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| Devastation in Clydebank |
It is the 8th of May 1945. Britain’s broken cities sigh relief at the end of the Second World War and with it an end to the destruction it has brought upon them. Britain’s people are looking at these broken and overcrowded cities with an anticipation of a brighter future that reconstruction will bring. In little more than a month Clement Atlee’s Labour will be elected to replace Winston Churchill’s wartime government, largely on the merits of a strong socialist campaign promising more modern homes and a higher standard of living for all citizens of Britain in future.
Since 1945, Britain has long repaired the damage brought to its homes by WWII. Over 65 years after the war, the Britain in which we live exists with the effects that the post-war housing effort has had on the landscape, people and aspirations of the country. By analysing the changes made, through specific examples, I hope to conclude whether the housing built since WWII has changed Britain for the better or the worse?
During the war a quarter of Britain’s twelve million homes were damaged and, in the worst hit areas, scenes of complete devastation were witnessed. In Glasgow’s Clydebank only seven homes remained undamaged. The damaged homes were often abandoned leaving the occupants no choice but to move in with relatives. This meant in many parts of Britain people were living cheek by jowl, even in areas never before considered slums. Many houses did not have indoor toilets and a large proportion of people still cooked on rudimentary ranges. The people of Britain put up with these conditions out of necessity during the war but after, the post war citizen was going to demand a more modern and comfortable standard of living. One thing that was certain was that this demand could not be met by the traditional British building industry, which required much skill, labour and time that Britain did not have enough of.
The answer was prefabrication. Britain had already become accustomed to prefabrication during the war as factories had to cope with the massive demand for munitions and aeroplanes for the war effort. The conclusion of architects and engineers was that if Britain could so successfully provide munitions at great speed through the standardisation of parts, it could provide houses using the same methods.
The first examples, during a great wave of prefabrication, were the ‘temporary’ homes erected immediately after the war for returning servicemen and their families. There were many examples of these, designed by various architects but they became dubbed with the general name ‘prefabs’. Mainly targeted at young families the ‘prefab bungalow’ could be erected on site in less than a day when the component parts had arrived from the factory. The frames could be put together by unskilled labour and the occupants could move in soon after. The layout was open plan, which was revolutionary for the time, as the rooms were connected to each other; rather than being entered from a hallway. On top of this new layout, families moving to these houses from slums were delighted to finally have an interior cooker, interior toilet, hot running water and even a washing machine. Many of the ‘prefabs’ were built with generous gardens, which allowed the residents more space than they could have imagined after living in the wartime slums. It is a testament of the success of ‘prefabs’ that, although conceived to be temporary housing, many people grew people grew extremely attached to them. There have been campaigns, by residents whose prefabs are threatened by demolition, to save their beloved ‘temporary’ homes. There is no doubt that this first wave of post-war housing did much to raise the aspirations of people moved out of slum areas. Even though he mainstream press at the time dismissed them as ‘rabbit hutches’ or ‘chicken sheds’, the humble ‘prefab’s’ standardisation paved the way for the construction of many future housing developments.
A Prefabricated Home With Resident 1993
For architects and builders at the time, prefabrication could not be ignored when it came to the provision of permanent housing. One of the first post-war examples of a standard house came with publication of the design ‘Steel Framed Houses At Northolt’ by architect Frederick Gibberd in the Architectural Review of 1945. These houses showcased the speed and ease of erection of a building that used prefabricated parts for its frame. These houses, in the right conditions, could be built and ready for occupation after three weeks and the savings gained from this new housing approach meant houses could be offered at a lower cost or rent than was traditionally possible. Different cladding materials were shown on the houses to show the different possibilities of façade treatment, but the interior layout remained the same. Open plan, like the prefab and with all the modern conventions and individual space that the ‘prefabs’ had brought the nation’s people to expect; this new standardised approach to housing was receiving critical acclaim and attracting the nations attention with an exiting view of the future. The inclusion of a driveway even suggested that it would become normal for people to own a car and implied that these houses could be built anywhere.
Sketches Showing Variations Of Frederick Gibberd’s ‘Standard Houses’
It was not long after the standard home that even more radical visions of the future were being developed. New towns were being planned on the outskirts of major cities all over the country in order to relocate people from inner city slums. One of the more radical of these new towns is Cumbernauld.
Conceived by architect Hugh Wilson, Cumbernauld was the embodiment of the new ways of living that had been developing since the war. With many types of standardised housing, the town was designed to be, ‘a balanced, self contained, community’ where people could shop, sleep, work and play and have enough space for a modern lifestyle. Like Frederick Gibberd’s prototype house, most of the houses in Cumbernauld were detached or semi detached, built by frame construction and had generous gardens. But perhaps most importantly is that they each included a garage. Cumbernauld’s design is radical partly because of the dominance of the role the car has to play in the town’s transportation. It can be assumed that Hugh Wilson thought that a resident of Cumbernauld could be solely reliant on a car for their transportation and this is no more obvious than in the multi level, indoor town centre which has a road cutting straight through the middle and a huge car parking facility inside. To me this is one of the main reasons that Cumbernauld has come to be known as a desolate and hostile environment. The pedestrian in Cumbernauld is segregated from the road and although this was an idea backed with good intentions of creating peaceful quiet walkways; the result is that Cumbernauld has no traditionally recognisable streets. The town centre, supposed to become Cumbernauld’s high street looks isolated from the rest of the town because of the large amounts of space that surrounds it. Whether this is a deliberate homage to the intentional intimidation of brutalism or just simply a misjudgement in design, Cumbernauld feels isolated because of its low density, detached houses and over reliance on the automobile.
Cumbernauld Town Centre
Cumbernauld is, however, by far not the worst effect of the post-war housing. The standard home has paved the way for arguably greatest tragedy of the post war period and that is suburbia.
The massive growth in suburbia since WWII was not a result of questioning and debate over the way a future Britain should be; it has instead been the result of homes for profit. Standard houses, like Frederick Gibberd’s, have provided an opportunity for contractors to take over the British housing sector by cutting and pasting standard homes onto British countryside, at as low a cost as possible in order to make maximum profit. Unlike other low-density housing developments, like that of the ‘Garden City Movement’ or even Cumbernauld, many suburban areas are completely car dependent, with few if any local shops and amenities. This means that Britain’s high street has turned into a bad version of Cumbernauld as the people of the nation travel by car to supermarkets, park their cars in fields of tarmac and shop in these food warehouses in order to sustain a life of commuting, sometimes over a hundred miles to their places of work, every day. To make matters worse, contractors such as ‘Wimpey’ and ‘O’Brien Homes’ own large areas of the British land for future development. This stockpiling of land has pushed land prices up and has made it harder for the independent house builder to build houses and thus leaving architects scrabbling for the few government housing commissions that remain.
In my view, the massive deurbanisation that has occurred in the post-war years has taken the concentration away from the development of Britain’s towns and cities. Although many government and council led schemes have led to radical inner city developments, such as Sheffield’s Parkhill flat’s solution to urban density by placing ‘streets in the sky’, in many places in Britain, even city estates have been built at low cost and low quality without the provision of even basic amenities. This is no more apparent in Glasgow’s urban area where cars and business have experienced a greater priority than the homes of its residents. Glasgow City Council’s housing policies have produced contractor driven housing towers around the city and none are more infamous than the Red Road flats where the low life expectancy, drug abuse and gang warfare arguably worse than the slums they were meant to replace. This commercial approach to housing regards people as little more than numbers and that is something that can be hard to swallow, especially in Glasgow, a city that was once revered for its socialist demeanour and liberal provision of top class libraries and schools as well as many other public services.
Glasgow’s Red Road Flats
Where good architects and planners have been given a free reign, there are some excellent examples of housing that caters for the needs of the public and redevelopment of Britain’s cities simultaneously, such as Ralph Erskine’s ‘Biker Estate’. Achieved with the help of many collaborators this scheme was worked on over 12 years between 1969 and 1981 to redevelop an area a mile east of Newcastle’s city centre. Possibly heeding the lessons learnt from the car dependant suburban sprawl of modern Britain, ‘Biker Estate’ literally turns its back on the road with a long wall of accommodation that protects the estate from arctic winds and the noise of the busy road to the north. Behind the wall is an urban oasis that encourages the inhabitants to grow plants in order to soften the estate and make daily life a bit more colourful. Erskine pays a huge amount of detail to human scale, which is something that can be clearly seen in the entrance decks to the houses. The estate is now grade two listed and has been popular with its residents since it opened.
An entrance walkway in Ralph Erskine’s Biker Estate
In conclusion, my opinion is that although people desperately had to be housed after WWII, the post war housing effort has, in balance, turned out to be a failure. The great speed at which houses were constructed and the locations that many were built has provided Britain with a housing stock that no longer suits the country’s needs. As Britain and other countries around the globe look to distance their selves from the car, Britain finds itself with an infrastructure that only suits the automobile and it’s citizens are discovering they cannot lead their lives without commuting long distances to work. In Britain’s rush to re-house its population after WWII it raised the expectations of the British people, making people need more space and privacy than is sustainable. Suburbia has lead to the death of communities and has taken a lot of life out of Britain’s cities’ as the lifeblood that is the people rush out along the arterys of motorways every day after work every day. But for a few good examples, good inner city living has not been achieved in Britain. The huge problem that post-war housing presented was one that did need radical solutions but it is the radical solutions that post-war housing presented that are causing the problems needing to be tackled today.
References:
British Town Planning and Urban Design- Elanor Smith-Morris
The People’s Peace -British History1945-1990 D941.085 MOR
Palaces for the People: Prefabs in Post-War Britain- Greg Stevenson
Architectural Review 1945 Jan - Jun - Pg 40 Francis Gibberd
Aycliffe to Cumbernauld - D711.40941
Cumbernauld: Town for Tomorrow D711.4094 CUM
Cumbernauld New Town D711.4094 CUM
Modern Flats -FHS Yorke and Frederick Gibberd
The Architecture of Ralph Erskine - Peter Collymore - D720.924 ERS/C
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