Our Brutalist town centres deserve demolition, not our protection

‘Iwas brought up as a boy in a district which I still think the loveliest in England,” said EM Forster in a 1946 radio broadcast. “Hedges full of clematis, primroses, bluebells, dog roses and nuts.” The author was describing Stevenage, the part of the country – and it was then country – where he had spent his childhood, and which inspired Howards End.

Forster was speaking against the New Towns Act, spearheaded by Lewis Silkin, minister of town and country planning in Clement Atlee’s government. The minister’s aim, to rehouse those made homeless by the Blitz away from the old urban slums, was honourable. But Forster feared the New Town of Stevenage would “fall out of the blue sky like a meteorite upon the ancient and delicate scenery of Hertfordshire”.

So it did. Crash! Shopping centre. Crash! Concrete piazza. Crash! Bus station.

Before the first paving slab went down, an investigator from Mass Observation – the social studies unit – asked locals what they thought of the proposed development. “I shouldn’t like to see the beauty taken away,” said one. “Have you seen the beauty of the place? That avenue of chestnuts up by the school and parish church?”

On May 6 1946, Silkin himself addressed more than 3,000 people. “I want to carry out in Stevenage a daring exercise in town planning,” he said to shouts from the crowd. “It’s no good your jeering: it is going to be done. Stevenage will in a short time become world-famous,” he continued. Disbelieving laughter. “People from all over the world will come... to see how we here in this country are building for the new way of life.” Silkin left to cries of “Dictator!” Yobs let the air out of his tyres.

Still, the town went ahead. In 1959, the Queen unveiled the concrete-and-granite clock tower; Harold Macmillan visited the Co-op. Some were won round; others not. Locals changed the city signs to read “Silking rad”.

Silkin had hoped it would be a “gay and bright” place. Was it ever? Historic England, the conservation body, certainly thinks it is special enough to protect. Stevenage town centre has just been added to its “heritage at risk register”. The main square, now bordered by betting shops and boarded-up windows, “reflects the contemporary architectural and urban design thinking of the 1950s”.

I have been squinting at photographs of Leonard Vincent’s clock tower in Stevenage and trying to see what Historic England sees. I play this “best-will-in-theworld” game every time a post-war tower, concrete bunker or desolate bus shelter is listed. In London, I stand in the Barbican, lost in its maze of walkways, and stare, and try to see what the Brutalist braves see when they cheer for Trellick Tower, Balfron Tower and the Alexandra Road Estate. I see grey, forbidding slabs of cruel concrete.

How to Love Brutalism is the forthcoming book by John Grindrod, author of Concretopia, a history of post-war British architecture. Grindrod writes superbly about this period, but still I look at the office blocks, council flats and high-rises he celebrates and feel oppressed and diminished by their grim faces. Inhuman architecture, machines to barely live in. Save our shopping centres? Our glum urban squares? I’m with Forster. Send a new shower of meteorites to blast them to the ground.