sense, and provided the service for, was one of St. Thomas’ Hospital, and a consultant who later became, or through this work became a very close friend of mine, a very dedicated physician, and a body of people who had their own organisation called the Respronauts. But what he was involved with them was, with their, them as patients. They were the people who had been profoundly affected by the great, 1950s I think it was, 1950s, the...

Polio?

Polio epidemic.

Yes.

And the King George Fund, King George’s Fund? Yes. And Lambeth Council, Respronauts, as they call themselves, St. Thomas’, the King George’s Fund, formed a consortium to provide a holiday home for just such people, not just those from polio but others from severe, who had severe physical disabilities and had to be looked after Edward Hollamby C467/22/05 F5872B Page 95 by people, and the idea of it was that it would give their carers time to have, refresh themselves, or even as...we worked out the brief, which took a long while working out, to...they could even form part of the holiday themselves, they could be accommodated. And this was...the problem about this was, they had to be transported to that site during the course of a day, without undue physical demands on their energies, so it couldn’t be great distances. On the other hand, it was necessary that it should have an equable climate for as much of the year as possible. And so, I had a year’s work, not just doing that of course, but that was the pleasurable part of it, with one of my staff, covering most of the south coast, looking for the right distance and the right climate. And eventually... Several very interesting sites, but the wrong climate. Eventually the two that came together, just the right distance and certainly the right climate, was Netley, and we found that the...Netley Castle as it was called, although it was a great 19th century house, it wasn’t a castle, but there was a castle also on the opposite side of the road, that the kitchen garden to it, which was a very considerable extent, a huge area, that that was to be sold off, walled, a view over the Solent, and the Southampton Waters. And so, that was a very important thing, the view, to these people who were in wheelchairs, couldn’t move themselves about, except some of them...well not entirely, there were some of them who were lesser disadvantaged that could. But some of them, I mean, like the chairman of the Respronauts, who could only move his head, there was nothing else he could do, but that brilliant man, he could...he was able to conceive of an engineer providing all the equipment for him, to run a business, a financial business which he ran, and he did it all from his head, and the only thing that he couldn’t do was type letters, and his wife, who was a nurse, did that for him. But everything else, all the communications, everything, the information and everything, was all done by him, and he could only move his head to do it. And he was most inspiring. I was tremendously emotionally affected by this project, I felt it was one of the most needed things at that time. I was staggered by the way that there were human beings who were so deprived of everything that we all had, or most of it. But they all had intellects, and that was a strange thing, that they were people who were very intelligent people, and it seemed that it had struck them rather than just Mr Everyman. Anyway, a year’s work went by and we eventually decided on this site, and Doris...the last thing that decided us was, Doris and I had a picnic in February on the site, sitting out in the open air, and that convinced us, this is the place to be. And then we... It was a long process of design, Edward Hollamby C467/22/05 F5872B Page 96 because all these people were involved in it, and so there was constant toing and froing, the development of the idea. It was very expensive as an institution, but the Conservative Government of Lambeth had decided to support it, and together with these other bodies, it was achieved and went ahead. And I think that was one of the things that I felt was a strong personal contribution that I had made to a better life for some people, who otherwise would have been caught up in their disabilities. So, I was really talking about, it was during the Conservatives, who didn’t fundamentally change things. I always remember Alderman Braxton[ph], who became the Chairman of that Planning and Development Committee that I spoke of, and the Conservatives, who had previously been a councillor at Wandsworth, and the reputation of Wandsworth had been very reactionary, and I can remember feeling fearful when they were elected, and I knew that he was to be Chairman and he was going to see me in my room there, and my God! what am I going to say, and what is he going to say? And my staff, some of them were outside, secretary and others, all listening, and they said, ‘After a little while it was nothing but laughter that was coming out of the room.’ Well, the chemistry worked, and it clicked, and we had a very constructive and I think valuable partnership, which is always an absolutely vital thing in local government. You and the chairman or other members that are of particular significance and importance, leader and so on, you have to have a relationship which is one of shared...it has to come from the councillors and it has to come from the officers, able to do that. And I always remember when Labour came back in and all these young Labourites were all coming in, and I drove Alderman Braxton[ph] home, to his home in Streatham, and one of his last words were to me, ‘Well we haven’t been too reactionary I hope, Ted.’ And I felt really that too, it’s part of that thing that I think I’ve referred to, I can’t help always but seeing some part of the other side. It’s not...life isn’t black and white. So, we... The young Labour, as we called it then, came in. One of the first things they were to do was to, Brixton town centre, which was a major project that I was proposing, and within which were...both north town centre and south town centre were clusters of very tall towers, very tall, and which were to mark Brixton as the centre of the borough. And they came in with the beginnings of the anti tall building prejudice, that has remained since I suppose in various ways. It’s beginning to change a bit now. Anyway, what they decided was, they were going to set up a special committee, and they were going to do all the research, and they were going to decide whether or not it should proceed in the way Edward Hollamby C467/22/05 F5872B Page 97 that I had been proposing. This was conceived as, seen as being a major slap in the face. I could attend the committee, but I wasn’t able to present reports, they would do it all themselves. And they did, and they did it very thoroughly. They worked hard; they of course had to ask for information, reports, in the end, but we could never make recommendations. But in the end, what did they do? They endorsed completely what we had been proposing. Well I was very impressed with that, because I felt, they were, many of them were young men and women who had come in to local government, never before been in it; they’d come in with the idea from outside that there were these chief officers who were running everything, and they were going to jolly well show them the way. And then when they had to actually do the work themselves, and they did do it very thoroughly, they found out what the real problems were. And then, they learnt so much by that process. Well one of the principle ones of them eventually became chairman of the committee, the main committee that I served, that Planning and Development Committee, and though from time to time we used to have our conflicts, he was good enough to say to me, as indeed was one of the other women, and also Ken Livingtone’s wife, who was one of the committee members there then, they had all been rebels, rebels against, as they seemed to us, and...but they were good enough to come and say, ‘We were wrong and you were right.’ And then, Ken Livingston’s wife... Oh no, that was the, this other chap who was the chairman, said, ‘The trouble is, we always suspect that we don’t come into it until you’ve all decided it, and then you produce something for us and say, “Approve this,” or not. Why can’t we be involved in the process?’ So I said, ‘Well, why don’t we set up, not a formal committee, which would have the problem of reporting to the Council, being executive in some way or other; why don’t we have a committee which officers and members, and not one on one side of the table and the other on the other, all round the table, discuss projects from the beginning, when the brief is being prepared, not when it’s already been prepared, and not when the design has been completed, so that in fact you who will be making judgements on it will be part of the process of producing it.’ And so we did that. And it was Ken Livingston’s wife, who said to me, ‘This is the best committee in the Council, because we’re so much involved in it.’ And for some considerable while...all these things were getting institutionalised in the end, and in the end it did become, but not for a long while. For some time it was a most creative and valuable body. It created a sense of partnership and, to use one of Morris’s words, brotherhood, that hadn’t existed at all, and that was Edward Hollamby C467/22/05 F5872B Page 98 most valuable in being able to create, for that period, I mean, eventually it became quite different, quite, for very different reasons, but for that whole period of the Seventies, there was a very constructive attitude between what was regarded as all these young Turks, and us in the department. I should have mentioned also, going back to that beginning when I said that I was consulted about the committee structure, because of the way in which, at the L.C.C. I had always felt that, marvellous authority that it was, it was so remote from people, you never met the people who it was to be for, that you were proposing and designing or anything like that. And I remember, I put it to the chairman and the key councillors, why don’t we have public meetings, not a platform, but in a pub, where we all have a drink and we’re gathered together, local people, and ourselves, and discuss a project that is going to be coming about, and that we’re going to design, or which we are in the process of designing, so that people know what’s happening. And they agreed. And that was a tremendous thing. Very few local authorities have ever agreed to go out to talk to people about what they’re going to do before they’ve ever done it. And the first thing we did was to go to Central Hill where, which is on the edge of the borough, a beautiful site, escarpment leading up to the Crystal Palace looking out over London, and the Council, before I went there, had already started the process of a compulsory purchase order in order to develop the area for housing, and there was a body had been set up to oppose it. And so, we invited them to meet us in the pub there, and we went through what we were wanting to try and do, and discussing it with them, with plans that had never been shown to the Council at all. And the remarkable thing was that, it won them over, and the body set up to oppose the CPO formally decided to support it. Well that of course convinced the councillors, this is the right way to go about things. And for again a long while we had a very close system of meeting people at their level, and discussing, long before projects reached a stage at which they were highly defined at all, of getting the reaction to ideas and companies[??]. And this worked very very well, until gradually that too became institutionalised, and back came the bloody platform, and then it all changed again. So, I suppose what I’ve learnt from this is, and to some extent was what made me, although there were other motives as well, but one of the motives that made me decide to leave Lambeth and go to Docklands, was that Docklands was absolutely new, and there was nothing there, there was no big organisation. So you were in from the start again, it was small. And somehow I’ve Edward Hollamby C467/22/05 F5872B Page 99 always felt this, that as soon as it’s grown too big I’ve got to get out of it, and go back to...

And also perhaps, perhaps you like being a pioneer, perhaps it’s more interesting to help create things and set them up.

Yes.

That’s more interesting really isn’t it.

Yes. I think so. Yes.

I mean Lambeth, I think I read somewhere, you had a department, an office, with 750 people.

Yes.

That’s an enormous number of people isn’t it.

Yes, yes.

Of all kinds of professions and so on.

Yes. Not so many as Robert Matthew had at the L.C.C.

How many did he have?

Much much more than that of course.

Much more? Yes.

But you’re absolutely right, and I recognised it myself. I mean, by that time you see, that meant that it became much more departmentalised.

Edward Hollamby C467/22/05 F5872B Page 100

Yes. And your job title changed too didn’t it.

[INAUDIBLE] Director of Development.

Yes.

Planning and Development. Now was it Director of Planning and Development? And then, my job title changed again, to Director of Development, and that was at the later period, which was the period when I really ran into great trouble. That was only partially...well that wasn’t really because of the size of the department, though in a way that was part of it, because we were very powerful. But it was basically a schism in the Labour Party, and the...Ted Knight, who you may well have heard of, was a leading member in what was a revolt within the Labour Party, drove out the former leadership, became leader himself, and he... They saw the... Again, this problem of, what was their role, and they were seeking to establish the absolute primacy, but in this case not on a collaborative basis with the officers of the departments, because it affected all departments, but mine most of all, but one in which you do as you’re told. So, I had a great battle. I mean some of it was very unpleasant, and I had to speak up in committee, and... I mean, I can remember even when there was a direct Labour committee, and so they were, the Council was actually building for itself, and there was a special meeting, and I attended it, I didn’t normally attend that, but I attended it because they were being highly critical of the way in which one development was being carried out, on the building side this was. And they, in the committee said, ‘Well we want to see the files.’ And I had to say to them, ‘No, I’m sorry, I won’t provide you with the files.’ Now, my God! that’s a difficult thing to have to say to your bosses. Because, they had a direct interest; it would have been quite wrong to allow them to manipulate executive decisions on the basis of what they had learnt about costs and everything on the job that they were concerned with. And that was only one example of it, but ultimately they decided to cut the department into two, and destroy it really, to destroy its power. And I went to see Ted Knight, and I said, ‘What are you doing this for?’ And he said, ‘Well you’re too powerful.’ And, so in a way you see that is this process that happens every time, growth... Without power you can’t do anything; the growth of power, and then there becomes envy or competitors. And when for different reasons the politicians are involved, it was a Edward Hollamby C467/22/05 F5872B Page 101 situation that was no longer possible, but however, as in my life, good luck, it’s always appeared at the right moment, and just at that moment London Docklands came on the scene.

Well, let’s go into a bit more about Lambeth. When you were told that you had to do what you were told to do, what was your argument for not doing what you were told to do?

Well I won’t say that it was presented in just that way; that was what was behind it. No, my... I mean I wasn’t answering that precise question.

No, no.

But what I was answering, or reacting to, was the pressures which were created by that question. Well in some cases I had to strongly resist; in other cases I had to compromise, or felt I could compromise. I think that it produced that uneasy relationship which went on in that way for some months, some little while.

Mm. But as an architect and planner, what do you think your contribution was during those years at Lambeth?

The whole of the period of Lambeth?

Yes.

Oh.

Apart from the nursing home, which obviously you...

Well I think that...the quality of housing on the whole was a very high...the standard was a very high standard. I think particularly what I feel now was the most valuable achievement was the integration of conservation and new development, that was fundamental to the development plan which I produced, or produced under me, and which was expressed in a number of jobs, and I suppose the one that was most Edward Hollamby C467/22/05 F5872B Page 102 significant and most remarkable you could refer to was the Clapham Manor. It’s an area with some history, and which had some slums, which was partly due for redevelopment because of slum clearance, which was due for the provision of sites for special buildings; there we held, went through a whole process of, from the beginning, collaboration with the...there was a local Clapham Society, which was very vociferous. In fact Lambeth had about five societies, a very strong community presence. And we worked out proposals which were to conserve and retain as much of the character of the area as was possible, and provide new housing and facilities, like a day nursery and other public buildings, which were to be a part of it, all with the support of the local community. And I think that really work like, partly...no, I’m going to qualify that. Work like that, and also work like that at Central Hill, were major contributions to the way in which we should go about providing housing. At Central Hill, because there was a beautiful and unique site, preventing any building higher than the escarpment which remained tree-lined as it was, and an architecture which was, in its quality was both rather beautiful, but didn’t intrude, hugged all the contours, gave great terraces, stepped up the hillside so gave terraces to the people who lived there, who could get sun into their houses from one side, and the other side would look out over London. That was a major I think contribution to what housing could be like. Also I think that the Clapham Manor, and I think probably in the end the Clapham Manor was the most important thing, because that was an indication of the way, without wholesale clearance of things, or large-scale development, you could create what was in effect a continuing environment. So I think that, that was so. But of course, there were also individual projects which we were very successful in being able to bring about, both financially, but one of the Conservative Government Ministers that used to regularly...or...we used to have lunches every month, mayoral lunches with some of the chief officers and members, and a leading Government Minister, and one of those Conservative Ministers, when they had a Conservative administration, I remember always after, in the discussion, saying, ‘What is it about Lambeth that has this extraordinary.....

End of F5872 Side B Edward Hollamby C467/22/06 F5873A Page 103

F5873 Side A

Tape Six A, talking about the magic of Lambeth.

Yes, that’s right. Yes. We did better than most authorities at getting money out of the Government. And that was because we, whatever the, and I’m talking about the earlier period and the, well not just the earlier period of Lambeth’s life, a large part of it, it changed when the Ted Knight administration became involved, because that became much more confrontational. But the policy had always been that we would work with the Government. We were accessible and got great access to...that was partly personal, we were able to do this with civil servants and, as I say, because of this liaison with Government Ministers, of whatever political persuasion, there was...we sought always to find a way of agreeing with Government. Also, one of the things that, whenever...because Government always had this habit of saying, towards the end of a financial year, ‘Ah, some more money is available, if you can use it,’ knowing full well that most people wouldn’t be able to use it. But what we did, we had a policy of designing buildings and keeping the drawings ready, and then, if they announced that, to go straight out to tender. And so we were able to take up these magical offers for all sorts of social purposes, welfare and day nurseries, all that sort of, libraries, and they were I think impressed by this, Government. Anyway, it did us a great deal of good, and we had this very positive relationship with central Government; it was never confrontational. It did become later, and that then was, but that part of the story, the decline of Lambeth, and the decline of Lambeth is, to me is a horrifying story. I had a...

Mm, it’s still going on isn’t it.

Oh yes, yes. I mean, it’s...it’s a process that once it happens, is sort of remorseless, winds its way. And it has to get to a point where suddenly it has to start going back again. I think it’s terribly sad that, it could have been, that it became like that; it was full of such, such promise. But there it is, that’s the nature of our democratic politics.

In your post at Lambeth, you also commissioned architects, didn’t you, in private practice, to do schemes for you? Edward Hollamby C467/22/06 F5873A Page 104

Yes. Oh yes. Yes.

Who, which firms did you commission?

Oh dear dear dear.

But was it your choice? I mean did you think, so-and-so might be rather suitable?

Oh yes.

Yes.

Yes. Ted Cullinan. [PAUSE] Oh dear, this...

Well I think Darbourne and Darke, but that might not have been a very successful one.

Sorry?

Darbourne and Darke.

Darbourne and Darke, yes.

At Bowland Road.

Oh yes. Yes.

But that didn’t work out terribly well, did it?

At Bowland Road. What went wrong there? I can’t remember.

Oh, well one of the partners thinks that it wasn’t one of their best schemes. But anyway... Edward Hollamby C467/22/06 F5873A Page 105

Oh.

Yes. So you, you were a patron as well, weren’t you?

Oh yes. Yes. Well I didn’t know that they, that they thought that it wasn’t one of their best schemes; they ought to have been more vociferous about it. Trevor Dannatt. I’ll gradually think of them as I go along.

But that must have been great fun actually, it must have been great fun commissioning people to do things as well.

Yes. And...one needs to feel that there will be a sense of co-operation. It isn’t just a business matter of ordering something over the counter; there needs to be a process of actually, both sides, of commissioner and commissioned having the desire to produce whatever is the policy and the ideas of the basic organisation, if they want... And so you need to feel... But not necessarily just that they will do it the way you would do it. In fact, I don’t ever, I’ve never thought that, because amongst the groups at Lambeth I encouraged them to be, not fundamentally philosophically different, but to be distinct, so that in fact Lambeth wouldn’t get filled up with what is one standard look. That to my mind would have been disaster, and would be disastrous. And you would get that if just what I thought was imposed. So you had to be critical but also give the possibility of imaginative designing to all those people who could benefit by it, and could bring much better quality to it as a result of it. And the same with the private architects; you had to feel they will be people who will do that, but on the other hand you’ve got to give them the chance to be able to do that.

Mm. Did you have any ground rules at all, I mean did you say anything about the height of buildings or materials or...?

Oh yes. There would be, there would be a planning brief, as there would also be the technical brief, whether it was housing, or in some cases, I mean one case it was an old people’s home, I think Trevor Dannatt did, from...so it would be the welfare brief. That and the planning brief would be compiled, and would be discussed with the Edward Hollamby C467/22/06 F5873A Page 106 proposed private consultant, and provided for him, or her, as the basis for their work. So, they weren’t just given a site and said, ‘Well get on and do it’; they had something positive to work from, and certainly height of buildings would have been one of those things. It wouldn’t necessarily have been so precise as to say, they’ve got to be three storeys or two storeys or four storeys, but it might well have said, they should be no higher than so-and-so.

And would you have said, we don’t want any of those nasty lumps on tops of roofs, with the tanks or the lift?

I’m not sure that it ever became necessary to say that. I think we would have said it, had they appeared. We would have... Because, I mean, it wasn’t, somebody went away and then did it all and then brought it and handed it over and said, ‘There you are, that’s it, will you pay my fees now?’ There was a continual process. I used to hold every week design conferences, and they would be with my own staff of course, but also in the case of a private architect, not every week but a period that was sensible, they would come in with the proposals as developed so far, and we would discuss it, and then they would go on to the next stage. I think that that didn’t work so closely obviously as it did with my own staff, because they were just downstairs, but the principle was there, that it was important that the ethos of Lambeth was there in what they did.

What was the ethos?

It was, I hope, I can only say the intention was, for it to be that the architecture should be delightful, liveable with, not overwhelming, maybe exciting, related to the surroundings, or the opportunities. I mean, I’m trying to recollect now. It would have been those sort of factors that we would have wished to see, and I think always, I can’t remember a case where we ever quarrelled with anybody about that. Whether or not that remark about Darbourne and Darke, from one of his partners, was because there they had some disagreement about the height of buildings or not, I don’t know, that might have been. That was rather a critical area of Clapham, and we might well have...but I don’t know, I can’t... I mean, I knew John Darbourne so well, and had such an admiration for his work, I can’t really think that it would have been likely to Edward Hollamby C467/22/06 F5873A Page 107 have come about in that way; I can’t remember. It might have been the materials, I don’t know whether it was that, because I think that... We had a, not an absolutely precise but a general policy on materials which was that in Kennington it would be stucco or yellow brick; in Streatham it could be red brick, because Streatham was very red brick and red tiles; in Clapham and in that area of Clapham, if I remember rightly that was an area also where there was a considerable amount of red brick and we may well have said that this should be a red brick development. There were... I mean, at Central Hill where it was on the edge of the borough with a landscape setting so to speak, it was white, but that was exceptional. But generally speaking there was this view about materials, but it was always of using very high quality brickwork. With Darbourne and Darke, I can’t think it could have been about brick as against something else, because John Darbourne...

Was a brick person.

Was a brick man.

Absolutely, yes.

And my own view, not absolutely but generally, was that brick was the thing to use. And through most of Lambeth you’ll see in the things that we did, nearly always yellow brick.

Do you think that one of your abilities is that you, you like people, and if you do think that’s true, don’t you think that’s rather important, for somebody who, like you, who’s a director?

Yes. Well, I think probably...it’s difficult to see yourself quite in that way. I mean, I do like people; it doesn’t mean to say I don’t cross swords with them; you can cross swords with somebody that you like, and it will be justified by the quality of the debate, the argument, the battle itself. But on the whole, I suppose there are people that, there are certainly people I don’t like at all, and I’ve certainly crossed swords with them, and did.

Edward Hollamby C467/22/06 F5873A Page 108

Did they tend to be politicians?

Yes. Yes. Well no, there were... Of course, in a big department, also there are some problems that arise from time to time; on the whole I think very very few that I had, but I did have, I mean, one or two, and one case where there was a chap, and – his role was one in which he had to have a relationship with the public, and his temperament was so, what do you say, unbalanced, that he wasn’t good for that purpose. And I did have to persuade him, ‘You ought to go somewhere else.’ So I would have to do that sometimes, but very very seldom, very very seldom. I mean one of the reasons why I think was that a lot of people that came to work at Lambeth didn’t just come out of an advert, they came, quite a number in the first instance were L.C.C. architects who had worked with me at the L.C.C. and who came to work with me. Rosemary Jones[??] came to Lambeth, and so did a number of others, who became group leaders and...

Kate Mackintosh was one.

Kate Mackintosh of course was one. She didn’t come from the L.C.C. actually, she was...she actually worked for Southwark, and previously had been the principal designer for one of, what I thought was one of the most disastrous buildings that Southwark did, which was the equivalent almost of Central Hill. It was on a high profile edge of the borough, and it was a very multi-storey, big block of flats, and I...I didn’t think that was right. But nevertheless, Kate was...had very very definite qualities, and she was a very valuable member of the department. But she you see I respected because she had strong views, and she would fight for them, but she wasn’t, she wouldn’t...she didn’t bear resentments, so that was I think the important thing, and I think certainly most of the people I worked with, not all of them, as I found out, but most of them, were like that. So, I don’t know, perhaps I’m not a bad team leader in that way. I think I got the best out of people that you could get out of them, and that is an important thing.

How do you get the best out of people?

Edward Hollamby C467/22/06 F5873A Page 109

Well, by being sympathetic to, and giving them a responsibility, giving them the opportunity to achieve their ambitions. Some people are quite different to others, it’s amazing. There was one architect who came from the L.C.C. as a group leader, very efficient, good designer, his work was good, and effective, and I wanted to promote him. He didn’t want to be promoted. No, he just wanted to be a group leader. Now, but there were other people, and Ray Evans, who became in the latter period a chief architect in the departmentalised organisation, and who went to Northern Ireland as chief development architect there, or was it housing development architect, she was one of those people who I think responded enormously to being able to be responsible, given their head, but at the same time always able, and I think this is, always able to talk to you, always able to talk to me, about, if there was a problem, and accept criticism if there was a fair criticism. We remained, as many of the others, friends, we’re still friends throughout all that, and now. She’s a very talented woman. Done some beautiful, some of those lovely flower paintings for me, and she’s a poetess, and has amazingly produced a whole book of poems which has just been published – well, was published last year, and Ken Livingstone wrote the, and that surprised me enormously, Ken Livingstone wrote the introduction to it. I didn’t know that he was interested in poetry you see. You don’t know always.

Yes, he, he has got a soul, I would say, wouldn’t you?

Oh yes, Ken. He...it was a great disappointment I think in many ways, he could have been so much more creative as a politician, but he constantly fouled his own nest. He has to appeal somehow to the, I won’t say the lowest common denominator, but to the street group, the... He can’t get...rise above it all sort of thing.

He does seem provocative doesn’t he.

Yes, yes he does, he likes that, and I suppose he enjoys that. On the whole he would be, he was very good humoured. When... Of course he was at Lambeth you see, and in fact in the early, those early, he was one of those young guard that came in, and in the early days he I think cultivated me, and we were quite close, but...there was something wrong about Ken that, he would fall foul of the powers that be, his other councillors. You see, he distanced himself there. Then he went to the G.L.C., was on Edward Hollamby C467/22/06 F5873A Page 110 the brink of being highly successful, fairs fair, was a marvellous thing that he... But then... God! only he could make it so easy for Margaret Thatcher to remove the G.L.C.

What, because of putting the unemployment figures...?

That’s right.

Well that’s provocation isn’t it.

Yes, mm. Yes.

Do you think you’ve got a political instinct?

I think so, yes. Yes. Yes. Which has served me well.

And it is an instinct, I mean you’re just born with it?

Oh it’s just an instinct I think. But it certainly wasn’t...I never desired to become a professional politician or anything like that, but it...I think to some extent, any architect that wants to be successful has got to have that instinct, which isn’t necessarily about party politics at all, it’s about how to persuade, how to persuade that what you’re dreaming of, what you’re thinking of, is also what somebody wants. That, that is very much politics; in the sense of being pure politics, that’s what politicians do about social and legal matters, they have to persuade, and if they’re good at doing that, and it may be by their alchemy or whatever. Margaret Thatcher, I mean, who could only enrage me, could...except that I could admire her you see as well, because, partly because she was so successful, but also because she had a strong powerful determination. That in itself is an admirable thing, but she also had an overweening...I don’t know, what would you say, would you say a conceit for her? I don’t know. An overweening, an overwhelming certainty of her own greater importance than men. And all the men that I’ve known have all fallen, well, metaphorically, on their face in front of her.

Edward Hollamby C467/22/06 F5873A Page 111

What...

I’ve even heard her tell Ministers off.

With terror?

With terror, absolute terror. I’ve seen them go pale. All except Michael Heseltine, he never did.

Mm. And do you think a political instinct, apart from persuasion, is also being able to sum somebody up rather quickly, that you can see where they’re coming from?

Yes. Yes, it does involve that, yes. Yes. And that, I mean I don’t know how you get that, it’s an antennae that you’ve either got born with or develop quite quickly. I mean, I think it must be developed, but I suppose perhaps it’s already there, because, you see when I was very young, I was very shy, extremely shy. I didn’t communicate easily with people, or make friends or anything like that; I was a bookworm. But my mother decided that I should take up ballroom dancing, and my God! I thought this pansy thing that she’s... But my mother was terribly influential, to me, and she persuaded me to go to a dancing school, which was fairly nearby, and I...

It wasn’t at the Hammersmith Palais was it?

No no no, no, it was...it was the...a young man, he was the son, my own age, who became a friend for many years, we lost, during the war I didn’t see anything of him, we lost them completely, but his father was a musician, and played in Jack Payne’s band, these big bands of the Thirties, and I... And it was partly perhaps that you see, that I was always, I first became so interested in music at the Holy Innocents church, I think I mentioned that before, and then I, I’ve always been interested in music, and so perhaps that communicates. And certainly I’ve...they had a dancing school you see, and also had a band, and I was part of the band, I used to play the drums you see. And so...but dancing, I don’t know, I had thought of it as pansy you see, and then I began to like it, and mastered the skill. I was actually quite a good dancer. And so, I Edward Hollamby C467/22/06 F5873A Page 112 don’t know. But what it did was, that shyness was, that overwhelming shyness was gone. I could communicate with people then, after that. So, my mother was...

Yes. When you were at Lambeth and you were head of 750 people...

Not all the time.

Well, anyway let’s pretend, there you were, this general in charge of this huge regiment of... Did you think to yourself, golly, haven’t I come a long way since I was a teenager going to evening classes in Hammersmith?

No, I don’t think so.

You didn’t?

No, I... No. I don’t think so. I think... I look back much more now than I ever did, but I...I think then, I was always thinking ahead, it was...

Mm, too busy really to think probably.

That’s right, I think so.

Yes. But don’t you find... I mean it does seem amazing to me that you didn’t start off with many advantages, well, apart from jolly nice parents.

Yes.

But you’ve made your way, haven’t you.

Yes, but I think that, events and society and the world were such that they opened up possibilities.

Yes, the times were like that.

Edward Hollamby C467/22/06 F5873A Page 113

I was at the right time. I’ve said, I’ve always been so lucky. Somebody, I can’t remember who it was who said to me, ‘You’ve fallen on your feet again Ted.’ And I do. Or I did. So I’ve never had a boring job.

No.

I mean, I might have been... No, I... Where was I... No, I don’t think I’ve ever had a boring job. So, well that’s...aren’t you lucky to go through life and be able to say that.

Mm. Yup.

End of F5873 Side A Edward Hollamby C467/22/06 F5873B Page 114

F5873 Side B

This is tape Six B, and third interview with Ted Hollamby at his home, the Red House, Upton, Bexleyheath, and the date is the 26th of September, and it’s Jill Lever doing the interviewing.

Ted, have you got anything more you would like to say about your time at Lambeth?

Yes. I don’t think in what I was saying previously that I said so much about the sort of personal relations with some people, quite a lot really, I’ve always felt so instinctively, not that I’d thought it out, that working together was...meant that one had to understand each other, feel the chemistry, and when you had that, something came out of it that was far more than you could ever produce of yourself. And it made me think of two or three people I ought to have mentioned, who had enormous influence on me, in working, I suppose I should say for me, but with me. One of them was a young man called, well, a younger man, called Bill Kretchmer. When I say a young man, I’m thinking back of course to when I first met him, which was when I was a student at Hammersmith. He was a refugee from Nazi Germany, had got to England via Italy where he spent some time at Florence University, and then via France came to England, met me, and we seemed to like each other, did a lot of studying together. I went away to the war then, he became a broadcaster for the B.B.C., because of his languages, and even I think was the man who...he had to listen in to foreign broadcasts I should have said, rather than broadcaster, and he was the man who received the broadcast of the death of Mussolini and reported that. So, and he became a very close friend of Doris, and when I came back after the war we came together again, students again together, trying to catch up with the past, and then went into, did architectural competitions together.

With any success, did you win any competitions?

No.

No? Did you get mentioned or a place or...?

Edward Hollamby C467/22/06 F5873B Page 115

No, no we didn’t, I’m afraid. But we just, we enjoyed doing it so much, and it was good for us. So then, when I eventually went to the L.C.C., Bill Kretchmer also came to the L.C.C., and when I became a group leader he became my deputy in the group and we worked together. And I think I probably have already mentioned the schools at Hammersmith that I designed then, and he was very very closely involved with me in that, and then other works. He then had a different career. I went off of course to Lambeth; he went, worked for Coventry, for Arthur Ling, he worked with Birkin Howard, and he became also a reader at Cardiff University. And then, when I went to Lambeth and we advertised for a deputy, he applied, and got the job, and we were back again together. And it was a very creative relationship, I think we both recognised it. He was much more organised than I am. I would tend to involve myself in something deeply, probably too deeply for a manager, but that was the way I worked. He would plan things out and make things work [INAUDIBLE]. So we complemented each other extremely well. And we then, as I said, had a very good relationship there at Lambeth, until I went off to Docklands which we’ll be talking about later. The other person that had a tremendous influence at Lambeth, and who I had a very close relationship with, was Ted Happold. Ted came to Lambeth as a young engineer, because I wanted to have the best possible engineers to work with the department. It wouldn’t have been possible with structural engineering to have set up a department which was big enough to have been able to attract the highest quality of engineers, who in any case with the engineering, structural engineering profession, did tend to be much more, to use the modern word, privatised than in architecture, even at the earliest times after the war. So, I wanted Arups, who I knew well from the L.C.C. times, and had worked with, to be our consultants, but I didn’t want to have a relationship in which there was, for some professional, for a professional, who was such an important part of producing architecture in the modern world, to be distant at all. And when you’re dealing with a consultancy, over years, you wouldn’t always get the same people to deal with. There is an inevitable remoteness. So, what I arranged with Arup was for him to provide for us an engineer who would actually be seconded to us; he would be Arups but he would be there in our office, working with us, and knowing what, and growing to know, what our ethos was. Well, Ted Happold was that young man, and he I think learnt a great deal about what architecture was really about, because he was being able to work so closely with all of us architects there. And I remember how important was, very early on I went with him and our Edward Hollamby C467/22/06 F5873B Page 116 chairman, we flew out to Switzerland to the great Swiss national exhibition at Lausanne, which was enormously influential. It was there with all those great, exciting...not great, that’s the wrong word; with those exciting structures that they were providing for all the different pavilions and buildings, the colour, the atmosphere. It was really a marvellous opportunity for us to talk about architecture together, and we grew very close in that way. I think that Ted, who went on then later to make a most distinguished career and of course became professor at Bath, had absorbed something, and indeed I’ve been told that he, it was his time at Lambeth that produced for him an understanding of what architecture, modern architecture was all about, and the enormous part placed, that the structural engineer must play, in a sense as an architect too, a specialist but as part of the job of designing and producing architecture. So that was Ted Happold. And there are others of course. Different people have had such a close relationship with me in that way, that I feel that I’ve learnt so much and gained so much from it, and it’s always it seems that learning process, that developing something that you, maybe skills you have got, that they come out so much more powerfully, strongly, when in fact you have others who you share it with, and the same goes for them too, and I think it happened with those two that I’ve quoted, but there were others. And I think that perhaps, I mean it’s difficult to think about yourself in that way; others really have to see you, or, see you as you really are, but, I think I always had this ability to be able to communicate very very closely with other people, to have a feeling for their own ideas, and not to be utterly independent of them. So that I could work with people always, and always enjoyed working that way. I don’t know, but I thought it was rather important to mention them, because they were important in my career.

I mean part of your approach has always been the integrated team, hasn’t it.

Yes.

I mean you have people with different disciplines.

Yes.

Did you have landscape architects? Edward Hollamby C467/22/06 F5873B Page 117

Yes, yes.

And interior designers?

And interior designers. Indeed the whole gamut of the various designers who play a part in producing finished buildings, and that ranged right the way from town planning at one end to the furnishing and decoration of an old people’s home or a children’s home at the other end. And I was able to not do it all, but be involved in all of it. Now that’s very difficult, it must be, for many people, if you’re really organised, you would be much more distant from it I think. But I would get involved with all of them, at some stage or other. I held design conferences every week, so that the staff were always involved with me, discussing design and the work that they were doing. So, I think that was an important, for me it was a way to work which might have seemed to many people very untidy, but which I think was a way in which I could be involved in, and influencing the people who worked with me, and yet could also have the benefit of a large organisation, powerful, and able to actually achieve a great deal. And it’s very difficult to do both of those things. The ideal thing of course is when you’re small. I remember when we started at Lambeth, how marvellous it was, so, I even did designing when I was ill for a short period, when I hurt my back, on the...had a drawing-board over my bed, and the staff would come in, and I’ve got a marvellous cartoon still that Noel Field[??] drew showing me with my leg up in the air and bandaged all over, and them all waiting with their drawings to see me. I think that sums up somehow the sort of, that sort of relationship, and it made life very enjoyable, and not bureaucratic.

Mm.

I hate bureaucracy, and yet you have to have efficient management, and of course Bill Kretchmer helped to provide that.

Mm. And was he...he was there all the time that you were there?

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He was...yes, all the time, well all the time that I was there, and in fact towards the, the last year or so, perhaps the last two years at Lambeth, he became a corporate planner, and was assistant to the chief executive in that. So... His role actually expanded. But he of course benefited enormously from all the work that he had been involved in in...and the processes that were involved, in succeeding, in carrying out large programmes, and producing quality.

Mm. Why did you leave Lambeth?

Well I left Lambeth because, I would have been very happy to have finished my career at Lambeth, but when changes took place in the Labour Party in particular, and a number of members of the Labour Party that came in were determined to overthrow, not only the leadership of the Labour Party, which they did, and take it over, but also to overturn the organisation of Lambeth’s departments. And Ted Knight became the leader of the Council, and he and others decided that the broad functions that I had been involved in were to be split into two. Well not actually into...well not specifically into two, but in effect into two, and that the strategic and the town planning work, and aspects of conservation and design, related to that, would remain with me, but all architecture and all of those other aspects would be provided under another chief officer, and they recruited another chief officer. He wasn’t very effective, and actually, it sounds spiteful to say this but, I can’t even remember his name. But, for a short...this was a fairly short period. And I felt of course deeply unhappy about this. I was given tremendous support though by two politicians, Liz Duparc[ph] who was the Chairman then of the, Chairwoman of the committee, the Development Committee still existed, and Peter Mandelson. And we... I suppose their support made me think I could still be effective, and I think I was still. But, I didn’t feel the same about Lambeth. Well, then, by a happy chance, I suppose it was a happy chance, and I was then about 60, the formation of London Docklands Development Corporation came about, and...Harrison... Sorry.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

I was struggling for a pee you see.

Edward Hollamby C467/22/06 F5873B Page 119

Yes. It was Patrick Harrison.

Patrick Harrison. Rang me up and said, ‘Ted, did you know that there was this job; are you going to apply for it?’ They’d advertised for a chief architect and planner. And it hadn’t been set up even. The Bill was still going through Parliament, and there was a period, which was quite a difficult one, when there was an organisation which of course depended absolutely on that Bill which was being contested, and I think it was going through the Lords then, being, coming about. And yet, they had actually, appointments had been made. There was the chairman, the vice-chairman, and Reg Ward’s chief executive. But they advertised for two main posts, the chief architect and planner was one of them, to be part of a triumvirate which was to run the new organisation. So, I said to Patrick, ‘Oh no no no, I’m getting too old for starting to go, to get jobs, aren’t I.’ However, it made me think about it. So I did apply, and, well, I got the job. I did carefully study before I went for what was a very interesting interview with the chairman and vice-chairman, Bob Mellish was the vice-chairman, and Sir Hugh Wilson was an adviser to the committee, and there were others. And it was very informal, quite different to the Lambeth interview which had been a grand great assembly in the Council chamber. And I, I think because I did make a careful study, I was very interested in any case in the whole problem of what to do with an area where its life was taken out of it, and an enormous extent, it had never been included in any development plan, because it had the special dock uses, so the London Development Plan had no proposals for Docklands, which suddenly became an area which was of such enormous extent, I was absolutely staggered. The area of Docklands was equivalent to Kensington Gardens to the City, the other side of the City, the east end of the City, and in the south Waterloo, and the north Euston. An area which you would have thought was of a great city in itself, and very disparate, full, I found, of local communities. I’d benefited enormously by a friend of mine and Doris’s from our, who had always been close to us from our youngest days, used to go on cycling holidays together, and she was an East Ender. And I learnt, and had learnt, an awful lot about the East End, and the communities of the East End, from her and their friends that I knew. So, I...I think I had an advantage in that I had an understanding of that community nature of the East End, and yet I knew also that to produce the redevelopment of this vast area, and to do it in effect standing on your feet, there was no time to prepare the classic survey plan and operation, it all had to be Edward Hollamby C467/22/06 F5873B Page 120 done at the same time. And that was a great challenge. I remember thinking, feeling, this is a new way to plan; no longer vast years that go by where you produce the development plan and then the development plan goes for an inquiry and all the rest of it; you get on and from day one you’ve got to do it. And, I think also, because I realised how much history there was in that area, and that fascinated me, the most beautiful churches that still existed. And so, I was, I think, sufficiently fascinated, sufficiently interested and skilled and knowledgeable, that I persuaded that committee to give me the job, which they did. And I was so surprised. And I can remember going back, Doris ran the C.A.B. in Lambeth at that time, and I can remember going back, walking about and then going up to see her, and saying, ‘Well, it’s all over.’ Actually, that was before I knew. I went back to the office then, and Reg Ward rang me up and said, ‘You’ve got the job, do you want it?’ And that was it. Well the rest of the story I suppose is another story, about London Docklands, but that was...that was the...it was really because of what had happened at Lambeth, that I went to London Docklands. I wouldn’t have done it otherwise. And that produced a new lease in my life and a new, and I think a very, I think really a very creative, not last- burning[??] but major effort and influence, when I was already very very experienced.

Mm.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

You’ve got the job at L.D.D.C. You’re...

Is it on?

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

We’re going to talk about the L.D.D.C. now.

Well, I’ve spoken about my interview, and I got the job.

Could you explain who the other two people in the triumvirate were, what were their... Edward Hollamby C467/22/06 F5873B Page 121

Ah yes. The chairman of course was Nigel Broakes, and the vice-chairman was Bob Mellish, M.P. for Bermondsey. That, the three that I was joining there were themselves appointed, but as I think I said before, there was no legal basis, so in fact it was a sort of interim arrangement, and might have disintegrated, it might have come to no end. They asked Lambeth to second me, and so, at first I spent part time in Lambeth and then part time with Docklands. And this was in a period from, I got the job you see in the December, and it was in July...what am I talking about? I suppose 1981 I think it must have been, July 1981 was when powers, the powers were finalised and formalised. So there was that interim period during which I gradually moved more and more into Docklands and more and more out of Lambeth. And that was a fascinating period. It was once again very small, I can remember even when there was just a handful of staff there, all the furniture arriving, and we all took our coats off and we were all unpacking the furniture. We had...

Where was the office?

This was in the Isle of Dogs. A brilliant idea for where to place it, right in the middle of Docklands, in the middle of the, perhaps one of the most problematic areas of it, which had been designated an enterprise zone. Well the whole, the ethos of course of the setting-up of Docklands was that, Michael Heseltine, it was his basic idea, was to bring a new economic life to Docklands. And these were the Thatcher, this was in the Thatcher era, and... But Heseltine I would say, wasn’t certainly a Thatcherite, but he actually could see that it wasn’t a matter of building up Docklands as a new commercial industrial venture; it was also making a new part of London. That I wondered about, inevitably the political aspect of it, when I accepted the job. There was Nigel Broakes with his reputation as the, one of the biggest of the commercial operators, and I wondered, was he interested in quality of development and design, was it just the commercial aspect that he would have been, would be interested in? I was very apprehensive perhaps of the way in which he might look at things, and therefore see my role. But I was so pleased with the way in which we were able to work together, and I feel I ought to say this, because I didn’t think it could be like that, but he was most supportive, and even in areas where perhaps he hadn’t thought out, like conservation. I can remember only too well in those early, those months Edward Hollamby C467/22/06 F5873B Page 122 when, in the sort of twilight period before the, when we were talking about policies and so on, I was talking about conservation, and I can remember him saying, ‘But our job surely Ted isn’t sort of propping up old properties; we’re going to bring all these new offices and development and so on. It’s a completely different thing.’ And then, later on, when one of these jobs that I wanted to get done was the repair and restoration of St. George-in-the-East, the great Nicholas Hawksmoor church, we had got it done, and the stonework was pure white Portland stone again, it looked very beautiful, and the landscape in front of it, and he saw, either met me or sent for me, or something like that, and said, ‘Ted, I want to tell you, remember you told me about the importance of conservation?’ He said, ‘I came up here from the City with a number of my business friends to show them the problem, and we passed St. George- in-the-East, and they all said, “Look at that!”’ He said, ‘I hadn’t thought of it, but that was a symbol.’ And his...it was that I think openness and willingness on his part to actually learn as well as give guidance on the business side and the overall development of Docklands, that I found extremely helpful, enormously helpful. Reg Ward, the chief executive, was a very different sort of character, very, I would say explosive almost, but not explosive in the violent sense at all; he would go off in all sorts of different directions. He was quite untameable. Having had a history of being chief executive of a number of authorities, including Hammersmith of course. And what we...we disagreed about an awful lot, I felt, in spite of what I’d previously said about the way I work, I felt that I was an absolutely perfect manager compared with Reg, but, what we did share was his intense feeling for creativity. He wasn’t disciplined about it, that was the trouble, he would go off into all sorts of different directions. However, that creativity did create a sort of, not a bond but a sort of connection between us which was, which without would have been a very very difficult relationship. And these were the people that in the, with Bob Mellish of course, and Sir Hugh Wilson, who had been the previous director of the.....

End of F5873 Side B Edward Hollamby C467/22/07 F5874A Page 123

F5874 Side A

Tape Seven A.

I was saying that Sir Hugh Wilson was a member of the earliest-appointed board at that time, and of course, Hugh had been, was an old friend of mine, he’d been President of the R.I.B.A. when I was the Treasurer at the R.I.B.A., Honorary Treasurer, and I think we knew and liked each other very much, and he was an achiever, and...but I think he also liked my creativeness, he gave me tremendous moral support, but also friendly, not advice, on the contrary, he often said he was learning from me, and I thought that was marvellous. But he was that sort of man. So... Oh, could you switch.....

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

So, Hugh was a great ally of mine, and I suppose I was an ally of his, as a board member, but we I think were again... I was saying how, somehow, when something is the beginning, it’s so exciting, and it’s small, there are no boundaries, you can all talk together and work together easily. I always find that perhaps the most exciting part of any job. And it was like that, it was very, more than just like that, it was absolutely marvellous at Docklands, that feeling of, here was a great new enterprise that we were going to undertake, and of a nature which had never been undertaken before. We were escaping from the planning bureaucracy of the long periods that would elapse between policies, plans, and then carrying out, all had to be done at once. And so, it was very exciting, and very demanding, enormous hours were put in, and the small staff that we had, some of whom came from the G.L.C. at that time, specially seconded, and then many of them decided to stay with Docklands, I think most of them did. We had a barge which was moored alongside the jetty. And of course I should mention the place where we worked, it was on the Isle of Dogs. It was in an office building that Norman Foster had designed for, as to be the central, or the operational office of, I’ve forgotten the line of the steam, the ships that it was feeding, but it was a typical Foster building in many ways, two great glass planes, absolutely open-plan, a staircase came up into the middle of it. We all worked together there. It’s true, Reg, I and a colleague who was the chief surveyor, had a corner, which Edward Hollamby C467/22/07 F5874A Page 124 could be slightly curtained-off, but the ethos was, we all work together. And if anybody came, and many people coming to the office would always say, ‘It was so exciting, coming up that staircase and coming right into the middle of things.’ That was what it was like. But I’ve gone ahead a bit, because that was what it was like when it was working, but that was the office. And all our thinking then was about, where we were going to go, and what we were going to do; what projects were essential initially, and from them, what would follow. So, this was I suppose the most creative period of that whole job, so much was thought about and achieved in such a short time. I also, partly because of what I’ve said before of my understanding of the local communities there, I used to go out and, of course the Docklands pubs are absolutely marvellous, and with members of the staff, and we would meet with local, the locals who used the different pubs. And one of the things that I learnt was how tiny and tight often the communities were, so that when I was in a pub in Wapping, and I can’t remember the name of, which one it was, but I was speaking to the locals there, and we were saying how a road that the G.L.C. had proposed, which was going to cut right through all the communities that we would demolish, through Limehouse, and they said, ‘Limehouse? Well that’s nothing to do with us, we’re Wapping.’ And one realised just how parochial those communities were. Very very strong in their sort of community feeling locally, but in fact quite unable to cope with the idea of thinking about Docklands as a whole. So, that period was one of so much finding out, thinking about the future, and the way it would[??] go/work[??], and also starting on projects, many of which would be key ones to give some indication of where we were going. Of course, one of the first problems that had to be tackled was the enterprise zone itself, and that was a problem for me, because the enterprise zone meant enormous freedom for developers, but the detailed enterprise zone regulations, the scheme, had to be established, and so I was directly involved with the Ministry in establishing those regulations. The irony of it is that we established a height regulation, which was later to be the reason I think for my deep disagreements with Reg Ward and perhaps some other members of the board, but I think mainly with Reg, when success had perhaps gone to their heads, and they were, together with the American banks, envisaging the development of Canary Wharf, in a way completely different to what we had envisaged, and which in the design guide that we produced, showed a completely different sort of concept, no great high buildings competing with the City of London. It’s very interesting, this ethos, this idea that somehow, I felt Edward Hollamby C467/22/07 F5874A Page 125

Docklands had to be a series of places, it couldn’t be one place, to the east of London, but adding up to a new world, and that it shouldn’t compete with London as a whole. And then there was the view of some others, and Reg in particular, that it should be somewhere that actually competed with the City of London, and said, we are competing with you. And so, it was to be a new City, and I felt that was wrong, we disagreed about that. But it was later on perhaps in my time there, and the board by that time were willing to, wanted to go along with what seemed to be the enormous success of Docklands, the banks all wanted to come, American banks in particular, from the City. And so, my view...

Well what was your sort of vision? I mean it was, it was there in the design guide presumably.

Yes.

That...

Yes. Yes.

What would you say that was then? Not to compete with the City.

Not to compete with the City.

Not towers that would be...

Well, I have to go back to one of the things, the important aspects of that, those first few months, the discussions we had about what sort of environment new Docklands should have. One of the things that was so important was water. This was absolutely unique. There was no other part of London, perhaps few cities in the world if any, where there was a whole succession of water basins now disused which would, could become the setting for development of the land around them. The previous view that had existed before L.D.D.C. came into existence were, they were to be filled in and they would be land. And that we said was absolutely wrong, and I think that was the most important creative decision we made. Because whatever else is good or bad Edward Hollamby C467/22/07 F5874A Page 126 about Docklands, the marvellous thing about it is that it is that water city, that those, that early decision made certain of. And so, it was really their thinking about how to create a new environment which respected the water areas, and used the wharves, the tongues of land, and the surroundings to the water, as the areas for building, sometimes stepping into the water itself, but being low-rise. The marvellous warehouses in the north of the Isle of Dogs were to be rehabilitated and to take on a whole lot of uses, that was what was envisaged then, and there would be commercial uses on the wharves, long slender wharves which existed in the Isle of Dogs there, one of them called, of course was Canary Wharf, that was from the previous trade that existed in the Isle of Dogs.

Oh, not to do with canary birds, but the Canary Islands.

Canary Islands, yes. The other one we called Heron Wharf. Now, it had never been called Heron Wharf or anything like that before, and the reason why was, there, in those early days looking at these great empty spaces, beautiful it was as well, because also the sky, because it was so, not hemmed in as the rest of London is, the sky became very very important, you were aware of it. And you got these great, vast areas of still water, and tremendous skies. And one of these wharves, you could see every morning the herons lined up alongside on them, and fishing from there, and so we called it Heron Wharf. And that really also reinforced my view, which others shared, and certainly Hugh Wilson did, that those water areas, and what could go with them, was the most significant thing about Docklands. So, it was a view of, which was of buildings around the water, which were of the scale and height of the old warehouses, or smaller, sometimes as with Heron Wharf itself, quite rakish sort of buildings that would have a flavour of, a nautical flavour about them. That was the sort of thing that we wanted to see. But also, a whole landscape and waterscape which was integrated, and that it wouldn’t just be like factory estates. So that was the sort of environment that we envisaged for the Isle of Dogs, much more small-scale, much more intimate, in those days, and that appeared in the design guide.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

Edward Hollamby C467/22/07 F5874A Page 127

So we appointed Gordon Cullen to, partly I suppose because we wanted him to, with his enormous gift for illustration, to be able to show that sort of very romantic sort of reconstruction of the Isle of Dogs that we were looking for, the old world with the new. There wasn’t so much of the old, but the use of the water and buildings, which were, had a nautical flavour about them. And Gordon Cullen of course, being Gordon Cullen, did more than that, he introduced his ideas into it as well, and that was very creative, and I think resulted, that Isle of Dogs design guide was a most valuable, as well as a really rather beautiful document to have produced as a guide to developers. And then, what sort of developers? Because, you weren’t able to plan who the developers were going to be. They would either be people who saw the chance and the opportunity, they might be big businesses, but they weren’t at first, they were small businesses, and a whole area of the entrance to the West India Docks, which had been, which were, had previously, I think it was the police control buildings, it was a complete quadrangle of buildings, but very low-rise, historical buildings which we made into, I think we designated, that was our first conservation area. The idea of designating conservation areas in reconstructing Docklands so was one of the earliest things. And into that accommodation, all sorts of small firms came in. And indeed, one of them, Stitch Design, Barbara Marriott, who came in with a firm to produce beautiful designs of stitch-work, and, we had such a close relationship with them, and it’s a fascinating thing. Barbara is coming here to Red House with a whole group of her friends later, in, next month. We’ve always remained friends from there. That was a developer. And that sort of relationship was possible because they were small, they were also taking the opportunity, the excitement perhaps of it, of a new environment. The risks that were involved for them as well. But it was those small developers that really started it off. And then of course it grew, was more successful. What went on then from then was, we became more organised, and I was able to recruit young students, just leaving Sheffield University, who became part of the team, and, we had then a small team of planners. Peter Dean[ph], who had been at the G.L.C., very much involved in Docklands from the earliest there, and then, and several others who had come in then, together with these young men who, and one young... Oh, and I should mention of course, because that was critical to it, what I wanted to do was not, was not to isolate ourselves from the boroughs, because the boroughs were still the overall planning authorities, but they had no development plan for Docklands, because as I explained before, there never were any development Edward Hollamby C467/22/07 F5874A Page 128 plans. But it was important politically also that there wasn’t a barrier between this new authority imposed on the area, and them. And so, I arranged for, from the planning departments of Tower Hamlets, Newham and Southwark, for a planner to be seconded to come and work in our team, it was like the Ted Happold thing again.

Yes.

And they came in. Myra Barnes[ph] was one of them, she came from Southwark. And they were...this worked for some little while, and we had very good relations at the planning level, even though...and very good relations politically with Southwark for a period, but cool relations politically with Tower Hamlets and with Newham. But, of course there were representatives of those boroughs on the board of the L.D.D.C. It hadn’t got to the point where in fact there was great hostility; there was from the G.L.C., but even there, we... In one of the other things apart from the water areas that we had realised were so significant in Docklands, was the lack of communications, and so the idea of the Docklands Light Railway was born. And it was the first overland railway to be built in London I think for, oh, 80 years, 100 years or something like that.

Why did it have to be overland?

Well partly because of the topography, and partly because the railway viaducts from the, not the London system, but the mainline railways, or, they weren’t always the mainline, but the branch lines, and the old lines that extended into Docklands were overground, and that was because it was all marshland originally.

Mm.

So, you had these very fine arched viaducts as a typical part of the system. It seemed to me that the advantage of that was that, these means of communication weren’t pushed underground out of sight, and where you travelled like a mole, but you travelled seeing the surrounding city, or as it was of course, the docks, which they were passing through. And then, from that, also, because it had, where it had to connect up, it had to also pass either under or over roads, so you either had an Edward Hollamby C467/22/07 F5874A Page 129 underground system or you had an overground system. And I thought this will be one of the ways in which people can see and be excited by Docklands. So, we proposed a plan which was actually for an east-west communication which would eventually get to Newham, Beckton, and a north-south communication which would cross it at the Isle of Dogs, coming right down to Island Gardens, opposite Greenwich, and in the north, joining up with the railway, the normal railway system. We expected that perhaps one half of that we’d get approval from the Government. However, we got approval for the whole idea. We were exultant actually, we thought this was absolutely marvellous. And there, at the Isle of Dogs, these two lines met at high level, and crossed over the water. There was a long argument, and of course we had looked at other alternatives, like a tramway system which operated on the roads, but we were trying to make a public transport system, and eventually decided that, it was decided, because a special body was set up, and the G.L.C. was involved in that, and London Transport, to devise the system. So, the system that was eventually devised was for then very advanced thinking, of a computerised railway, which would be controlled at a main control centre, would have no drivers on the trains but would have, and I always thought this was a most important thing, and I’m sure it’s even more important these days, was to have a guard who would be moving throughout the whole system. So there was no isolation of people in carriages or anything like that. And he was the operator. So therefore it was both the system and the means of the structures to design for it to operate on, and as I said, I thought, this is the great opportunity to see if you’re travelling in Docklands, the excitement of passing over all these water areas, and what was the emerging development, and of course we got marvellous drawings from...that were made, of the water areas of the docks, and the buildings all round them, and these bridges and viaducts passing across them with their trains. And that was approved, and came about. And then, again, the.....

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

The body that was set up, which comprised the G.L.C., London Transport and the L.D.D.C., to bring about the Docklands Light Railway, had a number of committees of course, and one of them was a design committee, of which I was the chairman, and my vice-chairman was John Parker, who had previously worked for me at Lambeth, on Brixton town centre, went back to the G.L.C., and we came together. That was Edward Hollamby C467/22/07 F5874A Page 130 really about the only area in which there was any co-operation with the G.L.C. But it was extraordinary there, because there was a common interest that, in spite of all the politics, we worked together, and very constructively. So, that was the Docklands Light Railway. There were some other initiatives that I think were important, and I wish some of them had been carried through more, but it was not to be.

Like what?

Such as the initiative in art, public art, and I established a programme of providing a sculpture throughout...it was intended to be throughout Docklands. It started first of all in Architectural Heritage Year, and Docklands played quite an important role in that, in fact one of the, there was a whole pavilion with an exhibition, a major exhibition, of Docklands proposals and work, which was the focus of the Docklands role in Architectural Heritage Year. But also out of that, and together with it, were a whole number of initiatives in sculpture which were in the area within the West India Docks, surrounding the pavilion, on the dock edge sometimes, and sometimes close to the pavilion itself. And out of that then, I conceived the idea of having a role for sculpture throughout Docklands, celebrating history but also bringing images of the future to... Could we stop for a moment? Oh damn!

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

So, as I was saying, I had this idea of establishing sculpture, public sculpture, throughout Docklands. One of the themes was to be the great engineers, and two or three of those who had built the great dock works at the London Docks and also the, on the southern side, Southwark Docks there, the sculpture, and I designed bases for them, and worked with the sculptor again as I had with Henry Moore, were carried out. And many more were to be devised so that one could actually trace the history of the men who had made the great works of the docks, which we had preserved by using them for the new development. And also, in addition to that, then the other works which were exciting and enjoyable in themselves, and were, as I think I’ve said before, looking ahead to the future, and by their modernism expressing that, which was as I saw Docklands; it was both recapturing the marvellous history that it had, but also not of becoming stuck in that, and looking ahead into a new world. So, that went Edward Hollamby C467/22/07 F5874A Page 131 some way, and quite a lot of sculpture was produced. But unfortunately at the end of the day it wasn’t...I wanted to set up a public arts trust for Docklands, and that ran into opposition in Government, and I’ve never been able to find out why, but they, the Government department that was responsible for L.D.D.C. resisted it, and I became, when I retired, a consultant but not any longer in a position where I could so influence policies like that, and it died. And I think that’s a great shame, because it seems to me that art involved in the public, in the world in which people move around, and which can help them to think about what their environment is about, is much more significant than.....

End of F5874 Side A Edward Hollamby C467/22/07 F5874B Page 132

F5874 Side B

Tape Seven B.

I think one can then start to talk in Docklands about the period which, after the first excitements, after the great policy decisions which meant that, the conservation of the water areas meant the most important expression to what Docklands’ future would be, after the ideas, the provision of public transport through the Docklands Light Railway, and bus services that never existed which were brought into the Isle of Dogs in particular, but also other parts of Docklands, and the ideas of conservation and the importance of history, life I suppose settled more into developing these policies, and a range of strategies were adopted. But the use of the word strategies is interesting, because here we had, as indeed we had right from the beginning, the necessity to raise money, which wasn’t going to be...which was partly Government money, for infrastructure, and there was a massive amount of infrastructure. None of the systems for drainage, water supply, gas, electricity, any of those things existed on the scale that was needed to feed the area when it was no longer just docks. And that had to come from Government expenditure, Government grants. But development had to come from attracting entrepreneurial development, raising its own capital. I think first we thought that much of this would, should come from the City of London, but it didn’t; it came from individual developers. And it’s very interesting I think that that perhaps, when one goes back into English history, it’s always been those freebooters who have somehow produced the initiatives and the actions that have become important and significant. You know, you can go right back to Drake and...but perhaps that’s too fanciful. But it was in developers small and large that the capital came for the development of Docklands. But of course, these developers all had their own ideas about what they wanted to do. In fact, in a world in which, I’ve referred to all the infrastructure, but the planning infrastructure, the circulation system, the roads, the railways, the water itself, how could they be integrated so that in fact they weren’t just self-defeating and creating more problems than they solved? So you had to have planning. And here was a situation in which entrepreneurial development and planning had to go hand-in...not so much hand-in-hand, although they had to jolly well be able to grasp hands, and influence each other, all at the same time as it was actually being carried out. And this was, as I referred to very much earlier, for me, Edward Hollamby C467/22/07 F5874B Page 133 utterly new. All my past experience and my past understanding had been that you carefully plan and then you carry out and you raise the finance and you carry out what you had planned to do. And one, the end product, is often years away from that which started it off. That wasn’t to be at all. And I suppose at first I thought that this was really going to be very very difficult for me to be able to handle. In fact I found it extremely exciting, and liberating in a way, because one felt, here is a new world you’re entering into, and you’ve got to be effective in it. Perhaps it...that sort of reference to Drake and freebooting and all the rest of it, was something that was coming into me as well. But I did see the need for being able to attract entrepreneurial investment, and yet at the same time order it in such a way that it didn’t prevent other development which was equally important, and did add up in the end in some way or other to a positive whole. So, what we set out to do was, we had done for the Isle of Dogs, the Isle of Dogs Design Guide, and then we set out for each area of Docklands, recognising that they were to a degree quite distinct area development strategies. I think Reg Ward devised a different name for them, so that they wouldn’t sound too much like planning, but that’s what they were. So in each area developers would see what the desires and intentions of the corporation was in relation to the overall renewal of it. For instance, areas which, and whole buildings and, which had to be refurbished, not demolished; other areas which had to be dramatic; areas which in fact had to respect the scale of their surroundings. Those sorts of things were all illustrated, and they weren’t absolutely binding, because they all had to be eventually decided in relation to each individual proposal, but which were a guide to developers as to the sort of environment they were expected to play a part in. And it was on the whole I think very effective. I don’t know whether it’s that things at the earliest stage of them, when there is a sort of revolutionary fervour you might call it about proposals, infects everybody. I can remember the housing developers, and with Docklands it had been thought that the first stages of major development would be commercial, but in fact it was the housing developers who were the freebooters who came along to participate in Docklands and took the leading roles at the beginning. But they came along with all the inhibitions of their previous undertakings and strategies and their designs and the way they thought housing would be, housing for sale in Britain. Housing for sale, that’s another important aspect of this. We had realised that in the East End where such enormous proportions of the housing was in housing for rent, that it was absolutely necessary to counterbalance Edward Hollamby C467/22/07 F5874B Page 134 this to a degree with housing which was for sale. Housing for rent still was to go on, that would be through housing associations, but housing for sale was to be a very very important aspect, because we saw, for example, why did so many young people leave Newham? It was to move out and to have a home instead of having a flat. And so, when we devised the Beckton scheme in the east of Docklands we there had about five different house builders, each one we expected to do their part, slightly differently, their own thing, that would be good, because one of the dullest things, no matter how good, has always been huge-scale quick developments that produce so much repetition that they’re dull, and don’t have the excitement they might have seemed to have had on the drawing-board when it’s all very small.

Mm.

And so, we got them all together. And Beckton was the first. But before that, Nigel Broakes had a brilliant idea, he got them all together with Reg and myself and one or two of the other officers for a dinner in west London, I think it was over his office, and at that made this appeal to them to come into Docklands, but to co-operate and to play their part in achieving the new sort of Docklands we wanted to produce. And it was tremendously successful. So, all these housing developers, in Beckton in the first instance, came together, and produced housing which was quite different to what they had been producing, left to themselves, elsewhere in the country. And when in fact the first housing, there was a public opening of it at Beckton, and there was a grand sort of celebration and all the public was there, and there were speeches and so on, and I can remember the, we had a square which we had designed, but, we didn’t want just one designer to be doing the whole square, so one house-builder had done one side and one had done the other. There were factors which meant that scale and so on had to be common, but the way, the sort of housing, was different. And I can always remember the managing director of one of the firms coming and saying, ‘Which is ours?’ And I thought that was a tremendous success, that, because it meant they didn’t recognise that old old repeated standard thing that they were providing far in the north, right in the south, all over England, and you can see it to this day. So, that way of working together was something that was established very early on, and particularly with the housing developers, and some among them in particular were very very co-operative, employed good architects. I mean that was the other thing of Edward Hollamby C467/22/07 F5874B Page 135 course we always asked them to do, was themselves to appoint good firms of architects to produce their image, but in a different way to what they had been producing in the past. That of course went further as time went on, so Beckton, which in a sense had been almost you might say a combination between a garden city, yes I think perhaps...I was going to say garden city and suburbia, but I think I would say it was more like garden city, but in Docklands, with large areas of public open space, and a new shopping centre. All...that was very much, it was a great success story in terms of what was then happening, was that, those young people who had been moving out of Docklands and the East End generally, there was something to come back into, something to come into, or stay into, particularly for the younger couples who were getting married and so on, and having families, they could see a future for a family living there. And that was an absolute revolution compared with what the history since the war of Docklands had been, at least after that first period of re- occupation after the Blitz and so on. Then it moved of course into the areas that were much more already densely developed, with history; Beckton was very free, it was very open, it had been marshland, but some areas, in Bermondsey and Southwark and in, on the other side of the river in Wapping and Limehouse, were areas where there were very significant groups of buildings, streets, which were full of history, and we wanted those to be rehabilitated, to be converted. And that also brought developers in, sometimes different sorts of developers, but sometimes those housing developers who had been involved with their two-storey semi-d’s so to speak, came in to carry, work out there, notably firms like Barratts and others who would have always been thought of in terms of two...a semi-detached suburban development. And that involved very very close working with the staff in the Docklands office, dealing with the historic aspects of conversion and development. And so, we had developed then from that the idea, we’d had the area strategies, which indicated where areas of housing development ought to be. In Wapping for example, where the whole of the London docks had been filled in, we then unfilled a whole section along the dock wall, running right into Limehouse as a continuous canal, and that had the job of actually draining the area and holding the water whilst the tidal Thames came up and then receded, and it could be left to wait[??], which was a vital thing in that...much of the areas of Docklands, drainage is a very great problem for that reason. And yet at the same time provided an amenity running right the way through the housing. And then housing was to be alongside and running off from the canal. And the whole of Edward Hollamby C467/22/07 F5874B Page 136 what we call Western Dock was developed in this way, but again, not by one developer, but by a number of developers, so that there were different architectural expressions to the housing that was taking place amongst them, and there was very...one very fine group, the square and a whole set of steps descending down to the canal, within which, in the square was a very fine head of one of the great engineers standing on a granite column, taken from one of the old warehouses that had been demolished. So we actually reopened water where it had even been filled in. Elsewhere providing housing round the basins, like Shadwell Basin, where we had envisaged colonnaded... The whole of the area round the basin had to be accessed for public use, the water areas were there for and were used by a body which was giving training and also interesting things to do to young people in the water itself, and in sailing, learning to sale, learning to handle boats, and so you go the quayside running right the way round it, pedestrian all the way round it, and colonnaded housing running all the way round it, which Richard MacCormack came in to design, and we worked together very very closely on that. So, these developments were all developing differently, in different ways, because I felt that it as so vital that there was no standardised expression to Docklands over this vast area in the different areas of the docks that were being carried out for development. Then, of course there was commercial development as well, followed on on a bigger scale, and I suppose the major concentration for that was in the Isle of Dogs. I’m not quite sure whether earlier I didn’t dwell on the problem, which was a problem for me, of what was the right sort of development for the Isle of Dogs, but this was the period when Docklands was being, becoming successful, and there was an interest being shown, particularly in American banking firms in the City, in not being able to expand in the City but coming into Docklands. Now I felt that this could have been accommodated in a way which was physically more, not...I wouldn’t say small-scale, but which was within the scale of traditional Docklands. Reg Ward, and I think some of the developers themselves, saw it as the opportunity to be a rival city to the City, and so we got...the old design guide was thrown out of the window almost, certainly for that part of the Isle of Dogs, and we got Canary Wharf and the gigantic high building which could boast that it could be seen in Kent, and that was also higher than anything in the City of London. And I felt this was utterly wrong for Docklands. But that was really the only part I think of Docklands where that conflict between ambition to serve commercialism dominated the eventual architectural scene. I think in all other areas Edward Hollamby C467/22/07 F5874B Page 137 the character of the particular area was much more respected. But of course it was easier to do that I suppose you could say where there was much more historic building, and where, we had established a whole programme by then of conservation areas, which by their very nature established, together also with extensive listing of historic buildings, which then, by their very nature, were an important factor in conditioning the sort of designs. So, you got things like Butlers Wharf, and you got the narrow streets, the granite paving still, even when new offices and residential uses were coming into the old warehouses. There, one of them, which has a splendid arcade running out onto the river opposite the City, I think is a particularly exciting, but also marvellous expression of what change can bring without destroying history. So you had the dock which came out into the Thames, filled in for the car parking underneath, and then a great arcade of enormous, very considerable height, the two blocks of the warehouses curling towards the Thames and linking them together, this arcade with shops and restaurants on the ground floor, or the deck floor one might call it, sculpture within it, and residential at the highest levels looking out over the Thames and the surroundings. These sort of contributions I think were, not entirely new, but were certainly new to many of the developers who participated in them. And there were great opportunities for I think the architects of Britain, because it wasn’t just London architects, but, I suppose it was mostly London architects who got these jobs, but it was where...architects were being used by developers for all this work, and I think that that in itself was a very important thing to have come about, that in fact the development world, which often has been...treated architects rather, as rather expensive additions, was using them to get the most imaginative sort of results. We also in these plans had areas alongside the Thames which we had designated for public access, so that gradually what was building up was pedestrian walkways, which didn’t all just run alongside the Thames, which would have been very dull, but which sometimes met buildings which themselves were intruding onto the river and then it went back into the hinterland round them, back onto the Thames again. So constantly different views would come about, and it always seemed to me that, I’d come from Hammersmith where the riverside there is perhaps one of the most attractive features, Hammersmith and Chiswick, that area there, and when I was young there, there were buildings which did just that, and so you had to go away from the Thames, and you always got these much more interesting views, and it seemed to me that that was the one thing that we needed to do, in order to make the river Edward Hollamby C467/22/07 F5874B Page 138 interesting and not just a continually similar experience wherever you were, which became boring. And on the river frontage then were often housing developments of some very considerable scale, some of them very, I think, interesting pieces of architecture in their own right. Ziggurats and buildings which stepped down from great height, but which weren’t just blocks, so there was a lot of sculptural form to some of the more dominant buildings that were created on the riverside. I think these are all the positive aspects, and naturally I suppose I tend to look for those in that which has emerged in Docklands. My own appointment there was to end in 1985, ’86 I think, about then, and then I had a period of a couple of years, two-and-a-half years as a consultant, but of course with no, not so much influence on policies. And I think though, it’s probably not for me to say it, but yet, looking back I can see that where the architect is in the role[??], I always...I was there to, in a top role to advise the board. If you had the architect in that position, the architect-planner in that position, tremendous things can be achieved, because you form a rapport, and you have common interests, and you’re understood. If the architect is a servant who just does what he’s told, or makes an interesting design out of something which of course is fundamental to the design, which is the policy which has brought it about, then in fact enormous opportunities for both positive change, but also for thinking big, are lost. And it’s very sad that that often happens, and I think to a large extent, not entirely but to a large extent, that happened in Docklands, and I feel slightly sad to see it. A lot of the things I think that could have been done have been forgotten and left by the wayside, and...

Why did it work in the first four years perhaps, and then not?

That thing I’ve referred to earlier, rather exaggeratedly, as revolutionary fervour I think. When things are small, when the communication between chairman and board and the officers who are bringing it about are so close, it’s possible to both envisage and bring about things so much more quickly, and with a joint understanding of them. As things get bigger and bigger, and more and more complex I suppose, that, it becomes more and more necessary, or seems to become more and more necessary... I mean, that was my lesson that I learnt at Lambeth, that you get bigger and bigger in order to be able to solve the problems which have been discovered and you’re attempting to solve, but of course as you do so you create more problems in the very Edward Hollamby C467/22/07 F5874B Page 139 scale and reduction in easy communication that you’ve lost. So, I think that’s an element in it. I... Different places I suppose have different reasons for this, but it’s amazing how different, different areas at different times have risen. You see it in universities don’t you. Liverpool School of Architecture at one time I can remember when I was younger was the great school, Cambridge nothing; then Cambridge became important. The A.A., which was tremendous after the war and before, just before the war, when under Furneaux Jordan and then it declined and became, turned in on itself. This seemed to be features of all great endeavours, and...

It’s also to do with the people, isn’t it, that, the right person at the right time.

I think that is also a very important aspect of it too, yes. You have to have I think...it’s not that you want to be undisciplined at all, but you have to have a bit of that freebooting fervour, to want to do things which aren’t already established as the routine, to get out... You haven’t got routines in other words. And that brings out the best in the imagination. I think that probably it’s that. I mean it’s not just Docklands at all, it’s everywhere, that this always happens, and then you have to have a rebirth again.

But at Docklands you...did you have to use a lot of persuasion to get the developers to use good architects for the schemes? I’m thinking of architects like Nick Lacey.

Yes.

That lovely, those lovely flats.

Yes.

Was it your job to persuade the developers to employ the right architects, or the interesting architects? Edward Hollamby C467/22/07 F5874B Page 140

I think probably in the first place it certainly was, but not always. It was sometimes that the entrepreneur, the developers themselves, if they weren’t well-established ones, would themselves be.....

End of F5874 Side B Edward Hollamby C467/22/08 F5875A Page 141

F5875 Side A

Tape Eight A.

That meant we were having an influence, and for example, when I was talking about Canary Wharf, Heron Wharf, which we, I think is a highly successful and which was designed by Nick Lacey, absolutely the right thing, but also by a developer who wasn’t a big name at all, but who had commissioned this younger, imaginative architect for an authority who wanted to see that sort of thing. So we all saw things in the right way, and Nick Lacey made a marvellous job of it. I mean Heron Wharf is what I thought that more and more of the West India Docks ought to have been like. But in some cases though of course, and certainly later, developers would come along with their own architects; when I say their own architects, having appointed architects or having wanted to appoint architects. Sometimes we would advise them by giving them names of different firms, and sometimes they would come along and say, ‘This is our architect,’ and we would say, splendid. Because more and more they were using good architects.

Mm.

And I think that that must be an important lesson always in a planning authority’s experience and in their activity, to see how to get the executives who will carry out things, are people, not who will all see things in the same way. I mean we used to have tremendous arguments, and that is enormously important, that the differences of opinion, until and unless they become fundamental, are valuable in themselves in creating the rich variety you might say of human experience and expressing it. That is something that I really always felt is so absolutely vital, and which makes one suspicious and not wanting to achieve what technically can be so easily achieved in modern-day society, which is vast repetition, and vast repetition may be commercially and industrially the most economical, but it is not economical in psychological and social terms. It’s in fact very damaging. No wonder so many tall buildings are being torn down, or people want to tear them down, because the repetition of the standard has produced something that is boring and monotonous, no longer the excitement of those original buildings which were individual and different. Edward Hollamby C467/22/08 F5875A Page 142

Mm. Would you say that Docklands has been a success story, or a qualified success perhaps?

Yes, I think, I certainly think it has been. And perhaps the best measure of that would be that, whereas it was born within a period in which there was sharp political antagonisms, particularly between the London boroughs of Docklands and the Government, and that the very actions of bringing in new sorts of development, for new sort of urban life, into a very old well-established environment, albeit one in which so many people were leaving, was one in which there was inevitable conflict. So that there was not an easy, well certainly far from it, far from being an easy collaboration, between the politicians and boroughs responsible for those areas, much wider areas embraced parts of Docklands, and the L.D.D.C. But as time went on, I think that the, that changed. I mean Docklands Forum was the main agency for continual attack on Docklands, and most of it I think was...it was politically slanted, but it was...had it been accurate and fair, it might have been more understandable, but I think it was quite reactionary in that it was both trying to look back at what life was like when it was in the docks, that people were like, the old communities, no middle class, no...which was not true of course in the very early period of the docks, when people of different classes did live side-by-side, but there was this strong political war which was going on with the Thatcher Government, and we were agents of the Thatcher Government. But that as I say gradually changed. I think the very successes of Docklands produced that change. It never disappeared, certainly not in the Docklands Forum, although that became not so virile, or not so antagonistic as formerly, but particularly in the Docklands communities as they changed. And I think that, I mean, I can remember occasions when I had taken my friends as visits to Docklands, and talking to local people, and I remember one lady who had lived in the Isle of Dogs all her life saying how, ‘Well, after all it isn’t so bad as we thought it was going to be.’ And I think that a change came about in that way. As to whether then... That was in sort of the local sense. In the global sense, the bigger sense, yes I think it was a great success, because I believe it showed that it was possible to marry entrepreneurial abilities and assets, particularly financial, with planning, to be able to carry out development perhaps more quickly than it would be in any other way. And I think that as a result of that, though one has yet to see whether in fact in the forms in Edward Hollamby C467/22/08 F5875A Page 143 which it might develop, that the Thames Gateway, which is now the Government’s policy for renewal of the old communities and areas, many of which are very much poorer, like north-east Kent going down to Chatham and Rochester, that...and on both sides of the Thames of course, Erith, all these areas way beyond Docklands, and it can point the way in which, and I think has made it possible for Government and other agencies, and the local authorities, who haven’t been antagonistic to that. But on the other hand, they haven’t had imposed on them a body which was going to vigorously carry it out. So one wonders whether in fact, that perhaps not all the lessons have been learned. What for example makes me worry is Woolwich, where a once flourishing community with the Royal Arsenal, and the military barracks, the military presence there, with the decline of both, the same situation as the docks, as existed. And now Woolwich is nothing like what it was when it was a thriving community; it’s very poor, its shopping is poor, everything except the market has gone down. And it demonstrates I think how you need an agency with a tremendous amount of power to be able to move, rather than the more conventional strategic planning, leaving it then to others to carry it out, can operate. So, yes I think it’s had an enormous influence and has been a success story in its own right, and yet also I don’t think perhaps the lesson, that you need an agency with power to actually carry it out, a good deal of imposition if you like, to actually succeed. So, I suppose my answer is, yes and no. I think it’s a great example, but whether or not it’s going to have a more permanent influence, I’m not at all sure.

Well, in your Docklands, London’s Back Yard Into Front Yard...

Yes.

Which, and I’m looking at the paper of a lecture that you gave.

Yes.

You say, you talk about, where’s the civic embellishment.

Yes. Yes. Well that was one of the criticisms. No, you’re quite right. One of the criticisms that I had was that there were...all the development was of better housing, Edward Hollamby C467/22/08 F5875A Page 144 places to work, environment, but there were no town halls, no civic places in which people could say, or feel, this is my town.

Mm.

And which would, just as...I mean, in a way, looking out from Island Gardens across at Greenwich and the Queen’s House there, to some extent Docklands was able to encapture some of those things, and the grandeur of them, because they were there, Docklands was on the river. But just in the same way as those grand places at Greenwich for example are going to be part of the, a major part of the home of Greenwich University, where the university’s in Docklands, it’s that sort of question that I was raising there. And that needs something more than that development agency. A development agency won’t do that. It’s the civic pride, the sort of thing that manifested itself in, by entrepreneurs in the great cities of Britain in the 19th century, the end of, towards the end of the 19th century, the Birminghams, Liverpool, Leeds, those places. It was because they felt pride in their places. Now, I don’t know whether that, and I don’t think that has taken place. And I think that’s essential that that takes place, in order that in fact it has a soul perhaps as well as a heart.

Mm, yes.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

The other aspect is of course much more far-reaching, and that is the Thames itself. I was, I think, I suppose I was still a student then, was a member of the Thames Barrage Association, in favour of establishing a barrage across the Thames, which would stabilise the waters through London, and also would provide communication north to south across the Thames. Docklands isn’t one entity. I’ve said before, it’s a number of communities, but also north and South Docklands are utterly different. They’re separated by the Thames. After the Tower Bridge, there is no bridge until you get to Dartford, and there’s no communication, except the communication that you got at Woolwich through the Woolwich Ferry, which I used to use a great deal when I worked there. And the tunnels of course, Blackwall Tunnel and the other tunnel which is running...Rotherhithe Tunnel. But they are just streams of traffic, they aren’t Edward Hollamby C467/22/08 F5875A Page 145 ways of communicating, you can’t walk across from one to the other. Now I always felt that the Thames had got to be tamed, and that the tidal Thames had got to be, well tamed, so that it didn’t separate the north and south, as the river widens after Tower Bridge, in the way that it does. It’s interesting that way back in the 19th century the cut across the Isle of Dogs was made because the sailing ships found it so difficult to get round the Isle of Dogs, round the Thames, and so the canal system was to cut right across the top so that they could get through. Of course that happened just as the age of steam came in and they were quite successfully able to go round. But the Thames therefore it seems has always been a barrier, not a uniting factor. In the rest of London it unites, it isn’t a barrier. And one of the reasons for this was that the Port of London Authority had a by-law or a power which prevented any bridges being built which would limit their ability for, I think it was called Titan, a great crane, floating crane, which they had passing up and down the river, and which of course would stop also the big ships that came up to the docks. Of course that’s why the bridges weren’t built in the first place. But the docks no longer had the big ships coming up to them, there was Titan now and again coming up, and there was also the ship which is moored off of Butlers Wharf there, which had to go to have its hull scraped every few years. Now there were only two reasons therefore, these two rather esoteric reasons for establishing a whole regime for the Thames, which was in fact holding back the bringing together of the communities of north Thames and the southern side of the Thames, and I felt that what was needed was to get rid of that, to establish bridges and connections, and also take advantage of the size of the island to do what we had planned to do in the Isle of Dogs which was to establish between the wharves islands of development, but which were separated, so you would have an island of development in the middle of the Thames somewhere, perhaps round Beckton or beyond, to which a bridge would leap and then from it onto the further bank. And it seemed to me that to do that you needed the Thames barrage, and you needed to control the Thames. Well of course we got the Thames Barrier. Architecturally, absolutely marvellous, but hardly ever used. Its primary purpose of course was to stop those surges which inundated the marshlands of, particularly of Erith and that area, but elsewhere, and which were threatening more and more the rest of London with flooding. So there’s a control of flooding, but which does no more than that. And there were proposals which we actually made at Docklands, rather tentatively, to establish half level barriers from the, using the Thames Barrier, to at least partially Edward Hollamby C467/22/08 F5875A Page 146 control the tidal movement of the Thames, and thereby bring about the possibility for much more recreational use of the river. That didn’t come to anything, and rather like the boats which we, and a system that we encouraged to development, which I think lasted for two or three years, of the water bus system. But that again couldn’t compete with the railways, which were being designed to come into, always into the centre of London, and financially failed every time it was attempted. We were more successful with the airport of course, and the Docklands Airport has been in its way quite a successful venture. But coming back to the Thames, it seemed to me that here was perhaps the biggest of all the technical problems, but which would also have the most widespread effect on life of the people north and south of the Thames, for jobs, for the way they lived. And I felt that I would have liked to have been able to live long enough perhaps and be in a position strong enough to have been able to do something to bring about that dream, but the scale of that problem was so enormous that of course it was like the world of dreams, and not many people would give it much more credence than that. But I still think it’s something which is on the agenda, and maybe some future London will actually make a very much greater world of east London in that way. But then, the Port of London Authority will have had to have gone.

Mm, mm. Do you think the Millennium Dome will help? Because that’s...I know that’s Greenwich, but it is east London as well.

Well I suppose, certainly as the site for a great exhibition it will, and could have, the same, could have the same effect as the Festival of Britain did have on Lambeth and the South Bank. Mind you, there are mixed lessons there too. But my own feeling about the Dome is that the Dome is absolutely the wrong thing to do. Here is a vision of a world in which you are enclosed, it’s the space man vision, and I think that’s a terrifying world. That isn’t the future. I think the future is nature and the air and the water, and the natural environment, to which even the urbanites live. The Festival of Britain had that. But I think to put everything within a great enclosing dome is to signify the Millennium is pointing to another sort of, rather, to me, terrifying world altogether. And so, for those psychological architectural reasons I would be against the idea of the Dome. But that’s not the idea, against the idea of a great exhibition, although if that isn’t well organised, I mean that could be another sort of chaos on the Edward Hollamby C467/22/08 F5875A Page 147 grandest scale, which would be disastrous. I saw in the Building News I think I was reading only today, there is a proposal for a development which is for one of these, what do you call these places where you go into it and the whole world is around you? It’s like an enormous light bulb, towering over the Dome. Now, I...if things go on like that, I don’t think that Greenwich is going to be, what for many of us was, Hugh Casson’s tremendous achievement of the Festival of Britain. That inspired us for more than just a generation; it inspired the idea of public places where you could actually meet other people and walk and talk and sit out, and where you would have restaurants, where you would have nice views, where you have nice buildings. Nice is perhaps the wrong word, I don’t know; I tend to use it, because, not grand and great, but pleasant. And I don’t think you can feel that inside a great dome; I don’t know how you can feel what sort of world that is. So, not the Dome, but yes, I think Greenwich would be a tremendous opportunity. But it has to have a vision. You see the Festival of Britain had a vision, it was to make Britain better, it was...we can do it, Britain can do it. But what does the Millennium Exhibition say? What is it for? What is the Millennium going to be? If it says what I say the Dome says to me, I don’t like that future. But, I don’t think that anybody has got, physically got, has actually determined, that is what it is to be, the expression of a world of going into space and these terrifying developments of all these things that are flying round the earth now and the Americans producing weapons to shoot them down, because some of them are going to be colliding, and all...oh! It begins to make one feel that the world which was terrifying, that we thought we’d got out of, can become much more terrifying in the future. But this is making probably an awful lot out of Richard Rogers’ Dome.

Mm. If it gets built.

If it gets built, yes.

Can we touch on something now, if you’re happy with what you said about Docklands...

Yes.

Edward Hollamby C467/22/08 F5875A Page 148

Which is going back in history to William Morris and his influence. And then perhaps onto the Red House. Could you say something about William Morris’s influence on you and other people?

Yes. Now let’s see. You know that of course, as I said, that I was trained at the School of Building and Arts and Crafts in Hammersmith.

Yes.

And that Morris of course lived in Hammersmith, was very much, I won’t say revered but was a figure which was well-known in Hammersmith, and even to people like myself and to my mother in the Co-operative Women’s Guild and so on. That would be partly for his social ideas and political ideas. In other ways perhaps he wouldn’t have been so well known. And even at the School of Building of Arts and Crafts, my knowledge of Morris was relatively limited. The Arts and Crafts Movement was in decline in that period; Modernism was in its revolutionary period, and seemed extraordinarily exciting. But it was really through reading Pevsner and the MARS Group and bodies like that which I was involved in, that one actually learnt of the importance of Morris in a historical sense in the way in which a world, perhaps which he had sought, although I’m now really being influenced by my developed knowledge of Morris, but that dream world, a beautiful world, was also one that could be actually created by modern technology and the way of living of today. So, in the first place I suppose it was the political Morris rather than the artistic Morris that I was influenced by. But quite...inevitably, once one looked at Morris, beyond the latter part of his life, you then began to look at the earlier part of his life. And because of the...the desire... I think this is the way to put it. After the war, Modernism was triumphant, it was this marvellous, wonderful revolutionary period in which modern ideas were able to be developed, particularly in architecture, but the signs of the dullness of repetition to some of us were there then. And Morris seemed to be, not the answer to that, but to give an idea of how one could actually decorate modern buildings, or that the decoration of modern buildings wasn’t an infamous act, as Le Corbusier thought it was. What as it he said, something about the, the civilised man hangs easel pictures on his walls, the savage paints his walls, or something like that. Well, there were some of us who felt that painting the walls and bringing the arts into architecture in Edward Hollamby C467/22/08 F5875A Page 149 that way was in fact something which was a possibility and an essential part of modern architecture. So, in that way Morris I think had an important influence on the way we were thinking about architecture. I was in a position, I think I’ve described this earlier from the L.C.C., of designing the schools at Hammersmith that I had designed, and at a time when technology was such that, and.....

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F5875 Side B

Eight B.

Yes, so, designing these schools, and using craft methods to build, inevitably made one think in terms of an architecture in which decoration could form a natural part, was as validly modern as any of the other schools which by then were developing; perhaps not schools, but certainly there was the big division between the, I suppose roughly one might call the Scandinavian school, and the French school, Le Corbusier. And I suppose also the sort of, the way in which commercialism had adopted Modernism. I think that was a factor. So, at that stage I had discovered where all the blocks of the Morris wallpapers were and Sandersons factory, and I had his wallpaper designs hung in the school, so I began to see the value of what, the great restraint of his decorative designs, and yet the value of decoration in that way. Well now, I had obviously also been influenced, because it was roughly about the same time, by the possibility of living in Red House, and I... After the war, I have to put it this way, after the war, friends, Dick Toms and Mary Toms, who used to live in the same square, St. Peter’s Square in Hammersmith, as Doris and I did, we met up, he came back I think if I remember right, from the Indian Army or Burma, and I came back from the, being with the Far East fleet, and we met together and, what are we going to do with our young lives? That was the...we were talking about, what’s the future going to hold, what would we like to do? And what we said was, why don’t we live and work together, just like William Morris did? And then he went off to run the practice, a branch of the practice of Louis de Soissons in Plymouth, and I went to the Miners’ Welfare Commission in the first place and then to the L.C.C. Architects Department. I think I’ve referred to all this earlier. But... And then, five years or so later some friends of ours referred...rang me up and said, ‘Did you know Red House was for sale?’ Well of course I knew then the significance of Red House, the first house that Morris built, the one that Pevsner had referred to as being of tremendous influence on the Modern movement itself, that Gropius had understood in looking back to Morris, even though, as we all thought, from the Bauhaus we had learnt how to tame the machine. And, Doris and I were able to come down here to see it, which we did, one wonderful weekend with the...oh it was, I shall never forget it of course, the snowdrops all round the drive, it was early spring, and it looked very romantic and Edward Hollamby C467/22/08 F5875B Page 151 very beautiful. And, I sent a telegram off to my friend Dick, ‘I’ve found the house.’ And we came here to live together, and he came to the L.C.C. to work, and we lived and worked together, and the dream came true. And we lived very happily here together, the two families, sharing the house and both putting their energies into its repair and restoration, as much as we could in those days. And we learnt I think, certainly I learnt, well I’m sure Dick did too, that Red House wasn’t just a historical house that you lived in, but that was a home that was comfortable and as convenient as a modern house, with modifications that could be made. It hadn’t had electric lights, electric light system when Morris was here; it could have those. It didn’t have the services, it didn’t have central heating; it could have those, and it took them and it made it comfortable and convenient to live in. And so, it became synonymous, the idea of beauty and sensibility, comfort; not grandeur, not, nothing pompous about it at all. And that idea of an architecture which is able to be, is so adaptable, and is able to fulfil those functions, seemed to be what the Modern movement was really all about. But the Modern movement didn’t have to reject entirely, as it seemed to be at that period, and certainly where the influence of such as Le Corbusier was involved, the idea of the importance of history as part of architectural development itself. And I think that is where I learnt of the importance of conservation, so that, as I’d already referred to at the L.C.C., I was able to see the significance of, in urban renewal, not of just building anew, knocking down the old and building anew, but of bringing the two together, to create change, but change which still contained the, an idea of the past, which wasn’t reactionary but which was survival. And what is human life about? It’s about survival and change and adaptation, and that sort of architecture it seems to me is absolutely the right thing. And so, one could say, I had learnt much of this from Morris, and then from the experience of living in the house which he himself had established. But of course, it, with its garden and orchard, which in the early days was very over-grown of course, it hadn’t been used, except during the war by the National Assistance Board, had covered everything in brown paint, and we had years and years of removal of that brown paint throughout the house.

Did you have to do it yourself?

We had to do it ourselves, yes. There were some things that we had to bring in others to do, the great dormer at the rear of the house, where the water had been getting in at Edward Hollamby C467/22/08 F5875B Page 152 the timbers, we had a major job there to strut it and cut out the bottom of the posts, and the plates. A wonderful experience actually for dealing with historic buildings, and repair that, and we had to of course get contractors in to do that. In fact there were local builders that we were able to use in those days who were able to do that sort of work. And later we had to take the whole of the roof covering off where the tiles had, which were hand-made clay tiles, were fixed with oak pegs on chestnut laths; the chestnut laths were fixed with iron nails, and there was the weakness. The iron nails corroded, and instead of an individual tile falling away, whole pieces, sections of the roof would come away in a storm, and all those lovely tiles smashed. So we had to take a decision to tackle that as a major job, and...

Do you think that was...was that a Philip Webb detail, or did the builder get it wrong, or did something happen?

No, I...I think that was age, and the...and I suppose also that, yes, the lack of technology. If Philip Webb had been able to use stainless steel nails, or any of the sort of nails that we eventually used, which was of metals which wouldn’t corrode, then there would have been no problem. But because that sort of technology wasn’t there, then time and age had its impact. One learns all the time from this, and I in fact, I’m amazed these days, I read of some of the things that are able to be done in conservation which I would have never been aware of or thought of, a way that science has come into conservation on a most important scale. But going back to these...I don’t know whether they were lessons, I mean they were part of the process of our surviving, our living, here at Red House, we had to do these repairs. And then, I suppose we began to love the place more. But I was thinking about the garden, and Doris, my wife, had enormous influence here, how to have a modern garden which we could maintain; I mean for example, I remember most romantically first using a scythe when we came here, to scythe the grass, because Morris always referred in his poetry and in his writings to scything, but we soon realised that the mowing machine was much more sensible. There were some silly things I suppose, you could call them silly, like that, though it was great fun at the time. But establishing the garden so that there was the basic structure of the garden originally, and yet at the same time making it possible for living in today, was again part of the process of adapting, not fundamentally altering but adapting, from what the past had left to us. And gradually Edward Hollamby C467/22/08 F5875B Page 153 as I was, I think I was saying earlier, one came to love this place more and more and more, and it became natural to live here, how could you live anywhere else? But Dick and Mary Toms eventually did move, and their place was taken initially by, well their place was taken by David and Jean MacDonald. Jean MacDonald was an architect who used to work for me, or did work for me at that time. No no no no, that’s wrong. Who had worked for me at the L.C.C., and, because by that time it was Lambeth time. And David was an accountant, but, who was a wonderful craftsman. So the studio here was given over to David as a workshop, and he produced marvellous work, which he loved doing, here in the studio. So it was adaptable, it became a workshop instead of an artist’s studio. Then, as time went on, further change took place; David and Jean left, and our parents came. Another young architect who had worked for me at the L.C.C. and who became a partner of Shankland Cox & Partners, David Gregory-Jones, came and lived with us here. And he then of course went off to Jamaica as chief development architect, or chief architect to the development corporation of Jamaica, later he died, a few years ago. But, we had these friends living with us, all living together. Life was actually very enjoyable. We had a significant sort of sub-community, because in a suburb like this there wasn’t a community like there was in Hammersmith for example, a community like in Hammersmith, but there were an awful number of, sort of societies and associations of people, which these days has much more crystallised, so that the Civic Society is a very important body through the whole of the borough now. But then, our parents came, and my mother was terminally ill, and they lived here, and then she died, and my father lived here for a long while; I think Doris took my mother’s place, she was wonderful with him. And her father used to have his own room here, and our children grew up. Life went on changing, but within Red House always, and I suppose really, gradually one had begun to feel that this was a home that you could never leave. And then one, perhaps...I don’t think it happened just like that, one day one really realised, and as Doris and I sat outside and said, ‘It’s paradise.’ We’d found paradise.

Mm.

So, what Morris had achieved in building this house had been something that was much more than just building a home for himself; something that then had become very very important in relation to the whole development of architecture as well as a Edward Hollamby C467/22/08 F5875B Page 154 comfortable and convenient home for succeeding generations of people who had lived here. Made modifications, changes, but never fundamentally changed the nature of the place. And I suppose gradually more...we have always received visitors, from...particular interest of Morris, in the past, and from abroad, and gradually more and more people would be coming, until we felt that there was, here was a place where we lived, but which so many other people wanted to see, and which we ought to share to some degree with, so, we realised we had to organise it, and we would open it to the public, which we do on the first full weekend of every month, originally through the whole of the year, November, December, January, and people would come. We now restrict it to March to September, and giving ourselves time to clean, repair and do what is necessary. Because so many people come, there is a great deal of use of the house. But, the house is alive because of...it is not a museum, it’s still a home, but because so many people come and enjoy it, and many of them have become friends for life as a result, from different parts of the world, it’s meant that Red House has not become an institution but has become a lively home for us to continue to live in. But it has also become, I don’t think an institution in the sense that it’s like a museum or something like that, but in the sense of its influence throughout the world. The earlier influence of the house on the Arts and Crafts movement one...I gradually learnt about in studying the history of the Arts and Crafts movement, and also in writing.....

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

Red House became so enormously important and influential, not just as the home of William Morris, it was...because, as Morris’s fame became greater it became more well known because of that; but much more so, much more significantly so, because it was undoubtedly shared with other movements in that direction, but a primary source of the change in direction of architecture. And Philip Webb has to be credited with that, although probably the only time when Philip Webb and his client worked together, in a sense a joint designing role, must have been at Red House. Philip Webb was a very authoritarian sort of architect, and if his clients would tell him what they wanted, this is what he said, ‘Tell me what you want and I’ll design it for you, but don’t interfere.’ But with Morris it was quite different; he and Morris shared so much the understanding and belief in what they were doing, that they could work together in Edward Hollamby C467/22/08 F5875B Page 155 a way that didn’t work with anybody else with him. And Red House I suppose is very much a joint endeavour in that way. But, must be to a large extent Philip Webb’s role, and his work in establishing the design that was breaking with tradition and looking forward to a new architecture which was not just a repeat in some form or other of the architectures of the past, and so, or a reflection of them. It would contain pointed arches, which must have pleased Morris and his love of mediaeval things, but which Philip Webb saw not in that role but as sensible relieving arches to enable him to have segmental arches, flat segmental arches over his sash windows, absolutely modern control of ventilation. So, those two aims came together. But primarily it was in fact establishing an architecture which was of sensibility, convenience, comfort, and the plan and the form in which the exterior reflected what was the interior, was a new way of looking at architecture. It wasn’t a façade architecture. And others have written about it, and Hermann Muthesius, who came here in particular in the turn of the century to advise the German Government on English manufacturers primarily, because he was an architect and a historian he studied domestic architecture, saw the Arts and Crafts movement at the time of the turn of the century with the great achievements of Lutyens and Voysey and people like that, and was able to see the significance of that movement. And he, in a book that he wrote in 1904, described Red House as being one in which it didn’t imitate the past, but it was the first modern house, and that was an understanding and reflection of that movement that had taken place, and that Arts and Crafts movement became influential in Scandinavia, in America too, but in Scandinavia and northern Europe, and eventually into the Bauhaus, where Gropius recognised its importance and significance, certainly the importance of Morris’s influence and of Red House. And you could say that in a way, the house that Morris built, with his philosophy that the machine was the enemy, had become the house that could be built with the machine no longer as the enemy but tamed by man, and that was how the tutors of the Bauhaus would have thought about it. So, the house has been of enormous influence in that sense of the way in which architecture developed from the middle of the 19th century when it was built, and that perhaps is more important than the fact that it was built for William Morris himself. The two things are inextricably combined, but the house itself is a memorial to him, but it’s also a living thing which has had such an influence on the architecture that we live with to this very day. And of course, when I was a student that architecture was highly revolutionary, wonderfully exciting, a new world; Edward Hollamby C467/22/08 F5875B Page 156 that has now become so much of the world that one has begun to, and has disintegrated in so many ways, that one has begun to, not question it, you can’t question what it had rationally become, but it’s become a world architecture, and all the same old problems are faced in looking at it as architecture, that some people in the future are going to be working their way out of no doubt, as has always happened in the past. But the important thing I think is that here is this house so comfortable, convenient, modest, delightful, charming, and yet has been of great importance in that whole world history of architecture since. That is something that I’ve learnt and have been able to convey to many of the visitors who come, maybe to see the house that Morris lived in, but know nothing of the significance and influence of the house in architecture in other ways. But there it is. We, because of our occupation here, because of our work in restoring it and caring for it, it’s probably in as good condition today as it was when, I won’t say first built, but certainly in those early years, and it’s now, although has always been for a long long while a house which was strangely separated from Bexleyheath, the borough that has grown around it, the suburb that has grown around it, so much so that very few people within Bexleyheath would know anything about it at all. And that has changed. It changed even before the great exhibition last year at the Victoria & Albert Museum which produced an absolute flood of people wanting to learn more about Morris. But it was growing, and more and more being understood as being, perhaps because of the development of the conservationist philosophy, which is more widespread than perhaps we had thought, that more and more people were beginning to see, what is this house, and we’d like...we want to know more about it. We’ve even had people come here who have said they grew up here, would pass along Red House Lane and wonder what that house was like beyond the red brick wall. We think now the red brick wall isn’t the barrier that it once was, and perhaps I suppose with the development of the trust which we’re envisaging establishing now, the borough council itself, which had a terrible reputation in relation to historic buildings until a few years ago, is now becoming a member of that trust, and itself, in the historic building studies and others, and the very good exhibition it put on, is drawing attention to what it regards now as one of the most important assets in the borough. And also, interestingly out of that, again a re-understanding of Morris. And so, in the clock tower at Bexleyheath, where there were niches on each north-east, south-west side, on the side looking towards London is Edward VII when it was built; on the other side looking towards Edward Hollamby C467/22/08 F5875B Page 157

Canterbury and the route of the Pilgrims that Morris knew all about and wanted his house to be somewhere on that route, there is a bust now, the borough council last year made from a local sculpture who I used at Docklands also, a bust looking towards Canterbury. So, Red House exerts an influence; it’s not a static thing.

A bust of who?

A bust of William Morris.

Oh right.

And more and more, the ideas of Morris and the importance of Red House have become more and more well known, not only in the world, people come here from all over the world, but also in the people...we notice most, and really are most pleased about that, so many people from the, not just the borough of Bexleyheath but the south-east locality of London who come to see Red House, mostly for the first time, trying to see just what is it really like.

Mm. What sort of things do they say when they come to the house, what’s the most usual comment?

The best thing is to look at some of the letters we get that people write to us afterwards.

Yes.

Many people refer to it as ‘that beautiful house’. So, it is beautiful to them. And they also refer to their being able to come here and.....

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F5876 Side A

Tape Nine A.

And of course educationally it’s become very significant, we have a tremendous number of letters now from pupils who require, are being required to produce studies or essays, or are studying for their 11-pluses, and Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement has now become an important subject that they write about, a tremendous number. But also, I suppose in the sense that it has become for many people, having come here, created an interest in Morris in particular and the development of architecture perhaps to a lesser degree in many, which partly reflects the way in which there is a reaction to this modern world of ours which Morris continually is able to, what’s the word, to, not reflect, to... I can’t think of the right word. I know what it is in my head, but... To induce...

Mm, I think you’re...you’re saying, the fact that he’s relevant...

That’s right.

Yes.

That he isn’t just a piece of history, but is very relevant today. And the house in that sense is a permanent way of many people actually beginning to learn about it. And as I’ve said, not only pupils, but of course in the enormous number of theses and studies that university students and others are undertaking now all over the country, and we get loads of letters asking for information in connection with that. And also, when you think, you see in a living way, the William Morris Society itself was founded here after we came here a year or so later. In many ways the house, in all these ways the house is continually exerting an influence, and I think that is a tremendous reflection on the way in which are architecture can influence thought, even way, long long, a long long time after it’s itself been built, it’s of static materials, but yet it says something much more than just an inanimate object.

Edward Hollamby C467/22/09 F5876A Page 159

When you...when you furnished, and you’ve put wallpaper on the walls and so on, and painted the ceilings, what did you always bear in mind?

Well, I think firstly the spatial generosity of Red House, that was one of the things. But in the actual decoration, using the wallpapers was, because we thought they were lovely. There weren’t any wallpapers here when Morris was here, he was designing the first ones then, but the walls were covered in light distemper, and that period when the house was painted brown must have been when people wrote about it as being dark, and the house isn’t like that at all, it’s extremely light, but that’s because we have light walls, and the wallpapers themselves are not overwhelming and dominant. Though some of Morris’s papers, later papers, are much richer, although more of those would probably be, I’m not sure about this in fact, but would probably be those of John Henry Dearle who was his pupil, who is now beginning to be seen as being, because he rose to become chief designer for Morris, becoming of, in his own right seen as an important designer. So we chose wallpapers that were light, and not over- dominant at all in pattern. We also chose wall hangings, as Morris wanted to see here, and they are very effective, like the living-room, where if you take them away, the acoustic changes completely; it’s a much more comfortable room because of those wall hangings. We also... I think we were fundamentally interested in a home that was built originally for William Morris, but is not a museum, and in which the way in which artefacts, furniture, decoration has been influenced since his time, were as important as its beginning in the structure at Red House and the furnishings at Red House. And so, the settee that you’re sitting on here is Conran in his early years, a modern day bed which in fact is to us what Morris was trying to do, except here the machine has been tamed and the machine is used for it. The Windsor chairs there, you can see they are not Windsor chairs, they’re Danish Windsor, modern Windsor chairs. There is Isokon furniture. There is the built-in furniture that I design myself, which we think is honest and straightforward and sensible, and that’s what the rest of the house is like, and so, it doesn’t seem discordant in any way. Stylistically it’s in that same idiom of being what Morris said, don’t have anything in your house which you do not know to be useful and believe to be beautiful. That’s the way we see it and that’s the way it can be in modern times just as much as in his time when he expressed the idea. And the windows in the front door for example, were the work of Anthony Holloway who used to work with me at the L.C.C., an artist there, has Edward Hollamby C467/22/09 F5876A Page 160 designed modern windows which are on the theme of the seasons, and which there sit together with Morris’s original painted patterns. And they don’t conflict, don’t fight, but add to the richness of the decorations. So, in...we see it as a house which in fact in many ways, there’s a middle period of Liberty’s, there’s the work of the, oh dear, the other home of the Arts..... Turn that off.

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[INAUDIBLE] I was trying to say. There’s work of Ambrose Heal. And these are all stages in the development of furniture and design which were very much influenced by Morris, but which established themselves in their own right. And it seems quite natural to us that these form part of the furnishing of Red House, just as natural today as it seemed natural to Morris to have to re-design everything from scratch in his day.

Mm. When you...when you’re gone, would you want it to be kept as it is now, or is there scope for some change, or...?

No, I think that what we see is that, whilst we would like it to be a family home, we see that it is adaptable, and it can accept change, and must do so to survive, just as all conservation is based on survival. If you cannot adapt and change to meet requirements of, modern requirements, you don’t survive, and therefore, I think that’s true of historical buildings as well. They have to be able to adapt and change. It’s adapted the way we have got it, not violently, but it has done so. And no doubt there are other ways of using the house which it could perfectly well accept, and we would hope that that is what it will be able to do when we’re no longer here to influence it ourselves.

Mm. But your preference would be for it to still be lived in by a family?

That would be our major preference, yes. But an alternative might be a body like the Landmark Trust that uses it for holiday lets, but also allows the public to visit. And that is an important thing, that we think that whatever the use is, it must always be possible for the, whatever adaptations are needed for that, not to destroy the fundamental character of the place itself, and also that the environment, the local Edward Hollamby C467/22/09 F5876A Page 161 environment round it, which gives the feeling of the house standing in the country that it once was, that that shouldn’t be fundamentally altered and disturbed. So that it’s absolutely necessary that the orchard stays as an orchard. So there are some aspects which mustn’t change, although the orchard inevitably will have to have new trees planted. It’s that sort of adaptation and change that you need.

But you wouldn’t want any building that would...on the land that belongs with [INAUDIBLE]?

No, no, no, and that is what one would...we would...the trust that we are to establish, we hope will ensure.

Did you put the radiators in, was that...?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes. But of course, much of this, that will betray... At the time, when we came here we were very poor. Some of the things that we did, and which have been re-done, were not as successful as other things. On the whole though, I think that they have been successful, probably least successful in this room with that very large radiator there, but most of the other rooms, the radiators as part of the heating system...

Are very inconspicuous.

...are not over-intrusive at all. And some of them actually, in the bedrooms, actually I think are really nice, they’re nice objects in themselves.

Mm. It’s just, you know how conservation attitudes change...

Yes.

And the key words, authenticity and so on comes in. Edward Hollamby C467/22/09 F5876A Page 162

Yes.

And, I mean I think you’ve done it in the way that one would expect an architect to do it, which is to protect the architecture.

Mm.

And to do it in a rather modest, careful sort of way.

Yes.

That doesn’t impinge on it. So the house has been very lucky. But if the next generation, the next carer is a curator...

Yes.

Could be different.

Well it could be.

But they[??] wouldn’t[??] accept that.

It could, but then, between ourselves and the time when Morris lived here, it was first bought by a sea captain from Gravesend, who lived here I think for about five years, something like that; it was the home of, as a boy, of Sir Edward Maufe – not Sir Edward then of course, with his mother Maude Maufe, who in fact actually, one has to the give the credit to, that the orchard, which was there, was not owned by Morris, and it was she who bought it to ensure that it was preserved. There were other owners, and they have all made changes, some of which are, most of which would be reversible. Well that will happen, and that can’t be avoided in a place which is living and has purpose.

Yes. Edward Hollamby C467/22/09 F5876A Page 163

And one has to accept that.

Do you think you’ve had to make sacrifices by living in this house?

I can’t think of any.

I mean, I’m thinking for instance that your financial commitment is quite considerable, because it’s a large house, and you have two people who help part-time in the garden, and you have a maintenance man don’t you?

Yes. Yes.

And a cleaning woman.

Yes.

And not, most people wouldn’t have to budget for that sort of thing.

No. No, that’s true. But when you say sacrifices, I mean, that has enabled us to live here and enjoy it into the age we are now, when we would be less able to cope with all that by ourselves. So... Different people have different aspirations don’t they. Doris and I loved our world-wide holidays which we’ve had, we loved the garden here, and working in it ourselves as well as living here in the house. What more is there? We...you can’t think of, I can’t think of much more that I would desire. I have no desire for...and that isn’t a sort of false humility, that’s...we seem to be very rich.

Mm, yes. Well I think it’s a good match of people living in a house and the architect and the original intentions. You’ve never wanted to have a sauna or a...

No. Or a swimming pool.

Yes, quite, no.

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No.

No, so, it’s not been a conflict.

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You’ve also been involved in lots of other organisations and societies, apart from the William Morris Society which you founded.

Yes. I think that that has...it tended to grow out of my professional interests of course, so, it wasn’t unnatural that in the period when change was needed at the R.I.B.A., I was willing to be nominated to be a member of the R.I.B.A. Council, which I served for several years, and they were very interesting years, because they were at the, for me, looking back, they were the great years of the R.I.B.A., with several marvellous presidents, and who...in the course of which the R.I.B.A. was modernised and brought up to date, but was a lively and very human place.

This is the 1960s presumably wasn’t it.

Yes.

That whole decade.

That’s right, yes. And I suppose that, and I...that was when also Sir Hugh Wilson became President, and I became the Honorary Treasurer of the R.I.B.A. It always seemed slightly odd about me being a treasurer, because the treasurer at Lambeth always used to call me the director of spending, and...but I think I got a reputation at the R.I.B.A., and I learnt a great deal actually about finance doing that job, about how to balance restraint with actually enabling things to happen. Finance is a terribly important enabler, and I think I learnt the importance of it there, doing that. And then, because of my growing interest, and also because I suppose my growing authority in the world of conservation and historic building, I was appointed a member of the Historic Buildings Council for England, and served under two or three people who were chairmen there, one of whom was Jennifer Jenkins, who has remained a great Edward Hollamby C467/22/09 F5876A Page 165 friend and who is now going to be patron of the Red House Trust. And then later became a member of the London Advisory Committee of English Heritage when that was established. So, there are many activities which have grown sideways out of what I suppose is still the central professional role which have been an important part of my life, and I’ve given a great deal of my energies to. One aspect, for example, was the way in which the very fine church at.....

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So, one of which was the way in which I was able to be very influential in saving from destruction St. Mary’s at Lambeth, which is next to Lambeth Palace, and where the graves of the...of Tradescant, the great botanist who brought in so many of the flowers that we know from all over the world in the early 17th century, the church authorities were going to demolish the building, but we stopped that, and I was very influential in achieving that, and gained allies in a lady, Mary Nicholson, who with her husband, who I think was pretty well off, from Chelsea, who together, and with others, and, I think it’s Lady Beaconsfield, formed the Tradescant Trust, to take over the church, turn it into a museum which it is, and the garden into a Tradescant garden. And that was the sort of activity that wasn’t just...of course, at the time I had a function of a job in Lambeth which I, amongst which was conservation, and the care for historic buildings. But the amount of effort into that was greater than just that role; it was a very personal involvement, and I think that there have been quite a number of those sorts of involvements, where I’ve become members of trusts in order to bring about the saviour of some such buildings. Inevitably several of them were in Lambeth, where some of the great churches were all threatened at some time or other, but where quite positive results have come out of making the church no longer needed as a church, used in some other way in which in fact it survived. It’s that point that I was making earlier. And that philosophy I think has been one that has strongly gone into much of the work that I have done. And I suppose, it’s also resulted in the one or two books that are written, one about Docklands and of course the one about Red House. But they are always connected very very closely with my activities, so they are not observations on another, they are ways of carrying out the campaign so to speak.

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Mm. Mm. You seem to have a wonderfully integrated life; not only do you believe in an integrated approach to work and so on, but you also like to integrate all the aspects of your life, don’t you, so that...

Yes.

It becomes rather seamless in a way.

Yes. Yes. Seamless is a nice way of putting it I think. Some people would say very untidy, because inevitably it goes off into all sorts of different directions, and could be completely unable to focus, but I don’t think I have lost that ability to focus. So that it’s not...it has been a widespread influence, but which hasn’t dissipated because it’s become too wide and therefore had no force to it. I don’t know, one looks at oneself, and you can only...can think of the way you’ve seen your life. I mean talking to you in these recordings has made me think about myself in ways that I’d never ever thought about before. But I think probably it...that is an aspect of me. But what a wonderful thing for me, I believe, it’s been, that I was able to become a member of that marvellous profession, in that marvellous profession, to survive that terrible war, that I might have never seen the end of, and but lucky enough to do so, lucky enough to be able...as one of my friends said, ‘Ted, you always put your foot on the right lucky spot.’ Lucky enough to be able to go to the Miners’ Welfare Commission, where I could do what I wanted to do; lucky enough to go to the L.C.C., benefit from all the marvellous things that were being done there, and learn and learn and learn from it. Then to Lambeth. Even when it became too painful, lucky enough to be able to escape always, to be able to, once again regenerate. I think that...I don’t know... I mean, it must be luck, it is luck of course.

It is luck really. And also you’ve had the support of Doris for so many years as well.

That is absolutely fundamental. I perhaps realise it more now than ever before, but, the extent to which so much of my time was spent away from home. But...though not I think in the way in which I led a separate existence at all; I brought perhaps much of it into the home, which would have been boring to anybody other than somebody who was so supportive and interested. But I think we both gained something from that. Edward Hollamby C467/22/09 F5876A Page 167

Doris has tremendous qualities of, well survival qualities I suppose they are. And I always called her Mother Courage. She would...she would never go down. And in my greatest periods of depression, for short periods, she was never...she was always able to make me feel that there was something else would come along. It’s a defence mechanism with her. Sometimes it may seem very artificial, but always believing, it’s going to be all right. And that has been a great, enormous help to me. But not just that, I mean looking after a family, looking after this house, all those things we’ve talked about before, that again, is that luck? I mean, we met up as very young people, we had a short life before we were separated for years in the war, came together again, were able to once again establish affection and...and...comradeship. And through all the troubles that has always continued. Well that must be in this modern world very lucky, at least I think I’m very lucky.

Mm.

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As well as Doris, who, when I was studying, when I was making measured drawings at Chiswick House, would sit there in a deckchair and watch me making the measured drawings, but would be there with me, tolerating all sorts of things which young girls hardly would have done, many others anyway. But not only her; my mother was a tremendous assistance to me, to move perhaps into a world which I would have never been able to enter into, a woman of tremendous imagination. A working-class woman who, and yet who took me to see Shakespeare, who regularly attended the Old Vic, regularly was involved in activities which were very modern, and who longed for modernity. So she longed for... And she had a marvellous husband, who was a very placid man, but she would have liked no doubt much more excitement. But she could convey to me ambition, and I think that was something that was of a tremendous asset to me in developing as a young man. So, it’s to two women that I owe it all.

Amazing. Yes.

End of F5876 Side A End of Interview