Brave new world of the Precinct People

Michael Bird on the lost optimism of Sixties Britain, which swung the wrecking ball and dreamt of utopia

IBOOM CITIES by Otto Saumarez Smith 208pp, OUP, £65, ebook £54.14

f you’ve recently petitioned your local planning office about a concrete “monstrosity” or plate-glass “eyesore” – if the outrage still burns bright – Boom Cities might not be the book for you. If you can’t begin to imagine how pedestrian precincts, underpasses, multistorey car parks and other grim locations for TV crime dramas once embodied a bornagain vision of modern Britain, Otto Saumarez Smith probably won’t change your mind. But if you’re interested in the motives that inspired the wholesale reshaping of our town and city centres in the Sixties, he has a tale worth telling.

Featuring “a motley cast of architecture and planning professionals, one-nation Tories, Labourite expansionists, members of the establishment, earnest civil servants, localauthority bigwigs, and grafting developers”, it begins around 1960 in a parallel economic universe. Affluence and leisure time are predicted to increase indefinitely, not just for the ABC1s but for every single person in Britain.

The sociologist Ruth Glass, who coined the term “gentrification”, described the now bizarreseeming expectation that we could all look forward to “an abundance of goods and gadgets, of cars and new buildings – in an apparently mounting flow of consumption”. Colin Buchanan, author of the 1963 report Traffic in Towns, thought planners could take it for granted that “we shall have the resources to remould the environment to our liking”.

Never mind its plodding title, Traffic in Towns became a bible for the motor-car age, cited with messianic zeal by politicians on both Left and Right. “We have built our towns in entirely the wrong way for motor traffic,” intoned Conservative transport minister Ernest Marples. “We want an entirely different type of town.”

In former industrial heartlands, local councillors grappled – most of them way out of their depth – with how to address the imperatives of modern living. They feared that any town that failed to embrace the precinctand-underpass age would consign itself to a slow and dingy death, in which “small businessmen” in Victorian shops peddled their outmoded wares to a shrinking populace of car-less slumdwellers, while savvy shoppers zipped along ring roads to spread their disposable income around more up-to-date settings.

The alternative was to call in the architect-planners – a handful of specialist practices that could be trusted to deliver a new urban dawn. Bomb-sites, grand old town halls and covered markets, housing and shops of any premotor-car type or age (commonly dismissed as “slums”) – all of it had to go. Churches and one or two other historic buildings might be preserved as “features”, irrespective of their function.

Although the favoured modernist architectural idiom owed much to Le Corbusier and Left-wing utopian thinking, Saumarez Smith overturns the idea that architect-planners and the politicians who commissioned them were driven by a socialdemocratic urge. For different reasons, both Conservative and Labour governments during the Sixties saw modernist architecture as the most visible symbol of what they wanted to achieve, from the roll-out of the welfare state to the private sector feeding frenzy stirred up by plans to reconstruct entire city centres. In his 1962 book The Conservative Enemy, Tony Crosland, soon to be Harold Wilson’s economic secretary to the Treasury, opined that: “Greedy men, abetted by a complacent Government, are prowling over Britain and devastating it.”

This wasn’t the kind of “urbanity” that architect-planners like Graeme Shankland and Lionel Brett sought to encourage with their schemes. Saumarez Smith explains how the preferences and prejudices of these civilised, Oxbridge-educated chaps set the wrecking balls swinging. Semi-detached or American-style suburbia was anathema. The life of a city must be focused at its car-friendly centre. But – the big problem, really, though one that Saumarez Smith mentions only in passing – no one bothered to consult the citizens on what kind of life they actually wanted to lead. Architects’ drawings, Alan Bennett noted in 1967, were typically “thronged with Precinct People, a race of tall, long-headed Municipal Masai”. How many councils, he wondered, “have been gulled into demolishing their town centres by such drawingboard dreams”? In a drawing of how Shankland’s plan would transform Bolton town centre, Gordon Cullen – the architectplanners’ artist of choice – shows a