Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (9 page)

Nevertheless, to read Thomas Sharp’s presidential address in 1945 to the Town Planning Institute is still to be struck by his profession’s ultimately top-down assumptions. He did not deny that people had ‘the inalienable right to know fully what is being planned for them’ – including ‘the right to comment on the plans, to require alterations in them, and, if necessary, to reject them’. What Sharp explicitly repudiated, however, was ‘actual participation in the act of planning’, in other words before draft plans had been drawn up; the notion that the planner should essentially be the servant of the people, putting their wishes into technical form, he castigated as nothing other than ‘sheer demagogy, rather than a manifestation of the working of a true democracy’.
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That the language of the Rebuilding Britain exhibition in 1943 was so notably circumspect and reassuring presumably reflected the lack of popular enthusiasm for town planning. ‘Don’t get the idea,’ it insisted in almost hurt tones, ‘that the planner is a robot of a man without sentiment or good manners, whose
idée fixe
is to tear out the ancient core of our towns in the cause of traffic-flow or Brave New Worldliness. The truth is the exact opposite. The move for planning in England has come largely from those who loved old buildings and could see no other way of saving them than by getting “building development” controlled. It is not the dream of the planner to recondition towns until nothing of their personality remains.’ They did not see it quite that way in Bristol, where in the last two years of the war a sustained, unavailing campaign (mostly waged by traders but not entirely) sought to reverse the planners’ decision to create a large new shopping centre in the ‘off the beaten track’ Broadmead area at the expense of the city’s traditional shopping core. Nor did they in Wolverhampton, where in early 1945 what response there was to the plan for thoroughgoing redevelopment was typified by the view of one correspondent to the local paper: ‘I think Wolverhampton people’s best interests will be served in the preservation of much that is old in the town, rather than the sweeping away of familiar landmarks in a fetish or orgy of modernising that is almost an obsession today.’
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The same, crucially, may well also have been the case in Coventry, or at least on the part of the middle-aged and elderly suddenly finding themselves living in the middle of the new symbol of the new Britain. Barely a week after the decisive vote by the city council in February 1941 in favour of Gibson’s radical plan, a local paper published a cry from the heart by ‘An Old Citizen’: ‘It is to be hoped that the citizens as a whole will have the opportunity of expressing their views before any irretrievable step is taken, for the views of local government officials are not necessarily those of Coventry people who, after all, may want to live here after the war. We should like the new Coventry to be something of the old Coventry, and not merely a fourth-rate provincial city on futurist lines.’ Over the next three years there seems to have been relatively little expression of popular feeling either way, as local traders tried unsuccessfully to persuade the City Reconstruction Committee that, in the words of the President of the local chamber of commerce, ‘the old idea of street shopping was much better than “cloistered precincts”’. But in December 1944 the issue did briefly if obliquely break cover after the pro-plan
Coventry Evening Telegraph
reported Gibson’s talk on ‘The New Coventry’ to a meeting of Armstrong Siddeley workers. After stressing the need for 20,000 new houses in the city, Gibson had ‘pointed out the need for a departure from tradition in building methods’ before remarking in conclusion that ‘the people themselves would decide how they would be housed in the future’. This brought a double negative response: from ‘Coventrian’, arguing that ‘the people will decide that it is bricks and mortar they require, and perhaps a few less planners,’ and from ‘Longview’, who was ‘certain that if a referendum could be taken there would be an overwhelming majority in favour of the orthodox brick and mortar house’.

But for most Coventrians in the years after their devastating Blitz, the top priority was not to take part in controversies about a nebulous future. Rather it was to regroup, to retrench and to try to get back as soon as possible to something like normality, which in essence meant life before the war. ‘For the majority of the city’s population,’ the historians of this strong trend have noted, ‘abstract ruminations were simply irrelevant.’ By 1944 local cinemas were attracting record attendances, organised cricket and football were once again being played on Saturday afternoons, the Coventry Amateur Operatic Society was meeting for the first time since 1939, and the National Federation of Anglers was choosing Coventry as the venue for its AGM, reflecting the city’s almost 7,000 members of that decidedly non-reconstructionist body. Perhaps most telling of all was the behaviour of Coventry’s gardeners. Amid warnings from civic leaders that the proper business of horticulture was still the cultivation of vegetables, they quietly and privately during the last fifteen months of the war grew flowers and shrubs – potent, non-utilitarian reminders of a peaceful way of life that perhaps had not been irretrievably fractured.
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Above all, across the country, it was on the home that most people’s hopes and concerns were really focused. ‘Home means a place to go to when in trouble,’ a female Mass-Observation panellist declared in 1943. ‘A place where bygone days were happiest. A place sadly altered by the war. A place where you can do as you like without landladies to consider . . . A place to glorify when away and rely on always.’ The same year M-O published
People’s Homes
, a comprehensive survey of working-class attitudes to housing. ‘One often hears planners argue that ordinary people have no idea of what they want in housing,’ the survey’s introduction noted. ‘This is a satisfactory argument when you are planning for others without knowing their hearts and minds. The many verbatim remarks in this report put that tale out of court once and for all.’ Among those quoted was a 50-year-old working woman who lived in an upper tenement flat ‘with a husband, two children working and two children still at school’. She was asked about her dream home:

I’d like a sitting-room-kitchen, so that you could have meals in it, and a nice garden at the back for vegetables and chickens, and a flower garden in front. A nice bathroom all done with lino . . . Coal fire in the living room and none in the bedrooms, I don’t think fires in a bedroom are healthy. I’d like a sort of sunshine paper, if you know what I mean, with just a little beading round the top, flowers or fruit. That for the sitting room, and blue for the bedrooms. I like boards in the bedrooms, not polished or anything of that, but scrubbed, so that they come up lovely and white. Just scrub them with a bit of soap. The same in the kitchen unless we had a bit of lino there. I don’t like the stone floor in the kitchen. It’s so cold and damp.

On the basis of this and much other evidence, the survey concluded that ‘the “dream home” of the majority is still the small modern suburban house, preferably possessing all modern conveniences, such as a labour-saving kitchen, hot and cold water laid on to a sink in the scullery, and a bathroom with a separate lavatory’. It would also have ‘small but light windows, built-in cupboards, coal fires for warming, electric points in most rooms – these and a hundred other things would be appreciated’. Inevitably, ‘the range of personal wants is immense – but happily the elasticity of true democratic planning can offer an almost infinite variety, and so satisfy the healthy, contradictory categories of human need and hope and hate.’

This was not good enough for one of the book’s reviewers, the economist P. Sargant Florence. ‘The most that can be deduced is that some people like one thing, some another’ was his unenthusiastic response, and he argued that the book once again pointed ‘to the moral that standards it is desirable to achieve cannot safely be left to housewives who are not equipped with the necessary knowledge of what lies within the realm of possibility’. Accordingly, ‘architects and planners must give the lead and the target must be placed higher than the inarticulate yearnings of the average working-class housewife, if the same ill-defined sense of dissatisfaction is not to be perpetuated’.
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Over and above ‘all mod cons’, what people wanted – and clearly, unambiguously wanted – was privacy in their homes. ‘A garden that is overlooked, windows into which neighbours can see, balconies visible from the road or from houses opposite are all deplored,’ the report noted. ‘But above all, people dislike sharing a house with another family or even with one person, as many have to do.’ The unashamedly unemancipated Mrs Michael Pleydell-Bouverie, who by 1944 had spent three and a half years on behalf of the
Daily Mail
talking to ‘the Women of Britain’ about present and putative homes, agreed: ‘Speaking generally the people want to breathe and move, to be rid of neighbours’ wireless, and the clatter of early-risers and late-bedders . . . The community life of which everyone has had experience to some degree or other in this war, has not endeared or recommended itself as a permanent state of affairs.’ This strong desire for greater privacy was hardly a new phenomenon – historical demographers have shown that the ‘privatised’, home-centred domestic unit, founded on the nuclear family, goes back to pre-industrial England – but undoubtedly the war’s more or less enforced communal sociability sharpened such instincts. ‘Emphatically, no’ and ‘We prefer to wash our dirty linen in private’ were two typical, highly symptomatic contributions to discussions in 1943 by almost 300 Townswomen’s Guilds about the desirability of developing communal laundries.
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There is evidence, moreover, that if having to move some distance (usually out of a city centre) was the only way in which the desired mixture of greater privacy and more amenities-cum-space (including a garden) could be achieved, then most people were prepared to do that. A cross-class survey in 1943 of 2,000 women in their teens and 20s found that over half wanted to live in a suburb or small town and nearly a third in the country; while a study the same year by the Society for Women Housing Managers discovered that ‘an overwhelming majority plumped for a suburban house’ if given the choice between different types of modern housing. Nevertheless, the very understandable wish for modern conveniences far from implied an unambiguously positive attitude towards the modern as a whole. An official survey carried out in the closing weeks of the war saw a random sample of 1,727 housewives being shown four photographs of bedroom furniture. Number 1 was ‘plain and fairly modern’, number 2 ‘the most old fashioned’, and numbers 3 and 4 ‘extremely modern’. The preferences respectively expressed were 27, 45, 13 and 12 per cent. Significantly, in terms of the breakdown of these preferences, ‘the upper economic group tend towards modernity rather more than the lower economic groups’ and ‘the younger age groups like modern furniture more than the older age group’.
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It was the overwhelming desire for privacy that pervaded what was nothing less than a mass aversion towards the whole idea of flats – despite, as Frederic Osborn caustically put it in 1942, ‘the most persistent propaganda by architectural playboys who want larger boxes of plasticine with which to indulge their creative fancy’. A year earlier, the
Picture
Post
special (including Maxwell Fry’s modernist vision) had prompted congratulatory letters (with a fair sprinkling from the great and the good), but Margaret Blundell dissented: ‘Your Brave New World plan is all very well in some respects, but will “the workers” be satisfied even if it is put into practice?’ asked this gasfitter’s wife from Sirdar Road, Wood Green, N22. ‘I doubt it. Your flats would never be home to me. You can clear away whole towns of ugly old houses in one sweep, but you cannot change human nature so quickly. Slow change is better in the long run.’
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Over the rest of the war, a series of surveys showed how far from unusual Blundell’s dislike of flats was – a dislike, it must be remembered, at a time when ‘flats’ meant in most people’s minds a handful of storeys, not a high-rise in the modern sense of the term. Whereas 49 per cent of those asked in the
People’s Homes
survey wanted ideally to ‘live in a small house with a garden’, only 5 per cent of the sample ‘would by choice inhabit a flat, and even among flat dwellers only 28 per cent would not prefer to move to some sort of house, if they had the choice’. Soon afterwards, a submission made to the Dudley Committee by the Women’s Advisory Housing Council similarly asserted that only 5. 7 per cent of its respondents preferred flats to houses, with drawbacks of the former including not only lack of privacy but noise, fears over children’s safety, ‘gangsterism’ and problems of coal deliveries and refuse disposal. And Pleydell-Bouverie confirmed that 90.2 per cent of the women she had polled had expressed a preference for a house or a bungalow, a preference partly explained by one of her more graphic chapter titles, ‘99% Want a Garden’. Still, as the
People’s Homes
report had wryly concluded about working-class people and such apparently firm wishes, ‘Happily for the planners, they will make the best of a bad lot or a good little.’
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What about ‘community’? That bewitching, tantalising word would be the subject of many facile generalisations and much mental anguish in the years ahead but was not yet on the lips of every social investigator. Probably the closest to a ‘community study’ undertaken during the war was Dennis Chapman’s survey of Middlesbrough (a town not short of slums and industrial pollution), based on interviews in the summer of 1944 with 1,387 ‘housewives’, 971 ‘men workers’ and 238 ‘women workers’.