The 1960s – what went wrong?
Ronan Point, which collapsed in May 1968 killing five people
RIBA Library Photographs Collection
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Ken Hollings follows the fortunes of post-War British architecture
The main thing to go wrong with British architecture in the 1960s was, it transpires, British architecture in the 1950s – a period characterised by idealistic endeavours and misguided assumptions in which the road to the tower block was paved with the very best of intentions.
Considering the widespread problems confronting architects, town planners and successive government legislators in the years immediately following the Second World War, such an outcome may not be altogether surprising. In 1945 it was estimated that nearly half a million homes in the United Kingdom had been either destroyed or rendered unusable. The scale and urgency of the resultant housing problem, magnified by a rapidly rising birth rate and the amount of substandard dwellings left over from the 1930s, required a bold approach.
Nurturing the new
The Town and Country Planning Act, introduced by the Labour government in 1947, restricted land development by making it subject to tighter planning control. At the same time Labour also introduced a 100% tax on any increased value a site might gain after being developed, effectively keeping private interests out of the nation’s reconstruction. The result was a brief flowering of public-sector architecture in which modernism’s clean lines and functionalist rigour became emblematic of the new social order being ushered in by the welfare state.
The Royal Festival Hall – centerpiece of the 1951 Festival of Britain
Architect’s model reproduced in the 1951 Festival of Britain brochure
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It was, however, a very English form of modernism: one that was light, bright, spacious and scaled to the human individual. It was made even more palatable to the British people when it became the key architectural note in the design of the Festival of Britain, the ‘tonic for the nation’, which opened on the South Bank of the Thames in 1951. This was the architecture of the newly emergent ‘townscapes’ – an English approach to urban planning, which linked modernity with traditional notions of landscaping, suggesting a green and pleasant variation on what had, until then, been viewed as an international (that is, ‘foreign’) attitude towards building design.
Popular support
The populace flocked to the South Bank to look and admire. ‘What had been the private pleasure of a few cognoscenti,’ boasted one of the Festival’s architectural co-ordinators, ‘suddenly, virtually overnight, achieved enthusiastic public acclaim.’ The site layout, utilising open precincts containing an integrated mixture of materials and forms, became the template for shopping arcades, city centres and university campuses for years to come.
Anyone visiting the Royal Festival Hall, sole majestic survivor of the Festival’s glory days, should take a short walk along the Thames, towards the Hayward Gallery and the National Theatre, and have a guess at what happened next.
The townscapes, with their precincts, walkways and feeder roads, only added to the growing suburban sprawl surrounding the major cities. Meanwhile, a rapidly accelerating birth rate left nowhere to go but up. Low-density horizontal expansion quickly gave way to high-density vertical expansion, thanks to a younger generation of architects inspired by Le Corbusier’s taste for raw concrete and modular proportions, Walter Gropius’s advocacy of prefabricated units and Mies van der Rohe’s minimalist mantra: ‘less is more’. This was modernism with the gloves off.
Quick fix
Having established a post-war modernist precedent, ‘light, bright and spacious’ was out, and bare-knuckled brutalism came in. By 1954, the Tories had abolished building licences and development tax, before doing away with subsidies for ‘general needs’ housing, thus making public-sector building more attractive to private interests. The ‘cognoscenti’ were back but with hardly anything to do.
Looked at from the bottom line, less wasn’t just more, it was cheaper too. Modular structures were easier to design and less costly to build. Prefabricated units reduced the architect’s role to that of a mere assembler of parts, while the costly maintenance of raw concrete façades became the responsibility of local government, not the developers. Councils were soon vying with each other to relocate increasing numbers of families to ‘vertical garden cities’, otherwise known as system-built tower blocks, nearer to urban centres, where they became more visible to the general public.
Meanwhile, property speculators grew rich driving truckloads of cement through loopholes in Labour’s Town and Country Planning Act, creating skyscrapers many times larger than regulations had meant to allow. ‘We did not realise it was capable of being abused,’ admitted one of the people who had drafted the Act. ‘It was sheer ignorance.’
Devastating designs
Centrepoint, New Oxford Street, London, built in 1967
Joe Low/RIBA Library Photographs Collection
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Symbolic of such rampant speculation was Centre Point, a 385-ft high white elephant located at the bottom of Oxford Street, worth more to its developer unoccupied than rented out. ‘There are people today,’ The Sunday Times complained, ‘amassing stupendous fortunes by systematically destroying our historic cities.’
Then on, the morning of 16 May 1968, a gas explosion caused the collapse of one corner of Ronan Point, a 23-storey block of flats in East London, leaving five occupants dead and another 17 injured. Built from precast reinforced blocks slotted into place, then bolted and cemented together, Ronan Point contained a design fault that allowed a devastating landslide of wall and floor sections to occur. The building had been occupied for barely two months. ‘I wouldn’t live there rent-free,’ exclaimed one former tenant, even after Ronan Point had been rebuilt. In 1986 the tower block was demolished to make way for low-level terraced houses – just as if the 1960s had never happened.