Reconstructing modernity: Space, power and governance in mid-twentieth century British cities 9781526114167

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James Greenhalgh

The book shows how local corporations and town planners in Manchester and Hull attempted to create order and functionality through the remaking of their decrepit Victorian cities between 1928 and 1957. It looks at the motivations of national and local governments in the post-war rebuilding process and explores why and how they attempted the schemes they did. It shows how their efforts were contested by various actors; from businesses and commercial interests to shopkeepers and citizens going about their everyday life. Local corporations, the primary drivers of redevelopment, were moderate technocrats who believed that the ordering of space could produce more functional cities and better societies.

James Greenhalgh is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Lincoln

Greenhalgh

It examines plans and policies designed to produce and govern lived spaces – shopping centres, housing estates, parks, schools and homes – and shows how and why they succeeded or failed. It demonstrates how the material space of the city, and how people used and experienced it, was and is crucial in understanding historical change in urban contexts. The book is aimed at those interested in urban modernism, town planning, the urban histories of post-war Britain and social housing.

Reconstructing modernity

Reconstructing modernity assesses the character of approaches to rebuilding British cities during the decades after the Second World War. It explores the strategies of spatial governance that sought to restructure society and looks at the cast of characters who shaped these processes. It challenges traditional views of urban modernism and sheds new light on the importance of the immediate post-war period for the trajectory of urban renewal in the twentieth century.

ISBN 978-1-5261-1414-3 Cover image:

9 781526 114143 www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

Reconstructing modernity Space, power and governance in mid-twentieth century British cities

Reconstructing modernity

Reconstructing modernity Space, power and governance in mid-twentieth century British cities

James Greenhalgh

Manchester University Press

Copyright © James Greenhalgh 2017 The right of James Greenhalgh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 1414 3  hardback First published 2017 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

For John and Faith, my parents

Contents

List of illustrations

viii

Acknowledgements

x

Abbreviations Introduction

xii 1

1  Fantasies of urban futures

29

2  The functioning metropolis

77

3  The city and the suburban village

121

4  The spaces of everyday life

157

Conclusion

191

Bibliography

201

Index

221

List of illustrations

0.1 A57(M) Mancunian Way, unfinished slip road. Author’s own. 0.2 Ruins of the National Picture Theatre, Beverley Road, Hull. Author’s own. 1.1 J.D.M. Harvey’s drawing of the town hall and civic area Rowland Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan (Norwich, 1945), Plate 81. 1.2 Civic centre in Manchester by A. Sherwood Edwards. Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, Plate 31. 1.3 Illustration by Harvey of Queen’s Gardens area of Hull. Edwin Lutyens and Patrick Abercrombie, A Plan for the City and County of Kingston upon Hull (London, 1945), Plate XXI. 1.4 Drawing by Harvey of the city centre area of Hull. Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, p. 47. 1.5 Drawing of Manchester c.1650. Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, inside front cover. 1.6 Drawing of Manchester c.2045. Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, inside back cover. 1.7 Drawing of medieval Hull by Harvey. Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, inside front cover. 1.8 Drawing of a future Hull by Harvey. Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, inside back cover. 1.9 Front cover of the Manchester Planning Exhibition promotional pamphlet © Manchester Art Gallery. 1.10 Distribution of shopping facilities and road accidents in Hull. Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, Plate IX. 2.1 Zoning proposals for Manchester City Centre. Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, Plate 13.   2.2 Map of the Corporation’s proposal for Hull’s shopping

2 3 54 55

56 56 58 58 59 59 62 64 81

List of illustrations

ix

area. Hull History Centre (HHC)/L.711/CC, Report on central shopping area and improvements. W.R. Davidge, reproduced with permission. 92 2.3 Map of the Chamber of Trade’s proposal for Hull’s shopping area. HHC/L.711/CC, Report on central shopping area and improvements. W.R. Davidge, reproduced with permission. 92 2.4 Photograph submitted by Manchester Corporation in the More O’Ferrall appeal. National Archives (NA)/Housing and Local Government (HLG)/79/422, reproduced with permission.102 2.5 Photograph submitted by More O’Ferrall of a proposed advertising hoarding site. NA/HLG/79/422, reproduced with permission. 102 3.1 The proposed North-Western Neighbourhood at Wythenshawe. Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, Plate 53. 130 3.2 Photographs of the Wythenshawe estate. Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, Plate 51. 131 4.1 Drawing of the ideal view of the Southcoates Lane development, Hull. HHC/CTAH/5/M/22, reproduced with permission.  177 4.2 Photograph of the Southcoates Lane development, Hull. HHC/CTAH/5/M/22, reproduced with permission.  178

Acknowledgements

An endeavour like a book always involves trying to distribute too little thanks to too many people, but I shall at least make an attempt. First, this book was made possible by a grant from the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research, for which I am very grateful. Leif Jerram, Charlie Wildman, Selina Todd and Penny Summerfield were all there when this project started and offered a tremendous amount of encouragement and patience. The seed of this book was sown on Leif’s MA course back in 2004 and not one page would have been written without his influence and effort. Many wonderful people supported this project in ways that they may not have even realised themselves; Pedro Ramos Pinto and Dan Szechi were particularly helpful and had wise words in challenging times. Frank Mort’s detailed comments went a long way to addressing some serious oversights (although he may well think I should have listened harder). My friends and colleagues at the University of Lincoln: Helen Smith, Christine Grandy, Ed Owens and Sarah Longair, alongside Claire Hubbard-Hall from up the hill, all read a good chunk of the book. Krista Cowman and Jamie Wood offered useful advice on publication over a drink. Otto Saumarez Smith sharpened the edges of some of my architectural terminology, whilst Graham Barrett offered some eleventh-hour grammar help with his usual panache. Simon Gunn encouraged me to pursue the project and has been a huge influence on both the content of the book and my career to date. He is an endlessly generous and supportive individual to whom I (and many others) owe an enormous, and I fear unpayable, debt. Patrick Doyle, Tom Sharp, Barry Hazley and Rob Portass (honk, honk) deserve special mentions for their fine friendship and indomitable commitment to the pub as an arena for intellectual discourse. It has been my privilege to know and work with all four of you. Gary Butler, Maarten Walraven, Ben Wilcock, Nathan Booth, Tom Scriven, Ben Anderson, Sheona Davies, Alistair Kefford, Stevie Spiegl, Jess

Acknowledgements

xi

Dixon, Ravi Hensman, James Corke-Webster and all the other Picnic Wednesday and Manc History five-a-side members deserve a pat on the back for tolerating me. Another stimulating arena for my work has been the Urban History Group conference, so thanks to my friends and colleagues on the UHG committee and our big brother the Economic History Society for continuing to provide such fertile ground for developing new voices in urban history. Thanks too to everyone who helped me at the national and local archives, particularly David Govier, John Peel and Sarah Hobbs at Manchester, Martin Taylor and Christine Brown from Hull History Centre, and Paul Johnson at Kew. Martin Dodge and Peter Larkham, who have both written on similar subjects, were incredibly helpful as I tried to finish the book. Their willingness to assist a fellow academic whom they barely knew typifies the generosity of spirit that characterises the academy at its best. For Katherine Fennelly I reserve the greatest thanks and all my love. She has offered support beyond the call of duty and has been patient and encouraging through some hard times. Not everyone who made this possible was directly involved in the study of history, and not everyone made it to the end with me. Liz Harrison and Catherine Durose finally spurred me into resuming my studies by constantly prodding at my ego. Everyone at Corus and TATA steel helped me go on to a new career and I wish them well in the face of the terrible adversity the steel industry is experiencing in the UK and beyond. Wg Cdr James A. Chorlton helped support my studies and I hope he would have approved of this book. Bill Hunter offered useful insights into my writing from a unique perspective and he and Hazel have been marvellous friends and supporters. Mojo (paws off the keyboard!), Magic, Whisper and Solo also deserve a mention, despite them largely hindering the production of the volume. Lastly, I want to thank John and Faith, my parents, to whom this monograph is dedicated. They, alongside the stories of my grandfather, Sgt Fred Greenhalgh, first inspired and encouraged my love of history and the fascination with the Second World War that eventually coalesced into the ideas presented in this book.

Abbreviations

GMCRO H&DCT HHC HLG MoE MoH MoH&LG MoT&CP NA RACTP WESC

Greater Manchester County Record Office Hull and District Chamber of Trade Hull History Centre (Ministry of) Housing and Local Government Ministry of Education Ministry of Health Ministry of Housing and Local Government (Oct 1951) Ministry of Town and Country Planning (1943) National Archives, Kew Retailers’ Advisory Committee on Town Planning Wythenshawe Estate Special Committee (Manchester)

Introduction

[T]he only fitting tribute that could be paid to the devotion and courage of a brave people [is] to rebuild our City in a manner worthy of its citizens. … Few of us will see the completion of the plan. But may we point out the road to a destiny that will be not unworthy of the great victory that the heroism and faith of our people helped to secure.1

In the above introduction to the 1945 A Plan for the City and County of Kingston upon Hull, Hull’s Reconstruction Committee Chair, Alderman J.L. Schultz, presented a city at a critical juncture in its development.2 He described a city that, having forged a renewed civic spirit in the fires of the Blitz, was ready to embark on a lifetime of reconstruction to create a comprehensively planned city of the future. It is tempting for urban reformers and historians alike to seek these moments of rupture and points of crisis, to try and find that crucial moment where something or perhaps everything might or did change. Historians reading the multitude of similar sentiments expressed in plans and in speeches by Britain’s local grandees at the end of the Second World War might indeed conclude that Britain’s cities stood at the beginning of a bold and transformative path. Yet, by 1955 architect and academic Prof. H. Myles Wright concluded that it was hard to remember the ‘passionate ­determination … to lay out afresh the damaged and decayed portions of cities and rebuild them as far finer places’.3 Cities, of course, are always in the process of becoming something else, whether situated by politicians and planners at some imagined juncture on the journey towards a brighter future or merely through the incremental physical processes that shape the urban landscape.4 They rarely, if ever, complete these rhetorical journeys though: one generation of planners disavows the designs of their forebears, policies change with each election cycle, inhabitants use public spaces in ways that the designers never envisaged and developing technologies alter the infrastructural needs of urban life. Observing the unfinished slip road that hangs in

2

Reconstructing modernity

mid-air from the Mancunian Way (the ghost of an abandoned dual carriageway to Manchester city centre; see figure 0.1) or the burnt-out shell of the National Picture Theatre on Hull’s Beverley Road (reputedly the last untouched ‘blitzed’ building in Britain; see figure 0.2) reveals the scars of the never-finished journeys of cities towards the distant ­end-points proposed in 1945.5

0.1  The unfinished slip road on the A57(M) Mancunian Way.

Introduction

3

0.2  Ruins of the National Picture Theatre on Beverley Road, Hull.

This book examines Britain at one of the most symbolic of these rhetorical moments of crisis and opportunity – the end of the Second World War – to reconsider how competing interests shaped cities between the end of the war and the late 1950s. It asks how town planners, architects and local governments sought to create and govern urban space; it questions their objectives and examines the motivations that went into remaking British cities. Alongside this, it considers what consequences their successes and failures had for the trajectory of planned urban renewal that occupied the middle five decades of the twentieth century.6 In doing so, it asks how we might reinterpret the character of urban modernism that came to define these attempts to replan British cities. The decade that followed the war was neither the precursor to the triumph of architectural Modernism, nor a period of moderate, humanist modernism. Instead, the story told here evidences a decade of profoundly ambitious local government planning; a decade in which attempts to extend modernist practices, primarily at local-corporation level, to govern the totality of everyday life betokened the thoroughgoing radicalism of this phase of urban modernism. The post-war period has been presented as the golden age for British town planners, a moment when their long-marginalised profession gained access to a state apparatus of urban transformation that their

4

Reconstructing modernity

continental cousins already enjoyed.7 It appears to be the high point of optimism during a process of planned renewal in British cities that began in the middle of the 1920s and lasted until the crises of the 1970s.8 Yet, in popular memory the period is characterised by a series of intersecting and contradictory narratives. These revolve around the rebuilding of blitzed cities, the desecration of built heritage and the proliferation of Modernist architecture.9 Scathing criticisms by public figures like Prince Charles and Margaret Thatcher have fixed a simplistic narrative of the post-war period as a time of left-wing, Modernist recklessness in the public imagination.10 In turn, these accusations have linked architectural and planning failure to the wider problems of post-industrial Britain. Emblematic ‘failed’ social housing schemes or aesthetically radical buildings like Sheffield’s Park Hill flats, Manchester’s long-demolished Hulme Crescents or London’s Barbican complex have anchored these popular perceptions to tangible examples. The problem with these accounts is twofold: first, most of the truly Modernist architecture was not created until the very end of the 1950s at the earliest and the style only really took root as a built form in the 1960s; second, very little of this dominant narrative of reconstruction and irresponsibility has stood up to serious examination by historians.11 It might be comforting to think that so many of the infrastructural and social problems British cities encountered in the latter part of the twentieth century might be laid at the feet of a cadre of misguided, irresponsible or self-important planners and architects, but such easy explanations rarely hold water. A generation of scholars have, since the 1980s, demonstrated the complexity of the story of post-war urban development and planning. Architectural historians have shown the relative success of less emblematic forms of modernism in schools and housing, but also in the control of urban density and development of innovative building techniques.12 Town planning historians have pulled apart the motivations behind ambitious plans for the redevelopment of city centres and revealed the multiple challenges they faced in being realised.13 The visually exhilarating planning books and exhibitions produced by so many of the city corporations at the end of the war (the subject of chapter 1) have been dismantled and reassessed as useful, but utopian, fantasies or as pragmatic attempts at civic boosterism.14 The alleged failure of 1960s flats has been complicated by showing that many of their problems related to poor quality building, lack of facilities or governmental neglect, alongside the concomitant demonstration that similar issues persisted on more traditional cottage housing estates.15 The purpose of this book is to re-examine the processes and actors involved in planning, regulating and producing lived-in spaces at the end

Introduction

5

of the Second World War. Its objective is twofold: first, to build a picture of what happened when planners, councillors, civil servants and architects attempted to produce and enact visions of how cities should work by regulating the experience of urban space; second, to understand how this process in the ten years or so following the war helped shape the path of British urban renewal in subsequent decades. I argue that postwar approaches to urban space, which originated in the 1920s, were quietly radical, totalising and self-consciously modern in their approach to creating and regulating urban space, yet crucially not in thrall to architectural Modernism. Local corporations, the primary designers and deliverers of post-war redevelopment, demonstrated a growing desire to gain control of their cities in a holistic sense that began during the inter-war period. This desire was not founded on the production of an architecturally Modernist utopia, but in the control of building heights, land-use zoning, street widths, air quality, smells and noise. The defining belief lay not in the power of architecture to shape experience, though isolated and emblematic examples of this can be found, but in the power of highly regulated spaces, both extant and newly created, to produce specific, beneficial social outcomes. Though beyond the chronological boundaries of this study, the challenges faced from a range of actors in prosecuting this spatial project would have lasting effects on approaches to urban renewal throughout the 1960s. The idea of planning for ‘reconstruction’ in two cities, Manchester and Hull, thus functions as a lens through which to examine the shaping of post-war Britain, with a particular emphasis on aspects of urban planning that dealt with producing lived-in spaces and everyday experience. Though there is much specific discussion of these two cities that I hope readers will find illuminating, the study of them is not an end in itself; rather, they are treated as exemplars of the time, as case studies via which we might reach some broader conclusions. Examination of continuity and change in approaches to urban space in these two northern cities reveals the way elite views of society were encoded in the schemes to develop post-war Britain and illustrates the evolving and contested character of British modernity – a term to which I will return in due course. Discourses of bomb damage, wartime civilian sacrifice and what it meant to be modern played a crucial role in promoting ambitious and often radical proposals to shape the spaces of citizens’ everyday lives. However, actual approaches to the aesthetic of the built environment, though not identical in the two cities, almost always evidenced far less radicalism than the rhetoric espoused by planners and politicians. What the evidence shows is that in Manchester and Hull the common thread

6

Reconstructing modernity

was that imagining what being modern meant and how the modern city should function involved the belief that the expert, scientific manipulation of the built environment might solve the infrastructural and social problems – traffic congestion, insanitary dwellings, pollution and the distribution of amenities – that dominated urban Britain in the years before the war. The objective of the book is thus not merely to engage with the issues of planning or with the structures and attitudes of local and regional politics in the period for their own sake. Instead, it uses the study of these subjects as a way to draw wider conclusions about British society, modernism and the path of urban renewal in the twentieth century. These approaches to urban governance were not, of course, monolithic, homogenous processes, and how the modern city should function and the meanings of modernity were contested at different levels of the state, by a range of different groups. Local corporations, ministers, civil servants, planners, retailers, traders, guild members and other influential groups contested the symbolic and material spaces of cities by producing conflicting designs or by deploying contrary notions of how the built environment should take shape. As we shall see, contests over who might produce spaces and what went on in them were not only being played out over emblematic schemes for the redesign of entire city centres, but also in small-scale disputes over waste ground, bomb sites, fairgrounds and grass verges. Nor was it solely the rich, the expert or the powerful, the capitalist or the bureaucrat, who sought to contest the urban environment. As chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate, citizens on new housing estates also subverted and shaped the uses and outcomes ascribed to certain spaces, often through the quiet and unconscious habits of everyday life. This book seeks to complicate the picture of ‘urban agency’, and show how some of the key questions of urban life were both posed and answered in the contests over apparently trivial matters, like taking short cuts, the playing of ball games, the location of shops or the siting of advertising. The book ultimately shows how conflicting constructions of ideas as varied as community, consumerism, visual amenity and youth were fundamental in shaping both the physical environment of post-war Britain and forming approaches to urban renewal that had implications beyond the 1950s.

Continuity, localism and urban renewal Central to the discussion in this book are the effects of the historiographical periodisation of the mid-twentieth century on how we

Introduction

7

i­nterpret the processes of planning, modernism and urban renewal. David Edgerton has demonstrated how a reconsideration of the periodisation around the Second World War might alter how we view narratives of the welfare state and British decline, and here I want to suggest that we might productively engage in a similar, if slight, shift in perspective.16 This is because it seems to me that the way historians have dealt with the war has obscured some small but revealing elements of post-war approaches to the built environment, especially concerning the relationship between the local and national state. Understandably, the Second World War often looms as an exceptional presence in the historiography, punctuating the period and structuring historiographical understanding of change around notions of the periods labelled ‘interwar’, ‘wartime’ and ‘post-war’. It often forms the end or the beginning of a study or is excluded on the grounds of its exceptionality. However, the most common treatment – following the much-challenged work of Paul Addison – has been to examine the extent to which it produced or catalysed change across British society.17 In architectural histories this discussion of post-war continuity and change has tended to polarise around the extent to which the war created the conditions for the adoption of architectural styles and approaches pioneered during the inter-war period.18 Nicholas Bullock sees the war as a central driver of change, arguing that, whilst there were significant continuities in the design principles of the Modernist movements either side of the war: The war opened up unparalleled demand for experimentation and innovation. The war both forced innovation on general practice and incorporated the avant-garde into the new order of production.19

The problem with these types of conclusions is that, whilst there is certainly good evidence that austerity drove innovation in building techniques, they tend to ignore the pressure for change coming from the local state in the inter-war period. There is considerable evidence of a rhetoric of comprehensive planning (discussed in chapter 1), the increased dominance of the ideas of the MARS (Modern Architectural Research) group in Britain and the European CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’architecture Moderne) in planning discourse during the 1940s,20 and the creation of a host of new planning laws and regulations that all seem to have been driven by the war.21 The Barlow, Scott and Uthwatt reports, the Town and Country Planning acts of 1944 and 1947 and the raft of advisory pamphlets like the Ministry of Health’s Design of Dwellings and Housing Manual (both 1944) are just a few examples that represent a drastic alteration in approaches to town planning at national level.

8

Reconstructing modernity

While the local aspect of planning is not wholly ignored, architectural histories rarely set out to examine in any detail the motivations of and challenges faced by the local corporations responsible for delivering post-war buildings.22 The post-war period certainly was one in which a large amount of quite radical national legislation was produced concerning planning and design. However, as chapters 1 and 2 discuss, it was often preceded by and, perhaps, directly reflective of inter-war practices by local corporations. Understanding the character of urban modernity and modernism in the post-war period thus requires much greater attention to the role of the local corporation in the inter-war period, alongside an examination of the relationship between local and national government. In contrast to their architectural cousins, town planning historians have asserted the importance of examining the unique circumstances of local corporations. In doing so they have sought to understand the complexities of individual cities in the story of how post-war plans were enacted or stymied.23 As Otto Saumarez Smith and Guy Ortolano have shown, however, too close an attention to local peculiarities has often obscured the intricate nature of the relationships between the national and the local in formulating approaches to the built environment.24 None of the processes governing approaches to space make sense without a multi-layered approach to the structures of the state, and the detail of these interactions is crucial to this study. The reason for this attention to these details will, I hope, become clear in the following chapters. The adoption of a particular policy towards housing discussed in chapter 3, for example, may look like radical post-war change if viewed solely against legislation and advice from the Ministry of Health. However, when compared to the very similar local policies Manchester or Hull produced in the 1920s or 1930s, we can start to tease out the influence and significance of the small, yet crucial differences. Paying greater attention to the complexities of national and local approaches thus not only moves beyond polar meta-narratives of continuity or change but also begins to unearth vital details that have been obscured by the distorting presence of the war. What follows is primarily an examination of the motivations and difficulties behind planning British cities. Planning may initially seem, as urban historian Leif Jerram has put it, to be a concept that ‘sum[s] up irrelevance, boredom and small mindedness’.25 However, city planning represents, to quote Jerram again, ‘the “genius” of the twentieth century because it is both the means and the end of the last one hundred years of European civilisation, intellectual endeavour, and state formation’.26 It  represents an all-encompassing scheme produced by experts along

Introduction

9

purportedly indisputable scientific principles to shape society through the total control of space.27 What is important for the arguments presented here is that town planning and plans articulate the social and cultural anxieties of their day. They are physical interventions into the lives of citizens on a permanent basis that seek to solve perceived problems and perfect the totality of urban experience and function through material means. Planning strategies encapsulate and articulate the complex socio-­ cultural views of a host of influential state and non-state actors and provide a tool through which their views might be studied. Understanding the detail of what was similar or, conversely, unique about planning in the post-war period provides a way of examining how debates about urban society were encoded in space and thus played an active role in producing modern Britain and modern Britons. Planners and local governments emerge here as neither megalomaniacal, utopian idealists, nor pragmatists devoid of long-term goals.28 Instead, the local corporations in Manchester and Hull evidence a type of urban modernism that had parallels with and drew upon aspects of the Modernist movement, but was also deeply rooted in the practicalities of inter-war municipal government in ailing nineteenth-century cities. They were chiefly concerned with how the modern city should function, and organised their interventions around land-use zoning, the notion of ‘amenity’ and the belief that rationally planned, holistically ordered urban space would produce efficient, pleasant and functional cities and happy, productive citizens. In this they were quiet radicals whose intentions were a total control of new and extant environments. The currency of their ideas was not the grandness of architectural intervention, but the powerfully mundane potential of zoning, advertising control and smoke abatement. Their core belief lay in the power of expert manipulation of space to produce rationally designed places in which people could live, play, shop and work, in order to achieve positive social outcomes.29 The conclusions presented here about the character and challenges of post-war planning and the attention paid to periodisation also have a broader significance for our understanding of the trajectory of urban renewal between the 1920s and 1970s. This process fully emerged with the slum clearance programmes in 1930s Britain, Germany and North America at the same time as a rapid diffusion of modernist ideas about architecture and planning emanating from professional bodies like CIAM or the MARS group. In this timeline of urban intervention, as Simon Gunn has observed: ‘1945 was not so much a turning point as a catalyst to take up ideas and forms of expertise that had already been in wide circulation in Europe and abroad by the 1930s’.30 Opposition

10

Reconstructing modernity

to this urban modernism coalesced in the 1960s as the confident socio-­ spatial schemes of the 1940s and 1950s floundered, engendering challenges from citizens and scholars like Jane Jacobs, precipitating its collapse in the early 1970s.31 The post-war period thus represents a high-water mark of optimism and enthusiasm for planning amongst national and local planners and politicians. Unpacking this key period, as I have already indicated, requires considerable care, an understanding of the longer story of attempts at urban renewal and careful consideration of the motivations of those charged with the practical implementation of urban schemes. Local corporations, as chapters 1 and 2 will show, were most adventurous and bold in urban planning between 1942 and the early 1950s, yet their desires to seize control of their cities went back much further, beginning in at least the 1920s. Construction of Manchester’s Wythenshawe estate, for example, commenced in 1928, and the regional plan of 1926 is a recognisable prototype for the 1945 plans. Evidence of bold planning for Hull city centre stretching back to 1918 shows a local corporation frustrated by the lack of national legislation to match its ambition in land acquisition. Though the importance of the emblematic moments of the modernist canon in the 1930s should not be dismissed, the type of urban modernism that flowered in local corporations after the war had long, practical roots that stretched not only to CIAM and MARS but also to the deeply down-to-earth concerns of municipal governance. Similarly, at national level, legislation, influential reports and advice emanating from central government were most concerned with planning and design in an unprecedented burst that began in 1940 and ran until around 1947. Yet the Barlow Report (1940), which marked a ‘turning point in the evolution of planning’, was begun in 1937 against a long-standing discourse of public opinion ‘deeply concerned about the need for effective town planning’ to mitigate the ‘inherent defects’ of British cities.32 The post-war high-water mark thus needs to be dissected and understood in context as a moment of alignment between local ambitions, modernist dogma and national legislation. The upper limit of this period (and thus the study) represents the coalescing of initial difficulties into serious, though not unsurmountable, obstacles and is signified by two broadly significant changes. The first is the election of the Conservative government in 1951, whose modifications to the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act throughout the 1950s altered the ability of corporations to acquire land and whose deregulation of building licences facilitated much greater involvement from private developers.33 Secondly, the abandonment of controls on licensing for private house building in 1954, the Housing Repairs and

Introduction

11

Rents Act 1954 (which recommenced large-scale slum clearance) and the Housing Subsidies Act 1956 (which subsidised high-rise building over six storeys) fundamentally altered the approach to housing. At a stroke the local state ceased to be the primary deliverer of housing (except in slum clearance areas) and private developers became the chief builders of houses.34 For these reasons, when I refer to ‘the post-war period’ I specifically mean this stretch of time, ending around 1957. The late 1950s and 1960s were also broadly characterised by economic recovery and the final acceptance of genuinely Modernist architecture. The Conservatives’ new policies engendered state co-operation with private developers as a necessity rather than a mere adjunct, which produced symbolic Modernist interventions in cities, like Birmingham’s Bull Ring and Newcastle’s sweeping ‘Brasilia of the North’ programme of slum clearance and rebuilding.35 In Manchester and Hull, much like the rest of the country, the end of the 1950s was arguably the moment when the gentle neo-Georgian styles that had dominated the modest amount of post-war reconstruction gave way to truly Modernist designs. Peter House (completed 1958) and Piccadilly Plaza (1959–65) in Manchester, and the University of Hull’s buildings built between 1958 and 1967 show the emerging influence of genuine aesthetic Modernism.36 Yet, the end of the 1950s was also a time of growing disillusionment with the failure to satisfy post-war optimism. As austerity and lack of materials became less severe, critics of the lack of progress and seemingly diminished vision in planning became increasingly vocal. Though we might rightly baulk at too rigid a periodisation, the broad period beginning in the 1920s and ending in the late 1950s thus seems to represent a distinct phase of a longer development of planning approaches that sought to remake the largely nineteenth-century British cities and render them fit for the future. The period is characterised by a growing belief in the efficacy of a type of urban modernism that I argue emerged both from the professional discourse at the heart of the modernist movement, and also from very practical considerations at the heart of local government attempts to reshape increasingly decrepit cities. Initially, the form of urban modernism that emerged towards the end of the war emphasised the total power of long-term state intervention in planning cities, but this was swiftly tempered, perhaps even derailed, by important lessons about the limitations of planning, the patience of central government and the practical size and capabilities of the state. The period before 1953–55 has been presented as a kind of workshop for Modernists that pre-empted Modernism’s ultimate triumph as an architectural form in the 1960s.37 Here though I want to complicate this

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explanation by arguing that whilst the 1960s might have produced the most emblematic examples of built, architectural Modernism, by the end of the 1950s the moment of urban modernism – as a force to intervene in the urban environment on a truly totalising basis: as a design for life, rather than an architectural style – had passed, although its exponents did not yet realise it. The mistake, if we might call it that, has been for historians to fixate on the way buildings looked at the expense of the much more practical, yet thoroughly important aspects of more mundane interventions in space. The radicalism of local planners lay not in specific built forms but in their belief that society might be rebuilt through the total control of the urban environment. Favourable legislation in the core of this period – roughly between 1940 and 1947 – seemed to present a brief opportunity for local corporations to seize control of the space of their cities. Their attempts to exploit this opportunity had mixed results though. Some foundered on a series of challenges that came from central government, powerful non-state actors or even ordinary inhabitants. Central government, for example, gradually eroded its brief support for mass state acquisition of land, whilst local commercial interests – often partially ensconced within the local state – proved resistant to change. Retail and consumer trends proved too agile for planners’ rigid calculations concerning shops and spending habits, which were based on outdated models of need. In addition, as Klemek’s work on the 1960s and 1970s has also shown, the planned-for did not acquiesce to everything that was done to them, for them or in their name, undermining the strict socio-spatial schemes encoded in designs for estates and city centres.38 Yet, in other aspects planning was more successful: local corporations were supported by central government in their desire to control significant aspects of the sensory environment – gradually asserting their rights to limit pollution, advertising and noise – and few doubted the need for the continued expansion of housing provision. The story told here thus works as a ‘prehistory’ of the collapse of urban modernism as the core of urban renewal, but also asks questions about the nature and importance of architectural Modernism in the 1960s. As Gold has noted, little had happened by the mid-1950s to change the consensus that modernism was crucial to visions of the future, though the experience of the 1960s would.39 I argue here that whilst the 1960s might represent the apogee of Modern architecture as a dominant built form, the functional aspects of modernism’s nature – the aspects that were actually concerned with shaping society, not merely producing buildings – had already been altered or challenged in fundamental ways in the decade that followed the war.

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Modernity, modernism and space The history of urban renewal and state intervention in city space in this period is intimately bound up with understanding of how modernity and modernism produced particular approaches to the urban environment. A second major component of this book, and perhaps the most challenging to unpick, is thus the relationship between modernity, planning and modernism. It is important to understand and explain these ideas because so much of what was being planned in the post-war period was concerned with the nature of how the world should function and what characteristics made people and societies modern. However, ‘Modernism’ as an architectural and artistic movement, ‘modernism’ (not capitalised) as a practice of urban governance and ‘modernity’ as a historical process are different, but inextricably linked terms that have often proved troublesome to British historians.40 As Gunn has noted, ‘urban modernity itself has served less as a unified theory of the city than as an umbrella for a diverse set of ideas of the novelty and radical impact of city life since the late eighteenth century’.41 Given the elusive nature of modernity as an idea, it might be reasonable for the reader to stop here and wonder why modernity is worth bothering with at all. At its worst, modernity appears to be little more than a piece of jargon: a historical McGuffin that historians have used to subsume the processes and outputs that come from the sudden, rapid changes to Western society that occurred from around the middle of the eighteenth century. It can seem faddish and lazy, opaque and unnecessary, especially when the term seems to elude adequate definition. In scholarship on European history, however, clearer definitional categories emerge and it is worth briefly outlining how modernity has been envisaged to help explain the importance of its application in this book. There are, in a general sense, two broadly linked aspects of modernity. The first, in which we are most interested here, ‘marks the triumph of western rationality’ and is characterised by the impulse to order and categorise space and society along scientific principles derived from a particular set of Enlightenment projects.42 Particular physical markers like industrial development, urbanisation and the production of modern art have often been identified as definitive of modernity, yet these particular forms are not ubiquitous.43 Instead, they are characteristic of particular iterations of modernity that are specific to different times and locations. In other words, various modernities have emerged from different cultural contexts.44 Crucially for this study, this ‘process’ of modernity (as we might conveniently label it), represents a set of principles that have shaped how planners have designed and regulated urban environments.

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The second component of modernity, what I will call the ‘experience’ of modernity, is less relevant here. It is rooted in the forms of culture, social interactions and psychological responses that are generated as a result of people’s interactions with the ordering project described above. Though the characteristic processes of modernity seek to impose order, at the level of personal experience they often have the effect of disordering and dislocating individuals.45 In the city – perhaps modernity’s most conspicuous physical marker – for example, anonymity and the disintegration of traditional moral and social frameworks isolate and alienate individuals, but also create a seemingly limitless set of opportunities for stimulating encounters and personal reinvention.46 Questions discussed here concerning the nature of British modernity in this period represent an attempt to understand what characteristics and underlying assumptions governed the application of expert, scientific interventions in the production and management of urban space. The intellectual underpinnings of modernity – a belief in the rational application of scientific method – may be consistent, but the assumptions and value judgements upon which the process is based are mutable. The particular characteristics of the British process of modernity in the middle of the twentieth century reveal how and why certain approaches and schemes dominated during the period. The Second World War has been presented as a watershed when the continuity and stability associated with British understandings of modernity as a gradual, moderate process, devoid of ruptures, finally collapsed.47 Despite considerable evidence of a radical shift in approaches to urban space though, this interpretation causes a problem because evidence from Manchester, Hull and other British cities suggests that many radical facets of post-war spatial policy were being developed and utilised by local corporations well before the war. The understandings of what it meant to be modern in post-war Britain were thus not exclusively a product of the war, but stemmed from different contexts and intellectual bases. Moreover, the brand of urban modernity produced at local level was sometimes at odds with that espoused at national level, by citizens or by local interests. Modernity is thus understood in this book as a fractured process that shows the role of local corporations, commercial concerns and even citizens in producing competing modernities that sought to define how urban space should and could work.48 Modernity’s importance for histories of urban planning is intertwined with two other slippery concepts: modernism and space. Indeed, the relationship between Modernism as an architectural form and the practice of modernism as a more sober, ordering aspect of planning has been the source of some debate.49 The urban problems the planners and

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15

councillors of Manchester and Hull perceived – problems of ­congestion, suburban anomie, pollution or ‘poor amenity’ – were being framed as products of the disordered growth of the nineteenth-century urban explosion. In turn, their responses to these issues in the post-war period were self-consciously modern, guided by the hand of rational, scientific thought, but also, importantly for what follows, promoted through the application of a textual and visual language that sought to communicate just how modern and expert-driven the planning process was. The city Plans, discussed in chapter 1, invoke both a technical language of scientific expertise through maps and tables, but also conjure notions of progress through illustrations of architecturally Modernist buildings. The association between Modernist architecture and modernism as a practice though is confusing. Architectural historians have tended to use Modernism to describe a rigid aesthetic regime tied up in the grand schemes of architect–planners like Le Corbusier or Oscar Niemeyer and evident in a canon of Modernist buildings. Yet, the modernism of post-war Britain owed more to the ideas evident in CIAM’s Athens Charter of 1933, which argued that modernism should be just as concerned with producing a functional city.50 However, the primary drivers of this approach were not architects, but the rather more pragmatic councillors, engineers and planners who sought to remake their cities in response to some very ordinary municipal concerns. This form of ‘urban modernism’, as it has been labelled, had at its heart the essence of postwar British modernity: that the functional city could only be produced through the expert application of scientific principles to the production of space. As I will argue, this was the guiding principle of urban renewal in the post-war period, because, as John Gold has argued, ‘it offered unambiguous solutions to previously intractable urban problems … untainted by the ways of the past’.51 Urban modernism as a way of producing functional cities and improved lives was premised on the ability to manipulate space as an effective and knowable determinant of behaviours and experiences. Planners sought to produce the futures they desired in concrete and brick, and in doing so they encoded the most pressing anxieties about British society in the built environment and their plans for it. The study of the built environment thus offers the opportunity to understand a great deal more about the past than it might initially seem to. As Gunn has pointed out, the historiographical elevation of space from an abstract container for events to an active component in the constitution of social identities is crucial to understanding the process and experience of modernity.52 However, study of ‘space’ and its counterpart ‘place’ is, like modernity and modernism, a semantically complex field. Over the last 30 years there has

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been a growing acceptance of space as an essential category in historical analysis, hinging upon the recognition that knowing where something happens is fundamental to understanding how and why it happens.53 In other words, all things that happen must happen somewhere as well as somewhen. However, space has often proved difficult to apply effectively as a category of analysis. Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad or Ed Soja’s invocation of the collision of the physical and the imagined in Thirdspace are just two examples of attempts to construct an explanatory spatial framework for a field where a standardised taxonomy of space remains frustratingly elusive.54 For example, when archaeologist James Delle talks of the ‘Cognitive Spaces’ of coffee plantations – historical conceptions of how social order might be reproduced through planning the physical environment – he is invoking a different concept to sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who deploys the identical phrase to explain how individuals cognise the rules of social interaction within space.55 The discussion over what constitutes ‘place’ is similarly complex, with little agreement on what it actually means.56 For geographer Yi Fu Tuan, place is formed from specific spaces imbued with meaning through practice, whereas space itself is abstract and interchangeable. Michel de Certeau’s description of space as ‘practiced place’ views places as fixed, unchanging locations and space as being produced as a result of movement through and use of places. What is crucial for this book is that both theorists posit a dichotomy between the material and the meanings mapped onto and associated with the material world, regardless of their conflicting phraseology.57 Following this simple dichotomy, I use ‘space’ to mean the purely physical, abstract material of the world and, broadly following Tuan’s definition, ‘place’ to articulate the idea of specific spaces (locations) mixed with interaction and conceptualisation of what that space is and is for. Space thus means the entire material world, including what we traditionally interpret as merely gaps between buildings or topographical features. At times I use ‘a space’ as a term to denote a place – usually a piece of land of limited size – that has somehow impossibly come into existence before human interaction. I am aware of this as an unreal and slightly naïve construct, but it serves here merely to facilitate a usable nomenclature. Analysis of space and place is, despite its terminological challenges, an important tool for understanding modern Britain because of the supposed relationship between space and behaviour. The type of urban modernism practised by planners in cities like Manchester and Hull was predicated on the idea that space could be harnessed to produce knowable social outcomes. In other words, they were attempting to create places with specific meanings and behaviours attached to them.

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Yet, ‘placemaking’, whilst intrinsic to strategies of spatial governance that shaped the modern city, is also crucial in producing resistance to them.58 The rigid calculations and spatial schemes produced by planners were particularly susceptible to how ordinary people negotiated the new or altered spaces they encountered. Inhabitants shaped places through the execution of mundane, everyday activities, challenging the meanings produced by the designers.59 As chapter 4 argues, the taking of short cuts across a verge or over a fence might play just as crucial (if not greater) role in the making of a place as the designer’s original plans. Placemaking was crucial to the project of urban modernism as a ‘strategy’ of governance in the toolkit of liberal governmentality – a system of governance which seeks to shape individuals by encouraging the development of a citizen that is reflexive and self-regulating.60 Yet, in their desire to produce greater uniformity of experience, planners often proved insensitive to local peculiarities and failed to account for the variety and perversity of people’s quotidian habits.61 This book thus shows how the project of urban modernism faltered not just when it clashed with powerful groups and state actors but also in the face of the apparently powerless in the practice of their everyday lives, which challenged the strategies of authority.62

Methodology and structure It is worth briefly explaining my choice of Manchester and Hull as case studies as well as the limits of the enquiry presented here. The choice of these cities represents a desire to move away from examinations of post-war urban development which have centred either on London (as somehow symbolic or representative of Britain) or on the exceptionally badly bombed centres like Coventry or Portsmouth.63 Whilst both Manchester and Hull claimed (and to a certain extent still do claim) to have been heavily bombed, the difference between the two is significant enough to make them useful counterpoints.64 Figures vary between sources and even local government departments for both cities, but it is possible to say with some confidence that Hull suffered around 82 raids, with approximately 4,000–4,500 of its 92,660 homes damaged beyond repair and 1,200 deaths.65 Damage to a medium-sized, relatively isolated city like Hull was extensive, traumatic and lives long in local people’s memories. Even today it is not uncommon for people from Hull to feel bitterly marginalised in popular narratives of the Blitz that usually fail to mention their city.66 Manchester, on the other hand, escaped with a comparatively small amount of damage, suffering

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approximately 44 raids, about 680 deaths and 2,000 houses recorded by the local corporation as damaged beyond repair.67 Manchester has been well covered by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship and, though this book contributes to the sparse work on both cities in the 1940s and 1950s, the two cities are used here as exemplars – one large and emblematic, the other smaller and somewhat marginalised – of British cities in this period.68 Hull and Manchester are examples of a number of previously thriving industrial and commercial cities that by the late 1930s faced challenging futures, despite the inter-war attempts to revamp housing provision, city centres and transport detailed in chapters 1 and 2. What follows is not a comparative study and, whilst parallels are drawn at various points, I have not limited the scope of the investigation by only examining elements that occur in both cities. Rather, the two cities stand as specimens of how national and local governments, powerful non-state actors and inhabitants were dealing with the pressures and challenges of redeveloping cities in the mid-twentieth century. They were chosen for their ordinariness, their mundaneness and their typicality as cities struggling to adapt to a changing economy and a demanding citizenry. Finally, whilst the delineation of Hull as a city is relatively straightforward, what constitutes Manchester is a little more blurred. Attempts at planning for the region around Manchester – variously the unwieldy SELNEC (South East Lancashire North East Cheshire) conurbation and later Greater Manchester – as well as the blurring of the boundaries between adjoining authorities, particularly Salford, Trafford and Wythenshawe, make writing exclusively about Manchester rather challenging. I have decided for the sake of convenience to concentrate on those records and decisions concerning Manchester Corporation and its jurisdiction alone. No doubt some will find that my choice of topics renders the study somewhat incomplete. Considering the industrial heritage of the two cities, I have offered no discussion of industry nor attention to Hull’s status as a port. It is not, however, my intention to produce complete histories of the cities; rather, I focus on what we might call the ‘lived’ city. As planning historian Alistair Kefford has shown in Manchester, examination of the Plans and committee records leaves little doubt that economic and industrial revitalisation were at least as important in post-war planning as the experiential and social elements examined here.69 Furthermore, as chapter 2 shows, the idea of separating industry through land-use zoning was a cornerstone of the visions of the future contained in post-war plans. Nevertheless, the location and programming of industry, except where they impinged upon people’s experience of the city through noise or smoke production were not conceived of in

Introduction

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the same way as the lived-in areas of the city. They were intrinsic to the city, but zoning practices, new road layouts and slum clearance intended to keep them, like developing motorway and road networks, hidden and separated from the eyes, ears and lungs of the inhabitants. As such, I have chosen to leave those areas for future studies and the cities studied here are places of housing estates and city centres, not industrial estates and docks. The book is divided into four chapters: the first two deal with approaches to the city in a general sense, whilst the second two focus on housing and inhabitants. Chapter 1 starts by looking at the grand documents produced by Hull and Manchester promising an almost total recreation of their cities at the end of the war. Here, focusing on continuities in planning practice in Manchester and Hull, an examination of the role of the war as a discursive driver and attention to the pressures on local government, challenges existing interpretations of the Plans for each city. Presented as single-voiced and utopian, the Plans produced for public consumption at the end of the war were actually multi-vocal, pragmatic and deeply political documents. They were a product of a variety of discourses concerned with promoting the totalisation of spatial control of everyday life, legitimising the rights of expert planners and corporations to shape the use and future of the city, and communicating notions of modernity and progress to citizens. The dramatic visions of Modernist architecture, alongside the bewildering array of statistical tables and maps are viewed here not as realisable plans but as ways of communicating notions of progress through the visual language of urban and architectural modernism and the technical exercises associated with planning expertise. Careful interpretation of their contents and origins alongside plans for urban development produced in inter-war Manchester and Hull reveals the blend of fantasy and reality, of radical design and disguised continuity contained within the Plans. Rather than evidence of a tyrannical and destructive outbreak of architectural Modernism, the 1945 Plans are representative of the extension of modernist practice into the spheres of everyday life that was radical for the totality of its intervention, not its built form. The second chapter shows further evidence of the way in which local governments’ radical and technocratic approaches to the city were being expressed during and after the war. It focuses on the practical application of spatial rules in this period, particularly in attempts to define what might happen where, not only through the application of land-use zoning but also via the control of the sensory environment. It explores the contingent and various ways that local and national experts, as well as residents and businesses, dealt with the mundane spaces of the inherited

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city such as bomb sites, fairgrounds, advertising hoardings and partially damaged city centres. This approach provides a picture of the interaction between central government, corporations and local interests as they sought to define what space was, how it should be used and who should control it. Local corporations emerge as the primary drivers, and most ambitious sponsors, of post-war urban modernism defined by a quietly radical desire to gain control of the space of the city in a holistic sense. Chapters 3 and 4 explore how planners sought to define a particular sort of society, and particular types of human interaction, through the use of physical space on social housing estates. Chapter 3 examines why the neighbourhood unit became particularly prominent in the design of post-war housing developments. Attention to the continuities and differences between inter-war and post-war estate design shows how certain persistent assumptions about inhabitants’ needs and lives shaped the arrangement of facilities on the new estates. Socio-spatial models of ‘need’ determined the location of shopping centres, which were envisaged as centres of face-to-face interaction that would generate suburban communities. Yet, the models of consumption encoded in neighbourhood design conflicted with both the shopping practices of the inhabitants and the spatial strategies of retail capitalism, which in turn restricted the provision of facilities on the new estates.70 The chapter shows the local state learning tough lessons concerning their ability to shape lives through interventions in space, which are also reflected in the final chapter. The difficulties of producing homogenising models of people’s use of spaces that worked in practice informs chapter 4, which argues that the spaces of everyday life – community centres, grass verges, paths or gardens – were subject to various contradictory uses by the inhabitants of new housing estates that challenged the models of use envisaged by planners and local corporations. By consciously and unconsciously contesting what spaces might be used for, the habits of inhabitants’ everyday lives came into conflict with the spatial strategies of the local government.71 This process of contestation subverted and altered the purposes and practices associated with the spaces as places and caused clashes with local government and amongst groups of residents. Community centres form the first part of the study and the chapter demonstrates how these were contested sites themselves, despite the government’s vision that they should be neutral spaces, accessible to all. The second half of the chapter demonstrates how strategies of movement and usage caused conflicts between local government and tenants on the new estates, and how these tactics of everyday life played a role in ­subverting the original placemaking strategies of the corporations and, in some cases, actually reshaped the material environment.

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Notes  1 Edwin Lutyens and Patrick Abercrombie, A Plan for the City and County of  Kingston upon Hull (Hull, 1945), p. v, foreword by Alderman J.L. Schultz, Chairman of the Kingston upon Hull Reconstruction Committee.  2 Sir Joseph Leopold Schultz OBE was the Labour leader of Hull council from 1945 to 1979, Lord Mayor and earlier a councillor. He is a figure who stands astride half a century of Hull’s political landscape and is often referred to as ‘Mr Hull’. He is commemorated by a statue outside the Guildhall in the city centre.  3 Local Government Correspondent, ‘Fading dream of finer cities’, Manchester Guardian (4 May 1955), 5, quoted in John Gold, ‘A SPUR to action?: the Society for the Promotion of Urban Renewal, “anti-scatter” and the crisis of city reconstruction, 1957–1963’, Planning Perspectives, 27:2 (2012), 199–233 (200).  4 Allan Pred, ‘Place as historically contingent process: structuration and the time-geography of becoming places’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 74:2 (1984), 279–97. Pred actually argued that places are always in the process of becoming.  5 ‘Listed status for bombed cinema’, BBC News, 2 February 2007 (online source): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/humber/6324301.stm, accessed 12 December 2016.  6 Since the 1950s there have been successive alterations to the nomenclature attached to the processes of urban change, e.g. ‘renewal’, ‘reconstruction’, ‘redevelopment’. For more details, see: Andrew Tallon, Urban Regeneration in the UK (London, 2013), pp. 4–7, and Gold, ‘SPUR to action?’, 201–3. For simplicity I use the term ‘renewal’ – even though it did not become popular till the 1950s – to refer to the academic debate on the overall projects that took place between c.1920 and the mid to late 1970s. The first chapter addresses the use of the term ‘reconstruction’ and its importance as a rhetorical device, but elsewhere I have used ‘redevelopment’ as a general term.  7 Gordon Cherry, The Evolution of British Town Planning: A History of Town Planning in the United Kingdom During the 20th Century and of the Royal Town Planning Institute, 1914–74 (Leighton Buzzard, 1974); Gordon Cherry, Cities and Plans: The Shaping of Urban Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London, 1988); Gordon Cherry, The Politics of Town Planning (London, 1982); Barry Cullingworth, Environmental Planning, 1939–1969. Vol. 1, Reconstruction and Land Use Planning, 1939–1947 (London, 1975); Barry Cullingworth and Vincent Nadin (eds), Town and Country Planning in the UK (London, 2002); Lionel Esher, A Broken Wave: The Rebuilding of England, 1940–1980 (Harmondsworth, 1981).  8 Simon Gunn, ‘The rise and fall of British urban modernism: planning Bradford, circa 1945–1970’, Journal of British Studies, 49:4 (2010), 849–69.  9 There are a host of popular books that both evidence and challenge these notions, some of the best are: John Grindrod, Concreteopia: A Journey around the Rebuilding of Post-war Britain (Brecon, 2013); Lyndsey Hanley, Estates:

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An Intimate History (London, 2012); Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism (Hampshire, 2008); David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 1945–1951 (London, 2007). 10 The ‘post-war period’ is a very labile term in popular discourse and can cover anything from 1939 to the present. See: ‘Speech by HRH The Prince of Wales, 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), Royal Gala Evening at Hampton Court Palace’, 30 May 1984 (online source): www.princeofwales.gov.uk/media/speeches/speech-hrh-the-prince-of-wales-the-150thanniversary-of-the-royal-institute-of, accessed 19 September 2016; Margaret Thatcher, ‘Conservative Party Conference Speech’, 9 October 1987 (online source): www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106941, accessed 20 September 2016. Prince Charles famously called modernist buildings ‘carbuncles’, amongst other derisory comments. Thatcher opined that planners had ‘cut the heart out of our cities’. 11 On the difference between the 1940s and 1950s and the later period, see: Nicholas Bullock, Building the Post-war World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain (London, 2002), p. xi; Gold, ‘SPUR to action?’; Otto Saumarez Smith, ‘Central government and town centre redevelopment, 1959– 1966’, Historical Journal, 58:1 (2015), 217–44. 12 Bullock, Post-war World, pp. 280–1, also chs 8 & 9. 13 Junichi Hasegawa, Replanning the Blitzed City Centre: A Comparative Study of Bristol, Coventry and Southampton (Buckingham, 1992); Junichi Hasegawa, ‘Reconstruction of Portsmouth in the 1940s’, Contemporary British History, 14:1 (2000), 45–62; Philip N. Jones, ‘“…A fairer and nobler city” – Lutyens and Abercrombie’s plan for the city of Hull 1945’, Planning Perspectives, 13:1 (1998), 301–16; Peter J. Larkham, ‘The place of urban conservation in the UK reconstruction plans of 1942–1952’, Planning Perspectives, 18:3 (2003), 295–324; Peter J. Larkham, ‘Thomas Sharp and the post-war replanning of Chichester: conflict, confusion and delay’, Planning Perspectives, 24:1 (2009), 51–75; Peter J. Larkham and John Pendlebury, ‘Reconstruction planning and the small town in early post-war Britain’, Planning Perspectives, 23:3 (2008), 291–321; Nick Tiratsoo, ‘The reconstruction of blitzed British cities, 1945–55: myths and reality’, Contemporary British History, 14:1 (2000), 27–44; John Stevenson, ‘Planners’ moon? The Second World War and the planning movement’, in Harold L. Smith (ed.), War and Social Change: British Society in the Second World (Manchester, 1986), pp. 58–77 (pp. 59–60). 14 Matthew Hollow, ‘Utopian urges: visions for reconstruction in Britain, 1940– 1950’, Planning Perspectives, 27:4 (2012), 569–85; Frank Mort, ‘Fantasies of metropolitan life: planning London in the 1940s’, Journal of British Studies, 43:1 (2004), 120–51; Chris Perkins and Martin Dodge, ‘Mapping the imagined future: the roles of visual representation in the 1945 City of Manchester Plan’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 89:1 (2012), 247–76. 15 Mark Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns: Social Change and Urban Dispersal in Post-war England (Manchester, 1998); Anne Power, Property before People: The Management of Twentieth Century Council

Introduction

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Housing (London, 1987); Anne Power, Hovels to High Rise: State Housing in Europe since 1850 (London, 1993). 16 David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain 1920–1970 (Cambridge, 2006). 17 Studies that end with the war included Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger (eds), Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II (Oxford, 2001); Andrew Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900–1939 (Buckingham, 1992); Andrew Davies and Steven Fielding (eds), Workers’ Worlds: Cultures and Communities in Manchester and Salford, 1880–1939 (Manchester, 1992). Studies that largely skip the war include Joanna Bourke, Working-class Cultures in Britain, 1890–1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity (London, 1994); John Burnett, A Social History of Housing, 1815–1970 (London, 1978); Martin Daunton (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain. Vol.  3, 1840–1950 (Cambridge, 2000); Peter Malpass and Alan Murie, Housing Policy and Practice (Basingstoke, 1994). History that treats it as driver of change includes Paul Addison, The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (London, 1975). For challenges to Addison’s view, see: Steven Fielding, Peter Thompson and Nick Tiratsoo, ‘England Arise!’: The Labour Party and Popular Politics in 1940s Britain (Manchester, 1995); James Hinton, ‘1945 and the Apathy School’, History Workshop Journal, 43 (1997), 266–73. For discussions where the war appears as a driver of change, see: Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 40–43. See also: Kynaston, Austerity Britain, pp. 20–5; Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century: A City and its People (London, 2008), pp. 38–40 & 62–3. 18 John Gold, The Experience of Modernism: Modern Architects and the Future City, 1928–1953 (London, 1997). 19 Bullock, Post-war World, p. xi. 20 CIAM, formally Congrès Internationaux d’architecture Moderne, was formed in June 1928 by 28 European architects to advance the cause of architecture as a social art. The group was influential, but their most telling contribution was arguably the 1933 Athens Charter in which they put forward the principles of zoning, rehousing and traffic flow as a means of creating a functional city. MARS was founded in 1933 as an architectural think tank for British architects and critics, and is perhaps best remembered for its series of plans for London. See: John Gold, ‘The MARS plans for London, 1933–1942’, Town Planning Review, 66:3 (1995), 243–67; Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanisms, 1929–1960 (Cambridge, MA, 2002). 21 The quantity of laws, reports and guidance booklets is enormous, but good summaries of the legislation and reports produced during the war can be found in Cullingworth and Nadin (eds), Town and Country Planning; Peter Hall, Urban and Regional Planning (London, 1992), pp. 63–89. 22 John Gold, The Practice of Modernism: Modern Architects and Urban Transformation, 1954–1972 (Abingdon, 2007), pp. 77–145 looks at some local cases, but his aim is not a detailed examination of the relationship between local and central government.

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23 Hasegawa, Replanning; Hasegawa, ‘Reconstruction’; Jones, ‘“Fairer and nobler city”’; Larkham, ‘Thomas Sharp’; Larkham and Pendlebury, ‘Reconstruction’; Tiratsoo, ‘Blitzed British cities’. 24 Guy Ortolano, ‘Planning the urban future in 1960s Britain’, Historical Journal, 54:2 (2011), 477–507; Saumarez Smith, ‘Central government’. 25 Leif Jerram, Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe’s Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2011), p. 317. 26 Jerram, Streetlife, p. 317. 27 Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1996). 28 This binary debate is often represented in the historiography, for a good example see: Hollow, ‘Utopian urges’, 569. 29 Gunn, ‘British urban modernism’, 852 refers to a similar idea as ‘technocratic pragmatism’. 30 Simon Gunn, ‘European urbanities since 1945: a commentary’, Contemporary European History, 24:4 (2015), 617–22 (618). 31 Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal (Chicago, 2011). 32 HMSO, Town and Country Planning, 1943–1951, Progress Report, Cmd 8204 (London, 1951), pp. 5–6. 33 Harriet Jones, ‘“This is magnificent!”: 300,000 houses a year and the Tory revival after 1945’, Contemporary British History, 14:1 (2000), 99–121; Oliver Marriott, The Property Boom (London, 1967); Peter Weiler, ‘The rise and fall of the Conservatives’ “grand design for housing”, 1951–64’, Contemporary British History, 14:1 (2000), 122–50. 34 John R. Short, Housing in Britain: The Post-war Experience (London, 1982), pp. 47–9. 35 Gordon Cherry, Birmingham: A Study in Geography, History and Planning (Chichester, 1994); John Pendlebury, ‘Alas Smith and Burns? Conservation in Newcastle upon Tyne city centre, 1959–1968’, Planning Perspectives, 16:2 (2001), 115–41. 36 Clare Hartwell, Manchester (London, 2002), pp. 182 & 189; David Neave and Susan Neave, Hull (London, 2012), p. 30. 37 See: Bullock, Post-war World, particularly ch. 12, and Gold, Experience of Modernism, especially chs 8 & 9. 38 Klemek, Transatlantic Collapse. 39 Gold, Practice of Modernism, p. 10. 40 Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters, ‘Introduction’, in Becky Conekin, Frank Mort, and Chris Waters (eds), Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–1964 (London, 1999), pp. 1–21 (p. 9). 41 Simon Gunn, ‘The spatial turn: changing histories of space and place’, in Simon Gunn and Robert J. Morris (eds), Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the Western City since 1850 (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 1–14 (p. 6). 42 Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. Richard Deveson (London, 1991), pp. 81–2, cited in Leif Jerram,

Introduction

25

Germany’s Other Modernity: Munich and the Making of Metropolis, 1895– 1930 (Manchester, 2007), pp. 2–6. Jerram’s introduction features a very lucid and comprehensive definition of modernity, to which my own work owes an intellectual debt that should not go without acknowledgement. See also: Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge, 1991); Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge, 2000); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (London, 2000). 43 Peukert, Weimar Republic, pp. 81–2; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London, 1930). 44 Johann P. Arnason, ‘Communism and modernity’, Daedalus, 129:1 (2000), 61–90; Schmuel N. Eisenstadt, ‘Multiple modernities’, Daedalus, 129:1 (2000), 1–29; Bjorn Wittrock, ‘Modernity: one, none, or many? European origins and modernity as a global condition’, Daedalus, 129:1 (2000), 31–60. 45 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Rolf Tiedemann (London, 1999); Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London, 1983); Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, 1970); Georg Simmel, Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (eds) (London, 1997). 46 For work on the city as a facet of modernity, see: Jerram, Germany’s Other Modernity; Jerram, Streetlife; David Thorns, The Transformation of Cities: Urban Theory and Urban Life (Basingstoke, 2002). 47 Martin Daunton and Bernard Rieger, ‘Introduction’, in Daunton and Rieger (eds), Meanings of Modernity, pp. 1–24 (pp. 12–15). 48 Daunton and Rieger, ‘Introduction’, in Daunton and Rieger (eds), Meanings of Modernity, p. 3. On competing modernities in Britain, see: Conekin, Mort, and Waters, Moments of Modernity; David Gilbert, David Matless, and Brian Short (eds), Geographies of British Modernity: Space and Society in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2003); Simon Gunn and James Vernon (eds), The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (London, 2011); Frank Mort, ‘Scandalous events: metropolitan culture and moral change in post-Second World War London’, Representations, 93:1 (2006), 106–37. 49 Gunn, ‘British urban modernism’, 851. 50 Gold, Experience of Modernism, p. 61. 51 Gold, Practice of Modernism, p. 10. 52 Gunn, ‘Spatial turn’, in Gunn and Morris (eds), Identities in Space, pp. 2–7. 53 Denis Cosgrove, Mappings (London, 1999), p. 7; Barney Warf and Santa Arias (eds), The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York, 2009), unnumbered Introduction page & p. 1. 54 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1991); Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford, 1996). For discussion of the issues of a spatial taxonomy, see: Leif Jerram, ‘Space: a useless category of historical analysis?’, History and Theory, 52:2 (2013), 400–19. 55 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, 2000); Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford, 1993); James A. Delle, An Archaeology of Social

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Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains (London, 1998). 56 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London, 2008); Tim Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis, 1996); Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Oxford, 2004); Thomas F. Gieryn, ‘A space for place in sociology’, Annual Review of Sociology, 26:1 (2000), 463–96; Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (London, 1995); Kenneth Hewitt, ‘Place annihilation: area bombing and the fate of urban places’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 73:2 (1983), 257–84. Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge, 1994); Pred, ‘Place as historically contingent process’; Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London, 1976); David Seamon, ‘Body subject, time space routines, and place ballet’, in David A. Seamon and Anne Buttimer (eds), The Human Experience of Space and Place (London, 1980), pp. 148–65; Yi-Fu Tuan, Place and Space: The Perspective of Experience (London, 1977). 57 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (London, 1984), p. 117; Tuan, Place and Space. 58 For examples of how planning and urban design studies began to adopt the ‘making places tradition over the post-war period, see: Peter Buchanan, ‘What city? A plea for place in the public realm, Architectural Review, 1101 (1988), 31–41; Simin Davoudi, ‘Sustainability: a new vision for the British planning system’, Planning Perspectives, 15:2 (2000), 123–7 (126). 59 David Seamon, A Geography of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest and Encounter (London, 1979); Seamon, ‘Body subject’, in Seamon and Buttimer (eds), Human Experience. 60 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Colin Gordon (ed.) (Brighton, 1980); Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003); Nikolas Rose, ‘Assembling the modern self’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London, 1997), pp. 224–46; Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge, 1999). Anthony Giddens calls this ‘late modernity’. See: Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, 1990); Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge, 1991); also Raymond Williams and Tony Pinkney, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London, 1989), p. 32. 61 James Scott in Seeing Like a State describes how insensitive and undemocratic planners can be, echoing Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York, 1961). See also: Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence; Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust; Robert Fishman, The American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy (Washington, 2000); Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York, 2001). 62 De Certeau, Everyday Life. 63 Nicholas Bullock, ‘Ideals, priorities and harsh realities: reconstruction and the

Introduction

27

LCC, 1945–51’, Planning Perspectives, 9:1 (1994), 87–101; Junuchi Hasegawa, ‘Governments, consultants and expert bodies in the physical reconstruction of the city of London in the 1940s’, Planning Perspectives, 14: 2 (1999), 121–44; Hasegawa, ‘Reconstruction’; Hasegawa, Replanning; Nick Tiratsoo, Reconstruction, Affluence and Labour Politics: Coventry, 1945–1960 (London, 1990); Phil Hubbard, Lucy Faire and Keith Lilley, ‘Contesting the modern city: reconstruction and everyday life in post-war Coventry’, Planning Perspectives, 18:4 (2003), 377–97; Emmanuel Marmaras and Anthony Sutcliffe, ‘Planning for post-war London: the three independent plans, 1942–3’, Planning Perspectives, 9:4 (1994), 431–53; Mort, ‘Fantasies’. 64 Chapter 1 will argue that it was in the best interests of cities like Hull to emphasise the bomb damage they suffered to place them in a hierarchy of funding at the end of the war. For evidence of the claims, see: ‘Archive maps pinpoint Manchester Blitz bomb sites’, Manchester Evening News, 14 December 2012 (online source): http://menmedia.co.uk/manchestereveningnews/news/s/1596191_archive-mapspinpoint-manchester-blitz-bomb-sites, accessed 9 January 2016. 65 Hull History Centre (HHC)/CTAY, Air raid reports (dated throughout the war); Tom Geraghty, North East Coast Town: Ordeal & Triumph: The Story of Kingston-upon-Hull in the 1939–1945 Great War (Hull, 2002); Philip Greystone, The Blitz on Hull (1940–45) (York, 1991). 66 This is perhaps exemplified in the unhappiness still expressed that Hull was only ever referred to as a ‘North-east Coast Town’ in wartime reports, which is produced as evidence of national disregard, despite this being a standard practice amongst newspapers for all cities. Manchester might be ‘a Northern Town’ or ‘a place in North West England’, for example. See: Geraghty, North East Coast Town; ‘From the archive, 30 December 1940’, The Guardian, 30 December 2010 (online source): www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/dec/30/londonblitzed-by-german-bombers, accessed 19 May 2016. 67 Greater Manchester Country Records Office (GMCRO)/GB127/Council Minutes/Emergency Committee, vols 3 & 4 (various dates); Peter J.C. Smith and Neil Richardson, Luftwaffe over Manchester: The Blitz Years 1940–1944 (Radcliffe, 2003). 68 On this period in Manchester, see: Viv Caruana and Colin Simmons, ‘The development of Manchester Airport, 1938–1978: central government subsidy and local authority management’, Journal of Transport Geography, 9:4 (2001), 279–92; Peter Shapely, Duncan Tanner and Andrew Walling, ‘Civic culture and housing policy in Manchester, 1945–79’, Twentieth Century British History, 15:4 (2004), 410–34. On Hull, see: Jones, ‘“Fairer and nobler city”’; Nick Tiratsoo, ‘Labour and the reconstruction of Hull’, in Nick Tiratsoo (ed.), The Attlee Years (London, 1991), pp. 126–46. Manchester’s emblematic nature as a Victorian industrial town can be seen in the number of scholarly i­nvestigations into it in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century: Andrew Davies, The Gangs of Manchester (Preston, 2009); Robert Kargon, Science in Victorian Manchester (Manchester, 1978); Alan J. Kidd and Kenneth Roberts (eds), City, Class and Culture: Studies of Social Policy and Cultural Production in Victorian

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Manchester (Manchester, 1985); Michael Nevell, Manchester: The Hidden History (Stroud, 2008); Harold L. Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago, 2005); Peter Shapeley, Charity and Power in Victorian Manchester (Manchester, 2000). For works dealing with the early twentieth century, see, for example: Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty; Davies and Fielding (eds), Workers’ Worlds; Charlotte Wildman, Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918–1939 (London, 2016). Conversely, Victorian Hull has only two general histories: Hugh Calvert, A History of Kingston Upon Hull: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London, 1978); Edward Gillett and Kenneth A. MacMahon, A History of Hull (Oxford, 1980), and three geographical enquiries from the 1970s: Clive A. Forster, Court housing in Kingston upon Hull: An Example of Cyclic Processes in the Morphological Development of Nineteenthcentury Bye-law Housing (Hull, 1972); Gareth Shaw, Processes and Patterns in the Geography of Retail Change, with Special Reference to Kingston upon Hull, 1880–1950 (Hull, 1978); M.T. Wild and Gareth Shaw, ‘Locational behaviour of urban retailing during the nineteenth century: the example of Kingston upon Hull’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 61 (1974), 101–18. 69 Gunn, ‘British urban modernism’; Alistair Kefford, ‘Disruption, destruction and the creation of “the inner cities”: the impact of urban renewal on industry, 1945–80’, Twentieth Century British History (forthcoming). 70 Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs; Alice Coleman, Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing (London, 1985); Power, Property before People. 71 De Certeau, Everyday Life.

1 Fantasies of urban futures

In 1945, in common with many other British towns and cities, Hull and Manchester produced comprehensive, detailed redevelopment plans. Unlike pre-war plans, which tended to be somewhat piecemeal, usually dealt with specific areas of cities and were rarely published, a significant number of the post-war plans for cities and larger towns were printed in impressive books, garnering much press attention and were accompanied by well-attended public exhibitions.1 These Plans were a spectacular mix of maps, representations of modern architecture and ambitious cityscapes that sit, sometimes uneasily, alongside detailed tables, text and photographs (see figures 1.1–1.10 and 2.1).2 Though never realised to any great extent, the Plans appear to represent a time when British cities gazed at the limitless possibilities of the post-war world and imagined a better, healthier, fairer self. Looking at the Plans 70 years on they are extraordinary documents that contain a huge amount of often confusing information. Manchester’s runs to 274 pages and Hull’s 92, although with the Hull Plan being 36 x 28 cm compared to Manchester’s 31 x 25 cm the two are closer in size than merely counting the pages seems to indicate. Manchester’s Plan has 260 separate images, including 112 photographs, 72 maps and 30 architectural drawings of various types. Hull’s has 150 images, including 88 photographs, 10 architectural drawings and 52 maps, of which 12 are large fold-out maps over 70 cm in length. Both Plans are impressively visual and contain imaginings of new buildings and streets, which are rendered in a variety of inks and pencils. Though displaying the influence of a range of different traditions, including familiar domestic takes on Classical and Beaux Arts, most of the illustrations display a recognisably British, moderate version of architectural Modernism.3 The Plans also illustrate their technical expertise through a very large number of information-heavy, often full-colour maps which included redesigned city centres, new housing estates, population distributions, locations of road accidents, bomb damage and land-use zoning proposals.

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It is hard to do justice to quite how ambitious the Plans seem to a twenty-first-century eye. They are total plans that seek to deal with the entirety of cities and the totality of the urban environment in a way that has rarely been attempted since. The most salient elements of the Plans were exhibited for the public, in Manchester’s case across ten rooms in the city art gallery, whilst both were accompanied by models of the proposed estates, glimpses of which survive in Hull’s archives and the  Manchester Corporation promotional film A City Speaks.4 Both the radical and high-profile nature of the Plans has meant that they have fared poorly in popular imaginings of the period. These memories rest heavily on an image of planners as high-modernist despoilers of Victorian and medieval heritage, hell-bent on realising multi-storey nightmares in drab concrete and steel. In 2013, for example, the BBC News website ran an article entitled ‘Secret plan to demolish Manchester Town Hall revealed’.5 This rather dubious article – a twice-printed book and abridged pamphlet, accompanied by press coverage and a public exhibition that attracted 125,000 visitors can hardly be described as ‘secret’ – made the unqualified claim that Manchester’s ‘much-loved Neo-Gothic town hall’ could have been demolished had planners ‘got their way’.6 The character of this piece is typical of a set of persistent, popular narratives that recall the Plans as symbols of the hubristic failure of planners to deliver the bright new Britain that they had claimed their mastery of urban space and architecture would produce. With a few exceptions though, academic historians have been rather less hyperbolic in their treatment of the Plans and have tended to utilise them as part of a wider examination of the character and effects of post-war planning practice. The Plans, though ‘rarely influential as planning documents … underpinned a growing consensus, which looked to social improvement through a root and branch approach to the existing urban fabric’.7 This body of work has demonstrated the obstacles raised by a plurality of economic and social influences that largely frustrated the realisation of the Plans in the rare cases where any serious attempt was made to implement them.8 The majority of historical work from the 1990s onwards has tended to point out how few of the Plans were actually considered for completion in their entirety. In doing so, historians have tempered accusations from earlier analyses that planners were either tyrannical modernists who obliterated built heritage and fragile urban ecologies or did not go far enough in their project.9 Importantly, perhaps only Corelli Barnett’s generalised critique of national planning and a number of studies of housing have come close to equating the kind of visionary utopianism seemingly evidenced in the Plans with the actual built outcomes in British cities.10

Fantasies of urban futures

31

Examinations of the Plans have instead tended to treat them as one of a host of post-war documents that formed part of a ‘new rationalist response’, indicative of a moment when the ‘rational use of space and the grand design were amply catered for in a spate of legislation which followed the beginning of peace’.11 As Peter Mandler demonstrates, the Plans have consequently been framed as a product of a wartime consensus around social reform and planning, which encouraged planners to try and overcome their historic weakness within British policy through grand demonstrations of their expertise.12 A problem arises though because too often, despite few believing the Plans were meant for realisation, they have been taken as ‘a utopian blueprint for a perfect city’ and thus the material embodiments of a single, holistic (if unrealistic) scheme.13 The Plans studied here though were far from unified, singlevoiced documents; rather, they were amalgamations of differing views and priorities and need to be examined as such. They were the work of a number of authors and artists who produced material that was often antagonistic or internally contradictory. Examining the Plans against planning schemes from the inter-war period, whilst considering the use of wartime rhetorics of civilian ­sacrifice, starts to disrupt the coherency of the Plans as single-voiced documents. Understanding which elements of the Plans were new, what was merely repackaged and who produced them begins to open up potential conclusions about local government, the effects of the war and the importance and character of urban modernism. The close attention to continuity and change, as I suggested in the introduction to the book, is thus deployed here to slightly skew our historical perspective to facilitate an unpacking of the various influences upon the Plans. The Plans performed a number of different functions and contained the remnants of older plans, which created tensions between text, maps and illustrations. These tensions reveal the competing influences on the Plans, and also point to how we might usefully interpret these rich documents. Planning theorists and historians have emphasised the need to go beyond simple analyses of implementation and completion, as a means to better understand the differing influences at work in the formulation of plans.14 This approach draws distinctions between those parts of the Plans that were intended for completion – especially where they were merely repackaged existing schemes – and those parts that were fantastical, though still profoundly functional. Frank Mort has suggested that the Plans cannot be judged merely against their enactment as actual schemes for the redevelopment of the city, nor seen as documents produced wholly through rationally judged professional and ­political

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initiatives, because they also drew upon a ‘wide range of cultural visions, which are assembled out of an expansive repertoire of intellectual meaning systems about city life’.15 Closer examination, then  – ­particularly of the visual representations and maps contained within the Plans – points us to a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of their purpose, the discursive environment that produced them and their importance in shaping the future city.16 The Plans here emerge as tools for examining how the notion of post-war modernity – in the sense that the perception of what ‘modern’ meant was translated into buildings, maps and drawings – functioned in shaping approaches to planning and the city.17 The chapter thus attempts to understand the interplay of modernity and ideas of modernism and their importance for the postwar city, building on work which has sought to disentangle aesthetic modernism from more mundane and functional expressions of modernism as a planning practice.18 The chapter begins by exploring how narratives of reconstruction and the experience of war served to create the conditions in which the Plans might emerge, showing how the content of the Plans reveals the genesis of the documents in the discursive context of the war.19 Narratives of civilian sacrifice and the barbarism of the war produced a discursive environment in which the Plans were presented as an attempt to establish a clean break with perceived planning mistakes of the past. It then goes on to show how planners and local governments alike attempted to manipulate the powerful idea of expert planning to establish their right to control and plan the future city against a background of competing voices. As Mandler has argued, the ‘neat land-use maps … with their concentric circles of population densities, neat segregated uses and geometric traffic grids’ implied that the ‘whole country could be redesigned scientifically’, serving to promote planning as a discipline.20 Yet, whilst largely agreeing with Mandler on this assertion, I want to go a step further and suggest that by understanding the content of inter-war planning policy at the local level we can also see that the Plans evidence the ambition of local governments in a period where their power base was under threat. As chapter 2 will show, local government approaches to space in the post-war period sought to control the city on a detailed, holistic basis. Here we begin to unpack the Plans themselves to better understand the reasons that, as Larkham and Lilley have noted, these seemingly radical documents actually contained so many planning schemes from before the war.21 The first two sections of the chapter thus illuminate the role of local government and the importance of the war in providing a framework in which long-held desires to control and shape the city might begin to be expressed.

Fantasies of urban futures

33

The final part of the chapter also develops several debates about town planning, modernism and modernity by examining the visual and textual material in the Plans as multi-authored, fragmented documents, not merely material representations of coherent, holistic schemes. They evidence an attempt to mould the future shape and idea of the modern city through imaginative use of urban fantasy.22 Images of architectural Modernism were not presented as a realisable aim, but as a way of mediating between the present and an indistinct but fundamentally better future. Post-war urban planning was not guided by monolithic attempts at aesthetic homogeneity but by a rationale that social improvement could be achieved through a comprehensive approach to both new and extant urban spaces.23 Flawed interpretations of the visual materials contained in the Plans are, as a result, partly responsible for an over-emphasis on the influence of architectural Modernism in post-war Britain. A more careful unpacking of the various motivations that went into the Plans allows the analysis to move beyond them as merely material representations of holistically conceived schemes. It opens up the potential to reveal a great deal more about the period and people that produced them than has previously been attempted.

Blitz, bombing and reconstruction The speeches of politicians and outpourings from the media towards the end of the Second World War appear, at a casual glance, to evidence something of a consensus on the value of comprehensive town planning.  This proliferation of similar ideas emerged as a result of recasting the destruction of the Blitz as an unmissable opportunity to enact radical urban improvement schemes.24 Architect and planner Max Lock, director of the Hull Regional Survey, was typical of this view, arguing that Hitler had brought the British ‘to their senses’ before adding that: After experiencing the shock of our buildings disembowelled before our eyes … we find the cleared and cleaned up spaces a relief. In them we have hope for the future, opportunities to be taken or lost. These open spaces begin to ventilate the congestion of our cities and maybe also of our imagination.25

The sheer volume of similar sentiments led planning historians like Gordon Cherry to conclude that whilst ‘war damage gave the opportunity to rebuild’, a ‘new social psychology in wartime Britain provided  the  determination’.26 Peter Larkham too has placed the

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e­ mergence of the Plans amongst a ground-swell of enthusiasm for town planning: During and immediately after the Second World War there was a substantial boom in the production of town-wide redevelopment plans across the UK, This was, of course, initiated by the severe air-raid damage that had been inflicted on cities such as London, Coventry and Plymouth in 1940–41. Such damaged cities had no option but to replan, and quickly … and they were encouraged to do so by political exhortations.27

Given these conclusions, it is tempting to see the Plans as one manifestation of a unified British modernity, centred around the benefits of town planning that stressed rationally determined ‘order, cleanliness, speed and efficiency’ as a facet of wider discourses of state planning, yet which faded quickly after the reality of post-war austerity took hold.28 Analysis of the contents of the Plans, however, suggests a more diffuse set of objectives. They are full of civic self-promotion, and there is clear evidence of inter-war legislative priorities concerning housing, rateable value, urban dispersal and interactions with adjoining county councils. Moreover, the totalising approaches of the schemes go far beyond making good on proposals in respect of Blitz-devastated areas.29 The Plans, then, are more complex documents than they might seem at first glance, and the way they articulated the role of the war and bomb damage is a crucial starting point in unpacking the way in which their contents were assembled. Histories of the plans for blitzed cities tend to start with Lord Reith’s exhortation to ‘plan boldly and comprehensively’, made in his capacity as Minister of Works and Buildings.30 Reith’s instructions arguably encouraged planners’ boldness in the scope of the documents they produced, especially given that no guidelines on how the plans should look or what they should contain were produced by the Ministry. It was only when the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act dictated a stronger framework for the development plan that the documents produced became more sober, text heavy and technical in nature.31 In 1941 though, Reith, at least in his advice to corporations, appears to be one of the chief advocates of enterprising and integrated planning solutions.32 His advice to plan boldly did not only apply to those cities which had been severely damaged either. In a meeting with journalists in Manchester on 28 August 1941 Reith claimed that the aim of his visit: was to stress the urgency of preparing early for the great task of reconstruction which will have to be taken up when the war is over. … Too little thought had been given in the past to the way in which the land had been used. In the post-war reconstruction the use of land must be better planned, especially in relation to public health, livelihood and family life.33

Fantasies of urban futures

35

The problem was that Manchester, whilst recently bombed, was not as heavily damaged as other cities of a comparable size. It is therefore worth pausing to question why such an emphasis was being placed on ‘reconstruction’ over simple redevelopment.34 Reith’s vocal enthusiasm for exuberant planning is perhaps explained by the utility of such sentiments in maintaining morale: the promise of a brighter future might offer solace to the bombed and also mitigate any sense of despair when viewing any future damage.35 As geographers Stephen Essex and Mark Brayshay have remarked regarding Plymouth’s Plan, sending a clear message that reconstruction would occur was essential not only for morale but also for future economic prosperity.36 In emphasising the inadequacy of past land use Reith also implied a much more comprehensive form of planning would be necessary for the task of post-war development. His words pre-empted the segregation of land use in the city Plans discussed in the second chapter, but also implied a causal relationship between holistically planned cities, health and social improvements that would be central features of many of the plans.37 Reith’s marking of the war as a caesura with past planning mistakes is representative of the types of language emanating from the state, which cast war damage as an opportunity to create a better future. The classification of all postwar building work as ‘reconstruction’ when, in reality, high levels of destruction existed in only a handful of locations, tied a pressing need to modernise unplanned cities to the rewards of a hard-fought war. It is perhaps unsurprising then that the idea of reconstruction has lived so long in popular memory. The role of the war was, for most cities, not to create the actual physical need for reconstruction but to bring the issue of town planning to the fore. In short, the emblematic examples of severe destruction – like Coventry or London’s East End – created a set of conditions where the importance and utility of town planning became prominent in the minds of the ‘common man’.38 It is, however, necessary to go beyond merely the conditions the war created and speculate on the political utility of narratives of reconstruction. It is not enough to simply say that an enthusiasm for planning existed and the Plans reflect the high point of this enthusiasm in material form, especially since the examination of the evidence later in the chapter will cast doubt on the veracity of this position. Messages emanating not only from government ministers, like Reith, but also from the local corporations appear to have served to form a link between bomb damage and redevelopment encapsulated in the deployment of terms like ‘reconstruction’ and ‘rebuilding’. Viewed in this light the Plans potentially become more than just a material manifestation of the primacy of rational, holistic planning; they are also an

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attempt to evoke an idea of newness in approach, to which this chapter shall return later. The utility of a narrative that leant on the notion of post-Blitz ‘reconstruction’ can be seen in the centrality of the idea of reconstruction to the Hull Plan’s case for wholesale redevelopment of the city centre. Alderman Schultz, chair of the Hull Reconstruction Committee, indicated in his preamble the integral nature of reconstruction as both a direct result of bomb damage and as the just deserts of a heroic citizenry: When the fury of the enemy’s assault was loosed upon our City and we saw our heritage shattered under the weight of air attack, the spirit of the people of Kingston upon Hull was unbroken. … We resolved then that the only fitting tribute that could be paid to the devotion and courage of a brave people was to rebuild our City in a manner worthy of its citizens. Out of the ashes of the old would arise Phoenix-like a fairer and nobler City.39

It would be easy to dismiss this as mere communitarian, political rhetoric from a left-wing politician and, if the statement is viewed as an address to the people of Hull exclusively, then it seems an eloquent, yet unexceptional appeal to the citizenry. Yet the damage was not as total as Schultz implied, which naturally would have been known to the people of Hull as they went about their daily business. Patrick Abercrombie, the main author of the Hull Plan, commented in his notes accompanying the redevelopment of the city centre that ‘had the bomb damage been more concentrated, a more constructive programme for the first “Period Plan” would have been suggested’.40 Earlier on in the Plan, he also noted that: ‘the war damage [has not] been as continuous as in the City of London or at Plymouth, so … a more complex plan was likely to result’.41 There is then something of a tension between these sentiments and the framing of the Plan within the language of civilian sacrifice and bomb damage in the following section from the Plan’s opening paragraph: The City of Kingston upon Hull is one of the three most bomb-damaged areas in the country: it has suffered, not only destruction, but dislocation of the very life of a community; rebuilding and reconstruction are necessary and urgent.42

This tension in describing the importance and extent of Hull’s bomb damage raises questions surrounding the reality of bomb damage and the reasons for stressing it as a major factor in considerations of redevelopment that might be tackled by comparison with the very similar Manchester Plan.

Fantasies of urban futures

37

Unlike Hull, Manchester, though bombed heavily on two nights prior to Christmas 1940 and along with adjoining Salford suffering some significant damage to its city centre, was treated comparatively lightly by the Luftwaffe.43 Therefore, the language of Manchester’s Plan instead emphasised that the need for the city to be replanned had existed long before the war. City surveyor and engineer Rowland Nicholas (credited as the author of the Plan) acknowledged as much in the introduction, arguing that: ‘Manchester’s war damage is too scattered to affect in a material degree the scale of the problem [of replanning the city] or the nature of its solution.’44 Similarly, Nicholas’ opening statement in the Plan suggests that the role of the Blitz was more as a driver of discourse than creating the physical conditions for rebuilding: ‘It was the blitz that awakened public interest in planning. But it was not the blitz that made planning necessary.’45 Later in the introduction he reinforced this point: The need for planning, then, has always existed and always will exist. Here in Manchester it is especially urgent now – not because of the blitz, but because whole districts of our city are so decrepit that they must in any event be redeveloped … The blitz drew attention to the problem of re-planning. Here and there, on a relatively small scale, it also created an immediate opportunity for reconstruction.46

The two Plans presented their need for investment and resources within similar yet different frameworks, and the language used in the town planning committees of each city illustrates the dichotomous relationship between how reconstruction was being presented publically and its actual significance to local policy decisions. In Manchester the various committees showed little tendency to use ‘reconstruction’ to describe post-war planning work in their internal correspondence, and there was scant difference between the plans for flats and housing slated for completion in 1939 and those reactivated in the period 1943–45.47 In the scheme for the redevelopment of Hull’s Anlaby Road area, the documents of the Housing Committee demonstrate a brief enthusiasm for the term ‘reconstruction scheme’ during late 1945, yet bomb damage was only one of the four reasons cited for the redevelopment alongside dilapidation, overcrowding and Anlaby Road’s classification as a ‘slum clearance area’ prior to the war. Less than two years later the scheme was simply referred to as ‘Anlaby Road Redevelopment Site No. 1’.48 In contrast, in documents intended for public consumption the association between extensive bomb damage and reconstruction remained prominent long after they disappeared from internal nomenclature. The 1958 Hull City Council publication Planning in Action, for example, still referred to ongoing and planned work as ‘reconstruction’ and placed

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much emphasis on the extent of bomb damage, seemingly as a way to mitigate criticism from the public and press over slow progress.49 Hull’s Plan evoked this rhetoric of reconstruction by illustrating the  need to rebuild via the inclusion of two large aerial photographs showing the bombed city centre and a full page of photographs evidencing the most severely bomb-damaged buildings.50 Taken alongside Schultz’s statement, the Hull Plan represents an attempt by Hull Corporation to position its own need for emergency rebuilding within the context of civilian suffering and national sacrifice, and, thus, a hierarchy of resources.51 The insistence on ‘reconstruction’ as a label and the images of widespread damage evidence an attempt to place Hull amongst those cities considered worthy of special attention. This, of course, had the potential to attract private investment – indeed a significant amount of what was achieved by 1958 would be through collaboration with private commercial interests – but a strong emphasis remained on securing assistance from central government coffers.52 Hull was one of the seven test cases identified by the Advisory Panel on Redevelopment of City Centres, a government body set up to review the financing and planning issues faced by the worst hit cities and the Plan evidences a corporation jockeying for position against Plymouth, Southampton, Coventry, Bristol, Portsmouth and Swansea.53 Hull Corporation likely understood that it could not compete for investment and materials with a test-case city like Coventry, which had attained a national symbolism that far outweighed the actual damage.54 Yet the Plan makes frequent comparisons with Plymouth – a similarsized coastal town, which although sustaining a denser concentration of damage to its city centre had suffered a similar amount of overall damage to Hull.55 In addition to the importance of placing itself within this post-war hierarchy of need, Hull Corporation also had other reasons to stress the magnitude of the damage to the city. Proposals contained in the reports and legislation that emerged between 1940 and 1944, particularly in 1942’s Uthwatt Report, recommended that local corporations should be able to compulsorily buy land for the same price as in March 1939 and classify areas of Blitz, blight or both as reconstruction areas.56 Uthwatt’s recommendations would have radicalised the ability of local corporations to control land usage by enabling the acquisition of significant areas of their cities in an arbitrary fashion. It is perhaps unsurprising that the 1944 Town and Country Planning Act (T&CPA) subsequently reduced the recommendations to a clause that corporations could only claim compensation for areas of Blitz, not blight.57 Nevertheless, as the following chapter shows, corporations swiftly recognised the utilitarian

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potential of classifying areas of Blitz damage as a means of securing large areas of cheap land in central areas. The Hull Plan framed the purpose of post-war planning within a narrative of need, centred on the damage to the city. The Plan functioned, in this respect, in two ways: first, as a way of communicating the legitimacy of planning to the population through the interplay between a new, rigorously planned city as a reward for civilian service and the need to repair bomb damage; second, it simultaneously operated as a way of establishing Hull within a hierarchy of national resources at the end of the war. Despite the visual similarities between the Plans, Manchester’s Plan did not stress damage very heavily; indeed, with only sporadic bomb destruction it chose instead to play upon the notion of a pre-existing need, actively downplaying the importance of the Blitz. Viewing the Plans in this way suggests that they were far more than simply material expressions of a grand planning scheme or just an assertion of planners’ expertise. Instead, it opens up the possibility that they might have multiple purposes encapsulated in a single document, an idea that deserves further attention.

The right to plan the cities of the future The variation in the ways the two Plans presented narratives of reconstruction and redevelopment illustrates that they could serve subtly different purposes that went beyond the simple communication of the proposed redevelopment schemes. This, however, is only one aspect of a variety of influences that coalesced in their production. Understanding why they emerged in the form they did also requires attention to the position of local government and its relationship to the planning profession in post-war Britain. The Plans were commissioned at great expense and effort by and for local corporations and, I argue, they consequently represent a material assertion of their right to plan and shape their cities at the end of a difficult time for local government. Although the postwar period would see the local state manifest as the primary vehicle for the delivery of national strategies of health, welfare and housing, in the inter-war period the power of local corporations and their future role had been challenged by central government machinery and influential local concerns.58 Despite persistent attempts to purchase land in city centres and, as Charlotte Wildman has demonstrated in Manchester and Liverpool, enact some ambitious planning schemes, the inter-war period had been a story of corporations’ frustrated ambitions to redevelop their increasingly decrepit urban infrastructure.59 In addition, wartime and the post-war period were both characterised by local government unease

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at the expanding remit of central government and a concomitant desire to carve out as much influence as they might manage.60 In a similar way to local government, for the planning profession the mid-twentieth century has been characterised as a crucial moment when town planners, little more than a vocal pressure group, asserted their right to be an integral part of the state’s bureaucratic apparatus.61 During the war a consensus had emerged that facilitated the post-war extension of planning powers to penetrate into areas of the nascent welfare state, particularly social housing construction.62 Urban planners seized the opportunity to construct a powerful position, presenting themselves as experts and gatekeepers of the knowledge that could make material the urban future that British citizens deserved.63 In this narrative the Plans then appear to be a manifestation of a popular desire to plan comprehensively, produced by an incipient planning profession in concert with local corporations that ensconced town planning firmly within the machinery of government. Even accepting this debateable explanation of what the Plans represented, and despite Larkham and Lilley’s observation that Plans were also a form of ‘civic boosterism’, it remains difficult to pin down precisely why corporations proved so enthusiastic about producing something as visible, ambitious and expensive as the Plans.64 It seems that, similar to planners, local corporations sensed an opportunity to consolidate their own powers and position in the post-war world. They did this by asserting their right to plan the post-war world through the language of expertise, progress and, again, emerging discourses of rebuilding as a reward for civilians’ suffering. Yet, whilst buying into a discourse of radical new planning, the apparently new approach was often little more than an exciting, visually stimulating rehashing of long-held ambitions to comprehensively plan cities. As Larkham and Lilley have pointed out: In some cases, it is obvious that the concerns of the ‘reconstruction plan’ have little to do with the aftermath of the war, but much to do with the planning concerns that immediately preceded it; the ‘reconstruction plan’ was, perhaps, a convenient mechanism to formulate and promulgate these ideas.65

The details were different across cities, but the intentions of the Plans were demonstrably similar. In several instances, for example, authors pragmatically co-opted existing schemes or half-finished projects and incorporated them in the final documents with little more than a thin veneer of difference. The Plans thus evidence a desire to communicate a radically reconsidered approach to urban order – often through the

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expression of modern designs – whilst closer investigation shows the repeated use of recycled and rebranded inter-war schemes.66 The supposed radicalism of the Plans thus stems from both a downplaying of inter-war ambitions, taken alongside an overly simplistic reading of the Plans themselves. As a starting point in understanding this apparently contradictory ­trajectory of the Plans – as both radically new but also rather familiar – it is important to understand how planning was being framed in the postwar period. Planning reputedly represented a radical departure from the horrors of the unplanned, pre-war world; additionally, the post-war discourse of town planning had not yet connected planning’s manifest rationality with the desire to order, classify and homogenise that had produced the Holocaust.67 Instead, the war was seen in the immediate aftermath as a product of irrationality, of the twisted minds of individuals like Hitler, or of the barbaric predisposition of the Germanic or Japanese peoples.68 This juxtaposition of the modern rationality of planning against the barbarism of the war was common amongst the advocates of town planning. In a speech to the Royal Manchester Institution (RMI) in March 1942, J. Hubert Worthington, former professor of architecture at the Royal College of Art, reportedly told the audience that: A city the size of Manchester … needed not one but a dozen civic centres, and first in importance came the Cathedral and Chetham’s Hospital. We must be ruthless in clearing the area around them, so that they might stand among trees and lawns in a spacious close with a deanery fit to live in. This might well be the form that our war memorial might take as a symbol of the triumph of Christianity over barbarism.69

Worthington’s speech conflated aesthetic features with a just reward for victory and sacrifice, echoing Churchill’s June 1940 speech that had warned defeat would mean ‘the whole world … will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age’.70 This type of rhetoric stressed that the approach to planning in the postwar period would be a match in its scientific rationality for the darkest depths of the war. Yet, there appear to have been doubts in the planning profession about how much had actually changed. In January 1941 a disagreement between the chairman of the Manchester Society of Architects, C. Gustave Agate, and the president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), W.H. Ansell, summed up the way that planners were interpreting the opportunity for planning after the war. It was reported in the Manchester Guardian that: ‘except so far as the recent destructions [of the Blitz] had created a self-healing spark ready to be kindled in the citizens of Manchester, he [Agate] saw no opportunity

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now which had not always existed’. In response Ansell stated that: ‘the need had always been there, it was true, but such an opportunity had not occurred in our lifetimes’.71 The issue for the framers of the Plans, regardless of how rhetorical this moment of optimism in the public discussion of planning was, was that many of the schemes they had no choice but to incorporate were far from new.72 Manchester Corporation’s plans for the Wythenshawe ‘garden suburb’ were produced by Barry Parker as early as 1928 and the plans for the undeveloped portion of the estate that appeared in the Manchester Plan were (with some important, but small changes discussed in chapter 3) an updated version of the originals.73 Indeed, despite the uniqueness of the opportunity presented by the post-war period, much of what appeared only represented a superficial advancement of inter-war approaches. Books like Rebuilding Manchester and Manchester Made Over by local grandees E.D. and A.P. Simon had advocated radical control of planning to produce a city fit for the future during the mid-1930s.74 These followed on the heels of the 1926 Manchester and District Joint Town Planning Advisory Committee regional planning scheme for Manchester and the surrounding areas. Though over 170 pages long, it possessed little of the visual flair or artistically realised modernism of the 1945 Plans (there was only one illustration of a proposed building) and was firmly aimed at the production of a regional approach to future planning. Yet, in common with other plans produced during the inter-war period, in its discussion of zoning, clean air, control of building density and provision of green spaces it shows the foundations of the approaches that were presented in the 1945 Plans.75 Hull Corporation’s Ferensway project – a plan for a new city centre boulevard, complete with shopping arcades and car parking – although never wholly completed, was authorised under the provisions of the Kingston-upon-Hull Corporation Act 1924 and opened in 1931. The land had been gradually acquired from 1914 to 1929 and the new development occupied an area formerly composed of cramped slums and small factories, which were cleared to make way for the project. Central to the development was a competition to design all the buildings on the new route, where special care was taken to ensure good traffic flows, uniformity of design and even specially devised lighting that would create a cheerful atmosphere.76 Ferensway would be lined with neo-Georgian buildings and was the ‘pivotal centre’ of the Corporation’s ‘bold and many sided scheme of reconstruction’ that included slum clearance, garden suburbs, 12 miles of new roads, bridges and ‘the ­conversion of an obsolete block into a beautiful boulevard [Ferensway]’.77 Hoped to be a landmark in municipal redevelopment, the project ground to a halt

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towards the end of the 1930s and many of the grand buildings were never constructed. Although an attempt to produce such a large central redevelopment was comparatively rare in inter-war Britain, it was certainly indicative of actions being taken in other cities like Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester.78 In addition to the Ferensway development, Hull had four pre-war planning schemes for different districts of the city, two of which were approved before the outbreak of war. Prepared by Alexander Pickard, Hull’s town clerk, a 1942 report in the files of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government claims that ‘prior to the outbreak of the War the whole of the City [of Hull] had been Town Planned’.79 Pickard added: ‘the planning schemes provide for the segregation, by means of zoning, of industrial from residential premises, for the improvement and development of communications and for the orderly and improved development of amenities generally.’80 Pickard’s plans, like those contained in the 1926 scheme for Manchester, show that a totalising, zonal form of town planning had been considered desirable by the Corporation for some time before the outbreak of the war. Manchester, like Hull, also produced plans for the development of the city centre during the inter-war period. In October 1938 the Manchester Evening News (MEN) detailed the plans for the widening and refurbishment of Cannon Street, a plan which had been both slow and costly (due to the need to buy up the warehouses which lined the old street). The widening of Cannon Street had been proposed as far back as 1896 and had been the subject of two Parliamentary bills in 1903 and 1930.81 One of two articles in the MEN on 12 October 1938 led with the following: Manchester has for long had no cause for pride in its narrow streets … and for some time it has been realised that plans for widening will have to be accompanied by strict control of frontages if the city is to be given the dignity it lacks.82

The article closes with the sentiment: ‘Cannon-street [sic] is now one of the worst streets in the city. It may soon be the best – and we hope the beginning of a new and more spacious modern Manchester.’83 Whilst the designs produced by the two corporations evidence little of the Modernist architecture that would come to characterise the post-war images of cities, instead displaying the kind of late Beaux Arts classicism of the inter-war period, these early plans were deeply modern in the scope of the intervention in citizens’ lives and experience.84 As Jerram and Gunn have both pointed out, modernism as a functional, o ­ rganising project should not be confused with the aesthetic high modernism exemplified in a few showpiece buildings.85

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The evidence of inter-war practice suggests that more detailed consideration needs to be given to just how radical the planning environment was at the end of the Second World War. In the 1920s and 1930s both Hull and Manchester had a local brand of proto-modernism that was not only progressive and tapped into wider notions of an organised and planned city but was also being interpreted at a local level and undertaken piecemeal as funds and land became available. Despite the totalising nature of the 1945 Plans and the sheer scope of their vision (variously presented at 50 or 100 years), they were not particularly different in their aims to acquire and control the use of large areas of the city. The winning designs for Ferensway’s grand façade may have displayed none of the hallmarks of the aesthetic Modernism in the Plans, but the absence of a specific architectural approach does not diminish a similarity of intent (though not scope) with the Abercrombie Plans. Yet, despite these similarities, planners were presenting the war as a radical moment of opportunity, driven by the destruction it wreaked. The question therefore remains as to why plans that were so similar in intent to pre-war designs should be presented as such a radical departure from the past. What is noticeable about both sets of plans for the pre-war development of Manchester and Hull is that they were hampered by the difficulty of acquiring the land needed to realise them. It is perhaps no surprise that, whilst central government was stressing the need for comprehensive planning in the early 1940s, for the local corporations the legislation to compulsorily purchase land could not arrive quickly enough. Thirteen Lord Mayors of ‘Blitzed towns’ – including Alderman Schultz from Hull and Salford’s C.J. Townsend – wrote a letter to The Times in October 1943 urging the government to legislate immediately to allow them to replan their urban environments.86 Their letter evoked a narrative of a planned post-war Britain as a reward for civilian fortitude and pushed for an extension of local corporations’ ability to plan comprehensively when it argued: Hitler has given us an unexpected chance of rectifying past mistakes in our layouts. Yet we are unable to move with certainty … because the government have as yet failed to give legislative effect to their pledges that public bodies would be given power to acquire, at prices related to pre-war values, such land as is required for development and replanning. … The country must not allow the need of service men and our gallant home citizens to be disappointed by those who would profit through our needs. … Some ­property owners will not even negotiate with local authorities when the latter lack compulsory powers to buy.87

Provincial cities were pushing for an extension of their powers to enable them to replan large areas of their city centres and u ­ nderstanding

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how and why this occurred is crucial in understanding the nature of the Plans. At the end of the Second World War the right of corporations to plan their cities was far from sure; they faced the loss of their control of utilities and were all too aware of the inter-war unwillingness of national governments to curtail private developers’ hold over land.88 In addition to central government a number of non-governmental interests were formulating plans and suggestions of their own prior to the publication of the final versions of the Plans.89 The RMI was one of the groups that formed its own reconstruction committee in July 1943 to ‘assist’ with the replanning of Manchester.90 Amongst its stated aims were: ‘to encourage civic pride; recognition of the beneficial effects of good planning and so to encourage the application of such principles in this region … and to offer advice in appropriate cases on any proposals affecting the general amenities of the region and itself to select suitable projects for consideration’.91 As was the case with the Plans some years later, they also organised exhibitions to promote their ideals and designs to the public.92 In a bold move they also presented an extensive plan of their own for the construction of a cultural centre for Manchester – featuring cinemas, theatres, several concert and banqueting halls and a grand exhibition hall – which they submitted to City Architect G. Noel Hill in April 1944.93 Surprisingly, given the fact that nothing as detailed or ambitious appears in Nicholas’ Plan, on 12 February 1945 the RMI stated they were ‘gratified to find that the suggestions made in our Memorandum to you [Hill] had been so fully incorporated into your scheme’.94 The RMI was just one of a number of voices trying to impose their vision of the future upon the post-war planning process. In their speeches to the Manchester Society of Architects in January 1941, Messrs Ansell and Agate were stinging in their criticisms of Manchester’s failure to plan comprehensively in the inter-war period and prescriptive about the shape of future developments. They argued for the preservation of aspects of Manchester’s Victorian industrial fabric, increased interaction between the civic authorities and the citizens, larger buildings and ‘fewer and wider streets’.95 Alongside examples like these and the pre-war input of the Simons, there was growing discussion in the press concerning the need for a comprehensive vision of Manchester’s future shape.96 Hull Corporation’s preparations for the Plans had also crystallised in the knowledge that local commercial and industrial concerns were seeking to exert influence over the planning process. Although his figures were used in the Hull Plan and prepared with support of the Leverhulme Trust and Hull Corporation, Max Lock’s Civic Diagnosis was also funded by local building magnate R.G. Tarran, the directors of Reckitt and

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Coleman (a local household cleaner and pharmaceutical manufacturer) as well as several other industrial interests.97 There was no suggestion of impropriety nor undue influence upon the final form of the Plan, but it does serve to illustrate the ways commercial interests were involving themselves in the future of town planning. In 1941, following the bombing of a group of warehouses on Portland  Street in Manchester, George Pepler – Chief Town Planning Inspector to the Ministry of Health – and H. Graham Vincent at the Ministry of Works exchanged letters which demonstrated the uncertainty over who exactly would be responsible for the co-ordination of the reconstruction effort, as well as the considerable influence of private owners.98 Following a conversation with Ernest Simon and Sir Thomas Barlow in Manchester, Pepler reported that Barlow was one of several owners of a group of warehouses ‘flattened by the Hun’ who wanted to put together a ‘redevelopment plan’ for the area. However, upon asking the Manchester town clerk, Barlow was rebuffed as the private redevelopment plan might have conflicted with the ideas of Reith. Subsequently, Simon had requested that Pepler write to Barlow and encourage him to produce a plan. Vincent felt that this was a bad idea, asking Pepler: Are you sure you should not tackle it at the Town Clerk’s end? Obviously we want to encourage owners to get together for re-development. But I should have thought that the Local Authority’s plan should have come first, otherwise individuals and groups might produce plans which do not properly carry out or conform … and so might arise some danger of conflict.99

Vincent’s advice was remarkably prescient, since the next decade would be scarred by bitter disputes over redevelopment plans. Nevertheless, in the optimistic days of 1941 his remarks illustrate the range of competing voices that were seeking to gain traction in the post-war planning process. The pressure exerted on the planning process by a host of interested parties suggests that the Plans served as an attempt to wrest the discourse of post-war planning into the control of local government and their planning experts. Though local corporations had made attempts to replan cities in the inter-war period, the post-war Plans had to both buy into and exert control over a much larger and louder discourse of modern planning. The upshot was that corporations pitched the tone and presentation of the material in the Plans to communicate a clean break with the past: a break produced through a series of overlapping narratives of progress and the visual imagery of expertise and modernism.

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The technocratic fantasy The Plans emphasised a newness of approach towards post-war urban design and presented planning as a scientific, rational process that was the just reward for national endeavour during the war. However, as an explanation of what the Plans actually contained, the analysis of the circumstances that produced them alone falls short. Each Plan featured an array of technical drawings, maps and bold architectural visions produced by multiple authors, artists and draughtsmen. The diversity of imagery alongside this multi-vocality thus requires close attention in order to uncover and interpret the complex post-war tensions embedded within the documents. It would be easy, given the brashness of the architectural vision the Plans often present, to write them off as clean-sweep, modernist aberrations. Yet this view has been increasingly challenged by writers like geographer Philip Jones who have argued that plans like Abercrombie’s for Hull often contained rather practical solutions to mitigate things like transport and housing problems that persisted in the 1960s and 1970s.100 Larkham, similarly, has shown that many of the plans paid far more attention to conservation of historic buildings and areas than they might have been given credit for at first glance.101 Here, I add to this work by approaching the Plans from a perspective that uncovers the tensions between their textual and visual components to demonstrate how the presentation of modernism – both in architectural style and as a wider practice – within them might be reconsidered. In producing plans rich in seemingly technical language, but also strikingly visual, the local governments of Hull and Manchester were invoking the expert power of the planner as both an aesthetic and a scientific shaper of urban space. The application of planners’ knowledge within the Plans legitimised the local governments’ own positions at the head of post-war town planning, quieting and emasculating competing voices. By also engaging in the visual and textual language of modernism the Plans asserted the progressiveness of the authors, implying a relationship between the depictions of strikingly new forms of architecture and the more sober approaches to planning housing and shopping precincts the documents contained. These illustrations were often at odds with the text of the Plans, but functioned as a means of capturing and dictating the public imagination concerning the future. The Plans utilised visual fantasies as a means of invoking a particular type of planned, ­scientifically ordered future in the manner stressed by historians Becky Conekin, Matthew Hollow and Frank Mort.102 As an adjunct to the more artistic representations of buildings the Plans also deployed maps and other more ‘technical’ illustrations to

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bridge the gap between the fantastical visual material and the large amounts of written text. Work by geographers Chris Perkins and Martin Dodge offers a method via which we can understand the ways maps contained in the Manchester Plan ‘appear to fix and facilitate the possible futures, offering potent evidence of a vibrant, rational, possible urban life’, whilst the drawings of the city centre juxtaposed against the pictures of the city in 1945 ‘encourage a belief in their imagined possibilities’.103 The twin elements – visually arresting architecture combined with seemingly grounded technical exercises – were encapsulated in the Plans and legitimised the role of both planners and local government as custodians of the future city through the notion of expertise. Mort, quoting from the Architectural Review, in his work on the London Plans noted that planning was understood as: a new democratic contract between experts and the public that was being forged in the unique conditions of wartime. It was the expert’s job to keep the public informed using all possible ‘modern resources’, while the public could use this information ‘to keep an eye on the expert’.104

The Plans engage in this dialogue between experts and citizens by presenting their schemes in accessible visual and textual terms. However, they also enforced a clean break with the past by showing a future that looked different and was crucially made more legible and accessible through the technical exercise of mapping.105 Showing how Plans that were, as I have suggested, generated for somewhat different reasons could look so similar thus illustrates how the national discourse of planning dictated a similar response from all concerned parties. It also sheds light on why so much of the Plans’ content has been interpreted as evidence of radicalism. The different forms of media within the Plans cannot be read in isolation, since they are complex and multi-vocal documents. Whilst Nicholas and Abercrombie may have been their guiding hands, both Plans had many authors, both in terms of the text and the visual material. Misunderstandings concerning the Plans have thus been common. In 1996 planning historian Ted Kitchen stated that the Manchester Plan proposed that: The city centre should more or less be razed to the ground, and modern buildings should replace the Victorian and Edwardian heritage that was simply not valued at that time. This included the demolition of Waterhouse’s Town Hall (now listed Grade I), which is today widely regarded as one of the finest Victorian buildings in England.106

In popular memory too the Plans have frequently been cast as destructive and megalomaniacal evidence of modernist architects’ attempts to

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destroy built heritage. In his introduction to his historical guidebook, The Manchester Compendium, Ed Glinert, for example, repeats the clichéd charge that the Manchester Plan sought to replace the town hall – ‘the grandest, greatest and most imposing building in the region’ – with a smaller, ‘streamlined – and hugely expensive – modernist replacement’.107 These interpretations, though common, are a misreading of the Plans, predicated on absorbing the visual elements without fully considering the text; misreadings that not only expose the power of the visual material to invoke notions of progress but also dictate a more careful consideration of the text. The proposed city centre development and accompanying drawings show the town hall replaced (see figure 1.1); however, attention to the text of the Plan reveals a different story.108 Nicholas explicitly called the plans ‘tentative’ and offered the replacement of the town hall as one of two possible options for future generation, never making even a vague reference to the cost, form or design of any replacement building.109 Moreover, if this element of the Plan had been so fundamental the same illustration would surely have appeared in the soft-backed abridged Plan, which it does not. The focus on the town hall is understandable – a version of the drawing was used in the advertising material for the exhibition (see figure 1.9) – but it merely serves to illustrate how frequently misinterpreted the Plans have been. In a similar vein, Manchester: 50 Years of Change describes the Manchester Plan as: an attempt to remove all traces of Victorian Manchester because of its links with poor living, working and health conditions and to replace it with ‘modern mechanisms’ to run an international city.110

The Plan does indeed represent a radical vision; however, there is no suggestion that all traces of Manchester’s nineteenth-century expansion should be erased and the Plan is unspecific about exactly which buildings would be kept or removed. Whilst acknowledging that many older buildings had now outlived their usefulness, both Plans were generally unspecific about buildings in any shape or form. It seems to have been the striking visions of future buildings, coupled with selective readings of the Plans’ actual text that have led to the assumption that there was a prescription contained in them to demolish treasured buildings, or raze the city centres. The issue of misinterpretation of the Plans highlights the difficulties that arise from the assumption that they are documents to be adopted in any holistic fashion. The fragmented, multi-vocal and frequently contradictory quality of the Plans is perhaps best evoked by looking at the various introductions. Much is made in the introductions to both Plans concerning their desire to be viewed not as an imposition of an elite

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plan, but as discussion pieces. This is evident in Schultz’s assertion that the Hull Plan would allow citizens ‘[to] discuss, to consider, to criticize, to amend and to adopt such of it as they consider proper’.111 Schultz’s sentiments are thus almost completely at odds with the interpretation of the Plan as a holistic and fully executable plan for the future. Alderman Jackson, in a similar vein, argued that the extent to which the civic authorities in Manchester would be able to improve life and working conditions depended ‘ultimately upon the interest, determination and wishes of the citizens, to whom I commend this book [the Plan] for careful study’.112 Cllr Ottiwell Lodge, chairman of the Town Planning and Buildings Committee, described the Manchester Plan as ‘no attempt to revolutionise the face of the city, but shape it into a satisfactory pattern – largely conforming to the present layout’.113 Lodge’s words hint that the intention of the Corporation was more concerned with the functioning of the city, rather than any attempt to completely reshape it. Nicholas himself confirms the view that the Manchester Plan was fundamentally conservative in his own foreword: our redevelopment scheme must take more careful account of the financial consequences of removing undamaged buildings. Thus our initial idealism has been tempered by a growing preoccupation with present realities.114

He goes on to add: ‘I can only hope that they [the citizens of Manchester] may be satisfied with the result, and that they will find it helpful in formulating the official plan that is to guide our post-war reconstruction.’115 Even with the above caveat, Nicholas was still keen to emphasise the tentative nature of the plan: It is not claimed that the plan as it stands reflects a perfect compromise between the actuality and the ideal; indeed, its very nature and the manner of its presentation demand that the spirit of idealism should predominate.116

It seems that the Plans, whilst rhetorically presented as fully realisable planning schemes, were not entirely conceived of as totalising approaches to planning in reality, at least by the time they were released. Planning historian Emily Talen, discussing how we might assess the implementation of plans from a theoretical perspective, argues that: If planners were to begin their manufacture of plans with the caveat ‘It will be impossible to determine whether or not this plan will ever be implemented,’ many communities would rightly challenge the very notion of plan-making.117

Yet, this appears to be exactly what the post-war Plans did do. Moreover, examination of the circumstances leading to their publication suggests

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that there was never any indication that the schemes contained inside would be adopted in their entirety. Larkham and Barry Cullingworth have both shown that the majority of Plans were presented as ‘advisory’ or ‘outline’ and their status remained rather indeterminate.118 Hull had, on the advice of central government, commissioned its Plan in the late summer of 1942, engaging Lutyens and Abercrombie – perhaps the most formidable planning duo of the day – at considerable expense.119 Yet, their remit was only to produce a plan that might be presented to local government for approval. Indeed, around nine months elapsed between the presentation of the Plan to the Corporation and its release to the public.120 Furthermore, Hull Corporation, having received the Plans in November 1944, asked Abercrombie to modify the central area plans in January 1945.121 Manchester’s Plan emerged in a much more ad hoc manner than Hull’s, and according to Lord Mayor W.P. Jackson: When the post-war planning of Manchester was begun about two years ago [c.1943] the intention was to present the proposals to the Town Planning and Buildings Committee, and subsequently to the City Council, in a series of reports supported by plans. As the City Surveyor [Nicholas] proceeded with his great task it became increasingly evident that the problems of planning and reconstruction in Manchester were so interrelated that it would be wiser and more informative to prepare and present the Plan as a whole.122

The Manchester Plan was not initially formulated as a plan to be adopted wholesale, but, in the further words of the Lord Mayor, as an attempt to assist the ‘Manchester Civic Authorities and indeed all who are concerned in the layout of the city … [to] appreciate the effect of any planning policy which they may officially adopt’.123 It is likely that Manchester Corporation, always keenly aware of civic competition and its bombastic reputation for innovation, decided to publish their own Plan after realising the similar intentions of other cities. Nevertheless, there is a similar set of concerns expressed in Alderman Schultz’s introduction to the Hull Plan as those in Manchester’s: ‘This is the plan. It is put forward as a guide to the citizens for the future development of our great City.’124 Jackson, Schultz, Nicholas and Lodge seem to have been trying to condition the public’s reception of their Plans by making it clear that the more radical elements were representative rather than concrete designs. These tensions do not merely apply to the introductory sentiments of the corporations’ members either. In the Hull Plan, the drawings of principal illustrator J.D.M. Harvey (figures 1.3 and 1.4) seem to bear

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little relationship to the maps and text produced by Abercrombie and his staff. This multi-vocality is also present in the Manchester Plan with drawings produced by at least ten different artists, including Harvey, City Architect G. Noel Hill and J. Hubert Worthington, who would ultimately undertake the restoration of the Cathedral precinct following the Blitz. The visual material was not the only multi-vocal element: in excess of 60 members of staff and outside consultants were employed in creating the Manchester Plan, perhaps most significantly one Derek Sailor, who Nicholas acknowledged had turned a ‘somewhat technical script into a book which the layman can appreciate’.125 The Hull Plan seems to have been rather more tightly controlled  – and Lutyens’ contribution was, of course, limited by his death in January 1944 – yet Abercrombie’s introduction suggests that around 20 people contributed to the Plan in some way. Hull City Architect Andrew Rankine’s department made perhaps the biggest single contribution by completing most of the work on the central area and housing estate plans, often from existing schemes. In addition, the Ministry of Agriculture’s Dr Dudley Stamp appears to have produced the whole of the chapter entitled ‘Land classification and agriculture’, and a number of maps are adapted from Max Lock’s Civic Diagnosis.126 Consequently, whilst the Plans emerged as fully formed documents, they were the product of competing and often contradictory voices. Seemingly then, by the time they were published, neither Plan was regarded as an indivisible or comprehensive piece of planning, if indeed they ever had been. Furthermore, their authorship was incredibly varied and demonstrates significant internal tensions. Given the lack of endorsement for the schemes demonstrated in the forewords by the various councillors, it might seem surprising that the Plans were published or displayed at all. Indeed, Hull Corporation were reportedly plunged into a state of ‘bewilderment’ by the presentation of the Plans and opposition to the Plans had been received from central government, the Hull Chamber of Commerce and Shipping, the Municipal Affairs Group (often abbreviated to MAG – an anti-Labour caucus within Hull City Council) and the Hull & District Chamber of Trade (H&DCT) before publication.127 The London and North East Railway, owners of much of the frontage to the river, had made it clear that they were set against co-operation with local planners’ proposals to tackle Hull’s congested rail and road crossings.128 Against this wall of voices, which stressed that the early ideas emanating from Abercrombie were simply too radical, the Hull Reconstruction Committee forced Abercrombie to incorporate an alternative location for the new shopping centre in the published Plan.129

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Yet, both corporations likely felt under some pressure to produce Plans comparable with other blitzed cities.130 There was, in any case, the added pressure of establishing their own place in the post-war hierarchy of resources, both with citizens and with central government. Perhaps both cities also wished to reawaken public interest in planning, which had appeared to be on the wane since the dark days of the Blitz, whilst for Hull the pressure of spending so much on Abercrombie and Lutyens must have added to the desire to proceed with the publication and exhibiting of the Plans.131 The multiple authorship, alongside tensions in the language used within the Plans, means that any analysis of the content needs to pay close attention to the way the text interacts with images to gain a better understanding of the intentions behind the documents. Dodge and Perkins, for example, argue that the pictorial representations in the Manchester Plan might have served to promote the particular policy objectives of the authors, rather than merely communicate information about realisable designs.132 However, they also argue that one purpose of the Manchester Plan was to communicate realisable technical information to those who might fund it. Whilst the following chapter will argue that this was sometimes true, the multi-vocality of the documents suggests care needs to be taken over which textual and visual elements should be taken as realisable. Surveying the Plans, one thing is immediately striking: much of what is contained in the books goes far beyond a simple planning report in terms of the visual material and is conversely short on technical details.  The Manchester Plan might claim on its final page that ‘we have  ascertained that our plan is technically feasible; we have indicated  how its execution can be made administratively possible’, but these claims seem rather hollow given the scarcity of financial details.133 Facts and figures concerning housing density, population size, family structure, building age and numbers of vehicles are present, but they sit more as selective illustrations to back up certain points than as an attempt to present a coherent technical document. Discussions of the housing project at Wythenshawe in Manchester’s Plan – ­ developed long  before  the war and included as a separate chapter from the general  discussion of housing – are highly detailed, yet the section on the city centre is vague and tentative. Alongside these elements, the visions of the cities, represented in maps and zoning plans, are seemingly precise (see figures 1.10 and 2.1, for example), yet the drawings of the city centres are speculative illustrations, produced by various artists  with little regard for Abercrombie or Nicholas’ actual text (figures 1.1–1.4).

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1.1  J.D.M. Harvey’s drawing of the town hall and civic area from Rowland Nicholas’ City of Manchester Plan.

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1.2  Proposed design of the new civic centre in Manchester by A. Sherwood Edwards, from Nicholas’ City of Manchester Plan.

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1.3  Illustration by Harvey of Queen’s Gardens area of Hull from Edwin Lutyens and Patrick Abercrombie’s Plan for Kingston upon Hull.

1.4  Drawing by Harvey of the city centre area of Hull from Lutyens and Abercrombie’s Plan for Kingston upon Hull.

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The Plans are also almost completely lacking in detail about how the projects they outline are to be achieved. Indeed, in Abercrombie’s own words about the city centre Plans: In the following brief description of the Plan [for the city centre], no further reference will be made either to the distinction between existent and proposed factors or to the stages by which the Plan may be realised.134

Nicholas’ proposal is even less ambitious when it comes to the central area, stating: The inside back cover of this book depicts a Utopian vision of modern buildings … But this is merely a flight of fancy, intended to remind you that Manchester will, in any case be a much altered place by 2045. In practice the redevelopment of the commercial centre of a city must be a comparatively slow process of change whose direction cannot be envisaged so far ahead.135

These images in the front and back covers of the book (figures 1.5 and 1.6), as Nicholas observed, were not in the remotest sense plans or even technical drawings, but their positioning – the first and last images the reader sees – gives a clue as to how they were meant to function within the Plans. The Plan is effectively ‘poised between full colour endpapers depicting an historical past and an imagined future’.136 The illustrations of the cities’ past and future indicate that what is contained in the Plans is a framework to traverse from the old to the modern, right down to the contrast between the early modern style scroll and lettering added to the reproduction of the famous Palmer map of Manchester of 1650 and the clean, functional font used on the illustration of 2045.137 The Hull Plan has remarkably similar images (figures 1.7 and 1.8) and, like the Manchester Plan, evidences a transition from the early modern city to the highly planned, clean modernity of a fantasy future in its inside covers. Similar to Manchester’s, the Hull Plan uses two different font types to illustrate the transition, and the inside cover drawing of Hull is a reproduction of Wenceslas Holler’s c.1642 print of Hull, but copied by Harvey.138 As the final drawings of the city evidence a strange, abstract fantasy of a distant utopia, so the drawings of the past city evidence an abstract representation of the rooted, but indefinable past of the cities. These illustrations of past and future are not, then, about presenting a realisable plan but about invoking the notion of a better future: a future which was planned, organised and superior to what had gone before. The drawings illustrate that there is a point in the distant future where the perfect city might be achieved and that the way to get there was contained in the Plans. The tension between the visual material and the textual detail though suggests that rather than being a concrete, realis-

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1.5  Drawing of Manchester c.1650 from the inside front cover of Nicholas’ City of Manchester Plan.

1.6  Drawing of Manchester c.2045 from the inside back cover of Nicholas’ City of Manchester Plan.

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1.7  Drawing of medieval Hull by Harvey from the inside front cover of Lutyens and Abercrombie’s Plan for Kingston upon Hull.

1.8  Drawing of a future Hull by Harvey from the inside back cover of Lutyens and Abercrombie’s Plan for Kingston upon Hull.

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able guide, the Plans instead represented a promotion of the techniques – ­scientific, expert-led planning – by which the future might be achieved. If the inside covers invoke the transition from an unplanned past, the illustrations of unbuilt buildings and parks (figures 1.1–1.4) contained within the books serve a similar, though slightly different, purpose. These drawings were not entirely concerned with producing real space; if they were they would certainly bear a closer resemblance to the text. Instead, they are visual fantasies that enhance the newness and progressive nature of the Plans. Of course, all plans contain some element of fantasy and it would be naïve to pretend that those on display in the Plans are unique. However, the specific role these illustrations might have is crucial to our understanding of how imagining a space might be as important as creating a realisable, technical blueprint for development. Frank Mort uses John Harley’s concept of ‘subliminal geography’ in  work on the post-war plans for London, in which he argues that the  visual elements of plans were urban fantasy used ‘to denote the ­conscious construction of an imagined urban scene that was in excess of the socially possible or politically acceptable’.139 In the Manchester Plan, drawings of the possible new town hall show much of the city’s Victorian core cleared and replaced with less ornamental buildings (figure 1.1); yet, this vision is only one of the tentative possibilities ­outlined in the text. Similarly, the drawings of Hull’s city centre (figures  1.3 and 1.4) show buildings which are never discussed in any detail by Abercrombie and certainly not described in architectural form.140 I cannot do justice to the complexity of the differing artistic styles on display in the Plans, but in both, and in common with many others from  the period, the brand of Modernism is decidedly gentle and ­moderate. Whilst recognisably Modernist in their clean lines, emphasis on function and lack of ornament, the imagined buildings blend in stylistic twists borrowed from Beaux Arts, Neo-classical, Palladian and other more peculiar vernacular traditions (see figures 1.1 and 1.2). I thus use the term ‘Modernist’ loosely to cover a range of styles and I hope scholars of architecture will forgive my rather catch-all use of the word. The important element – at least for this study – is that the purpose of these visual representations seems to have been to fix a certain image of the city’s future in the popular discourse concerning the plans for the city. There appears to have been no intention to reproduce the specific architectural styles, rather the drawings functioned as a way of enforcing a clean break with the past by producing fantasy visions in a general architectural style that was synonymous with progress in the period. As Gold has noted, modernism was growing in influence during the war, and had come to encapsulate the notion of how both architects

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and urban planners should deal with social issues. Although none of the  Plans were ‘modernist in the strict sense, they contained an edgeways  penetration of modernist ideas about design and society, ­ ­primarily through the sympathies of the personnel appointed to the planning teams, which allowed the plans to be adopted for discussion by modernists’.141 Indeed, wartime posters produced by the Army  Bureau  of Current Affairs to inspire serving soldiers illustrate how  architectural Modernism was becoming synonymous with progress and the shape of the future. The series of illustrations, entitled ‘Your Britain, fight for it’, depict three different architecturally Modernist buildings – the Finsbury Health centre, a school and a block of flats – presented in brilliant white against a background of dark, inter-war slums, an impoverished child and Blitz-damaged buildings.142 Similarly, on the cover of the pamphlet that accompanied Manchester’s planning exhibition (figure 1.9), two children stand amongst the crumbling bricks and beams of the old city, whilst a new Manchester awaits them illuminated by the rising sun. Here is Manchester and Britain’s new dawn illustrated through the clean concrete and perfect geometry of Modernism. The reconstruction Plans are just one of a host of popular images which exploit the association of aesthetic Modernism with ideas of progress and modernity, presenting a future fundamentally different to the past. The actual shape of the buildings illustrated is not important so much as the fixing in the minds of the reader that the future would be a clean break with the past: a transition from the broken, diseased, squalid world that existed before the war, to a cleaner, more beautiful future. Considering the actual similarities of much of the Plans’ material with inter-war schemes, the inclusion of Modernist cityscapes and buildings was then potentially crucial to the reception of the Plans amongst the public. The problem with the architectural illustrations and the text alone is that, in quite different ways, both may have seemed rather wishywashy. On one hand the drawings appeared to be merely artistic flights of imagination, whilst on the other the text could be somewhat vague and imprecise. Both had their roles, but the Plans did not rely solely on the drawings of buildings and parks for their striking visual material, and both are packed with maps, which are crucial in mediating between the  illustrations and text. As Perkins and Dodge point out, the cartographic representations of the city perform quite a different function to the drawings of the cityscapes, and it is these, alongside the tables of technical information like densities or wind speeds that lend a more solid sense of expertise to the Plans.143 Mapping is a fundamental

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1.9  Front cover of the Manchester Planning Exhibition promotional pamphlet. © Manchester Art Gallery.

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feature of the forms of governmentality practised by the modern state; it is a way of seeing the city and enforcing how the powerful think people should move through and experience it. Maps inform what citizens can know, where they can go and how they interpret the layout of cities and the possibilities of urban experience.144 In the Manchester and Hull Plans the maps appear to be relatively sober exercises in technical detail, showing the locations of housing estates and shops as well as demonstrating land uses and areas of green  space. The maps contained in the Manchester Plan were, nevertheless, somewhat lacking in many of the details that would have been necessary to make them realisable proposals.145 The inclusion of maps – some of which (particularly those which zoned industrial, residential and commercial use) were intended to be realised – in both Plans also appears to have been for the purpose of enhancing the impression of technical expertise amongst passages of text that were frequently rather  vague and often quite disjointed. Hull’s i­nformation-heavy illustrations of shopping facilities and road accidents or Manchester’s zoning  proposals for the city (figures 1.10 and 2.1), for example, are colourful, arresting images that portray a professional planning approach that was capable of understanding the city, making it legible and defining its future shape and usage. This interface between technical information and the eye-catching qualities of maps conveyed the idea of a scientifically planned world in an easily understood way. They allowed the reader to imagine a cadre of expert planners in control of the environment and suggested that the future was in safe, knowledgeable hands. The visual material points us towards the conclusion that the Plans, at least in part, served as a material artefact to legitimise the role of planning and local government in shaping the future city. Framed within narratives of civilian sacrifice and a brave new world as reward, the visual material of the Plans invoked an idea of progress through both the types of expertise represented in maps and figures, and representations of Modernist architecture. It is easy to see how the Plans have come to be so frequently held up as unrealistic planners’ dreams, since those who framed the Plans likely included so much attractive visual material because few could be expected to slog through thousands of words in passages of text and tables. Indeed, it was almost certainly their intention that the main way of interpreting the Plans would be through the visual materials, not through digestion of the text. Close examination of the Plans, however, reveals documents rich in tension, packed with utilitarian fantasies of progress alongside more realisable aims.

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1.10  Distribution of shopping facilities and road accidents in Hull from Lutyens and Abercrombie’s Plan for Kingston upon Hull.

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Conclusion The Plans, alongside rhetorics of progress and modernity emerging from planners and councillors alike, were technologies that sought to shape perceptions of the city, communicate notions of expertise and shape the future direction of planning policy, rather than merely offering guidance on physical form.146 In short, they were for communication to a wider public, rather than guidance for bureaucrats, and the imaginary futures they presented were attempts to secure consent for planning in a general sense. The manner in which local governments conceptualised and presented the notion of ‘the modern’ – through the communication of scientific planning expertise and the visual language of modern architecture – reveals a complex relationship between fantasies of progress stemming from discourses of reconstruction and the Blitz, the presentation of the war as a caesura and the development of technocratic approaches to the control and management of urban space either side of the war. The question of what the plans for cities like Manchester and Hull were is perhaps best approached by first saying what they were not. They were not, as popular memory so often contends, maniacal schemes which sought to indiscriminately obliterate the architectural heritage of Victorian cities in the name of modernism. When the text is considered alongside the visual materials, their commitment to architectural Modernism seems more representative than a concrete policy. Neither were they totalising plans that offered a singular, realisable structure for development; in this respect the Plans were too short on technical detail, too full of aesthetic fantasy and displayed a disjointed multivocality. I would argue that this is, in fact, one of their strengths as historical documents. The ideas in them were rarely entirely new – both cities displayed more limited attempts at improvement in both housing and city centre planning before the war – and they were not merely the product of enthusiasm born during the war and the Blitz. Nevertheless, the Plans were unique and nothing quite like them has been produced before or since. The city Plans for Hull and Manchester thus emerge as multi-purpose documents: a mixture of old schemes, pragmatic building projects, infrastructural solutions and abstract, architectural fantasies. They have multiple aims: they are materially unique attempts to exert control over a multi-layered discourse concerning bomb-damaged cities, the power of local government and the role of holistic, technocratic town planning. They are forms of civic boosterism and in some cases they represent plans already in place and underway. They evidence a particular moment

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of British modernity, when planners dared to dream of the future and national policy appeared to support local governments’ beliefs about the value of holistic planning. Although this period lasted only a short time, as chapter 2 will show, the Plans do hint at an optimism concerning how far the powers of the local state might be extended to control the future shape of their cities. The Plans were much more than uniform expressions of particular visions of modernity or Modernism. They were attempts to communicate a vision of progress to the populace and, by deploying images of the future (closeted in terms of architectural Modernism), condition citizens’ perception that holistic long-term, expert-led planning was the way forward. In part, the Plans legitimised the role of the emerging planning profession in government, but it seems to me that they also asserted the right of local government to plan and shape cities in a holistic manner. The deployment of experts painted the desires of the corporations to intervene in the space of the city (discussed in the following chapter) as scientific, politically neutral and essential. The future would be planned by knowledgeable, professional planners and marshalled by local corporations who would deploy that expertise to create a better future. Yet, the Plans also exerted control over other discourses. Whilst Hull  sought to buy into an idea of reconstruction after bombing  – comparing itself constantly to other cities in a similar situation – ­ Manchester, with less damage, sought to present itself as tackling long-standing problems. The role of the war was not merely to bring the need  for planning to the fore: it was to create a framework that facilitated the advancement of local governments’ long-held desires to extend their control over planning and the shape of the city. As the following chapter will argue, the control of land use and building in a  general sense to condition the experience of the city was always the aim of the corporations, rather than the grander aesthetic objectives that the visual material of the Plans seems to suggest. The Plans hint at a form of quietly radical, technocratic urban modernism that chapter 2 argues was the hallmark of post-war corporations like those in Manchester and Hull. The Plans represented a desire to gain control of what might happen in the cities and, as such, the brand of urban modernism that they evidence lay not in the specific aesthetics of the built spaces represented in the Plans but in the desire to assert control over the whole space of the city. Though the images contained within may have been fantasies – as all plans are to some degree – they were profoundly useful in imagining a future that was above all else planned and ordered.

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Notes 1 Town planning historians Peter Larkham and Keith Lilley list over 230 different Plans for post-war British towns and cities – see: Peter J. Larkham and Keith Lilley, Planning the ‘City of Tomorrow’: British Reconstruction Planning, 1939–1952: An Annotated Bibliography (Pickering, 2001). There were interwar planning schemes of some scope and ambition too. See: Charlotte Wildman, Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918–1939 (London, 2016); Manchester and District Joint Town Planning Advisory Committee, Report Upon the Regional Scheme (Manchester, 1926). 2 For the remainder of this book I have chosen to specifically refer to the planning documents as ‘Plans’ (or the Plans) with a capital letter. This is in order to distinguish the lavish documents produced at the end of the war from plans in a more general sense; where I refer to the ‘Manchester Plan’ or ‘Hull Plan’, I mean the specific documents produced. 3 Both Elizabeth Darling, Re-forming Britain: Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction (Abingdon, 2007) and William Whyte, ‘The Englishness of English architecture: modernism and the making of a national international style, 1927–1957’, Journal of British Studies, 48:2 (2009), 441–65 show how a very British type of moderate, gentle Modernism emerged from the midtwentieth century. 4 A City Speaks, film, directed by Paul Rotha (United Kingdom, 1947). The view of the exhibition is on screen from about 44 minutes into the film. 5 Helen Carter Bennicke, ‘Secret plan to demolish Manchester town hall revealed’, BBC News, 5 October 2013 (online source): www.bbc.co.uk/news/ uk-england-manchester-24330693, accessed 15 September 2016. 6 Margaret Justin Blanco White, ‘Manchester [district] planning scheme, by R. Nicholas’, Architects’ Journal, 6 September 1945, 169–72. 7 John Gold, The Experience of Modernism: Modern Architects and the Future City, 1928–1953 (London, 1997), p. 179. 8 Junichi Hasegawa, Replanning the Blitzed City Centre: A Comparative Study of Bristol, Coventry and Southampton (Buckingham, 1992); Junichi Hasegawa, ‘Reconstruction of Portsmouth in the 1940s’, Contemporary British History, 14:1 (2000), 45–62; Philip N. Jones, ‘“…A fairer and nobler city”: Lutyens and Abercrombie’s plan for the city of Hull 1945’, Planning Perspectives, 13:1 (1998), 301–16; Peter J. Larkham, ‘Rebuilding the industrial town: wartime Wolverhampton’, Urban History, 29:3 (2002), 388–409; Peter J. Larkham, ‘The place of urban conservation in the UK reconstruction plans of 1942–1952’, Planning Perspectives, 18:3 (2003), 295–324; Peter J. Larkham and John Pendlebury, ‘Reconstruction planning and the small town in early post-war Britain’, Planning Perspectives, 23:3 (2008), 291–321; Nick Tiratsoo, ‘The reconstruction of blitzed British cities, 1945–55: myths and reality’, Contemporary British History, 14:1 (2000), 27–44. 9 For evidence of this binary debate, see: Matthew Hollow, ‘Utopian urges: visions for reconstruction in Britain, 1940–1950’, Planning Perspectives,

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27:4 (2012), 569–85 (569); David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (London, 2007), p. 21; Peter Mandler, ‘New towns for old: the fate of the town centre’, in Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters (eds), Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–1964 (London, 1999), pp. 208–27; Tiratsoo, ‘Blitzed British cities’; Nick Tiratsoo, Junichi Hasegawa, Tony Mason, and Takao Matsumura, Urban Reconstruction in Britain and Japan 1945–1955: Dreams, Plans and Realities (Luton, 2000), pp. 1–3. For evidence of works in the 1960s that viewed post-war planning as framing two decades of timidity, see: Wilfred Burns, New Towns for Old: The Technique of Urban Renewal (London, 1963), pp. 63–4; Donald L. Foley, Controlling London’s Growth: Planning the Great Wen, 1940–1960 (Berkeley, 1963); Peter Hall, London 2000 (London, 1963). On treatments of planners as autocratic and insensitive to local tradition, see: Alison Ravetz, Remaking Cities (London, 1980) and The Government of Space: Town Planning in Modern Society (London, 1986). 10 Correlli Barnett, The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation (London, 1986). On the accusation that housing was particularly ambitious and utopian in its realisation, see: Alice Coleman, Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing (London, 1985); Anne Power, ‘Highrise estates in Europe: is rescue possible?’, Journal of European Social Policy, 9:2 (1999), 139–63; Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture: The History of a Social Experiment (London, 2001), p. 104–5; Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (New Haven, CT, 1994), pp. 96–7. 11 Helen Meller, ‘Urban renewal and citizenship: the quality of life in British cities, 1890–1990’, Urban History, 22:1 (1995), 63–84 (75). 12 Mandler, ‘New towns for old’, in Conekin, Mort and Waters (eds), Moments of Modernity, p. 210. 13 David Adams, ‘Everyday experiences of the modern city: remembering the post‐war reconstruction of Birmingham’, Planning Perspectives, 26:2 (2011), 237–60 (238). 14 On planning theory, see: Ernest Alexander and Andreas Faludi, ‘Planning and plan implementation: notes on evaluation criteria’, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 16:2 (1989), 127–40; Hugh Calkins, ‘The planning monitor: an accountability theory of plan evaluation’, Environment and Planning A, 11:7 (1979), 745–58; Emily Talen, ‘Do plans get implemented? A review of evaluation in planning’, Journal of Planning Literature, 10:3 (1996), 248–59. In historical perspective: Stephen Essex and Mark Brayshay, ‘Vision, vested interest and pragmatism: who re-made Britain’s blitzed cities?’, Planning Perspectives, 22:4 (2007), 417–41 uses actor network theory to examine postwar Plymouth; Peter J. Larkham, ‘People, planning and place: the roles of client and consultants in reconstructing postwar Bilston and Dudley’, Town Planning Review, 77:5 (2006), 557–82. 15 Frank Mort, ‘Fantasies of metropolitan life: planning London in the 1940s’, Journal of British Studies, 43:1 (2004), 120–51 (123).

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16 Hollow, ‘Utopian urges’; Mort, ‘Fantasies’; Chris Perkins and Martin Dodge, ‘Mapping the imagined future: the roles of visual representation in the 1945 City of Manchester Plan’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 89:1 (2012), 247–76. 17 Chapter 2 picks up on more of the specifics of how local government views of the modern city were translated into policies and legislation. 18 Nicholas Bullock, Building the Post-war World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain (London, 2002); Gold, Experience of Modernism; Simon Gunn, ‘The rise and fall of British urban modernism: planning Bradford, circa 1945–1970’, Journal of British Studies, 49:4 (2010), 849–69. 19 Alan Lewis, ‘Planning through conflict: the genesis of Sheffield’s post-war reconstruction plan’, Planning Perspectives, 24:3 (2009), 381–83. See also: Alan Lewis, ‘A history of Sheffield’s central area planning schemes, 1936–1952’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, 2006); Emmanuel Marmaras and Anthony Sutcliffe, ‘Planning for post-war London: the three independent plans, 1942–3’, Planning Perspectives, 9:4 (1994), 431–53; John Pendlebury, ‘Reconciling history with modernity: 1940s plans for Durham and Warwick’, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 31 (2003), 331–48. 20 Mandler, ‘New towns for old’, in Conekin, Mort and Waters (eds), Moments of Modernity, p. 210. 21 Larkham and Lilley, ‘City of Tomorrow’, p. 1. 22 See: Becky Conekin, ‘“Here is the modern world itself”: the festival of Britain’s representations of the future’, in Conekin, Mort and Waters (eds), Moments of Modernity, pp. 228–46; Hollow, ‘Utopian urges’; Mort, ‘Fantasies’. 23 Gold, Experience of Modernism, pp. 16–18; Gunn, ‘British urban modernism’, 850–1. 24 Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1996); Stephen Ward, Planning and Urban Change (London, 2004). 25 Max Lock, Civic Diagnosis: A Blitzed City Analysed [an outline summary of research undertaken by the Hull Regional Survey] (Hull, 1943), unpaginated, but second page. Reprinted from World Review, July 1943. 26 Gordon Cherry, Cities and Plans: The Shaping of Urban Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London, 1988), p. 113. 27 Peter J. Larkham, ‘Selling the future city: images in UK post-war reconstruction plans’, in Iain Boyd Whyte (ed.), Man-made Future: Planning, Education and Design in Mid-twentieth-century Britain (London, 2007), pp. 99–120 (p. 99). 28 Phil Hubbard, Lucy Faire and Keith Lilley, ‘Contesting the modern city: reconstruction and everyday life in post-war Coventry’, Planning Perspectives, 18:4 (2003), 377–97 (378). Nicholas Bullock and John Gold have also provided comprehensive views on the trajectory of British forms of modernism in town planning in this period. See: Bullock, Post-war World; Gold, Experience of Modernism; John Gold, ‘The MARS plan for London, 1933–1942: plurality and experimentation in the city plans of the early British modern movement’, Town Planning Review, 66:3 (1995), 243–67.

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29 See, for example: Peter J. Larkham and Keith Lilley, ‘Plans, planners and city images: place promotion and civic boosterism in British reconstruction planning’, Urban History, 30:2 (2003), 183–205. 30 See, for instance: Stephen Essex and Mark Brayshay, ‘Boldness diminished? The post-war battle to replan a bomb damaged city’, Urban History, 35:3 (2008), 437–61. 31 For comparison, see National Archives, Kew (NA)/Housing and Local Government Files (HLG)/79/257, Hull Development Plan, 1951, undated. 32 Essex and Brayshay, ‘Boldness diminished?’, 440. 33 ‘Lord Reith’s visit to Manchester’, Manchester Guardian (MG), 29 August 1941, p. 6; Rowland Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan (Norwich, 1945), p. iii. 34 John Gold has explored at some length the manner in which ‘reconstruction’ and ‘renewal’ were used. Peter Larkham’s assertion that ‘reconstruction’ was the most commonly used term in 1945 is reflected in both Manchester and Hull Plans. John R. Gold, ‘A SPUR to action?: the Society for the Promotion of Urban Renewal, “anti-scatter” and the crisis of city reconstruction, 1957– 1963’, Planning Perspectives, 27:2 (2012), 199–233 (202), quoting correspondence from Larkham. 35 Cities including Hull, Liverpool, Glasgow, Plymouth and Birmingham all suffered more large raids, more severe damage and greater loss of buildings than Manchester. See: Brad Beaven and David Thoms, ‘The blitz and civilian morale in three northern cities’, Northern History, 32:1 (1996), 195–203; Kenneth Hewitt, ‘“When the great planes came and made ashes of our city …”: towards an oral geography of the disasters of war’, Antipode, 26:1 (1994), 1–34 (4); John Ray, The Night Blitz: 1940–1941 (London, 1996), p. 264. 36 Essex and Brayshay, ‘Vision’, 420. 37 For examples of language in the Plans that equated good planning with healthier populations, see: Edwin Lutyens and Patrick Abercrombie, A Plan for the City and County of Kingston upon Hull (Hull, 1945), p. 1; Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, pp. iii–iv. 38 Hasegawa, Replanning; Hasegawa, ‘Reconstruction’. 39 Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, p. v. 40 Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, Plate XXIV. Sir Patrick Abercrombie was one of the most influential and dominant figures in British planning in the mid-twentieth century. He was Professor of Civic Design at the University of Liverpool and later held a chair in town planning at University College London. He is perhaps best remembered for his plans for London – The County of London Plan (1943) and the Greater London Plan (1944) – alongside plans for Bath, Plymouth and Hull. 41 Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, p. 41. 42 Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, p. 1. 43 Mass Observation/File Report 538, Report on Manchester and Liverpool, 6 January 1941. 44 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. 1. Nicholas, formerly the city engineer of Sheffield, would be Manchester’s surveyor and engineer from 1940 until 1963.

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45 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. 1. 46 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. 1. 47 See chapters 3 and 4. 48 Hull History Centre (HHC)/CTAH 2/Box 2020/File 24, The Anlaby Road reconstruction scheme 1945. 49 City Council of Kingston upon Hull, Planning in Action: An Account of the Aims and Achievements in Kingston upon Hull (Hull, c.1958). For evidence of criticism, see: ‘Hope for Hull’, Hull Daily Mail, 19 December 1950, p. 1. 50 Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, Plates V, VI & VII. 51 Larkham and Lilley, ‘Plans, planners’. 52 Hull, Planning in Action. 53 NA/HLG/88/8 and NA/HLG/79/132 contain a great deal of evidence of this organisation and its role in redevelopment planning. See also: Hasegawa, ‘Reconstruction’, 46; Hasegawa, Replanning; Nick Tiratsoo, Reconstruction, Affluence and Labour Politics: Coventry, 1945–1960 (London, 1990). 54 Tiratsoo, Reconstruction, Affluence; Hasegawa, Replanning. 55 Crispin Gill, Plymouth: A New History (Tiverton, 1993), pp. 259–62. For Hull, see: Hewitt, ‘Disasters of war’, 4. 56 Hansard, HL Deb. (series 5), vol. 129, no. 91, col. 89 (22 September 1943). 57 Mark Clapson and Peter J. Larkham, ‘The Blitz, its experience and its consequences’, in Mark Clapson and Peter J. Larkham (eds), The Blitz and its Legacy: Wartime Destruction to Post-war Reconstruction (Farnham, 2013), pp. 1–16 (p. 5); Mark Goodwin, ‘The scaling of “urban” policy: neighbourhood city or region?’ in Craig Johnstone and Mark Whitehead (eds), New Horizons in British Urban Policy: Perspectives on New Labour’s Urban Renaissance (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 13–184 (p. 177). 58 On the post-war period, see: Nick Hayes, Consensus and Controversy: City Politics in Nottingham 1945–66 (Liverpool, 1996); Ken Young and Nirmala Rao, Local Government since 1945 (Oxford, 1997). On the inter-war period, see: John Sheldrake, Municipal Socialism (Avebury, 1989). 59 Wildman, Urban Redevelopment. 60 John Stevenson, British Society 1914–45 (London, 1984), p. 312; Michael Tichelar, ‘Central local tensions: the case of the Labour Party, regional government and land-use reform during the Second World War’, Labour History Review, 66:2 (2001), 187–206. See also: John Sullivan, ‘Local government in decline?’, Fabian Quarterly, 28 (1940), 12–29. 61 Barry Cullingworth and Vincent Nadin (eds), Town and Country Planning in the UK (London, 2002); Gordon Cherry, The Evolution of British Town Planning: A History of Town Planning in the United Kingdom During the 20th Century and of the Royal Town Planning Institute, 1914–74 (Leighton Buzzard, 1974); Hollow, ‘Utopian urges’, 572. Hollow and Cherry have both commented on the way that the town planning profession began to stress the possible advantages of the destruction of cities from the start of the Blitz. 62 Paul Addison, The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (London, 1975); John Stevenson, ‘Planners’ moon? The Second World

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War and the planning movement’, in Harold L. Smith (ed.), War and Social Change: British Society since the Second World War (Manchester, 1986), pp. 58–77. 63 On the exertion of power and prestige through constructions of expertise and the figure of ‘the expert’, particularly with regard to the control and shaping of space, see: Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge, 1991); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (London, 1984); Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (London, 1973). 64 Larkham and Lilley, ‘Plans, planners’. 65 Larkham and Lilley, ‘City of Tomorrow’, p. 1. 66 Historians like David Gilbert and Charlotte Wildman have discussed the interwar period, but there is no comprehensive discussion of the extent of local inter-war planning in comparison to post-war planning and the post-war Plans. See: David Gilbert, ‘London of the future: the metropolis reimagined after the Great War’, Journal of British Studies, 43:1 (2004), 91–119; Wildman, Urban Redevelopment. 67 Leif Jerram, Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe’s Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2011), p. 367. 68 Robert Vansittart, Black Record: Germans Past and Present (London, 1941); Donald Watt, Britain Looks to Germany: British Opinion and Policy towards Germany since 1945 (London, 1965). 69 ‘Future Manchester: a dozen civic centres’, MG, 28 March 1942, p. 7. Worthington may also have been putting forward his own claim to be involved as a professional architect. 70 Winston Churchill, ‘Speech to the House of Commons’, HC Deb. (series 5), vol. 362, cols 51–64 (18 June 1940). 71 ‘Building the new Manchester: an unexampled opportunity to tidy up the city’, MG, 30 January 1941, p. 6. 72 John Pendlebury, ‘Planning the historic city: reconstruction plans in the United Kingdom in the 1940s’, Town Planning Review, 74:4 (2003), 371–93 (372). 73 Derick Deakin, Wythenshawe: The Story of a Garden City (Chichester, 1989), pp. 40–60. Chapter 3 of this book argues that, despite being presented as a clean break with the past, the post-war developments of Wythenshawe represented only a slight amendment to the original designs. 74 Alfred P. Simon, Manchester Made Over (London, 1936); Ernest D. Simon and John Inman, The Rebuilding of Manchester (Manchester, 1935). See also chapters 3 and 4 of this book. 75 NA/HLG/79/424, Letter from Town Clerk R.H. Adcock to Lord Reith, 27 February 1941; Robert Henry Mattocks, ‘Report of the Manchester and District Joint Town Planning Advisory Committee’, Town Planning Review,  12:3 (1927), 226–8. 76 Wesley Dougill, ‘Urban improvement schemes: ii. Ferensway, Hull’, Town Planning Review, 16:2 (1934), 123–5.

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77 David Neave and Susan Neave, Hull (London, 2012), p. 24. 78 Ward, Planning, p. 57 argues that only Hull’s Ferensway and Headrow in Leeds were central schemes of significant size, but this is debateable as no real sense of what constitutes ‘significant size’ is given, whilst Charlotte Wildman has shown significant investment and ambition in Liverpool and Manchester, see: Wildman, Urban Redevelopment. 79 NA/HLG/79/256, Civic surveys and research reports, February 1942, p. 2. 80 NA/HLG/79/256, Civic surveys and research reports, February 1942, p. 3. 81 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. 13. 82 ‘Building anew’, Manchester Evening News (MEN), 12 October 1938. 83 ‘Building anew’, MEN. 84 A drawing of the proposed façade on Ferensway can be found in Dougill, ‘Urban improvement schemes’, 124. 85 Gunn, ‘British urban modernism’; Leif Jerram, Germany’s Other Modernity: Munich and the Making of Metropolis, 1895–1930 (Manchester, 2007). 86 ‘Housing delays’, The Times, 21 October 1943, p. 5. 87 The Times, 21 October 1943, p. 5. 88 Sheldrake, Municipal Socialism, pp. 1–6, 26 & 70–1. 89 Gold, Experience of Modernism, pp. 179–80; Junichi Hasegawa, ‘The rise and fall of radical reconstruction in 1940s Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 10:2 (1999), 137–61 (141). 90 The RMI was a learned institution formed in the early 1823, and was a patron of the arts in Manchester. They formed the Reconstruction Committee in 1943 with the aims of encouraging civic pride and social responsibility; promoting appreciation of high standards in civic and domestic design; and  preserving buildings and monuments of historic worth and beauty. Greater-ManchesterCounty-Record-Office (GMCRO)/GB127/M6/1/15 1943–45, Royal Manchester Institution, Reconstruction Committee minutes, 5 July 1943; R.F. Bud, ‘The Royal Manchester Institution’, in Donald S.L. Cardwell (ed.),  Artisan to Graduate: Essays to Commemorate the Foundation in 1824 of the Manchester Mechanics’ Institution (Manchester, 1974), pp. 119–33; S.D. Cleveland, The Royal Manchester Institution (Manchester, 1931).  91 GMCRO/GB127/M6/1/15, Minutes, 5 July 1943. 92 GMCRO/GB127/M6/1/15, Minutes, 9 August 1943. 93 GMCRO/GB127/M6/1/15, Minutes, 29 April 1944. 94 GMCRO/GB127/M6/1/15, Letter to G. Noel Hill, 12 February 1945. 95 ‘Building the new Manchester: an unexampled opportunity to tidy up the city’, MG, 30 January 1941, p. 6. 96 Most frequent amongst the comments are calls for a regional planning solution for Manchester and the surrounding district (see: ‘Cooperation in planning’, The Times, 15 December 1943, p. 2; ‘Remaking of Manchester: importance of regional scheme’, MG, 14 July 1943, p. 6) and the urgency of the need for housing (see: ‘The new Manchester: city council and housing with social amenities’, MG, 6 January 1944, p. 2). 97 Lock, Civic Diagnosis, inside cover.

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98 Vincent would later be asked to head up a small team of research staff for the Ministry of Works and Planning, which was instrumental in the development of town planning in the post-war period through its recommendations. See: F.J. McCulloch, ‘Research and planning’, Town Planning Review, 23:1 (1952), 26–39. 99 NA/HLG/79/424, Correspondence between Pepler and Vincent, 4 and 9 April 1941. 100 Jones, ‘“Fairer and nobler city”’. 101 Larkham, ‘Urban conservation’. 102 Conekin, ‘Britain’s representations’, in Conekin, Mort and Waters (eds), Moments of Modernity, pp. 228–46 ; Hollow, ‘Utopian urges’; Mort, ‘Fantasies’. On the inter-war period, see also: Gilbert, ‘London of the future’, 91–119. 103 Perkins and Dodge, ‘Mapping’, 256. 104 Mort, ‘Fantasies’, 129–30, quoting from ‘This time’, Architectural Review, 90 (1941), 31. 105 See: de Certeau, Everyday Life, pp. 120–1; Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003), pp. 20–61; Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-century London (London, 2000), pp. 14–80 on mapping practices. 106 Ted Kitchen, ‘The future of development plans: reflections on Manchester’s experiences 1945–1995’, Town Planning Review, 67:3 (1996), 331–53 (340). 107 Ed Glinert, The Manchester Compendium: A Street-by-Street Guide to England’s Greatest Industrial City (London, 2008), pp. 3–4. 108 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, Plates 78 & 81. 109 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. 198. 110 Manchester City Council, Manchester: 50 Years of Change: Post-war Planning in Manchester (London, 1995), p. 16. 111 Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, p. v. 112 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. iii. 113 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. iii. 114 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. v. 115 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. vi. 116 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. v. 117 Talen, ‘Do plans get implemented?’, 248–9. 118 Barry Cullingworth, Environmental Planning, 1939–1969. Vol. 1, Recon­ struction and Land Use Planning, 1939–1947 (London, 1975), pp. 93–7; Larkham, ‘Urban conservation’, 298. 119 NA/HLG/79/256, Minutes of a meeting between Hull Corporation and the Ministry of Works and Planning, 3 November 1942; HHC/L.711/A, Hull Corporation, Post-war Replanning and Reconstruction: Report of Deputation who interviewed Lord Portal and Sir William Jowitt in London, 5 June 1942; Jones, ‘“Fairer and nobler city”’, 301–16. I have not found an indication of Abercrombie’s fee for the project; however, Larkham and Lilley in ‘Plans, planners’ (191) identify Abercrombie, alongside Thomas Sharp, as the most expensive planner of his day. Edwin Lutyens had famously been instrumental

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in the design and building of New Delhi with Herbert Baker. He was one of the principal architects on the Imperial War Graves commission, under which he produced the Cenotaph in Whitehall and the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. 120 NA/HLG/79/261, Letters between Mr Gatliff and Mr Mattocks (MoT&CP), 23 November – 15 December 1944. 121 NA/HLG/79/261, Meeting between Hull Corporation and the MoT&CP, 18 January 1945. 122 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. iii. 123 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. iii. 124 Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, p. v. 125 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, pp. vi–xii. 126 Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, pp. vii–viii; see comparison with Lock, Civic Diagnosis. 127 NA/HLG/79/261, Letter from Robert Mattocks (MoT&CP) to War Damage and Reconstruction Areas Officer, 27 November 1944, and various correspondence, 23 November – 15 December 1944. See the following chapter and  also: NA/HLG/79/262 concerning the rail over road scheme, September 1944 – August 1946. 128 NA/HLG/79/259, Advisory Panel of the redevelopment of City Centres, 25 May 1943. 129 Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, p. 46. 130 Larkham and Lilley, ‘Plans, planners’. 131 Steven Fielding, Peter Thompson and Nick Tiratsoo, ‘England Arise!’: The Labour Party and Popular Politics in 1940s Britain (Manchester, 1995), pp. 36–7. 132 Perkins and Dodge, ‘Mapping’, 269. 133 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. 205. 134 Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, p. 41. 135 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. 195. 136 Perkins and Dodge, ‘Mapping’, 268. 137 University of Manchester Library (Special Collections), EPL49, A plan of Manchester & Salford c.1650, drawn from a plan in the possession of William Yates Esqr. by John Palmer 1822. 138 Original: Thomas Fischer Rare Book Library, Toronto, ‘Hull’, c.1642, Plate 984. 139 Mort, ‘Fantasies’, 124. 140 See also the drawing for the new shopping centre: Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, Plate XXII. 141 Gold, Experience of Modernism, p. 17. 142 Imperial War Museum (London) IWM/PST/2909, 29010 & 2911, produced 1943. 143 Perkins and Dodge, ‘Mapping’. 144 See, for example: Nead, Victorian Babylon, p. 7; James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (London, 2000), pp. 53–82; Janet Vertesi, ‘Mind the gap: the London

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Underground map and users’ representations of urban space’, Social Studies of Science, 38:1 (2008), 7–33. 145 Perkins and Dodge, ‘Mapping’. 146 Here I am building on the good work of a number of authors: Conekin, ‘Britain’s representations’, in Conekin, Mort and Waters (eds), Moments of Modernity, pp. 228–46; Hollow, ‘Utopian urges’; Mort, ‘Fantasies’; Perkins and Dodge, ‘Mapping’.

2 The functioning metropolis

This chapter examines the strategies employed by the local corporations of Manchester and Hull to govern the space of their cities in the post-war period, by scrutinising the policies and projects that sought to control the urban environment. The techniques of spatial governance local governments deployed ranged from zoning large areas to prohibiting certain types of business, display or activity, and included the regulation of land, buildings and even the air. As chapter 1 suggested, the Plans evidenced, amongst other things, corporations asserting their suitability, expertise and right to plan the shape of the future city. In this chapter I explore the ways that corporations attempted to exert and expand this control in shaping both new and extant spaces. The picture that emerges is one of local corporations enacting long-held ambitions to mould the experience of their cities in a holistic sense through the application and expansion of planning and regulatory powers. Their aim was the assertion of a long-term, rational approach to the physical development of their cities. They plotted a radical set of interventions in both newly created and extant environments, seeking to map their own notions of urban modernity onto the totality of their cities’ space. The ways these attempts were challenged by central government, commercial interests and inhabitants reveals a contested picture of British modernity, demonstrating why even the more realistic elements of the Plans were often hard to implement. In doing so, it also shows how the project of urban modernism faced significant, fundamental challenges to its ordering schemes almost as soon as it began, whilst also experiencing considerable, though largely overlooked, success in mundane areas. A great deal of the literature on post-war urban Britain has illustrated the way that plans for cities were contested by a plurality of interests amongst the agencies of the state and commercial interests, at both local and national level.1 These accounts have painted the local state as pragmatic, humanist and moderate, and, with some caveats for badly bombed cities and particular elements of the Plans, have located

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­ ost-war radicalism squarely in the visions of the planning profession.2 p This view of post-war planning is problematic because, as I argued in chapter 1, the Plans display a multi-layered set of objectives and need to be interpreted carefully to understand what exactly it was that the differing influences on them sought to achieve. Moreover, too many accounts look for evidence of radical modernism in the extravagant built forms that are more characteristic of the 1960s or 1970s, instead of unpacking the much less flashy, but no less important, attempts to control and manipulate space dealt with here. In addition, accounts which assess the extent to which the Plans were implemented have largely excluded analysis of local corporations’ spatial strategies that dealt with extant spaces, although some attention has been paid to ‘built heritage’ and emblematic older buildings.3 This is an issue because for most cities, especially those coping with relatively light bomb damage, dealing with existing spaces comprised the majority of their business. Indeed, regulating advertising or dirty air may seem dull and attract less attention than an innovative housing estate or a daringly Modernist piece of architecture; however, it was through these schemes that local corporations attempted to perfect the totality of urban experience – and thus urban existence – in more comprehensive and lasting ways than even the most innovative or successful of the city reconstruction schemes. Moreover, how advertising was regulated on a suburban street corner or how noise from a fun fair might be limited involved important assumptions about psychology, aesthetic value, class and daily life that demonstrate the technocratic, spatially determinist character of the urban modernism being practised by local corporations. This chapter addresses this gap by following Simon Gunn’s work on Bradford, which has argued that, in relation to town planning: What was practiced [in Bradford], as in so many other British cities, was a banal urban modernism, based on functionalism rather than the iconic, a modernism of office blocks, urban motorways, and car parks, not of landmark buildings.4

Gunn argues for a kind of triad of guiding principles evident in post-war town planning that were ‘recognizably modernist in inspiration’.5 These were: the dividing of the city into functional zones; the conception of planning as an objective and rational tool; and ‘the belief in the modern as the guarantor of efficiency, progress, and human satisfaction’.6 This chapter agrees in large part with Gunn’s assessment – although his focus on industry is not reproduced here – but expands his attempt to rehabilitate local state radicalism in the historiography through examination of the character of corporations’ spatial practices and what they sought

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to accomplish. In anticipation of the discussion in chapters 3 and 4, it argues that local corporations attempted to enact schemes to manage the experience of space to produce a homogenous and beneficial experience of the city at street level. In this area they were remarkably successful, motivating a brand of governmentality premised on direct, experimental interventions from the local state reflective of the forms of placemaking, self-reflexive modernity I discussed in the introduction to this book.7 Central to local corporations’ ambitions was the increasing conviction that the experience of the physical environment – frequently expressed in the notion of ‘amenity’ – played a crucial and, importantly, controllable role in the production of desirable social forms, homogenous patterns of behaviour, healthier bodies and happier citizens. Yet central government and commercial interests’ views of how space worked and, consequently, how it should be redesigned were often at odds with those of local corporations. Understanding these relationships and issues therefore involves unpacking the overlapping, enmeshed interactions between groups that influenced the shaping of urban space.8 What the following examination of the contestation of planning policies highlights is the importance of the role of local government as the delivery vehicle for national programmes of social reform. The contestation of local corporation schemes for the redevelopment of cities was not just the product of pragmatism and post-war austerity, though these were important elements in the story.9 Challenges to local plans were also based on conflicting understandings of the role certain spaces played in shaping behaviours, particularly in relation to the functioning of the economy. The chapter tackles these issues through three sections. First, I examine the attempts by Hull and Manchester’s corporations to control land use through compulsory purchase and zoning, examining the clashes this caused with the various national ministries. This section thus builds upon the work in chapter 1 by examining which elements of the Plans local corporations genuinely attempted to realise. The second section looks at plans to reconstruct the shopping streets of central Hull as a case study of how powerful local voices sought to contest the Plans. The interaction between the national and local governments and local commercial interests is used to demonstrate the spatial nature of acts of contestation. Discourses of expertise and of how space functioned in producing and sustaining the social relations necessary for the functioning of the economy were deployed by local interests, particularly the Hull and District Chamber of Trade (H&DCT) as part of a campaign which successfully enforced their own agenda. The third section, focusing largely on Manchester, examines the notion of ‘amenity’

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and d ­ emonstrates the ways strategies of urban governance sought to control what the individual citizen might encounter. It shows the local corporation expanding and enacting legislative powers to impose their own views of what the city was for. Using disputes over fairgrounds, advertising, bomb sites and the creation of smokeless zones as case studies, the section shows how corporations tested the limits of new planning legislation, running into opposition from central government and corporate capitalists, but achieving a remarkable and lasting degree of success.

Zoning, land and long-term plans Land use and zoning are two of the key, interrelated elements that form the ‘realisable’ aspects of the Plans for Manchester and Hull. Zoning had been prominent in Manchester’s 1926 plan, as it was in many plans from the inter-war period, and would continue to be in plans produced in the 1950s and 1960s.10 Both Plans contained detailed zoning maps and dealt at length with the notion of how different areas of the city should be allocated for housing, industry, parks, commercial buildings or retail (see figure 2.1). Zoning, though a common practice of urban governance, represents the underlying assumptions concerning order and function that characterise urban modernism. Indeed, without a successfully zoned city the more ambitious elements of order and regulation are far more difficult to achieve. As I began to explore in chapter 1, despite the variety of architectural Modernism illustrated in the Plans, neither corporation showed the kind of enthusiasm for architecture that they expressed for zoning, remaining ‘wary of the planners’ visions’ when it came to specific buildings.11 Instead, the Hull and Manchester corporations’ attempts to extend their powers manifested in attempts to control the more general standards of building height, street width, traffic flows and air quality, and zoning was the starting point for such far-reaching endeavours. In this sense it formed part of an urban modernist approach that emphasised control over form and represented a long-term desire to possess unilaterally the tools to reproduce, with the greatest efficiency, the social relations that facilitated the functioning of society, economy and culture. Assessments of opposition to post-war local corporation schemes have shown how attempts to realise the Plans were frustrated by a combination of interventionist bureaucracy, the legacy of wartime austerity, increased centralisation, Treasury financial controls, the influence of landowners and persistent early post-war shortages of building materials.12 There is, in the extensive analyses already committed to print, very

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2.1  Zoning proposals for Manchester city centre from Rowland Nicholas’ City of Manchester Plan.

little s­ubstantive argument with which to disagree. However, I suggest that the clashes studied here between national and local governments over the acquisition of land were also due to a fundamental divergence in opinion over the acceptance of urban modernism’s approaches to the city.

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In the disputes between the various parties we see a contest over what the city was for, particularly its role in the national economy, and how control of space might enhance its functionality in performing this role. Central government did not wholly favour radical reconstruction because their priorities stressed maintaining, or restoring, the inter-war status quo, which meant reinstating the city as a functioning unit in the hard-pressed post-war economy. Local corporations had much wider long-term aims, which stemmed from a belief that they must possess a degree of control over what might happen where for the foreseeable future, without committing to specific plans concerning built form or layout. The idea of zoning was not new in the 1940s, of course. The Housing, Town Planning, &c Act 1909 had mandated that towns and cities with over 20,000 people produce development plans, which included powers to define zones where only certain types of building use would be permitted.13 Indeed, as geographers Simon Rycroft and Dennis Cosgrove argue, zoning came to embody the principles of the inter-war planning profession as a whole and features in most of development plans produced before the war.14 Yet, in practice the plans produced in accordance with the 1909 Act were rarely approved and its successor acts in 1932 and 1944 backed away from the idea of compulsory zoning in favour of discretionary powers.15 The 1944 Town and Country Planning Act (T&CPA) did, however, give local authorities power to apply to the Ministry of Town and Country Planning (MoT&CP) to designate Areas of Extensive War Damage and issue Declaratory Orders. This Act gave local government ‘enhanced powers of compulsory purchase and promised considerable financial backing from the centre’.16 The local authority could, in theory, compulsorily purchase all the land in a declaratory area and develop the land as they saw fit, either by offering it to private developers or with funds from their own coffers. Historian Michael Tichelar has argued that the extensions of compulsory purchase powers were a compromise on Labour’s proposal to nationalise ownership of land that was designed to satisfy local corporations’ desires to replan their cities.17 However, for the authors of the Plans produced in 1945 it appears the 1944 Act did not go far enough. Rowland Nicholas, the author of the Manchester Plan, wrote, for example: If planning is to succeed in turning Manchester into a well-arranged city, not only must the general character of the future development be defined by a zoning scheme, but each section of the city must be controlled by a development plan … Thus, in addition to the power to prevent any use of land or buildings that conflicts with the zoning scheme, power must also be available to prevent any use of a particular site which … would be ­inconsistent with the detailed development plan.18

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Nicholas’ statement went beyond merely the economic and infrastructural expediency of separating uses for land, implying a more total plan of which the zoning was a component part. Nicholas added that zoning areas by usage ‘produces a city that is, district by district, more uniform aesthetically and more “orderly” functionally’.19 The Plans were thus not only expanding the understanding of zoning to a more all-­encompassing prescription for the aesthetic environment but also implying a relationship between aesthetic order, uniformity of experience and functionality that was deeply modern. In this sense, zoning was, of course, an extension of the panoptical perspective of the cartographer, discussed in the preceding chapter of this book; but it also looked to manage spatial encounters at ground level. As a practice of governance, zoning represented an attempt to reproduce the all-consuming gaze of the state at the level of the street by making material homogenous land uses and experiences in clearly delineated areas, both new and extant. Zoning thus functioned as a tool in a holistic approach to how the city should work by melding more traditional notions of function with a less tangible belief in the positive psychological influence of managing the visual and more general sensory environment that I examine later in this chapter. This meant a system concerned with melding practical concerns about how, say, industry might be separated from housing to increase efficiency or improve public health, with the wider experiential and social benefits that might accrue from the cleaner air, fewer foul smells or enhanced amounts of daylight.20 Abercrombie issued a similar warning in the Hull Plan to that of Nicholas, arguing that neither the 1932 nor 1944 acts were adequate to ensure the orderly development of Hull, adding that new legal powers would be needed to realise the future Hull imagined in the Plan.21 These powers had to go far beyond merely defining what type of activity might transpire in a given space, extending to how the fabric of the city might be shaped. Local corporations had, following the frustrations of the inter-war period, been agitating for a radical extension of their powers to facilitate their visions of the functional city throughout the war. Yet, as I argued in chapter 1, the zoning proposals contained in the Plans cannot be interpreted in isolation: they have to be considered against the extent to which the local corporations sought to make them ‘real’. Cities like Manchester and Hull had long and painful memories concerning the amount of time and effort that had been wasted acquiring parcels of land for redevelopment in the inter-war period; projects like the redevelopment of Ferensway and the plans to widen Cannon Street being pertinent examples.22 The 1932 T&CPA left corporations

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open to unaffordable compensation claims and in the opinion of Hugh Dalton, then Minister of Local Government and Planning, the ability to acquire land ‘depended too much upon adroit administration of inadequate powers’.23 It is unsurprising then that the greater freedoms contained in the 1944 T&CPA, and seemingly favourable public and governmental opinion, were seized upon by local corporations. In 1945 an internal memo to the MoT&CP noted that Manchester Corporation were seeking to promote a private bill to extend their powers to control land usage, since the 1944 Act left too much power in the hands of the Ministry as to how the land might be used after purchase. This agitation for greater control of urban space was not limited to Manchester Corporation either. The memo also records that the Association of Municipal Corporations (an umbrella organisation of which Hull Corporation was a member) was also unconvinced that the powers contained in the 1944 Act would enable its member corporations ‘to rebuild properly’.24 Whilst Manchester’s private bill did not come to pass, Manchester Corporation tested the limits of the 1944 Act by applying a rather loose definition of what might be regarded ‘areas of extensive war damage’. If accepted centrally, their strategy of classifying large areas as ‘war damaged’ would have allowed the Corporation to permanently acquire and control large areas of urban land, radicalising their power to develop the city by making it financially viable to acquire the land. Indeed, Manchester Corporation were all too aware that the success of any zoning plans for the central area was contingent on the expense of acquiring land. Nicholas pointed out in the Plan that: ‘it would be foolish to attempt a rigid separation [of the city centre] whose enforcement would entail high compensation payments’.25 On 21 December 1945 a meeting between planning representatives from Manchester and the MoT&CP’s regional staff raised the concern that Manchester’s desire to classify the whole of the city centre as an area of extensive war damage was not conducive to the resumption of business in good time, would cause too much disruption over a long-term period and was impractical.26 The MoT&CP’s stricter definitions of ‘war damaged’ deflated the ambitions of the Corporation in a number of meetings and by 30 June 1947 they were forced to present revised proposals that reduced the area identified as bomb damaged from 400 to 200 acres of the central city, eventually acquiring a total of 22 acres by 1950.27 Similarly, by 1947 Hull Corporation’s request for 3,000 acres to be included in their application for a Declaratory Order was also rejected, based on opposition from the MoT&CP, the Board of Trade and local interests. Even when Hull Corporation requested a greatly reduced

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228 acres in February 1949 there were still a massive number of objections from local business, which lead to a reduction to 212 acres, and by 1951 only 276 acres had been acquired in total.28 Regardless of the failure of their ambitions, Hull Corporation were explicit in their aims, which evidence their ambition to wrest control of the future land use of their city, ‘to make the whole of the central area “the property of the people” so that the value of any improvements “instead of going into the private pockets of the owners … [would] come into the pockets of the ratepayers”’.29 It is hard not to detect the scent of the social democratic fervour of the post-war period in these sentiments. The Hull and District Property Owners’ Protection Association certainly did, raising the objection that: ‘if these Orders are granted the Corporation will have the power to acquire all existing freehold interests in these areas and impose their own terms on the present owners and occupiers on a leasehold basis’.30 Despite the efforts of local corporations, central government remained unconvinced of the wisdom of acquiring large areas of city centres. In the 1951 report on progress in town planning Hugh Dalton criticised the breadth of the declaratory orders issued by local corporations on the 1944 T&CPA.31 Dalton pointed out that many declaratory orders had been modified because what corporations considered ‘contiguous and adjacent’ damaged areas often included, undamaged buildings. Manchester’s planners argued that elements of the Plan, such as the widening of streets and improving the flow of traffic, could not be realised without the acquisition of whole areas and a contiguous, holistic approach to planning, regardless of the age or condition of the buildings.32 In contrast, where buildings were reasonably new or of historic value the representatives of central government and local owners understandably baulked at the prospect of ceding total control of them to the corporations. In July 1948, for example, the acquisition of ‘Area of Extensive War Damage No.4 (Market Place Area)’ in Manchester had to be entirely reprogrammed due to the Wellington Inn, a sixteenthcentury public house in the area, being granted ‘Ancient Monument’ status.33 What is also clear from Dalton’s report is that the amount of time corporations wanted between declaring land, acquiring it and actually building on it was at odds with central government ideas. The 1947 T&CPA modified its provisions so that declaratory orders could only be enacted where a firm, short-term plan was in place for comprehensive development. Here then we can see the tension between how central and local governments conceived of the project of acquiring land. By their nature

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many of the planned improvements to large areas were vague and very long term, and central government did not feel disposed to giving more than a decade to complete acquisition once an area had been declared.34 There was a distinctly economic pragmatism and urgency in central government that was at odds with the desire to gain control of cities in a much longer-term manner evident in corporation plans. It would, though, be a mistake to assume that the Hull and Manchester corporations’ ambitious attempts to gain control of areas of their cities were a pretext for a complete architectural overhaul. Hull Corporation did use the power of their Town Planning and Housing Committee to reject any applications for building work that did not fit in with the zoning proposed by Abercrombie, but by April 1947 Town Clerk E.H. Bullock was able to report that of 464 applications for private industrial building only 28 had been rejected.35 Bullock commented that: ‘If industrialists felt frustrated [by rejections], it was the fault of their own obstinacy in wanting to build outside the areas [zoned for industry] chosen.’36 Whilst Bullock reflected the depth of commitment to zoning as an idea, Manchester Corporation too showed that buildings only need conform to the broadest of usage and material parameters to be approved. In March 1946 the Town Planning and Buildings Committee refused an application from hardware manufacturers and suppliers Baxendale and Co. to erect a new warehouse on Dantzic Street and Miller Street in the north of the central area because the building was a single storey too high and too close to the street. What was significant about this incident was that the refusal came with the advice that should the necessary adjustment to the building design be made (which it duly was) the city would accept the application, since the area was programmed as an industrial zone.37 Whilst the city corporation sought to impose general standards of height and distance between buildings, predicated on notions of light and space, there was little concern for how the building should look from an architectural point of view. What emerges from the zoning proposals of the Manchester and Hull corporations is that the principal objective of local government was to exert control over the development of cities for the foreseeable future. The corporations focused on a long-term objective to control the future shape and functioning of the city in a holistic sense, as demonstrated by Nicholas’ opening lines in the Manchester Plan: With or without a plan, most of Manchester will again be gradually rebuilt in the course of the next half-century. If at every stage this process of reconstruction is made to conform with a master pattern of the kind suggested in

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this book, the Manchester of 50 years hence will be a city transformed; if not, it will still be as ugly, dirty and congested as it is to-day.38

This is not to suggest that the corporations were not interested in architecture, of course. Manchester Corporation devoted much time and significant resources to rebuilding the blitzed nineteenth-century Palazzo shell of the Free Trade Hall by 1951.39 Nevertheless, there were very few architecturally significant (or large) buildings at all – save Granada studios, begun in 1952 – built in Manchester before the  late 1950s.40 Hull, perhaps spurred by the significant amount of destruction in the small city centre, approved the daring white-wall and glass layers of the privately funded Hammonds department store, opened in 1950 – a typically restrained British classicism stripped to the point of Modernism.41 The Corporation’s more sedate neo-Georgian Queen’s and Festival houses were erected on land acquired by the Corporation from largely bombed stock in the hands of 38 different owners.42 Even then, the two buildings were noticeably part of a continuity in architectural evolution that spoke to the earlier survivors from the nearby inter-war Ferensway project. The overwhelming majority of development in the immediate postwar period studied here was far from Modernist in the architectural sense, and the focus on architectural Modernism can be something of a red herring. Naturally, no matter what the current voguish architectural style dictates, it should go without saying that most buildings are not erected by great architects. Instead, they are produced by host of engineers and nameless architects in the employ of corporations and private enterprise with various functional and confirmative specifications that rarely mention architecture. The reproduction of Classical, Georgian or Modernist mores then becomes rather more dependent on a generalised sense of taste than evidence of an overriding ideological commitment to Modernism. Buildings, after all, have to look like something. Oliver Marriott, writing on the post-war property boom, might point to anecdotal evidence from private developers concerning a city architect (who goes unnamed) dictating the exact architecture of a new building, but there is no significant evidence of this in Hull or Manchester.43 Aesthetic objectives, though, were secondary to controlling the long-term functionality of the city, though within this definition of functionality was the idea that broadly defined physical characteristics – open space, light, distance between buildings, building heights – had a direct effect upon the modes of social reproduction that were essential to the future of a working, modern city. Despite these attempts to control the space of their cities in a more comprehensive manner, the two corporations struggled with o ­ pposition

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from local interests and central government. The following section deals with the way these influential local actors contested the right of local government to control the space of the city, but it is also necessary to examine the opposition from the various bodies of central government to establish the thinking behind their position. Historian Nick Tiratsoo, in a detailed survey of the difficulties the Labour corporation faced in redeveloping Hull, argues that Hull Corporation were keen to implement as much of Abercrombie’s Plan as possible. In contrast, Westminster bodies like the Board of Trade were only willing to fund industrial development, rather than the civic and lifestyle-enhancing elements of the schemes because they wanted a quick resumption of normal life.44 Planning historian Peter Larkham also points out examples of scathing criticism from civil servants and ministers that survive in the fragmented records at Kew, of which Hull was particularly the subject.45 Tiratsoo and Larkham’s findings hint that a central tension in the relationship between national and local government was the way that each tier of the state viewed the city, which I want to open up a touch more here. Even before the Abercrombie Plan was published, plans to route railways over roads in Hull were receiving harsh criticism within the MoT&CP. Following a visit to Hull, Sir William Jowitt, then Minister without Portfolio, wrote to the Minister for Town and Country Planning, William Morrison, offering his support for Hull’s scheme. Typically for the time, ministerial enthusiasm was not matched by the civil service, who tended towards more sober and mundane consideration of plans. Scrawled on a departmental memo concerning the note, B. Gille, a civil servant in the Ministry, offered the following opinion: Frankly, I think Sir William Jowett’s [sic] letter does him no credit … there is reference to a number of very difficult planning problems that would result from such a whole-sale raising of the railways. I cannot feel that Hull have played their cards well. They have allowed themselves to be pretty well tied hand and foot while they await a plan of the nature of which they appear to be remarkably ignorant.46

What grounds Gille had for his view is not clear; however, what is evident is that even before the Plan was produced its more ambitious features faced stiff opposition. Part of the reason behind this opposition to the holistic replanning of cities was certainly financial. Even in badly blitzed cities like Coventry and Bristol, Declaratory Orders were scaled down after the Ministry had looked at them and there is ample evidence that their focus usually remained on the swift and inexpensive resumption of cities’ economic life.47

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Planning historian Junichi Hasegawa has shown that at the heart of national government objections to large Declaratory Orders were concerns about the poor economic climate in the post-war period, which by March 1948 led to the restriction of all capital expenditure that did not have an immediate economic benefit.48 In November 1945 Herbert Gatliff, Regional Planning Officer for the North, was dispatched by the Ministry to view Hull for himself. His report is damning of Hull’s inability to clean up the mess of the Blitz as effectively as other cities. Tiratsoo has suggested that much of the Civil Service’s antipathy towards Hull may have stemmed from the feeling that what was proposed in the Abercrombie Plan was ‘simply too good for a northern, working-class port’.49 However, Gatliff’s most pertinent comment suggests geographical or class prejudices were perhaps not wholly to blame: I feel it is no use trying to replan such a place so ambitiously as places like Bristol or Newcastle that have dramatic features and some colour or tradition. In the case of Hull one has got to concentrate on making it an efficient and seemly place to do its ordinary job and hope that by doing so one would get a prosperous and reasonably happy city with some elements of dignity.50

Gatliff’s observation hints at two conclusions that have a wider significance for this chapter: first, his opposition appears to have been directed at the ambitious nature of the Plans and the more expensive, aesthetic elements of Abercrombie’s Plan; second, he favoured a more pragmatic and functional approach that would restore Hull in a rather basic way. Indeed, ‘some elements of dignity’ is hardly the inspiring vision of the future the Plan or the Corporation envisaged. Read in conjunction with a memo written two weeks after his visit to Hull, the reasons behind Gatliff’s strident sentiments become clearer: ‘unless definite decisions are taken in a matter of weeks … the future of Hull will be irretrievably prejudiced and it will become a permanent depressed area’. Gatliff’s unfortunately prescient observation evokes a link between post-war economic recovery and immediate redevelopment, and the response from a Mr Hill evidences a similar urgency: ‘we have got to be prepared to overthrow most of it [the Abercrombie Plan] somehow at once’. A further handwritten note echoes the economic expediency at the heart of the Ministry’s concerns, with Gatliff suggesting that implementation of the Plan would take so long that Hull would lose a significant amount of the trade they might otherwise attract.51 National governmental bodies, particularly the Civil Service, appear to have favoured doing as little as possible to the physical shape of cities to gain the most utility from the immediate resumption of normal,

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e­ conomic life. Investing in expensive, long-term schemes in cities that could still function made no real sense in a national economic context. The willingness of central government to support industrial planning and their support for less restrictive land-use policy suggests that they had little interest in the actual spatial arrangement of cities or the experience of their inhabitants, which Gatliff dismissed as secondary concerns. In contrast to central government views, local governments were attempting to control land use to achieve a much longer-term project of governance that involved defining what might happen where. They were trying to integrate everything from road usage, citizens’ movement and areas of industry, to hours of daylight, air quality and building heights. This was not an attempt to impose an aesthetic form of modernism – there was hardly ever any concern shown over how exactly things would look – but an urban modernism which stressed the supremacy of planning and long-term functionality. The approach of the corporations also reflects both civic pride and an attempt to ensure their own primacy in post-war planning, unified under a set of central beliefs in the ability of space to shape experience and functionality. What the policies of local government in Hull and Manchester reflected was an optimism that the post-war period presented an opportunity to get to grips with planning the city as a large-scale machine of flows, functions and segregated space. The planners in each corporation were not simply concerned with speedy resumption of ‘normal life’, but with projects to control and shape the future shape of urban spaces.

Contesting the city centre State actors like the national and local governments were, of course, still crucial in the formulation of approaches towards urban space. Actors not formally part of the state also sought to control space and impose their own vision on the redevelopment process. Studies by historians such as Tiratsoo and Hasegawa of opposition from local, non-state interests have done a fantastic job of showing why local groups were able to successfully oppose planning schemes, concluding that a combination of dire economic necessity, emphasis on industrial rebuilding and central government pragmatism derailed radical approaches to post-war planning. However, they have rarely looked at exactly how the Plans were opposed in a spatial sense.52 Historian Peter Mandler’s explicit engagement with the visions of urban modernity that were inherent in framing and subverting urban planning schemes points the way here, though he says little about the ways planners sought to position modern

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society within systems of space and experience.53 The focus here is on the manner in which the H&DCT sought to oppose the relocation of the shopping district by deploying arguments that motivated the language of planning expertise, popular consent and demonstrated their own idea of how space worked. The Corporation and the H&DCT mapped competing modernities of post-war Britain into the real and imagined spaces of the shopping centres. What follows further illustrates the importance of the language of expertise in shaping public perceptions of planning schemes, as Frank Mort has demonstrated in his discussion of post-war London.54 In addition, it argues that disputes over how space might be shaped were not merely about pragmatism and financial necessity but also about competing notions of how the relationship between space, the modern city and experience functioned in producing certain patterns of behaviour. Abercrombie’s first draft of his Plan for Hull featured a scheme to move the Blitz-damaged main shopping centre from around Prospect Street to Osborne Street, a cleared former slum area a quarter of a mile to the south west.55 Even before the Plan was officially published, the H&DCT objected and the Corporation requested that Abercrombie provide an alternative design that retained more of the original layout and location.56 This revised plan appeared as an appendix in the published version of the Hull Plan and a further design, produced in the summer of 1947, became known as the Body Plan (after Hull Corporation’s chief exponent of it, Councillor Body; see figure 2.2).57 This revised scheme was also rejected by the H&DCT, who produced their own plan (known as the Davidge Plan, after its chief author) as an alternative (see figure 2.3). The hiring of William Davidge – the former president of the Royal Institute of Town Planning, who was third only to Abercrombie and Thomas Sharp as a formulator of post-war plans – appears to have been an attempt to add weight to the H&DCT’s preference for retaining the old shopping district.58 Davidge’s credentials as a planner were at the forefront of the H&DCT’s preamble to his Plan, in which they presented him as ‘Mr. W.R. Davidge, F.R.I.BA., A.M.Inst.C.E, F.R.I.C.S, P.P.T.P.I., Member of National Planning Committees and Adviser to over one hundred Local Councils’.59 Davidge’s status as a planning expert enhanced the credibility of the H&DCT’s desires and sought to match the Corporation’s attempts to monopolise planning expertise. Their insistence that Davidge ‘was engaged by the H&DCT to advise in the best interests of the whole City, not for the private benefit of Traders’, though unbelievable, presented planning as an objective, scientific exercise that functioned through a dialogue with the citizenry.60

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2.2  Map of the Corporation’s proposal for Hull’s shopping area from the Davidge Plan.

2.3  Map of the Chamber of Trade’s proposal for Hull’s shopping area from the Davidge Plan.

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It is demonstrable from statements by the H&DCT that they construed themselves as an influential actor on a par (or, at least, very close) with Hull Corporation. For example, C.R. Jones, speaking for the H&DCT, claimed that: This [the Davidge Plan] is submitted more as a basis for discussion than as a fixed or final plan. The Chamber of Trade have adopted it in principle as the Corporation have adopted the Abercrombie Plan in principle.61

His sentiments were reminiscent of Alderman Schultz’s foreword to the Abercrombie Plan, which stated that: ‘[the Plan] is put forward as a guide to the citizens … It is theirs to discuss, to consider …’, and shows the Chamber deploying the same democratising sentiment as the original plans had.62 Indeed, the H&DCT also produced an exhibition of their plans in summer 1948, echoing the exhibition held to show the post-war city Plans.63 However, the Corporation, seemingly unhappy at the H&DCT’s tactics and perhaps keen not to legitimise the Davidge Plan through association with the familiar spaces of local government, refused to allow the exhibition to take place on Corporation property. During the exhibition, held in a privately owned venue, the H&DCT held a vote amongst the visiting public on which plans should go ahead. Voters favoured the Davidge Plans over the Body Plan by a (perhaps suspiciously large) 3,000 votes to 64.64 As discussed in the previous chapter, the landscape of planning in the post-war period was contested by a host of different actors, both outside and within the strata of government. In Hull, by aping the presentation and language of Corporation plans, the Chamber of Trade sought to put its wishes to citizens in a way that seemed familiarly official and authoritative. Motivating the language of public consent also seems to have been key to the H&DCT’s tactics, and in its preamble the Davidge Plan quoted the Labour Party’s Discussion Pamphlet No.12 on planning, asserting that: planning must remain grounded in local government and its shape determined by the local people. … The planning experts may give the lead … but ultimately the plan must be tested at the bar of public opinion.65

The Davidge Plan explicitly accused the Corporation of ignoring the recommendations of the MoT&CP, revealing two elements of the H&DCT’s tactics. First, they were attempting to bypass the local state by aligning their approach and opinion with that of central government. This strategy, coupled with their demonstrable desire for a speedy resumption to the commercial activities of their shops, tallied with

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central government’s favoured approach to reconstruction. Second, the democratising sentiment, although deployed as a tool to achieve the H&DCT’s aims, bought into the language of popular consent evident in post-war discourse. The assertion that ‘the Chamber consider they are rendering a service to the people of Hull in the presentation of this plan’ also sought to minimise some of the inevitable scepticism about the H&DCT’s motives.66 As we have seen, the maps presented in city Plans invoked an air of technical expertise, which the Davidge Plan followed (see figures 2.2 and 2.3). Sociologists and geographers like Bruno Latour, Robert Kitchin and Martin Dodge have stressed that maps are socially useful tools of modern governance because they present representations of space as the product of an immutable, scientific exercise.67 By placing selected information on cost, timescale and ‘disturbance’ alongside maps of both the Body Plan and the Davidge Plan, the H&DCT’s document blurred the lines between scientific, expert planning and subjective opinion, enhancing the perceived veracity of the latter. Highly subjective views, in particular the comparison between the alleged ‘maximum disturbance’ of the Body Plan and the ‘minimum disturbance’ of the Davidge Plan, were thus legitimised by their association with a form of visual representation familiar to the public in post-war planning documents. Through the engagement of Davidge the H&DCT married a recognisable vision of planning expertise with their message.68 The final element that the Davidge Plans play on is the relationship of long practice to the effective production of functional places.69 There is a sense in the arguments made by the H&DCT that there is a very rigid understanding of how people used, understood and experienced spaces and the importance of these somewhat abstract ideas to economic function. In the introduction Davidge wrote that: Shopping Centres cannot be formed artificially or at the whim of an individual. They develop naturally according to the requirements of the people and tend to follow the direction of outward expansion of the City.70

Here, Davidge played the planning historian, tying ideas of practices and historical urban development to contemporary commercial concerns. The H&DCT, whilst opposed both to the cost and the disruption of the Corporation’s plans, were also concerned with the location the central shops would occupy under both Abercrombie and Body’s proposals. The traders felt that they were being pushed away from the actual city centre and that the delay in achieving a new shopping centre would change people’s shopping habits. They even suggested that many

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s­hoppers were already shopping as far afield as Leeds.71 They also believed that removing the existing flow of traffic by pedestrianising the main shopping streets – one of the central aims of the Abercrombie and Body Plans – would take away passing trade.72 Their concerns implied that places and their uses are formed through long habit and practice, which would be disrupted by excessive or sudden change. Davidge and the H&DCT’s view of the nature of usage, habit and attachment appears to be directly at odds with the assumptions of the Abercrombie Plan and the later Body version. In contrast to Davidge’s plans, the implicit assumption in their work stemmed from the notion that the ‘correct’ functional environment would produce the ideal citizen–consumer. Abercrombie’s central concern in the Hull Plan had been to find a location without any existing buildings that could not be demolished to make way. The Osborne Street site represented the only central area – since it was a mixture of cleared slums and old buildings – that could accommodate a completely new shopping centre in the first phase of redevelopment.73 Such pragmatism though rubbed up against the vague but strongly held conservatism of the retailers, who feared change would only be detrimental to their businesses. All of the plans for the locations of the shopping centre posited that the built environment was vital to the movement of people and flow of capital, and in post-war Hull competing interests attempted to shape the environment accordingly. The difference between the two approaches lay in the explanations of how they believed the greatest economic utility might be derived from the space in question.74 For the Corporation, as was the case with attempts to zone and acquire large parts of the city, the characteristic timbre of urban modernism involved a belief in total, longterm control and the power of space to define behaviours. Their modern city was a functional city full of spaces planned to produce favourable social outcomes. How the city was experienced by citizens, as we shall also see in the next sections, was central to how they imagined and sought to create a consumer citizen through the provision of the ‘correct’ shopping environment within a rationally laid-out city. The Corporation’s project attempted to create an entirely new ‘place’ with new rules and modes of interaction. In contrast, the H&DCT posited a causal relationship between repeated practice, familiarity and space. Their arguments imagined the city as a place of already formed habits and traditions, which might jeopardise the future of retailers if the habits were not maintained. This conflict between private interests partially ensconced within the state was enough to derail any chance of moving the shopping centre in the immediate post-war period and instead its reconstruction took place in a piecemeal manner. What it

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shows us though is just how complex, multi-faceted and, most importantly for this study, how deeply concerned with the relationships between space, citizens and function these contest over mundane spaces were. The Chamber of Trade may have had at their heart a deeply conservative and profit-driven attachment to both the area they had always occupied and the swift resumption of the retail trade, but the way they articulated their opposition tells the story of both the contestation of planning expertise faced by local corporations and also the host of competing, though wholly unproveable, models of how urban space functioned. These models were at the root of many of the intractable debates of this nature that played out across post-war British cities.

Advertising, amenity and injurious vistas Attempts to acquire large parcels of land or to wholesale relocate shopping centres evidence a desire to control the future shape of the city in a holistic, long-term sense. Likewise, the study of the opposition the two corporations faced in achieving their aims shows the variety of state and non-state actors that checked their ambitions. In the final half of this chapter I turn to look at some of the different ways the corporations and planners attempted to regulate extant spaces as a facet of their attempts to create a more orderly, functional and uniform experience of the city. The control of advertising, fun fairs, bomb sites and smokeless zones exposes the neglected story of existing places in narratives of state intervention in space. As with zoning practices, the regulation of the roadsides, bomb sites and residential streets studied here was centred on a belief in the ability of space to determine behaviours. Reducing advertising hoardings, eliminating noise and unpleasant smells, and the production of clean air laws were all attempts to create a uniformly positive experience of the city, particularly in areas where there were no plans to rebuild for decades, if ever. Crucially though, unlike with some of their grander ambitions, local corporations were far more successful in this area. Whilst the examples of zoning and mapping studied in the previous sections of this chapter represented the panoptical, homogenising eye of the planner, here the notion of ‘amenity’ is examined to understand how planners attempted to regulate sensory experience at ground level. Unlike the modes of knowing generated by mapping practices, the dialogue between the individual walker and space is so complex and disordered that it resists elite attempts to render it legible, uniform and comprehensible.75 Yet, in post-war Britain local corporations placed

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the production of a better, more functional city at the heart of urban modernism. This was not the modernism boldly realised in the drawings contained within the Plans, nor that evident in the architecture of the 1960s; rather, it was a deeply practical approach to making incremental progress in controlling what planners felt to be injurious, unpleasant noises or bad smells. Constructions of amenity meant defining what represented good and bad, beneficial and detrimental sensorial elements which were intrinsically tied up with ideas of how the citizen interacted with space. They thus signified an attempt to create a certain type of citizen subject through the regulation of space.76 I begin here with an examination of visual amenity as represented in advertising. The functional modernism of the corporations’ planners – emphasising what James Scott has called the tendency to ‘see rational order in remarkably visual aesthetic terms’ – sought to homogenise visual environments through practical attempts at obtaining statutory control of what citizens might encounter in the streets.77 In a broad sense, this desire to create pleasant, visually impressive environments manifested itself in the proliferation of new green spaces in the Plans or the planting of trees on housing estates. However, just as crucial were those elements of the existing city that corporations found undesirable, because the vast majority of the urban environment could not be rebuilt in the foreseeable future. A focus on visual amenity and the debate over advertising shows the importance of the visual encounter as a tool of urban governance, but moves away from discussion centred only on new buildings and architecture. As Lynda Nead, describing Victorian London, has commented: ‘The advertisement is the ultimate synthesis of the central themes of the modern metropolis: … It is part of the visual fabric of the city; it speaks to the eye and sustains the exchange of money and goods.’78 Yet the increasing commercialisation of public space posed a challenge to planners because it disrupted the uniformity of their designs; it constantly altered and destabilised the  relationship between the supposed benefits of planning and the inhabitant.79 As Leif Jerram has shown was also the case in 1920s Munich, the planners of Manchester were anxious about the increasing visual diversity of the city, which threatened the potential of ‘visual and experiential homogeneity to produce happy, proud, participative and compliant citizens’.80 In the post-war period much of the debate about the quality of the visual and more general sensory environments in specific areas makes reference to the concept of ‘amenity value’. Amenity, as it is used now, implies practical concerns over levels of service provision and their accessibility (swimming pools, shops, libraries, etc.). Yet, as sociologist

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Donald Foley argued in 1960, in post-war Britain it had a somewhat different meaning: One of the most relied-upon concepts in British town planning is ‘amenity’. This refers to a quality of pleasantness in the physical environment that is widely accepted as a goal. This, on examination, ranges from an essentially negative restriction against nuisances to a distinctly positive notion of visual delight.81

In essence, ‘amenity’ referred to a general unspecified pleasantness, which, though vaguely defined, was viewed to be highly affective and fundamental to the experiential benefits of good planning. Amenity value, though seemingly nebulous, thus implies a complex abstraction of how the experience of the environment might function as a technology of governance to produce certain movements, behaviours, motions and, ultimately, types of individual citizen.82 Records of Hull’s Town Planning Committee give examples of how a developing notion of amenity value was being applied to planning decisions prior to the publication of the Plan itself. Throughout the period 1943–50 there were hundreds of planning applications that requested permission to make alterations to housing, or to build garages.83 A number of applications, like one in February 1944 to erect a garage, were accepted subject to the condition that the garage doors be painted a uniform dark green to make sure they were not ‘injurious to the amenity of the surrounding area’.84 Similarly, in March 1944 an application to build several garages was accepted with the same stipulation on door colour and instructions that the roofs should be slate rather than asbestos, so as ‘not to injure surrounding amenities’.85 G. Noel Hill, Manchester’s city architect, also emphasised the importance of general uniformity in his guidance for house building. Everything from the colours of doors – where he advised against too many ‘crude and ugly’ bright blues, yellows or reds – to roof tiles – those of a purple hue were not allowed – as well as a prohibition on ‘doors and windows of bizarre design’ was covered in his extensive guidance document.86 In both corporations then, the presumed amenity of uniform appearance was being applied to both grander planning schemes and at a circumstantial, micro level. It was, however, in the consideration of controlling outdoor advertising that the concept of amenity was most starkly illustrated. The Manchester Plan stated that: For the most part our major roads consist of long dreary stretches of houses, shops, warehouses and other types of building, the elevations of which have no coherent relation to one another. Many of these properties

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are used for advertisement purposes; and since familiarity breeds contempt, each new poster and electric sign must exceed the last in size and effrontery.87

Advertising, because of its capacity to disrupt visual uniformity, had been of great concern to local corporations since before the war, despite having very limited powers to curtail it.88 In 1930, determined to prevent the uncontrolled spread of advertising, local corporations in Liverpool, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Dover had acquired special powers to license all advertising before it could be erected or posted, but this was rare.89 It was, however, this type of control of advertising – rather than the retrospective ability to challenge advertisers in court that formed Section 47 of the 1932 T&CPA – that the various county councils and corporations hoped might be produced in the 1947 T&CPA.90 The 1942 Scott Report had recommended such a pre-emptive licensing system be introduced, causing apoplexy in the advertising industry, who were only too aware of corporation and council desires to severely curtail advertising space.91 Accordingly, the 1947 T&CPA extended the powers of local corporations to restrict advertising and after 1948 (and the addition of further regulations) local corporations tested the new  regulations to the limits. Whereas the 1932 Act had merely allowed for courts to disallow advertising in instances where corporations  could demonstrate ‘serious injury’ to the amenities, the new rules left far more judgement on how amenity value might be defined to local councils and corporations.92 As a result, with almost immediate effect, local corporations began stringently applying their ideas of amenity to  strictly limit further advertising, especially on the freshly exposed gable ends of bomb-damaged housing.93 Indeed, across several cities, including Manchester and Liverpool, advertisers noticed that gable-end advertising and bills or posters on bomb sites were particularly disliked even before the provisions of the new T&CPA came into force.94 Despite the seemingly encouraging environment created in 1948, central government were, however, still somewhat resistant to local corporations’ strict and expansive interpretation of the rules. Two cases  stand out in the records of the MoT&CP concerning clashes between Manchester Corporation and advertisers that show these difficulties at work. In November 1948 Manchester Corporation refused  Arthur Maiden Ltd.’s application to erect a large billboard on a gable end at 47 Moss Lane West.95 In the appeal heard by the MoT&CP, the Corporation argued that the proposed billboard would be ‘detrimental to the amenity of the area’.96 Maiden’s representation

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was, in contrast, telling of the differing conceptions of how amenity might be defined: The property is situated in one of the poorer neighbourhoods of Manchester, and shops, No.47 being immediately opposite a large brewery. The gable end faces on to some waste ground which is being utilised by a demolition contractor … If anything, the erection of an advertising position, such as we desire, would improve the amenity of this area.97

Maiden’s view suggested that if the area was of sufficiently poor quality it could not be made worse. In response to this, during the hearing, Deputy Town Clerk C.A. Marsh stated that, since this was the first local hearing under the new Act: the Regulations [to control advertisements] were of considerable importance as they were the only powers the Local Planning Authority possessed for controlling advertisements. Under the Town and Country Planning Act 1932, the only control over advertisements which the Council possessed was after the Scheme became operative … The City had always striven to avoid gable-end advertisements, which they [Manchester Corporation] considered to be definitely detrimental, especially to the amenities of a residential area.98

He went on to add that the Corporation regarded the advertisement as ‘loud mouthed [and] shrieking’, noting that it would be visible for 10–15 years, since redevelopment of the area would take that long.99 The appeal was upheld, based on the MoT&CP’s view that the area was of a generally poor character, agreeing with Maiden’s implication that some areas suffered from such degradation and poverty that their amenity could not be further decreased. In contrast, the Corporation viewed no area as being so bad that their principles on uniformity should be compromised and sought to set a precedent for future cases. This was at odds with the position of Lewis Silkin, then Minister for Town and Country Planning, who, in a March 1949 speech, rejected calls from ministers to radically curtail advertising and added: ‘we have tried very hard to ensure that we never refuse an advertising application unless it is in the public interest … If there is any doubt we give the applicant the benefit of the doubt’.100 Silkin’s attitude typified the approach of central government, and in November 1949 the Association of Municipal Corporations wrote to the MoT&CP to object to the number of appeals by advertisers being upheld by the Ministry. Local corporations believed that all gable-end and flank-wall advertising should be prevented under the 1947 T&CPA and their blanket policy was that, regardless of the area, the amenity was

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detrimentally affected by the presence of advertisements.101 In contrast, Price-Jones from the Ministry was quite clear that advertising must be seen as an ‘accepted feature of ordinary economic life’, not something to be avoided.102 Price-Jones then went on to make a fascinating, though somewhat opaque observation: We have known for some time that individual authorities are finding it hard to accept the idea that advertisement control should be related to visual amenity and not amenity in the very broadest sense – what might be called psychological amenity.103

For the Ministry, limitation on advertising, like on the acquisition of land, had to be understood within the broader context of economic necessity. Price-Jones’ attitude also highlighted the core of the difference in the way the two arms of the state were thinking of amenity. For local planners the crux of the ‘billboard problem’, as Baker observed in early twentieth-century America, was not a question of pure aesthetic displeasure, but rather that it ‘destabilised architectural and landscape design’s power to properly form cities and citizens’.104 For the city corporations of Britain in the mid-twentieth century the fight to control advertising was thus also a fight to influence the selfhoods and behaviours of their citizens, which lay at the heart of urban modernism. Even in poor, dishevelled and bomb-damaged residential areas like Manchester’s Moss Side in the 1940s, the intrusion of advertising was viewed as contrary to the civilising influence of uniformity and a strong amenity value. The corporations were, as with all aspects of their plans, constructing the ‘urban populace as spectators, subject to [their] socializing influence through the sense of sight’, something perhaps unappreciated by the central administration.105 It is interesting, then, that in another case brought to appeal at the Ministry, where More O’Ferrall Ltd. wished to erect a sign on Stockport Road, the Ministry supported Manchester Corporation’s decision.106 The area was described variously as ‘pleasant’ and ‘residential’ in character, motivating a similar language concerning the character of the locality evident in the Maiden case.107 More O’Ferrall’s position, like Maiden’s, relied on the proximity of industrial premises and a busy main road to diminish the amenity of the area.108 Both sides presented photographs to the appeal hearing, barely recognisable as the same area. The Corporation’s displayed the residential and community characteristics of the area (figure 2.4), whilst the appellant’s emphasised the industrial character (figure 2.5). The photographs illustrate to the historian how the state saw the area: to borrow Scott’s phrase, these pictures allow us to ‘see like a state’ and, conversely to see like an advertiser.109 They

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2.4  Photograph submitted by the Manchester Corporation in the More O’Ferrall appeal.

2.5  Photograph submitted by More O’Ferrall of a proposed advertising hoarding site.

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reveal both the instrumentality and subjectivity of how and why the arguments were being made, but they also illustrate the differences and sources of conflict in the way the two sides conceived of the urban experience. The Ministry were obviously swayed by the Corporation’s arguments, commenting that the proposed free-standing hoarding would be unsightly for the residents whose houses faced the site before disallowing the appeal. The beginning of the 1950s saw the replacement of Lewis Silkin with Hugh Dalton at the MoT&CP – later itself to become the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (MoH&LG) in January 1951 – which signalled a dramatic change in policy. So, whilst the Advertisers’ Weekly might contentedly claim that 60% of appeals to the Ministry were upheld in May 1949, by June 1950 only 16% were upheld and the yearly figure fell to around 20%.110 Dalton had, on arrival, altered the system by which he judged appeals so that advertisers no longer had the benefit of the doubt on decisions, stating that they should ‘lean more towards the Local Authorities’.111 Though Dalton added that no ‘violent and sudden change in the trend of decisions’ should be evident, his civil servants assessed that of the 106 most recent adjudications the new system would shift the balance from 52% of appeals allowed to less than 8%.112 Indeed, the change was sufficiently radical that it encountered resistance from the departmental civil servants. Dalton was reproachful, observing that he was ‘surprised that [civil servants] Mr. Proper and Mr. Price Jones seemed to find it so difficult to adapt their practices’, whilst adding the rebuke: ‘I hope they will find it less difficult than they expect, when they begin to try.’113 Their concern was keenly felt by advertisers too, and in August 1950 the Advertisers’ Weekly complained that ‘control [was] becoming repression’ and local authorities’ argument that advertising in commercial or shopping areas was offensive ‘stretch[ed] beyond reason any interpretation of amenity’.114 Advertisers’ complaints received short shrift from the Ministry though, whether the corporations’ definitions of amenity were reasonable or not. They noted that advertisers ‘were complaining that with a change of Ministers there has been a change of view of what constitutes injury to amenity’. Whilst acknowledging this to be true, they were swift to also point out that ministerial decisions were subject to the censure of parliament as the will of the people, adding: ‘so far there is no indication whatever that public opinion sympathises with the advertisers’.115 There is little evidence either that a change of minister – Dalton was replaced by Harold Macmillan in 1951, who himself made way for Duncan Sandys in 1954 – brought any respite for the advertisers. Indeed, judgement after judgement throughout the 1950s showed local authorities,

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civil servants and different ministers applying ever stricter definitions of amenity to an expanding variety of spaces.116 In May 1952, at a meeting with concerned representatives from the advertising industry, P.D. Coates from the MoH&LG reported that they had argued that ‘amenity was never meant to cover some of the places where we [the Ministry] had supported the authority on appeal’. In light of his predecessors’ comments on Moss Side, his reply is telling of the way central government ideas on amenity had rapidly realigned with those of the local state. He responded that ‘the Department could in no circumstances accept that because people unfortunately enjoyed little amenity in their surroundings what amenity there was did not deserve protection’.117 This represented a pronounced change so total that by 1957 when, as if to evidence their complete volte-face, the Ministry even criticised local authorities for not going far enough to protect amenity when financial incentives from advertisers were sufficiently large.118 The speed of change with which advertising went from being a largely unfettered, accepted component of the economic functioning of urban landscapes to a highly regulated nuisance is all the more surprising in light of the radical change at the heart of central government. The change is indicative of the rapid absorption of two ideas central to the type of urban modernism practised by local corporations: first, that regulation of the totality of environment and experience was not only desirable but indeed crucial to producing functioning cities; second, that there was no level of poverty or depression that excluded an area from considerations of amenity. Unlike their opposition to the large-scale acquisition of land or reprogramming of shopping areas, control of advertising shows an acceptance in central government of the less eye-catching but still crucial aspects of local government ideas about the importance of regulating street-level experience. It also shows a willingness to subordinate certain commercial interests, even in the face of vocal and organised opposition, to accept restrictions that were inherently concerned with the ideals of urban modernism. The passage of the 1962 T&CPA, as well as the introduction in the same year of what was known as the ‘Clutter Code’– which curtailed the accumulation of advertising in residential areas and shop fronts – might then be tentatively seen as the culmination of these hard-won victories of the 1940s and 1950s.119

The sights, sounds and smells of the city The control of advertising was not the only aspect of the city’s environment into which corporations sought to extend their powers. Throughout

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the post-war period evidence shows Manchester Corporation constantly testing of the limits of what they might control in terms of amenity, going beyond the visual into the realms of smells and sounds. An article in the Daily Mirror from July 1950 reported that a Dr W. Chadwick, chairman of Manchester’s Health Committee, was called to advise the  Town Planning Committee on whether giving permission to a woman in Blackley, Manchester, to be a childminder would, through noise, ‘interfere with the amenities of the neighbourhood’.120 In this instance Dr Chadwick’s expert opinion helped the Corporation recognise that even they might be rather exceeding a reasonable definition of amenity. The case signifies a desire to both test the idea of amenity as a concept and also to question its limits as a tool of governance. One example of how notions of amenity were being exploited in governing the city is the passage of the Manchester Corporation Bill in June 1950. Clause 46 of the bill required all fairs and showmen to apply for licences before setting up. Manchester Corporation had little time for fairs, and in 1948 the Showmen’s Guild of Great Britain complained to the MoT&CP that Manchester had deliberately bought and then denied use of land regularly used for over 60 years by three different fairs.121 Fairs represented an uncontrollable, disordered element that was the antithesis of the ordered, knowable and functional modern city the Corporation desired. As the Showmen’s Guild and two other representative organisations recognised, the bill represented a threat to their livelihood and they employed legal counsel to oppose it in the House of Lords. Their arguments centred around their historic rights to set up on grounds without the consent of the Corporation.122 Mr Fitzgerald, KC, representing the Corporation, counter-argued that his clients were not opposed to fun fairs, but that they should be held in suitable places. He added that since the war, ‘there had been an increase in the number of fairs in the city, particularly on small, bombed sites in the slum centre, and many complaints had been received from residents’.123 The crux of the issue lay in the lack of legislation designed to control fairs, which had been historically exempt from controls mainly concerned with planning and permanent land usage. The 1936 Public Health Act allowed local authorities to control the use of moveable dwellings by the issue of licences, but this did not apply to circuses, fairs, stalls or stores.124 Despite discussions between 1946 and 1948 about a revision to the 1947 T&CPA that would have restricted the amount of time a travelling fair could remain on a piece of land, corporations remained relatively powerless to stop the siting of fairs.125 Much was made in the case concerning the noise coming from amplified music and generators, which ran late into the night, supposedly

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keeping people awake. In illustrating the necessity of the clause the Corporation turned to the expertise of the Medical Officer of Health for Manchester, Dr C. Metcalfe Brown, who testified that: he had visited many of the 46 fair sites in the city, and houses near them. The noise of the generators and amplified music could be heard in the houses in most cases, and caused considerable distress to the occupiers. The noise would have an adverse effect on people’s sleep, peace and health.126

In their own defence the fair owners introduced testimony from residents who lived near sites, both of whom testified that the fairs were no nuisance. The Lords found against the Corporation, stating that: ‘the clause was greater and more far-reaching than was required’.127 Though a failure for the Corporation, here in microcosm is the contestation of how the city should function that was being played out across postwar Britain. On one hand, the Corporation were employing rhetorics of rationality, public amenity and medical concerns; on the other, the showmen stood for free market capitalism and long-standing tradition, much like the nineteenth-century city the Corporation wished to rejuvenate. The showmen invoked local opinion and private utility to back up their case, whilst the Corporation saw fairs, like uncontrolled advertising, as a threat to the beneficial qualities of well-regulated space and the experiences of its residents. Amongst the favoured locations for fairs in the post-war period were the multitude of flattened and cleared bomb sites around cities, but it was not only fairs that caused problems on these ambiguous spaces. In Manchester we are left with a record of incidents of how different groups used them for their own purposes in the post-war period. What these innocuous incidents reveal is the manner in which various people conceived of spaces that had no obvious purpose – something to which I will return in chapter 4. Unlike the green spaces or fields of the new estates and neighbourhoods, bomb sites presented a different set of issues for corporations.128 Bomb sites are, of course, nostalgically remembered as dangerous yet exciting playgrounds for children, who periodically repurposed them for their own entertainment.129 The Bethnal Green Bomb Sites Association also turned blitzed sites into allotments and kept rabbits and chickens on them before local authorities finally had the resources available to make use of them.130 The continuing existence of bomb sites, despite their possibilities, naturally proved troublesome for local government. Corporation-owned sites in Manchester were usually fenced off, but unfenced areas were made use of by a variety of individuals. In several cases, local people had begun using the invitingly flat and open cleared sites as car parks, so the

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Corporation swiftly grassed over the area to prevent this.131 However, privately owned sites were, by the late 1940s, becoming the domain for activities which did not fit in with the Corporation’s wider attempts to regulate land usage. The most common use of these sites was for activities that took advantage of their locations to attract passing custom: street traders, hawkers and, in one case, a circus strong man.132 Whilst under the Public Health Act 1936 fairs were entitled to pitch up on such sites, ‘hawkers, costermongers and peddlers’ were not.133 Nevertheless, especially during clement weather, these cleared sites would attract lunchtime crowds to pedal all manner of wares. In April 1950 the Manchester Guardian reported that ‘probably 50 per cent of the leading traders of the city have made representations … to the Manchester Chamber of Trade’ concerning the removal of these ‘Blitz Site Hawkers’.134 The Chamber’s annual report was scathing of the private owners who allowed the practice to continue: Unfortunately we can only report that whilst the City Engineer is anxious to proceed [with the clearance of the sites], land owners’ interests hold him back meantime. It is a pity that some owners may concern themselves with their privileges first and the good appearance of the city last.135

As with the attempts to control travelling fairs, the city reacted swiftly. Local bye-laws were used to prohibit the sale of any goods on an open site and on the most commonly used streets in the city, prosecuting several of the traders in the process.136 In all then the spate of street and bomb-site trading only lasted around 17 months, but it shows how the Corporation, backed by the commercial interests of the Chamber of Trade – like Hull’s a body semi-embedded within the local state – tried and succeeded in defining what might go on in certain spaces. Planners are, of course, largely concerned with applying formulas that dictate commercial activities by calculating retail space and apportioning the need for various trades within defined spaces, making the ad hoc arrangements of street hawkers inimical to them.137 The bomb sites studied here were liminal, legally ambiguous spaces, with locations near Market Street and Deansgate – to this day the main axes of Manchester’s retail centre – which offered good visibility and plenty of passing custom.138 It would, however, be ridiculous to suggest that their removal was merely based on the commercial threat they posed, and here we can productively extend historian Patrick Joyce’s description of street markets to the street traders and travelling fairs alike. All three possess what Joyce terms a ‘symbolic potency’ as liminal spaces that threaten boundaries of social interaction and embody the threat of ‘misrule and disorder’.139 Street hawkers or even circus strongmen pose

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little or no commercial threat to the types of retailers found on the major thoroughfares of Manchester’s shopping areas. What they did do though was challenge the homogeneity, and therefore the supposed power, of highly regulated space to shape the behaviours of others. Each of the areas discussed here – advertising, fairgrounds and bomb sites – posed a threat to the project of urban modernism by challenging  the uniformity of the city visually, and occasionally aurally or  ­ olfactorily. However, the desire to manage the sensory environment  went further than the regulation of specific sites and undesirable activities. Manchester’s explosion in size during the nineteenth century had created what Harold Platt called ‘industrial ecologies’ packed with smoke and foul air, producing some of the first laws on air quality during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.140 Smoke control though was still very much an ongoing project for Manchester and its neighbour Salford at the end of the war. Nicholas stated at the start of the Manchester Plan that the city’s inhabitants were ‘condemned to live under a perpetual smoke-pall, which enfeebles the health-giving property of the sun’s rays  and lowers our general vitality and power  to  resist infection’.141 Smoke and smog, then, were much more than just  aesthetic problems; they were problems which impacted on the  daily lives of asthmatics or  people with other respiratory problems, or affected when individuals might hang out washing or let their children out to play. The output of these concerns was the ‘visionary’ and ultimately successful creation of smokeless zones in Manchester.142 In the spring of 1938 the Health Committee of Manchester City Corporation decided that they must obtain powers that would allow them to experiment with a smokeless zone in one part of the city.143 As with so much that had been a priority before the war, they were finally successful in creating the legislation necessary to gain control of the production of smoke in 1946 with the passage of the latest Manchester Corporation Act (Section 35).144 The problem of smoke abatement had been tackled at length in the 1945 Manchester Plan, with an entire chapter given over to the challenges of reducing pollution, and here, once again, the Plan reflected the technocratic tendencies of the planners. Key to the recommendations was the control of what might be burnt in homes and by industry, the height of smoke stacks and their position (via zoning) in relation to both the city and the surrounding areas. Manchester and Salford were, if not unique in their zeal, then rather ahead of their time – there is, for example, little more than a paragraph in the Hull plan on pollution. This is perhaps attributable to several factors. Hull, with its east coast winds and low density of heavy-polluting industries, may have been much less susceptible to the

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problems of pollution than Manchester, where the geographical location was described as ‘tend[ing] to maintain pollution’.145 Hull had neither historical precedent nor need to really pursue a clean-air policy. Indeed, this reflected a wider trend in much of Britain, where there was little appetite for the control of smoke before 1956 and the introduction of the Clean Air Act at a national level.146 The process of creating smokeless zones was not a speedy one and the 1947 T&CPA, despite over a decade of activism from Manchester and surrounding corporations like Bolton and Salford, contained very few provisions to control smoke through planning.147 Yet, by 1949 Salford had designated two areas ‘smokeless zones’ and Manchester had begun the process of truly creating the zones in 1952.148 Perhaps the most outstanding development though was not the zoning of certain areas, but rather the interference in people’s homes that the creation of suburban  smokeless zones entailed. Whilst legislation during  the Blitz had opened up homes to greater state interference, the post-war housing specification in Manchester insisted that all new homes must be capable of burning smokeless fuel.149 This was a fundamental intrusion into the home and encroached upon the sacred space  of the hearth. Richard  Hoggart, in his influential 1957 study of popular culture The Uses of Literacy, stressed the importance of the hearth thus: The hearth is reserved for the family, whether living at home or nearby, and those who are ‘something to us’, and look in for a talk or just to sit. Much of the free time of a man and his wife will usually be passed at that hearth; ‘just staying-in’ is still one of the most common leisure-time occupations.150

In new homes, the burning of smokeless fuel often involved the installation of a combined heater in new homes, eliminating the hearth completely.151 The Corporation also produced plans for expensive schemes, like the ambitious (though ultimately unrealised) District Heating Scheme, which proposed to supply all homes in Wythenshawe with hot water to remove the need to burn coal.152 Alongside fears about the health of the population, there was a concern with the appearance of the city. In 1945 the Observer ran an article quoting a speech from G. Noel Hill, the Manchester city architect, which argued that the utility of a smokeless Manchester was far more than merely health and cleanliness: No matter what is done to widen streets, extend the civic centre and zone trade and industry, it will be of little avail unless the smoke problem is radically solved. Smoke abatement is largely an academic subject, and Manchester people just refuse to take an interest in it. Those who dislike

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dirt are content to solve the problem personally by going to live in Cheshire, and regard Manchester as simply a dirty workshop.153

With the future of the city at stake and urban dispersal a real threat, Hill implied that making the city smokeless would serve to radically redefine how it might be used, causing it to be viewed as a place to dwell, rather than merely a place of work. The article continued: The city can fulfil its function as a metropolis only if it is densely populated or if it develops a West End and an inner residential quarter occupied by people who are fond of city life and are anxious to have good shops, restaurants, theatres and concerts. The farther the intelligent minority lives away from the centre the more difficult it is for cultural institutions to flourish.154

The extract is stark in its warning and its conceptualisation that the success of the city hinged not upon the majority of its people but upon the development of an intelligent leisure class in the heart of the city. Smoke and its effects diminished the amenity of the city and, Hill implied, led to the segregation and stratification of society based on those who had the means to avoid the unpleasantness of the city. In a planning environment that stressed light, air and space – much in evidence in British town planning in this period – the management of air quality was just as crucial as the elimination of advertising clutter or noisy fairs. Smoke abatement was a long-term project, but between 1945 and 1971 levels of sunshine in Manchester increased dramatically, most notably in the winter months (when smoke emissions are higher) where a 50–68% increase in the hours of sunshine was recorded. As environmental historian Christopher Wood concluded: ‘the relationship between falling smoke concentrations and [the] rising incidence of sunshine in the conurbation is undeniable.’155 Ultimately, this was only the beginning of a process which 35 years later would see Manchester’s entire conurbation designated a smokeless zone.156 The importance of Manchester Corporation’s attempts to create smokeless zones though lay not only in the result but in the manner in which the Corporation had to take a holistic view of the city to achieve it. It involved breaching the privacy of the home on a permanent basis and recasting the very air as a component that the city had to control in its entirety.

Conclusion In a certain sense the five or so years that followed the war drew the battle lines upon which the character of urban modernism would be

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fought. On one hand, it became clear that any notions corporations and planners had had during wartime that they might be able to acquire the land needed for the kind of total, long-term reconstruction they favoured were unfounded. Moreover, it was obvious that there was little support either locally or nationally for the kind of long-term disruption to the economic life of cities that might create wholly new patterns of shopping or retail. In this sense, the project of urban modernism had already absorbed its first and, perhaps, most crippling blows. The chance that entire cities could be programmed holistically, at least in any straightforward way, over the long term had gone. Nevertheless, there were significant gains; so significant that their importance for the project of urban modernism has been almost entirely overlooked. It is hard to emphasise just how important a contribution to the urban environment, nor how dramatic a change is represented in the successful curtailing of advertisements or the increases in sunlight and air quality that stemmed from clean air laws. One might walk through the centre of a British city today and try to imagine soot-blackened buildings, covered in all manner of advertising, but for most people, the curtailment of these urban blights has been so successful that even such an exercise would be very difficult. Post-war approaches to modernity and urban space were then defined by two features. First, local corporations attempted to holistically control the future development of the city to shape the experience of urban space. Manchester Corporation, in particular, showed evidence of ever-expanding attempts to homogenise, categorise and organise spaces, whether they were fairgrounds, bomb sites or advertising hoardings. These attempts sought to define what might go on in certain spaces, to regulate movement and to constitute the individual as rhetorically free, yet fundamentally constrained, through the manipulation of space. This process was attempted at a macro level through zoning, where the bird’s-eye view of the city promoted ideas of single-use areas, but also at a micro level that challenged everything from the right of individuals to make use of bomb sites to the colour of garage doors. The creation of a uniformity of vision, represented in the vague idea of amenity, was equated with homogeneity of experience and, thus, usage. What is crucial to our understanding of the period is that attempts to produce and control space were not merely expressed in new schemes like shopping centres or – as chapters 3 and 4 argue – housing estates but also in extant, mundane and ambiguous spaces. Corporations also pushed out the boundaries of what might be considered the space of the city through smokeless zones, regulating spaces above and around the city and by classifying air as part of their remit.

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Secondly, the Manchester and Hull corporations’ attempts to shape space were based on an understanding of how space functioned and, consequently, of the nature of urban modernity: literally, what it meant to be modern and how this should work. Yet, whilst the corporations and their planners constructed systems of spatial governance designed to produce certain places and uses, they were stymied by the differing view of how the city should be planned emanating from central government and from commercial interests. Central government deployed their own understandings of how space functioned and the purpose of the city. They opposed the notion of holistic planning because the projects would be too long term and expensive; their first priority was the  resumption as quickly as possible of the commercial functions of the city. This favouring of the economic functions of the city seems to have been at the core of many of the decisions regarding the location of  the Hull shopping centre, the allowing of advertising and the decisions to allow fairgrounds to continue without corporation interference. Yet their opposition – and the opposition of commercial interests – was frequently expressed in terms of spatial concepts like amenity. What this chapter has demonstrated is that the opposition to post-war planning schemes, whilst pragmatic and hampered by shortages of materials and men, also articulated different understandings of what a modern city was for and how it should function.

Notes 1 There is an enormous range a material which has shown how plans were contested: Nicholas Bullock, ‘Ideals, priorities and harsh realities: reconstruction and the LCC, 1945–51’, Planning Perspectives, 9:1 (1994), 87–101; Junichi Hasegawa, ‘Reconstruction of Portsmouth in the 1940s’, Contemporary British History, 14:1 (2000), 45–62; Junichi Hasegawa, Replanning the Blitzed City Centre: A Comparative Study of Bristol, Coventry and Southampton (Buckingham, 1992); Philip N. Jones, ‘“…A fairer and nobler city” – Lutyens and Abercrombie’s plan for the city of Hull 1945’, Planning Perspectives, 13:1 (1998), 301–16; Peter J. Larkham, ‘Thomas Sharp and the post-war replanning of Chichester: conflict, confusion and delay’, Planning Perspectives, 24:1 (2009), 51–75: Peter J. Larkham and John Pendlebury, ‘Reconstruction planning and the small town in early post-war Britain’, Planning Perspectives, 23:3 (2008), 291–321; Nick Tiratsoo, ‘The reconstruction of blitzed British cities, 1945–55: myths and reality’, Contemporary British History, 14:1 (2000), 27–44. 2 Stephen Essex and Mark Brayshay, ‘Boldness diminished? The post-war battle to replan a bomb damaged city’, Urban History, 35:3 (2008), 437–61 demonstrate that there was a persistent enthusiasm for radical redesign amongst

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Plymouth’s planners and local government that was frustrated by Whitehall. Jones, ‘“Fairer and nobler city”’, for example, considers the Hull Plan to be radical in many ways, but also shows how many of the schemes contained within the Plan might have improved Hull. 3 Peter J. Larkham, ‘The place of urban conservation in the UK reconstruction plans of 1942–1952’, Planning Perspectives, 18:3 (2003), 295–324 argues that Plans were often more sensitive to the conservation of historic buildings than has been allowed for. 4 Simon Gunn, ‘The rise and fall of British urban modernism: planning Bradford, circa 1945–1970’, Journal of British Studies, 49:4 (October 2010), 849–69 (852). 5 Gunn, ‘British urban modernism’, 852. 6 Gunn, ‘British urban modernism’, 852. 7 Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, Ideology and Consciousness, 6 (1979), 5–21; Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Colin Gordon (ed.) (Brighton, 1980); Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003); Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London, 1990); Nikolas Rose, ‘Assembling the modern self’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: 1997), pp. 224–6; Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge, 1999); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (London, 2000). Scott does not employ the term ‘governmentality’, preferring to base his work in the writings of Zygmunt Bauman. However, his description of state attempts to shape selfhoods through the production of affective, homogenous spaces has much in common with the Foucauldian perspectives of Joyce and Rose. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, 1990);  Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge, 1991); Raymond Williams and Tony Pinkney, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London, 1989), p. 32. 8 For discussion of scalar approaches to political geographies, see: Neil Brenner, ‘The limits to scale? Methodological reflections on scalar structuration’, Progress in Human Geography, 25:4 (2001), 591–614; Gordon Macleod and Mark Goodwin, ‘Space, scale and state strategy: rethinking urban and regional governance’, Progress in Human Geography, 23:4 (1999), 503–27. 9 For studies that have comprehensively shown the opposition from a parsimonious national government, see: Essex and Brayshay, ‘Boldness diminished?’; Nick Tiratsoo, ‘Labour and the reconstruction of Hull’, in Nick Tiratsoo (ed.), The Attlee Years (London, 1991), pp. 126–46. 10 Manchester and District Joint Town Planning Advisory Committee, Report Upon the Regional Scheme (Manchester, 1926). 11 Peter Mandler, ‘New towns for old: the fate of the town centre’, in Becky Conekin,  Frank Mort and Chris Waters (eds), Moments of Modernity:  Reconstructing Britain, 1945–1964 (London, 1999), pp. 208–27 (p. 225).

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12 Essex and Brayshay, ‘Boldness diminished?’; Hasegawa, ‘Reconstruction’; Hasegawa, Replanning; Tiratsoo, ‘Reconstruction of Hull’, in Tiratsoo (ed.), Attlee Years. 13 The Housing, Town Planning, &c Act 1909. 14 Simon Rycroft and Denis Cosgrove, ‘Mapping the modern nation: Dudley Stamp and the land utilisation survey’, History Workshop Journal, 40 (1995), 91–105. 15 Philip Booth, ‘Discretion in planning versus zoning’, in Barry Cullingworth (ed.), British Planning: 50 Years of Urban and Regional Policy (London, 1999), pp. 31–44. 16 Tiratsoo, ‘Reconstruction of Hull’, in Tiratsoo (ed.), Attlee Years, p. 134. The motivation for defining as many places as such was the ability to gain far greater revenues from the government, an incentive which became all the more tempting since such areas might be eligible for five years of 90% contributions from the national government. Town and Country Planning Act (T&CPA) 1944. 17 Michael Tichelar, ‘The conflict over property rights during the Second World War: the Labour Party’s abandonment of land nationalization’, Twentieth Century British History, 14:2 (2003), 165–88. 18 Rowland Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan (Norwich, 1945), p. 34. 19 Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 141. 20 For more discussion of what zoning was used for, see: Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Design and Planning in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1996), p. 59; Leif Jerram, Germany’s Other Modernity: Munich and the Making of the Metropolis, 1895–1930 (Manchester, 2007), pp. 53 & 162–4. 21 Edwin Lutyens and Patrick Abercrombie, A Plan for the City and County of Kingston upon Hull (Hull, 1945), p. 2. 22 See chapter 1. 23 HMSO, Town and Country Planning, 1943–1951, Progress Report, Cmd 8204 (London, 1951), p. 4. 24 National Archives, Kew (NA)/Housing and Local Government Files (HLG)/79/405, Letter from Gatliff to Cameron, 2 June 1945. 25 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. 192. 26 NA/HLG/79/405, Notes of an informal meeting with Manchester County Borough at Manchester, 21 November 1945. 27 NA/HLG/79/405, Manchester CB, 30 Jun 1947, and extract from Mr Hughes minute to D.P. Walsh, 10 July 1947. For comparison, see Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, pp. 35–41; HMSO, Town and Country Planning, p. 182. 28 HMSO, Town and Country Planning, p. 181. 29 Hull Daily Mail (HDM), 22 July 1946, and Hull and Yorkshire Times, 31 August 1946, quoted in: Tiratsoo, ‘Reconstruction of Hull’, in Tiratsoo (ed.), Attlee Years, p. 134. 30 Hull History Centre (HHC)/L.711/CC, Hull and District Property Owners’ Protection Association, ‘Replanning Kingston upon Hull’, 1947. 31 HMSO, Town and Country Planning, p. 41.

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32 NA/HLG/79/402, Meeting between Manchester CB and the MoT&CP, 21 November 1945. 33 NA/HLG/79/407, City of Manchester Reconstruction Area 4: Market Place, 11 July 1948. The debate over what to do with the Wellington raged on for years and the Corporation’s plans to demolish it were opposed until it was moved in the 1970s to make way for the Arndale shopping centre development. For an example of the objections, see: Greater Manchester County Record Office (GMCRO)/GB127/M723/6, Letter to Manchester Evening News (MEN), 26 June 1950, unpaginated cutting. 34 HMSO, Town and Country Planning, p. 41. 35 NA/HLG/79/269, Kingston upon Hull case history, 23 April 1947. 36 NA/HLG/79/269, Kingston upon Hull case history, 23 April 1947. 37 NA/HLG/79/424, Various correspondence between Baxendale & Co. and Town Clerk, 4 October 1944 – 13 April 1946. 38 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. 1. 39 See: Terry Wyke, A Hall for All Seasons: A History of the Free Trade Hall (Manchester, 1996). 40 Clare Hartwell, Manchester (London, 2001), pp. 33–5. 41 I am grateful to Otto Saumarez Smith for his suggestions and advice on architectural styles. 42 City Council of Kingston upon Hull, Planning in Action: An Account of the Aims and Achievements in Kingston upon Hull (Hull, c.1958), p. 17. 43 Oliver Marriott, The Property Boom (London, 1967), pp. 79–80. 44 Tiratsoo, ‘Reconstruction of Hull’, in Tiratsoo (ed.), Attlee Years. 45 Peter J. Larkham, ‘Hostages to history? The surprising survival of critical comments about British planning and planners c. 1942–1955’, Planning Perspectives, 26:3 (2011), 487–91. 46 NA/HLG/79/261, Internal memo 1245/573, 28 September 1944. 47 Hasegawa, Replanning, pp. 209–12. 48 Hasegawa, Replanning, p. 211. 49 Tiratsoo, ‘Reconstruction of Hull’, in Tiratsoo (ed.), Attlee Years, p. 141. 50 NA/HLG/79/261, Gatliff’s report on his visit to Hull, 5 December 1945. 51 NA/HLG/79/261, Hill’s and Gatliff’s correspondence on a memo of 18 December 1945, 21 and 28 December 1945. 52 Hasegawa, Replanning; Tiratsoo, ‘Reconstruction of Hull’, in Tiratsoo (ed.), Attlee Years. 53 Mandler, ‘New towns for old’, in Conekin, Mort and Waters (eds), Moments of Modernity. 54 Frank Mort, ‘Fantasies of metropolitan life: planning London in the 1940s’, Journal of British Studies, 43:1 (2004), 120–51. 55 Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, pp. 41–3. 56 Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, p. 46; NA/HLG/79/268, ‘Kingston-upon-Hull’, undated but c.14 May 1947. 57 NA/HLG/79/268, Report on the Replanning and Reconstruction: Shopping Centre joint conference, 12 August 1947.

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58 Davidge produced 8 plans in the post-war period, behind only Sharp (11) and equal with Abercrombie (8). Peter J. Larkham and Keith Lilley, ‘Plans, planners and city images: place promotion and civic boosterism in British reconstruction planning’, Urban History, 30:2 (2003), 192; Peter J. Larkham and Keith Lilley, Planning the ‘City of Tomorrow’: British Reconstruction Planning, 1939–1952: An Annotated Bibliography (Pickering, 2010), p. 4. 59 HHC/L.711/CC, Report on central shopping area and improvements./W.R. Davidge. 60 Mort, ‘Fantasies’, 129–30. 61 NA/HLG/79/268, Report on the Replanning and Reconstruction: Shopping Centre joint conference, 12 August 1947, p. 4. 62 Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, p. v. 63 NA/HLG/79/268. All the major city Plans were accompanied by exhibitions of varying size and other exhibitions were held for a variety of post-war schemes, perhaps most famously those that comprised the planning sections of the Festival of Britain in 1951. See: Becky Conekin, ‘“Here is the modern world itself”: the festival of Britain’s representations of the future’, in Conekin, Mort and Waters (eds), Moments of Modernity, pp. 228–46. 64 NA/HLG/79/268, Letter from Payne & Payne to the MoT&CP, 7 December 1948. 65 HHC/L.711/CC, Report on central shopping area and improvements./W.R. Davidge. 66 HHC/L.711/CC, Report on central shopping area and improvements./W.R. Davidge. 67 Robert Kitchin and Martin Dodge, ‘Rethinking maps’, Progress in Human Geography, 33:3 (2007), 1–14; Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How  to  Follow  Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA, 1987). 68 NA/HLG/79/268, Report on the Replanning and Reconstruction: Shopping Centre joint conference, 12 August 1947, p. 4. 69 See the discussion in the Introduction to this book: Tim Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression (Minneapolis, 1996). 70 HHC/L.711/CC, Report on central shopping area and improvements./W.R. Davidge. 71 Tiratsoo, ‘Reconstruction of Hull’, in Tiratsoo (ed.), Attlee Years. 72 NA/HLG/79/268, Report on the Replanning and Reconstruction: Shopping Centre joint conference, 12 August 1947, pp. 4–25; Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, p. 43. 73 Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, pp. 41 & 46. 74 David Harvey, The Urbanization of Capital: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore, 1985); Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford, 1993), pp. 140–51. 75 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (London, 1984), pp. 120–4. 76 Joyce, Rule of Freedom, p. 4. 77 Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 4.

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78 Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenthcentury (London, 2000), p. 58. 79 Laura Baker, ‘Public sites versus public sights: the progressive response to outdoor advertising and the commercialization of public space’, American Quarterly, 59:4 (2007), 1187–213 (1197). 80 Jerram, Germany’s Other Modernity, p. 58. 81 Donald L. Foley, ‘British town planning: one ideology or three?’, British Journal of Sociology, 11:3 (1960), 211–31 (220). 82 Joyce, Rule of Freedom, p. 144–7. 83 See, for example: HHC/CTCR/1.12.5–1.19.8 for many examples of planning applications. 84 HHC/CTCR/1.12.5, Report 3, 6 February 1944. 85 HHC/CTCR/1.12.5, Report 7, 30 March 1944. 86 GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, Building at Wythenshawe, 21 April 1939, vol. 6, p. 144. 87 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. 45. 88 As noted in Barry Cullingworth and Vincent Nadin (eds), Town and Country Planning in the UK (London, 2002), p. 144. 89 Rowland Nicholas and M.J. Hellier, South Lancashire and North Cheshire  Advisory Planning Committee: Advisory Plan 1947 (Manchester, 1947), p. 87. 90 Nicholas and Hellier, Advisory Plan 1947, pp. 87–9. 91 See various correspondence in NA/HLG/71/1027, particularly letter from Lord Southwood to Portal, 7 September 1942, and letter to William Morrison from David Roberts MP, 23 June 1943. 92 Town and Country Planning Act 1932, Section 47, para. 1. 93 In most documents the provisions are referred to as ‘Town and Country Planning (Control of Advertisement) Regulations 1948’, although the Act to which they were attached was referred to as being the 1947 T&CPA. 94 NA/HLG/71/1027, Letter from E.J.B. Lloyd to Lawrence Neal (MoT&CP), 6 March 1945. 95 Arthur Maiden Ltd. was founded in Liverpool in 1924 and would later become Maiden Outdoor Advertising Ltd. At their peak the company was one of the largest owners of billboards and advertising spaces in Britain. 96 NA/HLG/79/421, Letter to the MoT&CP, 19 November 1948; NA/ HLG/79/421, Letter to Arthur Maiden Ltd from Town Clerk, 9 November 1948. 97 NA/HLG/79/42, Letter to the MoT&CP, 19 November 1948. 98 NA/HLG/79/421, Appeal hearing, 26 January 1949. 99 NA/HLG/79/421, Appeal hearing, 26 January 1949. 100 ‘Silkin tells sign men of outdoor law clean-up’, World’s Press News and Advertisers’ Review, 31 March 1949, p. 4. 101 NA/HLG/79/1723, Meeting between AMC and Ministry, 4 May 1950. 102 NA/HLG/79/1723, Memo from Mr Price-Jones to Mr Proper, 1 December 1949.

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103 NA/HLG/79/1723, Memo from Mr Price-Jones to Mr Proper, 1 December 1949. 104 Baker, ‘Public sites’, 1197. 105 Baker, ‘Public sites’, 1199. 106 More O’Ferrall was founded in 1936 and were formerly Britain’s largest poster advertising group. See: ‘Our History’ (online source): www.clearchannel.co.uk/ who-we-are/history, accessed 1 June 2016; ‘More O’Ferrall profits soar: Poster advertising group ahead “in difficult conditions”’, The Independent, 24 March 1994 (online source): www.independent.co.uk/news/business/more-oferrallprofits-soar-poster-advertising-group-ahead-in-difficult-conditions-1431281. html, accessed 1 June 2016. 107 NA/HLG/79/422, Appeal hearing, 5 July 1949. 108 NA/HLG/79/422, Appeal hearing, 5 July 1949. 109 Scott, Seeing Like a State. 110 NA/HLG/71/1738, Advertisers’ Weekly, 11 May 1949, p. 9; Advertisement appeals – clearances, 25 August 1950. 111 NA/HLG/71/1738, Control of Outdoor Advertisements Directive on Future Administration (from Dalton), 25 May 1950. 112 NA/HLG/71/1738, Control of Advertisements – Principles Governing Appeal Decisions, 16 May 1950. 113 NA/HLG/71/1138, Control of Advertisements, 27 May 1950. 114 ‘Control becoming repression?’, Advertisers’ Weekly, 24 August 1950, p. 1. 115 NA/HLG/71/1738, Untitled note from T.H. Sheepshanks, 31 October 1950. 116 NA/HLG/71/1738 has the documents from many judgements, which detail the rationale behind decisions. 117 NA/HLG/71/1062, Correspondence: P.D. Coates to J.D. Jones, 28 May 1952. 118 NA/HLG/71/1738, Correspondence: G.R. Coles to Street, 2 August 1957. 119 Richard Haughton James, ‘Communications’, in John Button (ed.), Look Here! Considering the Australian Environment (Melbourne, 1968), pp. 83–120 (p. 99). 120 ‘Baby-minding spoils our street, they say’, Daily Mirror, 27 July 1950, p. 3. 121 NA/HLG/71/410, Letter from the Showmen’s Guild of Great Britain, 27 February 1948. 122 GMCRO/GB127/M723/61, ‘Power to control fun fairs’, Manchester Guardian (MG), 29 June 1950, unpaginated cutting. 123 GMCRO/GB127/M723/61, ‘Power to control fun fairs’, MG, 29 June 1950, unpaginated cutting. 124 Public Health Act 1936, Section 5(1)c. 125 See: NA/HLG/71/410. 126 GMCRO/GB127/M723/61, ‘Manchester asks for control of fairground sites’, MG, 29 June 1950, unpaginated cutting. 127 GMCRO/GB127/M723/61, ‘Power to control fun fairs’, MG, 29 June 1950, unpaginated cutting. 128 For the discussion of spaces on estates, see chapters 3 and 4.

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129 Paul Cloke and Owain Jones, ‘Unclaimed territory: childhood and disordered space(s)’, Social & Cultural Geography, 6:3 (2005), 311–33; Leo Mellor, Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture (Cambridge, 2011); Penny Wilson, ‘Beyond the gaudy fence’, International Journal of Play, 1:1 (2012), 30–6. 130 Hazel Conway, ‘Everyday landscapes: public parks from 1930 to 2000’, Garden History, 28:1 (2000), 117–34 (123). 131 NA/HLG/79/407, Defence Regulations 56A Victoria Buildings Site, 22 August 1947. 132 ‘Blitz site problem in Manchester’, MG, 14 April 1950, p. 8. 133 Public Health Act 1936, Section 5(1)c. 134 ‘Blitz site problem in Manchester’, MG, 14 April 1950, p. 8. 135 GMCRO/GB127/M723/61, MG, 14 April 1950, unpaginated cutting. 136 GMCRO/GB127/M723/61, ‘Barrow boys will leave blitz sites’, MEN, 13 September 1950, unpaginated cutting, and ‘Hawkers in court’, Manchester Evening Chronicle (MEC), 13 September 1950, unpaginated cutting. 137 Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 141. 138 For discussion of liminal spaces, see: Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London, 1960). 139 Joyce, Rule of Freedom, p. 82. 140 Harold Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago, 2005). 141 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. 1. 142 Ted Kitchen, ‘The future of development plans: reflections on Manchester’s experiences 1945–1995’, Town Planning Review, 67:3 (1996), 331–53. 143 Question from Mr John Tinkler, MP, quoted in Hansard, HC Deb. (series 5), vol. 336, col. 1392 (26 May 1938). 144 Debate on the Clean Air Act 1955, in Hansard, HC Deb. (series 5), vol. 545, col. 1389 (3 November 1955); GMCRO/GB127/Council Minutes (CM)/ Housing Committee, Housing Committee minutes, 12 November 1954. 145 Nicholas, City of Manchester, p. 175. See also the description of Hull’s environment in Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, Plate XII, which takes note of the prevailing winds in prescribing the preferred location of industry. 146 Ian Douglas, Rob Hodgson and Nigel Lawson, ‘Industry, environment and health through 200 years in Manchester’, Ecological Economics, 41:2 (2002), 235–55. The Ministry of Health/Ministry of Works (MoH/MoW), Housing Manual 1944 (London, 1944) does make mention of appliances for the home that might aid in both preserving stocks of coal and in reducing pollution, but Manchester Corporation were far in advance of the process. 147 Douglas, Hodgson and Lawson, ‘Industry’, 242; Christopher Wood and Nicholas Pendleton, Land Use Planning and Pollution Control in Practice (Manchester, 1979). 148 Christopher Wood, Geography of Pollution: Study of Greater Manchester (Manchester, 1973).

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149 GMCRO/GB127/CM/Post War Reconstruction Committee, Post War Reconstruction Committee meeting minutes: 1942–1948, 25 September 1944. 150 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-class Life, with Special References to Publications and Entertainments (London, 1971), p. 35. 151 See: MoH/MoW, Housing Manual, p. 16 for types of appliance recommended by central government. 152 GMCRO/GB127/CM/Wythenshawe Estate Special Committee, Wythenshawe Estate Special Committee minutes, 19 December 1950. 153 GMCRO/GB127/M723/61, ‘Smoke and culture’, The Observer, 17 June 1945, unpaginated cutting. 154 GMCRO/GB127/M723/61, ‘Smoke and culture’, The Observer, 17 June 1945, unpaginated cutting. 155 Wood, Geography of Pollution, pp. 54–5. 156 Manchester has been entirely covered since 1985. See: Manchester City Council, ‘Air quality’ (online source): www.manchester.gov.uk/info/413/pollu​ tion_control-air_quality/2942/air_quality/6, accessed 19 April 2016.

3 The city and the suburban village

In the previous chapters I demonstrated how local government in Manchester and Hull sought to holistically produce more orderly and functional cities and described the variety of challenges that they faced. Nowhere are these attempts to shape a certain type of society through the manipulation of space more in evidence than in the creation of social housing estates either side of the Second World War. The remaining two chapters of this book are thus concerned with the production of these estates, the ideas that underpinned their designs and the difficulties they faced. Whilst, of course, being practical attempts to address the long-standing shortage of housing and alleviate slum conditions, plans for social housing were also socio-spatial schemes to engender community and sociability, which reveal governmental concerns about the nature of society as a whole. The successes and failures experienced add to the story of urban modernism in the post-war period, showing local corporations learning hard lessons about the limits of their influence, the size of the state and their effectiveness as landlords. The period also evidences the emerging power of both retailers and shoppers to challenge the spatial logics of the planners, alongside the manner in which the practices of everyday life could contest the uses and meanings of certain spaces. The suburban estates of the mid-twentieth century emerge, not as clichéd bywords for conformity, nor as merely symbolic failures, but complex spaces through which we might understand the nature, motivations behind and difficulties faced by local corporations embarking on ambitious programmes of urban renewal in residential settings.1 The starting point for the examination of housing estates in this chapter is the ‘neighbourhood unit’: a conceptual template for suburban living adopted by the British government in 1944 and applied widely in the subsequent decade, particularly in new towns and large estates.2 It was an attempt to create a series of suburban villages of around 5,000– 10,000 people, based around centralised amenities in which all the needs

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of daily life – schools, shops, leisure facilities – might be found.3 The ‘neighbourhood principle’ had been advocated since the 1920s, particularly in America, as a model for planning the provision of facilities, producing a pleasant environment and curtailing vehicular traffic around housing.4 Importantly, though, the neighbourhood unit that emerged in post-war Britain was also a response to uneasiness about the lack of ‘community spirit’ on inter-war estates, which translated into the governmental strategies of local corporations and manifested in the adoption of the neighbourhood unit as a central planning principle in 1944. As such, the neighbourhood represented a strategy of governance based on a belief that the right sort of space could play an instrumental role in reinvigorating community spirit, sociability and neighbourliness across class divides. Yet, whilst the neighbourhood unit was presented as a new, thoroughly modern solution to inter-war problems, it was not. Many of the features proposed in the post-war period were remarkably similar to those proposed and built during the 1920s and 1930s. Its presentation as a new approach in documents like the Hull and Manchester Plans sought to create an imagined break from estate design in the inter-war period and harness post-war discourses of holistic planning and a visual language of urban modernism to create a fantasy of post-war suburban modernity.5 The attention to the high degree of continuity between inter- and postwar designs for housing serves to highlight a crucial difference between the neighbourhood unit principle proposed in 1944 and the designs for neighbourhood that emerged in 1920s America. British neighbourhood schemes sought to isolate the suburban community from external interactions by placing all the facilities necessary for daily life at the centre of each unit and the main roads along the perimeter. Neighbourhoods were envisaged as suburban villages, exposing disquiet over the loss of a specifically British form of community life rooted in notions of a semi-mythical ‘Deep England’.6 Planning policies evidenced a fractured notion of national selfhood, presenting modernist fantasies in plans and architecture whilst simultaneously contriving to produce mythical forms of community and daily life by envisaging community formation through territorial isolation of the population. As a number of historians and sociologists have observed, this villagised model of community failed to produce the types of sociability that planners proposed because forms of association were too diverse, overlapping and cut across the territorial boundaries of the neighbourhoods. Combined with increasingly home-based entertainments, particularly radio and later television, the localised ideal of daily life and community was comprehensively undermined and disintegrated.7

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This chapter expands upon these existing assessments by questioning the way that mechanisms of sociability and community were plotted in the designs of neighbourhood units. It does so by focusing on an important, but overlooked, feature: the location of shopping facilities. The patterns of everyday life that planners plotted in the space of the estates imagined a form of local, face-to-face sociability that revolved around trips to centralised shops, schools and community centres. Yet, as historians of housing like Douglas Robertson and James Smyth have observed in later periods, the processes that structured and defined everyday lives, and thus lived-in spaces, were unpredictable and more complex than planners had allowed for.8 Moreover, planners’ notions of shopping and shop location were conditioned by rigid calculations of need that did not account for the developing types and patterns of working-class consumerism in evidence in the post-war period.9 Nor did they account for the growing power of retail capitalism – whether represented by independent shops or large chain retailers – to challenge the ability of the corporations to control where and how shopping might take place. The chapter argues that retailers and shoppers alike displayed deeply spatial tactics, which undermined, and ultimately defeated, the model spatial strategies and types of interaction envisaged in the original neighbourhood unit principle – a reverse that questioned the assumptions at the heart of urban modernism and had significance beyond the period for local corporation attempts to produce retail facilities on estates. The chapter begins by examining the presentation of the neighbourhood unit within the context of the wider post-war housing programme. I argue that, whilst central government approaches to housing policy altered in the post-war period, local records display a high degree of continuity with the inter-war years. This continuity presented a problem for local governments in a discursive environment which stressed radical solutions to housing as a reward for wartime civilian fortitude. Consequently, the neighbourhood unit was presented as a radical spatial solution to anxieties about community, obscuring the unique features of the principle that emerged in 1944. The second section unpicks these unique features, demonstrating that in contrast to their inter-war counterparts, post-war British planners plotted suburban villages isolated from the city by main roads and open space, where the main focus of daily life was shopping, education and communal leisure. Central to the spatial mechanics of social interaction was the location of shops and other communal facilities; the planners imagined a specific set of daily interactions taking place between residents in shops and at

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school gates. The formation of durable communities and the supposed forms of life and associative interaction that accompanied them were the goals, but the reliance on space as a determiner of behaviour proved problematic. In the third section I explore how planners’ calculations of ‘need’ created a particular type of shopper, which was at odds with the wants and tactics of the residents. I argue that the inflexibility of the spatial strategies used to determine the distribution of shops meant they were swiftly undermined by changing shopping habits, consumer tactics and the practices and preferences of retailers.

Continuity, rhetoric and post-war estates In 1944 Manchester’s Lord Mayor, Leonard Bramwell Cox, published an address to the citizens through the local press, which presented postwar housing as a reward for wartime endeavour10: The health of the people is closely related to housing. Enemy air attacks on Manchester destroyed much residential property, some of which was old and a disgrace to our city – a disgrace which we hope to wipe out by the building of new and better homes … There can be no immediate improvement in health, or a satisfactory home-coming for a generation of young people fighting the enemy unless there are houses in quantity and in quality.11

Cox alluded to a break with a squalid and unplanned past, whilst emphasising the health benefits of better-planned housing, echoing similar sentiments expressed by Hull’s Lord Mayor J.L. Schultz in the introduction to the Hull Plan.12 Despite this emphasis on better-planned cities, the most immediate concern was a shortage of houses. Manchester estimated it needed 76,000 houses and Hull 13,000 to even meet immediate demand, with many more needed in the long term.13 Housing was also high on the agenda of the electorate, with 41% of respondents to a 1945 survey indicating that housing was their top priority in the forthcoming general election.14 Central government subsequently promised housing in both quantity and quality as a reward for the population’s fortitude during the Blitz.15 Each city was being presented with conflicting demands: on one hand to build quickly to meet the immediate shortage, but on the other to build comprehensively and innovatively as a reward for their citizens’ courage. Manchester and Hull’s leaders, like all British corporations in the period, were performing a difficult balancing act between necessity and the management of public expectation, which was especially crucial

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in a period where (as I argued in the previous chapters) the right to plan the city and control its future was being contested. The issue for corporations was how they might present their housing schemes, whilst balancing pragmatic need against popular discourse. Charlotte Wildman has built upon work on the utility of urban fantasy to show that the inter-war corporations of Manchester and Liverpool presented images of housing projects in different ways to invoke claims of modernity through visions of progress or stability and we can see this process at work again in post-war plans.16 Becky Conekin’s work on the 1951 Festival of Britain also demonstrates the importance of these types of representations of progress in town planning: The forward-looking representations on show in the summer of 1951 were projected as brighter, better planned, scientifically researched and more modern than the designs of the past or of the present. However, in addition merely to portraying this new future, the planners were also attempting to alter people’s experiences through popular education.17

Following Conekin’s argument, civic leaders in post-war Manchester and Hull sought to manage the contradictions at the heart of the post-war housing programme through the deployment of fantasies of progress. The modernist imagery, highly ordered maps and scientific language of the Plans aimed to signal a break with the past, invoking the notion of progress to mitigate the high degree of continuity evident in actual approaches to housing. Scholars studying housing have, like the two Lord Mayors, stressed the post-war period as a radical moment in the development of British housing policy. Anne Power argues that: the war gave a huge impetus to council housing programmes. The crude postwar shortage of homes forced the government to act, and the war itself generated an ethos of state intervention that made it easy for the postwar Labour government to take on the housing problem as the major plank of its social strategy.18

The post-war period was unprecedented for house building, with 1.9 million corporation-built homes completed between 1945 and 1957, despite shortages of labour and materials, almost doubling the total number built in the 1930s.19 In the inter-war period corporations built around 28% of housing stock, but from 1945 to 1951 this figure increased to 80%.20 Architectural historian Alice Coleman argued that this increased corporation ownership and the implementation of spatially deterministic designs marked the post-war housing programme out as a ‘utopian ideal of housing planned by a paternalistic authority’.21

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Nicholas Bullock and Patrick Dunleavy both argue that the scope and nature of post-war housing policy was determined by pressure exerted by a reorganised central government, which developed far more prescriptive advice for the construction of housing.22 Advice and policy emanating from ministries of central government might have changed to reflect a more all-encompassing housing planning system in 1944 – contained in the Ministry of Education’s Community Centres booklet, the Ministry of Health’s Design of Dwellings manual, and the Housing Manual 1944 – yet examination of local records suggests much of their advice was already employed by local corporations.23 In response to the Dudley Report (the findings of which would largely constitute the Housing Manual 1944), Manchester’s Housing Committee produced a comparative study between the report’s guidelines and the Corporation’s existing policy. The study stressed that in areas as diverse as the provision of lifts in blocks of flats, access to gardens and yards, provision of appliances and storage space, house groupings and planting of trees Manchester had been meeting or exceeding the new standards since before the war.24 As mentioned in chapter 2, inter-war advice from Manchester’s city architect on housing design enforced many stricter standards than anything produced in 1944, and Hull City Council enforced similarly strict standards of uniformity in colour and materials through planning permission judgements.25 Inter-war clearance and housing projects in Manchester included the vast Wythenshawe development alongside smaller schemes. These were typically similar to the plan to re-house 4,125 families in ten poorer areas including Collyhurst, West Gorton, St Clement’s and Hulme through clearance orders enacted in 1934 and 1939.26 Though curtailed by the war, planning resumed as early as the end of 1943 and work recommenced in mid-1944 on the same designs and locations.27 Indeed, for low-rise flats commenced in Hulme in 1945 the Housing Committee stressed that they would be the same as those tendered for in the original scheme in 1938 and that ‘only minor changes to the layout had been made’.28 The records of the Hull Corporation Housing Sub-Committee show that inter-war schemes had produced 10,827 Corporation-built dwellings and patterns of development in Hull remained similar in the postwar period. 29 Programmes that had been suspended during the war – like the modernist Porter Street flats, begun in 1938, influenced by the German Existenzminimum movement and built around a central garden area, shops and a community hall – were simply reactivated when the war finished, alongside the cottage estates at Bilton Grange and Endike

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Road.30 These elements of continuity were, however, obscured in the Plans, which presented post-war housing as a comprehensively different, new set of schemes. The presentation of Wythenshawe, Manchester’s showpiece experiment in social housing, in the Manchester Plan serves here as a case study of how continuity was being presented to the citizens.31 Here a fantasy of progress was being constructed not only, to borrow Mort’s phrase, ‘in excess of the socially possible or the politically acceptable’ but also to imagine a clean break with the past.32 Wythenshawe had been developed throughout the 1930s as a ‘garden suburb’ just outside the southern boundary of the city, but with only a portion of it complete the war had halted further work.33 In 1943 Manchester Corporation’s Emergency Committee concluded that the Corporation’s top priority must be: The planning of the undeveloped remainder of the Wythenshawe Estate which should provide sufficient accommodation for the first three years post-war housing programme. It is obvious that all considerations affecting the immediate commencement and prompt continuity of development at Wythenshawe should be settled as quickly as possible. It would be unwise at the moment to divert staff from these problems to more general considerations affecting a long term Housing Policy.34

Manchester’s policy-makers appear to have been pragmatic and unconcerned with wider debates about planning the rest of the city. Focused upon fulfilling central government housing targets and under pressure from the electorate, they opted to continue with only minor (though, as I show later, important) modifications to original designer Barry Parker’s plans.35 Merely continuing with unmodified existing schemes was, however, contrary to the rhetoric emanating from central government, which stressed a new approach to post-war housing. Continuation of inter-war schemes might also have proved unpopular with potential residents, whose predecessors had frequently complained about the failings of the inter-war estate.36 Typical of the discontent were the comments of Cllr Alfred Robens, Labour representative for the Wythenshawe ward, who stated that he wished to underline the fact that: Wythenshawe, in spite of its surroundings and its first-class houses, had suffered bitterly through the lack of provision for the social needs. In that one aspect, the great experiment of Wythenshawe had failed. Apart from four well-built spacious and well-attended public houses the estate had not a single public hall or centre for cultural and social life.37

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Robens’ comments were typical of the sentiment also emerging from Wythenshawe’s local community organisation, reported in the Wythenshawe Estate Special Committee’s minutes: Mr. Lloyd said that the Community Council fully accepted that the Wythenshawe Ward representatives did everything they could as members of the Wythenshawe Committee, but the fact remained that although the Wythenshawe Estate had been in existence for a considerable number of years, the Corporation have provided very little, apart from houses.38

Rowland Nicholas’ City of Manchester Plan also acknowledged that: we should recognise that the [Wythenshawe] estate reflects the general trends in housing development since 1919 and suffers accordingly from … a somewhat anaemic social atmosphere – a lack of robust community life – attributable in part to its newness, but more particularly to the absence of good communal facilities.39

The Plan thus attempted to present the continuing development of Wythenshawe as a clean break with the planning doctrine of the interwar period and to promote the use of the neighbourhood unit as a new idea. Nicholas was responding not only to practical concerns about lack of facilities on the estates but also to a deeper uneasiness over the anomie, absence of sociability and perceived lack of community on inter-war estates. Mark Clapson has illustrated how elite discourse was haunted by a ‘pervasive anti-suburban myth’ throughout the inter-war years, which stretched deep into the post-war period.40 Indeed, the Plans were being produced at the end of a decade that had seen a growing clamour – including work by influential figures in the fields of sociology and planning like Ruth Glass and Thomas Sharp – which contended that inter-war estates had been a failure of design.41 Nicholas, whose sentiments reflect concerns at elite levels over interwar suburbia that I shall return to in more detail later in this chapter, went on to claim that: The north-western neighbourhood unit will accommodate the major housing portion of the Corporation’s first-year housing programme. Its detailed planning will thus be the first application of the neighbourhood principle in this locality.42

His assertion that the neighbourhood unit was being applied for the first time was at odds both with shape of the existing estate and Parker’s designs. In 1935 Wesley Dougill, Abercrombie’s assistant on the County of London Plan and editor of the Town Planning Review, observed that

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‘the acceptance of the neighbourhood unit as the fundamental basis of planning’ had been one of four dominating factors in Wythenshawe’s design.43 It is absurd to suggest that Nicholas would not have been aware of Parker’s design and he appears to have known that he was generating something of a false distinction between the inter-war and post-war approaches. He acknowledged later in the Plan that the lack of facilities on the inter-war estate was not attributable to flaws in the existing designs, but to the ‘outbreak of war, which postponed the execution of plans already prepared for a civic centre and a number of other amenities’.44 Nicholas’ treatment of the plans for Wythenshawe appears to have been aimed at putting distance between the schemes presented in the Plan and the poor perception of the inter-war designs, which by 1945 had become the orthodox view amongst British town planners.45 Nevertheless, because they were so fundamentally similar, Nicholas’ efforts relied on creating a kind of fantasy of progress and newness. As I argued in chapter 1, the Plans can be viewed, in part, as attempts to assert control over a discourse which centred on new, scientifically conceived, holistic planning solutions. Consequently, in the Plan, Nicholas attempted to paint the process of finalising the first year’s housing programme as a comprehensive, expert-driven reconsideration of planning at Wythenshawe. The way that the Manchester Plan sought to invoke the notion of progress was through the positioning of Nicholas’ text alongside maps and drawings. The elevated layout of the North-West Neighbourhood (figure 3.1) illuminated the uniformity applied to the layout of the development as a technical exercise, and also showed a clean, modern, but decidedly green picture at street level.46 As geographers Martin Dodge and Chris Perkins have argued, the use of maps emphasises the rigorously planned nature of the depicted area.47 The positioning of the plans alongside artistic impressions of the estates binds the precise modernism of the buildings with Nicholas’ words and the technical precision of the maps to fully imagine the future of the estate within a fantasy of newness. The tensions of trying to enforce a break with the existing buildings are perhaps best demonstrated with reference to the photographs chosen to accompany the plans for Wythenshawe. In other sections of the Plan photographs of old houses, the existing city centre and choked rivers are juxtaposed with illustrations of architecturally Modernist buildings. In contrast, the photographs of Wythenshawe (figure 3.2) show little of the existing houses (they are slightly visible in two pictures). Instead, the precise lines of modern flats and bungalows are shown, despite being largely unrepresentative of much of Wythenshawe’s brick-built,

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3.1  The proposed North-Western Neighbourhood at Wythenshawe as shown in Rowland Nicholas’ City of Manchester Plan.

cottage-type houses. The decision to exclude houses from these pictures was perhaps taken because Nicholas and the other compilers of the Plan realised that the new housing stock would be almost identical to the old and would appear incongruous within the fantasy of progress the Plan sought to create.

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3.2  Photographs of the Wythenshawe estate from Nicholas’ City of Manchester Plan.

The presentation of neighbourhood design was intended to create a sense of newness of approach, to illustrate a break with an unplanned past. This involved both exaggerating the failings of the inter-war period and over-emphasising the newness of the post-war plans. This was achieved both through the text of the Plan and also in the presentation of maps and drawings. Whilst starker in the case of Wythenshawe due to the large number of homes already built and the neighbourhood

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principles already deployed, this fantasy of progress was reflected in Abercrombie’s designs for Hull and a series of models produced by Hull City Architect Andrew Rankine, who also compiled much of the detailed plans that were displayed at the exhibition that accompanied the Hull Plan.48 This approach sought to mevdiate between a relative continuity in built form and the rhetoric of planned, technological ‘newness’ evident in post-war discourses. The Plans thus focused upon exaggerating the difference in inter-war and post-war housing and augmenting reality with technological and aesthetic fantasies. The images were not fantasies in the sense that they were unrealistic dreams; they were useful, social fantasies aimed at invoking a particular notion of progress by reconciling material, built form with notions of modernity and newness.49

A very British neighbourhood In spite of what planners like Nicholas or Abercrombie might have claimed, the neighbourhood unit was not new to Britain in 1944: it had formed an important element of Parker’s plans at Wythenshawe and it was evident in the London County Council estate at Becontree.50 On a smaller scale, elements of the neighbourhood unit principle were to be found in Hull Corporation’s own North Hull estate, which was laid out as small scale neighbourhoods that observed many of the principles of greenery, density and facilities evident in the post-war advice.51 Despite this, there has been a great deal of confusion over the status of the neighbourhood unit. Nicholas Bullock, for example, states that: ‘in 1943 the concept of neighbourhood planning was new to England’.52 This confusion seems to stem from the difference between local practice and national advice; the neighbourhood unit was certainly a new aspect of published governmental materials at the national level like the Housing Manual 1944, yet the approach of Manchester and Hull’s corporations to neighbourhood grouping showed a great deal of continuity in policy and built form with inter-war projects. Crucially though, whilst elements of the neighbourhood unit were in evidence in inter-war planning ­policies and built forms, there were features of plans that emerged in the neighbourhood unit principle in 1944 that were peculiar to post-war Britain. The discussion that follows examines the differences between interwar and post-war interpretations of the neighbourhood unit to understand the concerns and impulses amongst the British elites that produced them. The particular character of the post-war neighbourhood unit was

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the result of a uniquely British, peculiarly post-war attempt to produce traditional, semi-mythical forms of village social life through decidedly modern spatial strategies as a response to anxieties about inter-war suburban anomie and forms of working-class association. The neighbourhood unit as discussed here thus evidences the peculiarly fractured modernity and national selfhood of post-war Britain.53 Whilst historians of the neighbourhood unit have acknowledged that many of its features were present in the garden city and suburb movements originating in the late nineteenth century, they have been reticent to analyse the specific features of the post-war British neighbourhood unit. Typically, the neighbourhood unit has been taken by historians as originating with the designs for New York by American planner Clarence Perry before appearing in the Dudley Report and other central government guidelines. The neighbourhood unit thus appears to be a spatial attempt to remedy the ‘atomistic dormitory sprawl’, lack of social and community life and supposed ennui of the inter-war suburbs.54 However, Perry’s designs for New York never contained the assumptions concerning the power of space to shape relationships and behaviours that the British designs did by 1944.55 Crucially here, by examining the way these differences in intent were expressed in the actual designs we can start to see how anxieties about post-war British society were being expressed in spatial policy. This amalgamation of the management of space with the management of society had, of course, long been a tool of urban governmentality and it was crucial to the type of urban modernism discussed in chapter 2.56 Concerns over topics as disparate as health, working-class leisure, youth crime, street lighting and sexual activity had been tackled by local governments through inherently spatial policies aimed at shaping behaviours since the nineteenth century.57 The estates of the post-war period were no different: arrangement of houses, roads, green spaces and amenities in neighbourhoods was believed to encourage rigidly specific patterns of movement and interaction, which would generate neighbourliness, sociability and community spirit. As with the control of advertising, or restrictions on unpleasant smells and intrusive sounds discussed in chapter 2, the appeal of the neighbourhood unit lay in the way its proponents claimed it could produce ideal communities, citizens and behaviours through the regulation of ground-level experience. Specifically, the neighbourhood unit satisfied a desire in the  local and national strata of British government to find a ‘sociospatial schema’ that might be a ‘method of reinvigorating community feeling at local  level’ to eliminate the perceived anomie and isolation of  inter-war suburbia.58 The neighbourhood unit principle was at

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once a response to the problems elites perceived in modern suburban living, whilst also  an attempt to produce places that would in turn engender particular,  homogenous  selfhoods and behaviours amongst citizens. The neighbourhood model proposed by Perry in 1929, whilst similar in design, was quite different in its intent and in its assumptions about space. It had been presented in the Regional Survey of New York and its Environs, Vol. VII as a model for producing suburban housing with a spacious, attractive layout and convenient facilities. Perry’s designs took many of their cues from proponents of planning theory like William E. Drummond, Raymond Unwin and, to a certain extent, from Ebenezer Howard’s garden city movement.59 The neighbourhood unit was a ‘reaction to the drab uniformity’ of grid layouts and the tightly packed houses characteristic of nineteenth-century American cities, whilst also reflecting concerns about integrating living space with increased car use.60 Crucially though, for its comparison with post-war British models, Perry’s neighbourhood unit was not originally presented as a socio-spatial formula for engendering community. Perry did acknowledge that various chance encounters between citizens might encourage improved social life and a ‘family life community’, but he made no suggestion that the spatial logics of the neighbourhood preordained these societal formations. In essence, Perry’s designs represented a flexible model in which any sort of space might produce opportunities for interaction, not a prescription for specific types of interactive space. British advocates of the neighbourhood unit were, in contrast, convinced that the neighbourhoods they produced were ‘that sort of physical environment which promotes neighbourliness’.61 They proposed the neighbourhood as a spatial panacea to rid British suburbs of what Nicholas had called the ‘anaemic social atmosphere’ and what Abercrombie had labelled the ‘interminable aggregations of housing’ that characterised inter-war estates.62 These anti-suburban sentiments were rife in the post-war period and had found voice during the 1930s, concomitant with the development, in ever greater numbers, of residential suburbs which had dispersed significant numbers of both the working and middle classes to the urban fringes. County council concerns over the loss of rateable value were compounded by unease, founded on long-held prejudices amongst the ruling classes, about what might happen if the working classes were left isolated without suitable supervision and guidance from their civic betters.63 Anxieties about working-class behaviours were at the heart of attempts to promote community activities on places like the Becontree estate during the 1930s and, as chapter 4 discusses,

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through the provision of community centres at Wythenshawe.64 These anxieties, combined with misgivings about the anomie of the suburbs, were exemplified in a widespread literary disdain for suburban life from writers like George Orwell and John Betjeman, to produce a discursive environment where a spatial solution seemed both possible and desirable.65 Perhaps the most frequent criticism of the suburbs was that they lacked a ‘sense of community’ – a preoccupation that would come to represent something of a holy grail for planners throughout the post-war years. Central to the appeal of the neighbourhood was the supposed ability of this technological approach to daily life to revitalise community spirit. Yet, quite how this was to be done was not wholly clear. Central to the idea of what a community should be were notions of class mixing and local activism. The Housing Manual 1944 advised that ‘different classes of people … make up a well-balanced neighbourhood’ and the Design of Dwellings Manual recommended the ‘erection of complete communities rather than development of purely residential estates for a single social class’.66 Lewis Silkin, Minister of Town and Country Planning, promoted the idea of a mix: in types of persons, in social and economic position, so that each person, each member of the community, may be able to make a contribution to the life of the community, and so that each may enrich by his experience the experience of others.67

In a 1943 guidebook for the creation of communities, The Size and Social Structure of a Town, the National Council of Social Services (NCSS) took a dim view of single-class communities, stating that: Class distinctions have been emphasised to an undesirable extent by the  segregation of rigidly divided income-groups into separate residential districts, many of which contain 2,000 or more families in which the principal wage-earner drew less than £3 per week. … The consequence of this segregation is that the new municipal estates contain relatively few people with varied experience in social leadership … there is a large store of latent talent … This talent, however, needs some preliminary leadership … Where leaders are lacking it is more than usually difficult to build up a community life.68

Looking at these sentiments it is clear that ideas of how ‘community’ should ‘look’ and behave were specifically attached to formal local activism, the mixing of classes and the production of social responsibility for the estates themselves. Yet, the mechanisms, spatial or otherwise, of how this community might be created remained unclear.

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This difficulty in articulating a coherent outline for how and by what mechanisms community might be achieved is perhaps unsurprising, for, as anthropologist Anthony Cohen observes: Community is one of those words … bandied around in ordinary, everyday speech, apparently readily intelligible to speaker and listener, which … causes immense difficulty. Over the years it has proved to be highly resistant to satisfactory definition.69

The framers of the Hull and Manchester Plans were themselves no clearer about how community might be created or function, but they were convinced by the efficacy of the neighbourhood in producing it. In the Hull Plan, Abercrombie stated that: The community sense has largely been lost in our overgrown cities, though it still in part survives where neighbouring villages or outlying suburbs have been absorbed, but not completely engulfed.70

Similarly, in the Manchester Plan Nicholas argued that: The function of the neighbourhood is to supply the immediate needs of everyday living. The more self contained the structure, the greater will be its power to induce a sense of local patriotism and an interest in community life. Its development as a social entity will obviously be handicapped if it is split by physical barriers or by streams of traffic.71

In Abercrombie’s stressing of the success of the English village in producing community and in Nicholas’ conviction that the most successful communities would comprise a single, indivisible unit, the ethos of the post-war British neighbourhood is perfectly captured. Abercrombie told Hull Corporation in 1944 that his design would turn ‘the city into a series of self contained precincts … thus residential neighbourhoods [are] insulated from industrial areas and separate identities are emphasised’.72 The neighbourhood unit was explicitly being imagined as a suburban village, to reproduce the rural or semi-rural character of a small settlement. This was a sizeable departure from Perry’s idea of the neighbourhood as a solution to increased traffic, but it is fundamental to understanding the importance of the neighbourhood unit and the reasons behind its subsequent problems.73 As sociologists would note as early as the 1960s the idea that post-war housing could be organised to reproduce an ideal of village life was one of the most unrealistic and misguided goals of post-war planners and politicians.74 In opposition to the suburban anomie and the isolation of the inter-war suburbs, planners envisioned a return to a nostalgic and

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semi-mythical picture of a specifically English way of living. Nicholas, in the Manchester Plan, opined that: A real community spirit still survives in the English village – in the companionship of the pub, in week-end cricket on the green and in the various activities of the village organisations. The neighbourhood unit is a modern urbanised version of the traditional village and the counterpart of the village green is the neighbourhood centre.75

It is not difficult to understand the appeal of this ideal to planners like Nicholas. Wartime propaganda had saturated the urban environment with posters stressing the precious uniqueness of this thatch-roofed, bucolic ‘Deep England’, and the distinctive character of British togetherness and community under the stress of the Blitz had been constantly invoked throughout the media.76 Narratives that emphasised the loss of community life concomitant with city life stretched back to the nineteenth century and the earliest forays into sociological investigation and worked alongside the prejudice towards the inter-war suburb.77 It is unsurprising then that, as historian Donald Foley noted, the neighbourhood principle had ‘a strong emotional appeal for those convinced that the city is too impersonal and complex, for it suggests the creation of small social units in the place of undifferentiated bigness’.78 Abercrombie, in the Hull Plan, maintained that the neighbourhood was far from an exercise in nostalgia, stressing that it would be ‘a fusion of local and city life’, serviced by transport links and modern communications; but the neighbourhood was fundamentally an attempt to focus associational lives, leisure and interactions within a specific, delineated suburban space. Yet, compared to the presentation of the new estates as clean, highly planned and modern, the desire to produce village life seems incongruous. British planners were plotting a highly modern, architecturally Modernist solution to the avowedly modern problem of suburban anomie. At the same time they saw inhabitants’ daily lives in crudely drawn caricatures of village life more common to depictions of pre-modern society than anything recognisable in the mid-twentieth century. The apparent incongruity of the means and the aims of ­planners’ schemes are indicative of a deeper contradiction in the national psyche in post-war Britain at the end of the war. On one hand, rhetorics of modernism, rebuilding and the incoming welfare state shone a light on a bright, planned future, but at the same time the British reached for a world they were losing and had perhaps never wholly had. The seclusion of the neighbourhood as a kind of suburban village was thus a scheme that was rooted in a belief that some specifically British, or

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perhaps more accurately, English, community sense might be awakened by the right type of space. Yet, there were more complex socio-spatial mechanisms at work than mere isolation. Since the neighbourhoods would be surrounded by other units and (supposedly) well connected to shops, planners sought to turn inhabitants’ attentions inwards through additional means. As the Manchester Plan stated, the purpose of the neighbourhood was ‘to supply the needs of everyday living’, not just to be a place to live.79 Indeed, it was the mapping of need that would prove to be one of the most significant elements of the designs and the most telling point of divergence from Perry’s designs and those produced on inter-war estates. In Perry’s original scheme, in Barry Parker’s blueprints for Wythenshawe and on Hull’s Derringham Bank and North Hull estates, the shops were situated at or around the junctions of major roads. This layout conformed to retailers’ desire to make the greatest use of passing trade and the convergence of several local populations.80 In contrast, on the post-war estates of Manchester and Hull the shops were uniformly placed in the centre of each unit. At Anlaby Road and Bilton Grange – both approved in 1944 – the initial layouts placed shops, schools and community centres in an agglomeration at the centre of the estate.81 In Wythenshawe the shops had also conspicuously moved from the edges of the inter-war developments to the centres of the new layouts, despite there being little overall change in other elements of the design.82 This change in design was a deliberate attempt to focus the daily lives of the inhabitants inwards. The inhabitants, particularly the wives and mothers, were imagined making regular, if not daily visits to the shops, perhaps stopping to chat with each other before collecting children from the conveniently placed school. Friendships, mutual interests and plans for leisure time should ensue from this face-to-face interaction. The results, alongside the interactions encouraged in community centres and at central public houses, would produce gardening clubs, sports teams or residents associations. The location of shops and other amenities – drawing the people into the centre of each neighbourhood unit – was thus crucial to the functioning of the community on the estates.

Consumerism, need and the community The broad consensus that had produced such faith in the neighbourhood unit and its model of face-to-face community did not last long. It had been discredited by the 1960s and, though it persisted in various forms through many new developments, particularly in new towns, planners’

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misplaced faith in the power of spatial determinism in producing certain social outcomes came to be seen as a central failing.83 Clapson has also shown how alternative forms of association – both in the home and outside the estate – meant only a few people used the community centre buildings, an issue which I discuss further in chapter 4.84 Studies concerned with associative behaviours amongst inhabitants suggest during the decades following the war the amount of activities taking place outside the defined area of the neighbourhood gradually rose to around 40%.85 Higher incomes meant more and more people stayed at home to listen to radios or watch televisions, whilst increasing car ownership meant travel beyond the immediate vicinity became far easier.86 Murray Stewart, a planning historian, concluded in 1972 that there was ‘little validity in the concept of an urban neighbourhood, or a local community, seen as a self-contained unit comprising jobs, shops, recreational and cultural facilities, delimited by physical boundaries’.87 There seems little to disagree with in these assessments, but a significant aspect of the mechanisms of sociability and community at the heart of neighbourhood planning has gone somewhat unexplored: the role of retail and consumerism in subverting the assumptions of neighbourhood planning. As Matthew Hilton has shown, the tactics employed by shoppers on the estates evidence the influence of consumerism in shaping space and the patterns of everyday life for working- and lower-middleclass individuals on post-war estates.88 In contrast, the calculations used to designate the location and provision of shops in the designs of neighbourhood units were based on base assumptions concerning need not want. In essence, planners assumed that consumers’ decisions revolved around convenience and distance alone, failing to account for notions like quality, brand loyalty or the emerging innovations in shopping. Planners’ failure, or perhaps inability, to account for the developing types of working-class consumerism and the aggressive spatial tactics of retailers undermined the socio-spatial outcomes they sought in the neighbourhood unit. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman suggests that an inevitable feature of modernity is the eventual subjugation of space into the service of consumerism, yet in post-war Britain consumer practices also undermined the designs of powerful planners and local governments.89 Shoppers, independent retailers and chain stores in Manchester and Hull all contested how and where consumption might occur. The changing nature of shopping and consumption amongst the working classes in post-war Britain was instrumental in challenging the ability of the state to intervene in space and, as such, represented a pivotal challenge to the assumptions at the heart of urban modernism that would have repercussions for decades afterwards.

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Even before the war few issues attracted more discussion between inhabitants and corporations than the lack of shops on new estates. Manchester’s city surveyor reported in September 1939 that there were severe delays in the provision of shops across the Wythenshawe development.90 A letter to the Corporation from the Wythenshawe Shelter and Protection Committee (one of the many tenants associations) in July 1941 concerning the Benchill portion of the estate was damning in its assessment of the facilities: I have been instructed by my Committee to draw your attention to the very inadequate shopping facilities on this Estate. In peace time this shortage of shops was felt, but now that there is rationing the position is impossible. The shop-keepers cannot cope with the queues and the patience of the women is rapidly becoming exhausted.91

Again, in February 1946 a meeting of approximately 400 Wythenshawe residents endorsed a letter to the Corporation protesting ‘in the strongest possible terms at the dilatory attitude of the Wythenshawe Estate Committee in not providing sufficient shops’.92 Records from the Hull Housing Committee tell a similar story: in August 1949, according to a report by the town clerk, many of the available shopping facilities on Bricknell Avenue, Priory Road, Southcoates Lane and the Bellfield Avenue/Salthouse Road estates were too far from homes to be practical.93 Delays in materials and labour prevented any work on the still empty sites for shops before summer of 1950, despite the Ministry of Health’s warnings concerning the severe ‘consumer need’ for shops on each of the estates.94 It is apparent that the failure to provide shopping facilities, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the war, was often attributable to the difficulties of securing scarce resources, yet this was only part of the issue. Across the developing estates in both cities, the changing shopping habits of inhabitants and the developing sales strategies of retailers made providing adequate shopping facilities challenging. In the inter-war period corporations like Manchester and Hull had made comfortable profits as the landlords of many of the shops and small precincts on existing corporation premises. Where shops had been built by the corporations themselves, returns on rents were sufficient to justify capital investment (anywhere between 10 and 18% in Manchester) and potential tenants were sufficiently plentiful that shops rarely stayed empty.95 In this period there were usually multiple applications for available tenancies and the corporations ruled with an iron fist.96 In October 1938 a dispute with a Mr Levy, a shopkeeper at the Royal Oak Estate Centre, Wythenshawe, who had failed to provide a chemist

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despite it being a condition of his lease, showed the Corporation’s ebullient confidence in the power of their position. Levy, complaining that providing a qualified pharmacist in his shop was uneconomical, offered to subsidise the position if he were granted the tenancy of an additional shop at Holyhedge. In response Alderman Jackson, speaking for the Wythenshawe Estate Committee, was reported as saying that: he was sure the Committee would not accept Mr. Levy as the tenant … and, in fact, not only would the Committee be prepared to release him from his obligations in respect of the Royal Oak shop, but they would be prepared to release him from his leases of all the shops he had.97

The Corporation took legal action and by March 1939 Levy was forced to sign a deed guaranteeing the provision of a chemist and agreed to pay two guineas to cover the Corporation’s legal costs.98 The Corporation’s actions and position spoke both of their confidence and the rigidity of the calculations of what each area should have. The dispute had not arisen over tardy rent payments but over the lack of a chemist in a specified area. Levy’s warning was not an isolated case, though few were threatened with such drastic sanctions and a more common point of dispute stemmed from the rigidity of the corporations in refusing to expand or alter what shops might sell. In 1942, for example, when the Co-operative Society based at Wythenshawe’s Brownley Green applied to for extra premises to deal with ‘upwards of 1,500’ family registrations for rationed commodities they were refused, instead splitting their business between two sites rather than embark on the likely fruitless process of applying for a new licence.99 Shops were allocated based on what each area ‘needed’ in terms of basic provisions and on whether another shop already sold similar items, and it was on similar principles that the shopping facilities were programmed for the new neighbourhoods after the war. Shops were no more than a set distance, usually a third of a mile, from any house in the neighbourhood and the number and types of shops were be defined by carefully calculated estimates of the projected intake of foods and consumables each household needed.100 Yet, it is this idea of ‘need’ that would prove such a problem for the planners and corporations; indeed, it is perhaps the most glaring weakness of the neighbourhood plans. As Hilton has shown, throughout the 1940s the ‘consuming desires’, not just the needs, of inhabitants – even those in the lower classes – had to be taken seriously by planners and policy-makers.101 Moreover, the consumption strategies of women – and it was overwhelmingly women who undertook the chore of shopping – even during the war were far more complex and unpredictable than any government might have been able

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to plan for. Shoppers proved willing to travel longer distances to satisfy perceptions about quality, for the convenience of certain shops or simply for a better price.102 Neighbourhood plans were thus founded on the questionable notion that planners could stabilise this diverse and often volatile set of actions through the arrangement of amenities. The problems caused by the unforeseen variations in the preferences and habits of shoppers can be seen in the way disputes over what shops should or should not sell were being framed. In February 1944  the Wythenshawe Estate Special Committee (WESC) decided to take action over a post office in the Northenden area which had, contrary to its lease, been selling items of stationery. The Corporation insisted that the same items were available only two doors away and no extension to the existing licence was needed. In response, the shopkeeper, a Mr Perry, insisted that his customers should have the right to buy their stationery in one location. Central to his argument was that non-Corporation tenants nearby ‘enjoy the privilege of being able to obtain their stationary [sic] requirements in full’, whilst the Corporation’s own tenants were accorded no such freedom. Mr Perry was able to muster several letters of support and get over a thousand customers to sign a petition in support of varying his licence.103 He asserted that: ‘it is the duty of the Wythenshawe Committee to serve the public of Wythenshawe, not to rule them … They require more facilities and less restrictions [original emphasis]’.104 However, the Corporation remained unmoved. Small though it may seem, this dispute reveals how the tactics of consumers and small retailers alike could begin to challenge the sociospatial schema of the neighbourhood. Perry’s appeals to the Corporation implied that his customers were making informed decisions about where they shopped and for what, showing a preference for convenience that echoed the burgeoning consumer cultures of the inter-war period.105 The issue for the Corporation remained that the developing habits of the shopper challenged the spatial rigidity of the need-based calculations that governed the spatial models of interaction that informed the designs. One central flaw of these plans was that distance is rarely the only factor that influences where people shop. Perry’s attempts to provide a greater variety of products in one place were tempting customers to consider patterns of movement and shopping that went beyond considerations of distance where shops offered a more convenient experience within one location.106 By attracting customers to new forms of retail, retailers could contest the boundaries of urban forms like towns, neighbourhoods and cities.107 Perry’s attempts to sell items for which he was not licensed did just this: he disrupted careful plans about what individuals needed and in doing so raised greater concerns about the

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potential of retailers and shoppers’ preferences to disrupt the mechanisms of community formation. Perry’s difficulties are indicative of a wider debate that was taking place between retailers and planners about the suitability of rigid, spatially deterministic, need-based housing designs in a rapidly changing retail environment. In a 1944 booklet named The Planning of Shopping Areas the Retailers’ Advisory Committee on Town Planning (RACTP) – an informal organisation comprising chambers of trade, co-operative societies and other industry bodies brought together by the MoT&CP – questioned the calculations at the heart of neighbourhood planning. They argued that it was ‘not possible to estimate precisely the shopping needs of a particular community, still less forecast how they are likely to change in future years’, advising that ‘the planner must therefore avoid committing himself irrevocably to rigid assumptions on the subject’.108 In November 1950, for example, the Corporation rebuffed an application from the influential Manchester & Salford Co-operative Society – in 1950 they provided 11% of the shops on the Wythenshawe estate – because there was ‘no question’ of alteration in the size or design of the shops ‘to meet the special needs of the Co-operative society’.109 Little came of the dispute in the short term, but the Corporation’s inflexibility and over-confidence in their own power was beginning to form an increasing feature of interactions with ever more confident retailers. Organisations like the Co-operative, as well as large chain stores, were attempting to impart their vision of how shopping and consumerism functioned in a very material, spatial sense, which often left them at loggerheads with corporations. In 1954, with ‘a considerable number of dwellings completed and occupied on the Longhill estate, and many others in the course of construction’, the Housing Committee were anxious to proceed with the building of this main shopping centre as soon as possible. Yet their attempts to find tenants were met with little enthusiasm.110 Manchester Corporation had noted that both applications and the return on rents had begun to decline in the post-war period. In Hull a similar process seems to have been at work.111 Hull Corporation offered a site on the unbuilt shopping centre to Woolworth’s, but the retailer would ‘not contemplate being represented in a shopping centre with only ten other lock-up shops as an attraction’. This was not the only instance where Woolworth’s felt the Corporation’s plans did not fit with their model of retail either: on the Bilton Grange estate, despite there being more than 20 shops, Woolworth’s once again stated that too few shops had been provided to suit their needs.112 Woolworth’s also suggested that the design of the units available was not suitable for the type of store they required, going so far as to include photographs of

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how they felt Woolworth’s frontages should look. Apparently unaware of the irony, they added: We do not, of course, wish to dictate to you how to provide for the shopping needs of your Estate, but it is interesting to note that in a Nottingham suburb where we are going to be represented, the Corporation have based the number of shops on one per two hundred persons …113

The 1944 advice from the RACTP had anticipated such an issue, suggesting that shopping centres needed to be a sufficient size and preferably on a street so that people might enjoy the activity of shopping, rather than it merely being a functional task.114 Woolworth’s, as a leading variety chain retailer (large self-service shops where consumers could browse a large selection of goods without pressure), framed shopping as a semileisure activity, not merely as a need-driven chore.115 Allocating fewer than half the number of shops suggested by the RACTP left Hull struggling to provide the numbers and types of shop they had originally planned across multiple sites.116 In November 1958 two shops opened on the Longhill estate, providing only a fifth of the retail outlets envisioned in the original plans for that site.117 Yet, it was not corporation tardiness nor lack of building materials that had left the estate without facilities; rather, it was the intersection of competing definitions of how and what retail was for: the meeting of the spatial politics of necessity with the expanding realm of consumerism. Up until 1954 food control legislation and prohibitive construction policies had largely prevented any significant developments in the areas of everyday grocery retail that would come to be dominated by supermarkets.118 Yet, it is apparent from the evidence here that, even during the period of rationing, consumer behaviours and an active antipathy from the retail trade towards the plans for post-war estates were already beginning to undermine the model of shopping proposed by planners. The planners’ modern vision of the city proposed a model that spatialised shopping for need, but retail capitalists contested that space by exploiting the growing power of the working-class consumer to choose where and how they purchased goods. In 1939 half of grocery retail in Britain was already provided by large-scale retailers, and this proportion would continue to expand ­throughout the post-war period.119 The Co-operative and Woolworth’s are two such retailers who demonstrate the growing power significant market share granted them against the corporations. Their experiences signal the learning of harsh lessons about the limits of state intervention in an increasingly consumerist retail sector. Just as inter-war chain retailers pursued aggressive spatial strategies to obtain the most advantageous

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locations to attract custom and challenge smaller retailers, by rejecting the opportunity to set up a shop Woolworth’s marked an important shift in the power of local government to influence how retail was planned.120 This was a watershed in defining the limits of governmental power and influence that would have important implications in the 1960s and beyond. By 1956 Hull Corporation had sought tenders from private developers to bolster the Longhill estate’s provision of shops, but even here only three responses were received and only two shops built.121 Yet, the increasing reliance on private capital points to a growing acceptance that the local state simply could not compete as a commercial actor on a par with retailers and developers. It was too rigid, too slow to act, unable to allow failure and, crucially, had to subordinate market forces to its moral responsibilities to its citizens. As Manchester Corporation stressed five years earlier, it was almost impossible to get individual retailers to build single shops and the aims of private developers who might undertake to build whole shopping precincts were almost always at odds with the social goals encapsulated in the neighbourhoods. They concluded that because developers would let to the highest bidders, not those who would ‘give the most efficient service’ the likely outcome would be to the detriment of the inhabitants and be against ‘sound estate development and management’.122 Alistair Kefford has shown that attempts by local governments in the 1960s and 1970s to balance these responsibilities against cultures of increasingly affluent consumerism through organised combinations of state and private sector led to similar problems in the development of shopping centres on social housing projects.123 By the 1980s the power of retailers to dictate where consumption occurred often meant essential items, particularly food, were no longer available within short distances of social housing projects, but this was merely the final symptom of the decline of local state intervention in retail space that had begun in the 1930s.124

Conclusion The post-war period was characterised by both the pressure to build houses swiftly and to comprehensively and holistically plan future cities. Consequently, local corporations were faced with the challenge of presenting a new, modern, highly planned approach to housing, when in reality many of their housing schemes in the post-war period were remarkably similar to those from before the war. The presentation of housing estates in the Plans sought to communicate a fantasy of

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modernity and newness to citizens through the use of maps, drawings and the judicious juxtaposition of photographs. The fantasy of progress the Plans presented was in some respects unrealisable, but at the same time it was profoundly useful during a period where the right to plan the city was being contested by different groups, and also in communicating progress to citizens who expected both speedy provision of houses and new approaches to planning residential spaces. Despite the conclusions of historians and the claims of post-war planners, the neighbourhood unit principle had been in use before the war and the version that appeared in 1944 had significant differences in design and spirit to Clarence Perry’s 1929 study. Anxieties over atomistic dormitory suburbs, working-class association and the loss of a mythologised, English village atmosphere were all expressed in the vision of the neighbourhood unit produced at the end of the war. This vision displayed a rather confused and fractured notion of modernity that looked back to a never-existent community past and attempted to recreate this through modern techniques of spatial control. Like the attempts to control advertisements on gable ends or to reduce smoke and noise discussed in chapter 2, the totalising scheme to control experience and shape behaviours is a marker of the confidence local planners and corporations had in the post-war period. This was the high point of the faith in space as a determinant of behaviour and the belief in the planners who promoted it that characterised this deeply practical, technocratic and distinctly municipal moment of urban modernism. It was also a short-lived moment: in the plans that sought to isolate neighbourhoods from the city and advanced a villagised notion of suburban life were the seeds of their own failure. This inward-facing community was to be created through a series of mechanisms that sought to make inevitable friendliness, sociability and general neighbourliness. These methods included the isolation of the neighbourhood by main roads and the provision of central amenities to encourage face-to-face interaction, a process in which the central location of the shops was key. This model of face-to-face interaction was spatially underpinned by rather limited and rigid notions of movement and shopping habits, which in the post-war period proved unsustainable, if they ever had been at all. The tactics of shoppers proved far more complex than either the models of movement or the notions of necessity that planners had based their neighbourhood designs upon.125 Although cars, refrigerators and supermarkets had yet to emerge in significant enough numbers to drastically change shopping habits, the 1940s and early 1950s demonstrate a more active, growing working-class consumerism than was allowed for in estate designs.

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In addition, retailers, whether large or small, sensed long before it became apparent to the corporations that the rigidly planned shopping centres of the new estates did not match up to the consuming behaviours and desires of inhabitants. Nor did the locations and layout of the shopping centres encourage the types of shopping and shopper that they imagined. Retailers actively disrupted the spatial strategies of the corporations by refusing to take up offers to be represented in the new shopping centres, leaving inhabitants without amenities and corporations unable to exert the type of control they had been used to. There were many reasons why the neighbourhood unit did not function in the way planners had imagined, and even if all the shops and facilities that had been planned had been provided it is likely that planners had vastly overestimated the efficacy of their designs in producing community.  Focusing on the binary of success and failure, though, would be to miss the importance of the process at work. Instead, the chapter has illustrated the role the choices and desires of both ordinary inhabitants and retailers played in eroding the confidence in one of the key tenets of urban modernism. In challenging the effectiveness of spatial schemes to produce knowable outcomes, they challenged the spatially deterministic basis on which schemes to make the city more functional had been based. This was the first of a series of setbacks that would have important implications for how the local state saw its involvement in the production of retail space. It was also an early symptom of the ideas examined in the final chapter of this book: the discourse of failure and the decline of the reputation of social housing projects.

Notes 1 For discussion of how suburban conflict can influence wider political movements and issues, albeit in an American context, see: Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue (eds), The New Suburban History (Chicago, 2006). 2 Ministry of Health (MoH), Design of Dwellings (London, 1944); Ministry of Health/Ministry of Works (MoH/MoW), Housing Manual 1944 (London, 1944), p. 1. See also: Mark Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns: Social Change and Urban Dispersal in Post-war England (Manchester, 1998). On its popularity in general, see: Peter Collison, ‘Town planning and the neighbourhood unit concept’, Public Administration, 32:4 (1954), 463–69; a study by the University of Birmingham in 1951 that showed that 19.2% of county and borough planners in England and Wales were using the neighbourhood principle in all of their designs, whilst 59.6% were using it in some. For the popularity in new towns, see: Andrew Homer, ‘Creating new

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c­ ommunities: the role of the neighbourhood unit in post-war British planning’, Contemporary British History, 14:1 (2000), 63–80. 3 National Council of Social Services (NCSS), The Size and Social Structure of a Town (London, 1943), pp. 8–9. 4 Donald Leslie Johnson, ‘Origin of the neighbourhood unit’, Planning Perspectives, 17:3 (2002), 227–45; Dennis Keating and Norman Krumholz, ‘Neighborhood planning’, Journal of Planning Education and Research, 20:1 (2000), 111–14; Larry Lloyd Lawhon, ‘The neighborhood unit: physical design or physical determinism?’, Journal of Planning History, 8:2 (2009), 111–32. 5 On the use of fantasy in planning, see discussion in chapter 1. 6 For descriptions of ‘Deep England’ and its importance, see: Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London, 1992), pp. 180–209. 7 Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, pp. 175–86; Norman Dennis, ‘The popularity of the neighbourhood community idea’, in R.E. Pahl (ed.), Readings in Urban Sociology (Oxford, 1968), pp. 74–92 (pp. 84–5); Ruth Glass, The Social Background of a Plan: A Study of Middlesbrough (London, 1948), pp.  17–19; Peter H. Mann, ‘The concept of neighborliness’, American Journal of Sociology, 60:2 (1954), 163–8; John M. Mogey, Family and Neighbourhood: Two Studies of Oxford (Oxford, 1956). For discussion of the preference for home-centred leisure pursuits, see: Judy Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900–50 (Basingstoke, 1995); Claire Langhamer, ‘The meanings of home in postwar Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History, 40:2 (2005), 341–62. 8 Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs; Homer, ‘Creating new communities’; Douglas Robertson, Ian McIntosh and James Smyth, ‘Neighbourhood identity: the path dependency of class and place’, Housing, Theory and Society, 27:3 (2010), 258–73. 9 See, for example: John Benson, The Rise of Consumer Society in Britain, 1880–1980 (London, 1994); Matthew Hilton, Consumerism in Twentiethcentury Britain: The Search for a Historical Movement (Cambridge, 2003); Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption, 1939–1955 (Oxford, 2000). 10 For discussion of how citizenship was reshaped in the post-war period to reflect the sacrifices of the working classes during the ‘People’s War’, see: Sonia O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain (Oxford, 2004). 11 Our Blitz. The Daily Dispatch and Evening Chronicle Record in Story and Picture of the German Bombing Attacks on the Greater Manchester Area (Manchester, 1990), p. 65. 12 Edwin Lutyens and Patrick Abercrombie, A Plan for the City and County of Kingston upon Hull (Hull, 1945), p. v. 13 Greater Manchester County Record Office (GMCRO)/GB127/Council Minutes (CM)/Post-war Reconstruction Committee (PRC), Joint meeting between Manchester, Salford and Stretford Councils, 25 September 1944; National Archives, Kew (NA)/Housing and Local Government (HLG)/79/256, Report of

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the Special Sub-committee of the Housing and Town Planning Committee to consider post-war housing, May 1943, p. 2. 14 John R. Short, Housing in Britain: The Post-war Experience (London, 1982), p. 156. 15 Peter Malpass and Alan Murie, Housing Policy and Practice (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 66–9, in which they argue that the war gave the working classes a temporary political advantage to demand housing. See also: Steven Fielding, ‘What did the people want? The meaning of the 1945 general election’, Historical Journal, 35 (1992), 623–39 (625); Anne Power, Property before People: The Management of Twentieth Century Council Housing (London, 1987), pp. 40–2. 16 Charlotte Wildman, Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918–1939 (London, 2016). 17 Becky Conekin, ‘“Here is the modern world itself”: the festival of Britain’s representations of the future’, in Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters (eds), Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–1964 (London, 1999), pp. 228–46 (p. 245). 18 Power, Property before People, pp. 40–1. 19 For discussion of the severe shortages in materials and labour in the immediate post-war years, see: Catherine Flinn, ‘“The city of our dreams?” The political and economic realities of rebuilding Britain’s blitzed cities, 1945–54’, Twentieth Century British History, 23:2 (2012), 221–45. For the housing figures quoted here, see: Office of Government Statistics, ‘House Building Completions: Social Trends 32’ (online source): www.statistics.gov.uk/StatBase/ssdataset.asp?vlnk=5 118&Pos=2&ColRank=2&Rank=448, accessed 14 January 2016; The Scottish Office, ‘Investing in modernisation: an agenda for Scotland’s housing’ (online source): www.scotland.gov.uk/library/documents-w7/hgp-04.html, accessed 12 January 2016; Arthur Peter Beck, ‘Housing in England and Wales during the business depression of the 1930s’, Economic History Review, 3:3 (1951), 321–41; A.H. Halsey (ed.), Trends in British Society since 1900 (London, 1972), table 10.24, quoted in: Colin G. Pooley and Sandra Irish, ‘Access to housing on Merseyside, 1919–39’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, 12:2 (1987), 177–90 (179); Anne Power, Hovels to High Rise: State Housing in Europe since 1850 (London, 1993), p. 188. 20 For details of corporation construction and ownership, see: Malpass and Murie, Housing Policy; Short, Housing in Britain. 21 Alice Coleman, Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing (London, 1985), p. 6. For other examples that depict post-war housing policy as an expression of utopianism, see: Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (New Haven, CT, 1994), pp. 96–7; Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture: The History of a Social Experiment (London, 2001), p. 104. 22 Nicholas Bullock, ‘Plans for post-war housing in the UK: the case for mixed development and the flat’, Planning Perspectives, 2:1 (1987), 71–98; Patrick Dunleavy, The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain (Oxford, 1981), pp. 37–55.

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23 Ministry of Education, Community Centres (London, 1944); MoH, Design of Dwellings (London 1944); MoH/MoW, Housing Manual 1944. 24 GMCRO/GB127/CM/Housing Committee (HC), Dudley Report: Comparative Statement, 11 September 1944, vol. 26, pp. 55–6. 25 GMCRO/GB127/CM/Wythenshawe Estate Special Committee (WESC), Building at Wythenshawe, 21 April 1939, vol. 6, p. 144. 26 GMCRO/GB127/CM/HC, Ancoats Clearance Area File (1652), 1930–43; GMCRO/GB127/M723/26; Meeting minutes, 20 July – 14 August 1939, vol. 23, p. 1–10. 27 Under MoH circular 1,866 dated 8 September 1939, the Ministry had instructed all local councils to cease slum clearance operations. In practice councils made decisions between finishing and suspending projects and there is evidence that schemes continued as late as October 1940. See: GMCRO/ GB127/CM/HC, Assorted minutes, 11 September 1939 – 9 October 1940, vol. 23, pp. 40–1, 54, 86–90, 104 & 223; 9 July 1943, vol. 25, p. 89; 10 August 1944, vol. 26, p. 24. 28 GMCRO/GB127/CM/HC, Meeting minutes, 2 July 1945, vol. 27, pp. 30–3. 29 Hull History Centre (HHC)/CTCR/1.14.5, Meeting minutes, 12 October 1945, p. 14; NA/HLG/79/256, Ministry of Town and Country Planning Advisory Panel on the Redevelopment of City Centres, 19 October 1943, p. 2, and the report of the Special Sub-committee of the Housing and Town Planning Committee to consider post-war housing, May 1943, p. 2. 30 Reports from the City Architect’s department show that there were pre-war schemes underway for slum clearance and rebuilding at Bilton Grange, Nornabell Street and Endike Lane, amongst others, which were continued after the war in the same places. HHC/CTCR/1.8.9, Reports 3, 4 & 56, 11 November 1938 – 14 April 1939; David Neave and Susan Neave, Hull (London, 2012), p. 26, and HHC/CTAH/5/M/22, Hull City Architect’s drawings for the Porter St Flats built between 1938 and 1946. 31 Rowland Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan (Norwich, 1945). 32 Frank Mort, ‘Fantasies of metropolitan life: planning London in the 1940s’, Journal of British Studies, 43:1 (2004), 120–51 (124). 33 Derick Deakin, Wythenshawe: The Story of a Garden City (Chichester, 1989). 34 GMCRO/CM/ PRC, Report of the Committee on Housing Problems, 13 July 1943, p. 51. 35 The nature of the differences is discussed later in this chapter, but the primary difference was the relocation of shops from the main road junctions that surrounded each neighbourhood to their centres. For details on shop location in Parker’s design, see: Wesley Dougill, ‘Wythenshawe: a modern satellite town’, Town Planning Review, 16:3 (1935), 209–15. 36 The files of the WESC contain many complaints over poor or slow provision of facilities. These are from residents’ groups and continue from the 1930s throughout the post-war period. See later in the chapter for examples from GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, 15 September 1939 – 1 September 1950, vols 7–12.

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37 ‘The New Manchester’, Manchester Guardian (MG), 6 January 1944, p. 2. 38 GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, 5 and 24 April 1945, vol. 9, p. 82. Harry Lloyd led the Wythenshawe Community Council and Wythenshawe Federal Council, organisations that aimed to unite the agendas of the different community centres in Wythenshawe. See: Raymond T. Clarke (ed.), Enterprising Neighbours: The Development of the Community Association Movement in Britain (London, 1990); M.P. Hall, Community Centres and Associations in Manchester: A Survey Made in 1945 by the Manchester and Salford Council of Social Service (Manchester, 1946). 39 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. 145. 40 Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, pp. 1–8 41 Ruth Glass and L.E. White, ‘A warning to planners: the story of the Honor Oak estate’, National House Builder and the Building Digest, September (1945), 25–9; Thomas Sharp, Town Planning (New York, 1940); Marianne Walter, ‘The housing estate: a warning’, Contemporary Review, May (1945), 285–90. 42 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. 151. 43 Dougill, ‘Wythenshawe’, 209. For details on Dougill, see his obituary in Town Planning Review, 19: 3 (1943), 5–6. 44 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. 145. 45 See, for example: Bullock, ‘Post-war housing’, 94. 46 See chapter 1 for a detailed discussion of how mapping practices were used in the Plans to communicate the expert nature of the ideas contained within. 47 Chris Perkins and Martin Dodge, ‘Mapping the imagined future: the roles of visual representation in the 1945 city of Manchester plan’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 89:1 (2012), 247–76. 48 Rankine made huge models of the new estates; see: HHC/CTAH/5/M/31. 49 As discussed in chapter 1, the notion of the usefulness of fantasy owes much to Mort, ‘Fantasies’. 50 Dougill, ‘Wythenshawe’, 209; Andrzej Olechnowicz, Working-class Housing in England between the Wars (Oxford, 1997), p. 6. For more on Becontree, see: Terence Young, Becontree and Dagenham: A Report Made for the Pilgrim Trust (Becontree, 1934). 51 Neave and Neave, Hull, p. 26. 52 Nicholas Bullock, Building the Post-war World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain (London, 2002), pp. 161 & 164. 53 Becky Conekin has commented that British modernity in the post-war period trod a difficult line between progressive modernism and backward-looking traditionalism. Conekin, ‘Britain’s representations’, in Conekin, Mort and Waters (eds), Moments of Modernity, pp. 228–46 (p. 245). 54 Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, pp. 29 & 38–9; Anthony Goss, ‘Neighbourhood units in British new towns’, Town Planning Review, 32:1 (1961), 66–82. 55 Nicholas Patricios, ‘The neighborhood concept: a retrospective of physical design and social interaction’, Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, 19:1 (2002), 70–90.

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56 Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003); Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-century London (London, 2000). 57 Ben Anderson, ‘A liberal countryside? The Manchester Ramblers’ Federation and the “social readjustment” of urban citizens, 1929–1936’, Urban History, 38:1 (2011), 84–102; Simon Gunn, ‘The Buchanan Report, environment and the problem of traffic in 1960s Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 22:4 (2011), 521–42; Mort, ‘Fantasies’; Chris Otter, ‘Making liberalism durable: vision and civility in the late Victorian city’, Social History, 27:1 (2002), 1–15. 58 Homer, ‘Creating new communities’, 64; Terence Lee, ‘Urban neighbourhood as a socio-spatial schema’, Human Relations, 21:3 (1968), 241–67 (243). 59 Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (Eastbourne, 1985 [1898]); Clarence Arthur Perry, The Neighbourhood Unit (London, 1998 [1929]); Raymond Unwin, Town Planning in Practice: An Introduction to the Art of Designing Cities and Suburbs (Princeton, 1996 [1909]). Perry is often cited as the originator of the concept of specific neighbourhood unit approaches to estate planning and it is true that he did the most to popularise the idea, but work by Johnson has suggested that William E. Drummond, part of Chicago’s reformist and progressive milieu, originated neighbourhood planning theory and terminology, which was exhibited and published during the years 1913– 22; see: Johnson, ‘Neighbourhood unit’. 60 Lee, ‘Urban neighbourhood’, 243; Perry, Neighbourhood Unit. 61 NCSS, Size and Social Structure, p. 7. 62 Patrick Abercrombie and John Henry Forshaw, County of London Plan (London, 1943); Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, p. 29; Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. 145. 63 Brad Beaven and John Griffiths, ‘Creating the exemplary citizen: the changing notion of citizenship in Britain 1870–1939’, Contemporary British History, 22:2 (2008), 203–25 (205). For evidence of pervasive anxieties over the potential of the working classes to cause political turmoil, see: Tami Davis Biddle, ‘British and American approaches to strategic bombing: their origins and implementation in the World War II combined bomber offensive’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 18:1 (1995), 91–144 (96); Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Harmondsworth, 1984), p. 290. 64 Olechnowicz, Working-class Housing. 65 Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, pp. 1–8 identifies George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (London, 1971 [1938]), p. 258 and John Betjeman, ‘Slough’, in Continual Dew: A Little Book of Bourgeois Verse (London, 1977 [1937]) as examples of a pervasive anti-suburban sentiment in British writing during the inter-war period. 66 MoH/MoW, Housing Manual 1944, p. 11; MoH, Design of Dwellings, p. 8. 67 Lewis Silkin, ‘Housing layout in theory and practice’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 55:10 (1948), 431–2.

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68 NCSS, Size and Social Structure, p. 3. 69 Anthony P. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (Chichester, 1985), p. 11. 70 Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, p. 55. 71 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. 135. 72 HHC/CTCR/1.12.5, Report 17, 1 May 1944; Lutyens and Abercrombie, Kingston upon Hull, Plate IX. 73 Perry, Neighbourhood Unit, p. 27. 74 Ronald Frankenberg, Communities in Britain. Social Life in Town and Country (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 197; Peter Willmott, ‘Social research and new communities’, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 33:6 (1967), 387–98 (390). 75 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. 135. 76 Calder, Myth of the Blitz, pp. 180–209; Howard Newby, The Deferential Worker: A Study of Farm Workers in East Anglia (London, 1977), p. 95. 77 Ferdinand Tönnies, Tönnies: Community and Civil Society, José Harris (ed.), trans. Margaret Hollis (Cambridge, 2001). 78 Donald L. Foley, ‘British town planning: one ideology or three?’, British Journal of Sociology, 11:3 (1960), 211–31 (223). 79 Nicholas, City-of-Manchester-Plan, p. 135. 80 Dougill, ‘Wythenshawe’, 212; Perry, Neighbourhood Unit. 81 HHC/CTCR/1.12.5, Report-17, 1-May-1944; HHC/CTAH/2/Box-2020, File24, undated-but-c.-April-1945. 82 See: Nicholas, City-of-Manchester-Plan, Plate 52. 83 For a general critique of the assumptions behind the neighbourhood unit, see: Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers (New York, 1962); Jon Lang, Creating Architectural Theory: The Role of the Behavioural Sciences in Environmental Design (New York, 1987), p. 101; Christopher Silver, ‘Neighborhood planning in historical perspective’, Journal of the American Planning Association, 51:2 (1985), 161–74. 84 Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, pp. 156–95 (see chapter 4 for discussion of community centres). 85 Willmott, ‘Social research’, 390; Peter Willmott, ‘Housing density and town design in a new town’, Town Planning Review, 33:2 (1962), 115–27. 86 Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs; Frankenberg, Communities in Britain, pp. 233–4; Glass, Social Background, pp. 17–19; Homer, ‘Creating new communities’, 77–8; Mogey, Family and Neighbourhood; Olechnowicz, Workingclass Housing; Peter Willmott, Community Initiatives: Patterns and Prospects (London, 1989), pp. 85–9. 87 Murray Stewart, The City: The Problems of Planning (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 32. 88 Hilton, Consumerism. See also: Benson, Rise of Consumer Society, who argues  that it is difficult to know exactly when Britain became a consumer society. 89 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford, 1993).

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90 GMCRO/CM/WESC, Wythenshawe Estate Shops, 25 September 1939, vol. 6, p. 264. 91 GMCRO/CM/WESC, Wythenshawe Estate – Shopping Facilities, 17 July 1941, vol. 7, p. 19. 92 GMCRO/CM/WESC, Wythenshawe Estate – Shops, 20 February 1946, vol. 9, p. 366. 93 HHC/CTAH/2/Box 2187/File 64, Proposed provision of blocks of shops, 8 August 1949. 94 HHC/CTAH/2/Box 2187/File 64, Various correspondence, 8–19 August 1949. 95 GMCRO/CM/WESC, Permanent shops, 1 December 1950, vol. 13, p. 175. 96 On the White Moss estate in Blackley, North Manchester, new butchers and grocers’ shops were allocated in 1947. Complaints were received from a number of existing owners and their solicitors who protested the decision to provide additional butchery and grocery facilities in what they believed  was  an already ‘saturated’ market, whilst 15 applications were received to fill  two shops. GMCRO/CM/HC, Various correspondence, 30 July 1947 – 7 November 1947, vol. 29, pp. 25–9. This pattern was repeated throughout the 1930s and 1940s; see: GMCRO/CM/HC, vols 25–30 for multiple examples. 97 GMCRO/CM/WESC, Various correspondence, 6 October 1938 – 22 March 1939, vol. 6, pp. 26–118. 98 GMCRO/CM/WESC, J. Levy – Chemist’s Shop Baguley, 22 March 1939, vol. 6, p. 118. 99 GMCRO/CM/WESC, Various correspondence, 24 February 1942 – July 1942, vol. 8, pp. 7–45. 100 Rowland Nicholas, The Manchester and District Regional Planning Committee: Report on the Tentative Regional Planning Proposals (Norwich, 1945), pp. 44–6; GMCRO/CM/WESC, Shopping facilities, 25 November 1946, vol. 10, p. 102; HHC/CTAH/2/Box 2187/File 64, Proposed provision of blocks of shops, 8 August 1949. 101 Hilton, Consumerism, p. 137. 102 Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain. 103 GMCRO/CM/WESC, J.W. Perry, 112 Sale Rd, Northenden, 19 December 1944, vol. 8, p. 424. 104 GMCRO/CM/WESC, Letter from J.W. Perry, 20 March 1945, vol. 9, pp. 54–5. 105 Matt Houlbrook, ‘The man with the powder puff in interwar London’, Historical Journal, 50:1 (2007), 145–71; Selina Todd, ‘Poverty and aspiration: young women’s entry to employment in inter-war England’, Twentieth Century British History, 15:2 (2004), 119–42; Wildman, Urban Redevelopment, pp. 131–8. 106 William Clark and Gerard Rushton, ‘Models of intra-urban consumer behaviour and their implications for central place theory’, Economic Geography, 46:3 (1970), 486–97; R.A. Day, ‘Consumer shopping behaviour in a planned urban environment’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 64:2 (1973), 77–85.

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107 Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York, 1991); Michelle S. Lowe, ‘Britain’s regional shopping centres: new urban forms?’, Urban Studies, 37:2 (2000), 261–74. 108 Retailers’ Advisory Committee on Town Planning (RACTP), The Planning of Shopping Areas: Setting out the Principles which should be Followed in Planning Shopping Areas (London, 1944), p. 4. 109 GMCRO/CM/WESC, Wythenshawe – Newall Green neighbourhood shop trades, 3 November 1950, vol. 13, pp. 86–9. 110 HHC/CTAH 2/Box 2173/File 100, Longhill Estate shopping centre, 30 December 1954. 111 GMCRO/CM/WESC, Permanent shops, 1 December 1950, vol. 13, p. 175. 112 HHC/CTAH 2/Box 2173/File 100, Letter to Hull City Architect from F.W. Woolworth and Co. Limited, 9 February 1955. 113 HHC/CTAH/2/Box 2173/File 100, Letter to Hull City Architect from F.W. Woolworth and Co. Limited, 9 February 1955. 114 RACTP, Planning of Shopping Areas. 115 James B. Jefferys, Retail Trading in Britain 1850–1950 (Cambridge, 1954), pp.  69–70. For an overview of the expansion of shopping as a leisure activity, see: Peter Newby, ‘Shopping as leisure’, in Rosemary Bromley and Colin  Thomas (eds), Retail Change: Contemporary Issues (London: 1993), pp.  208–28. 116 See various correspondence, in which the numbers of shops originally planned are continually reduced, various documents: HHC/CTAH/2/Box 2173/File 100, c.1954–58. 117 HHC/CTAH/2/Box 2173/File 100, Longhill Estate main shopping centre, 15 November 1958. 118 Gareth Shaw, Louise Curth and Andrew Alexander, ‘Selling self-service and the supermarket: the Americanisation of food retailing in Britain, 1945–60’, Business History, 46:4 (2004), 568–82. 119 Jefferys, Retail Trading. 120 Andrew Alexander, ‘Retailing and consumption: evidence from war time Britain’, International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research, 12:1 (2002), 39–57 (45); Risto Laulajainen and Lars-Erik Gadde, ‘Locational avoidance: a case study of three Swedish retail chains’, Regional Studies, 20:2 (1986), 131–40. 121 HHC/CTAH/2/Box 2173/File 100, Longhill Estate main shopping centre, 21 September 1956. 122 GMCRO/CM/WESC, Erection of shops and flats, 22 January 1951, vol. 13, p. 228. 123 Alistair Kefford, ‘Planning for affluence: consumption and citizenship on the Seacroft estate, Leeds’, paper given at Centre for Urban History conference, ‘The Transformation of Urban Britain since 1945’, University of Leicester, July 2013. See also: Neil Wrigley, Cliff Guy and Michelle Lowe, ‘Urban regeneration, social inclusion and large store development: the Seacroft development in context’, Urban Studies, 39:11 (2002), 2101–14.

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124 Rosemary Bromley and Colin Thomas, ‘The impact of out-of-centre retailing’, in Rosemary Bromley and Colin Thomas (eds), Retail Change: Contemporary Issues (London, 1993), pp. 126–50; Cliff Guy, ‘Corporate strategies in food retailing and their local impacts: a case study of Cardiff’, Environment and Planning A, 28:9 (1996), 1575–602. 125 Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Rationing austerity and the Conservative Party recovery after 1945’, Historical Journal, 37:1 (1994), 173–97.

4 The spaces of everyday life

In August 1946 Manchester Corporation concluded that, despite a series of measures taken over the previous decade, they could not prevent the damage caused by the inhabitants of the Wythenshawe estate walking on the grass verges that lined Princess Parkway.1 Although prickly bushes had been planted to deter pedestrians in 1937, the Corporation admitted that there was little further action they could take that would not defeat the aesthetic benefits they believed accrued from the landscaping of the roadside.2 The incident, one of many similar occurrences involving supposed misuse of green spaces, illustrates how, despite the ability to materially produce spaces, the socio-spatial objectives corporations across Britain pursued could be contested, subverted and undermined by the mundane, everyday actions of inhabitants. This example is just one of the clashes between local government and inhabitants on the housing estates of Manchester and Hull studied in this final chapter that show how the practices of everyday life could subvert and challenge the spatial practices of urban governance. Shedding light on the lived experience and agency of the inhabitants of mid-twentieth-century social housing, this final chapter continues where chapter 3 left off to demonstrate how the project of urban modernism and the ambitions of planners were challenged at street level by the very ordinary, quotidian habits of the very people for whom the estates were designed. As I showed in chapter 3, expectations about how certain spaces should function, what it was appropriate to do in them and the beneficial outcomes they were supposed to produce meant mapping certain expectations about how societies and individuals interacted onto spaces like housing estates. At their heart, housing estates were attempts to solve problems of squalor, disease and overcrowding in order to make lives happier and the experiences of inhabitants more pleasant. Yet, the perceptions that corporations and planners held about how space should function were often also attempts to find solutions to less tangible societal issues. Spatial designs were thus encoded with governmental

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anxieties and agendas over working-class association, concerns about suburban anomie and a growing disquiet about youth and delinquency. Examination of how planners and inhabitants conceived of and used a number of features found in the mid-twentieth-century housing estates of Hull and Manchester – namely public and semi-private green spaces and community centres – further demonstrates the ways that merely going about the business of everyday life further challenged the plans for estates discussed in chapter 2. Debates about social housing in the last 30 years or so have tended to fix attention on the reputed ‘failure’ of social housing, focusing on the origins of social problems and examining the provision of social housing from two related perspectives. On one hand, town planning and architectural historians have suggested that planners overestimated the potential social benefits of their designs, creating spaces with ambiguous purposes that lacked appropriate facilities and failed to reflect the realities of what tenants wanted in homes or neighbourhoods.3 In contrast, sociological approaches, whilst acknowledging the design issues of estates, have added that governmental neglect, lack of investment and unfavourable media presentation created a discourse of failure, marginalising social housing in the popular perception.4 Evaluations of the success or failure of housing estates tend to limit the agency of the inhabitants by homogenising their responses to the environment, restricting the opportunities to understand lived experience and inhabitants’ contributions to shaping their surroundings. In other words, what we are left with is a picture of housing estates that all too often portrays inhabitants as unwitting, powerless victims; valorises them in a heroic struggle; or else demonises them as the sole architects of their own demise. The final, rather hyperbolic narrative tends to be restricted to ideologues and rabble-rousing politicians, but representing the agency of people in shaping their environment continues to pose a problem for historians. For example, Andrzej Olechnowicz and Mark Clapson have done much to show how governmental misunderstandings about forms of associative behaviour and anti-suburban prejudice led to a lack of use of community centres.5 Yet, there is little explanation of exactly how those who did use the centres understood, interpreted or contested the idea of ‘community’ intrinsically bound up in the space of the centres themselves. Similarly to Clapson, Ben Jones has illustrated the diversity, heterogeneity and changeability of perceptions and feelings about community on estates either side of the Second World War.6 However, neither study attempts to crack open the interaction between space and individual agency. Here, then, a more detailed engagement with the processes at work in producing the spaces of the new estates – processes hinging on contestation of what spaces were for and how they

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should be used – might shed further light on how discourses of ‘problem’ estates began to be generated. Organised contestation of public spaces is, of course, key to the way places are constituted and was an important feature of life on new estates.7 Here, though, I follow work which has shown how individuals or marginal groups remade places with usages distinct from the ambitions of their designers.8 Housing estates were not static, unchanging impositions of spatial order; rather, inhabitants used unfamiliar and ambiguous new spaces in ways that challenged prescriptions of correct or productive usage through practices that were routine, quiet and highly practical. In dealing with these ‘quiet conflicts’ Michel de Certeau’s distinction between the strategies of the powerful and the tactics of ordinary citizens is again instructive, although should be applied with caution.9 The new estates did feature many attempts to routinise certain practices through spatial ‘strategies’ designed to organise movement and behaviour that often faltered when exposed to daily usage. It would, however, be a mistake to see the incidents that follow in too binary or dichotomous terms. The contestation of space was rarely reducible to a polar understanding of ‘state’ and ‘inhabitant’; as the previous chapters have shown there were multiple actors involved in the processes of urban renewal and inhabitants behaved in a variety of ways that resist simple attempts to homogenise their responses. Nevertheless, the most significant actors in the incidents studied here were the local corporations, groups of residents and individual inhabitants and it is the evidence of the relationships between these various agents upon which this investigation is centred. The chapter views these protagonists once again through the lens of ‘placemaking’, considering that all were attempting in one way or another to define appropriate behaviours and actions within certain, often unfamiliar spaces. The first section of the chapter deals with the impetus behind and the implementation of community centres on mid-twentieth-century housing estates. The promotion and provision of community centres sprang from anxieties about forms of associative behaviour and concerns about the suburban anomie of the inter-war estates. Here, I examine exactly how governmental elites envisaged community centres functioning, and show how contestation of what might happen in them curtailed their appeal to inhabitants and challenged the notion of community being espoused in post-war Britain. The community centre thus illustrates how strategies of urban governance were subverted by the ordinary leisure practices of groups of inhabitants, demonstrating contests over the ways different inhabitants viewed and understood the space of the centres. The second and third sections examine the ways in which the usage of ambiguous

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features of the new estates – hedges, trees, grassed areas and thoroughfares – caused tension between groups of residents and the local state. The patterns of movement and usage, alongside more traditional forms of contestation like letters and petitions, disputed elite interpretations of how spaces should be used. These incidents led to arguments between residents and the corporations and reveal the agency of residents in reshaping their environments, whilst suggesting early examples of the problems estates would become infamous for in the later years of the twentieth century. In this sense, the section tentatively suggests that understanding how residential space was being contested is important to understanding how discourses that stress the problems of social housing estates began to be formed.10

Communities and community centres In 1943 Sir Wyndham Deedes,11 the chairman of the Consultative Council of Community Associations (CCCA) and an influential advocate of the incorporation of community centre provision in post-war planning orthodoxy, argued that: The community association is a voluntary organisation of neighbours, democratically organised within the natural community … [and] is the human reality that lies behind the community centre without which the centre would be a lifeless building. The aim of the associations should be the development of a better and fuller life of the community.12

As I suggested in the previous chapter, the idea of how a certain type of community – centred upon the daily interactions of the neighbourhood unit – might be engendered was at the forefront of planning and social policy within the post-war British state, at both national and local level. Community centres formed part of the designs for most new estates and were manifestations of a desire to shape the types of leisure that the inhabitants of the new estates might engage in. Advice emanating from the state posited community centres as unpoliticised spaces in which the inhabitants might pursue ‘constructive’ leisure activities, come to know each other and forge new bonds of ‘community’.13 They were envisaged as the spatial component in a permanent mobilisation of local community to counteract the suburban anomie of the inter-war estates and encourage the working classes to use their leisure time for personal betterment.14 However, community centres became sites of contestation, through which various groups of inhabitants sought to define differing notions of what constituted a functional local community. Instead of

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being flexible spaces that evolving communities might use for a variety of activities, the communal spaces became subject to exclusionary tactics that diminished their appeal to the general population of the estates. At the same time this contestation of what the community centres were for challenged the very notion of what constituted community in post-war Britain. The way different groups mapped different understandings of community onto the centres functions as a prism through which to examine the notion of community and its relationship to space in mid-twentiethcentury Britain. Histories that have examined the provision and usage of community centres either side of the Second World War have largely attempted to understand why they went unused to show the flaws in the post-war model of community. Their conclusions have suggested that the model of association advanced by the state foundered on the increase in home-centred forms of leisure, the unattractiveness of the types of activities provided in the centres and the simplistic geographical organisation of the neighbourhood.15 Community centres experienced high initial usage, but this dropped off as time went on. Explanations of why usage declined contend that centres were run by groups with an increasingly narrow focus and that the community associations that ran them only experienced high membership at their inception through their usefulness in focusing and expediting residents’ complaints.16 The uses prescribed for the centres by the Ministry of Education and local government demonstrate anxieties about the nature of workingclass association and leisure that historians like Andrzej Olechnowicz, Tami Davis Biddle and Gareth Stedman Jones have detected in various policies throughout the first half of the twentieth century.17 State policies regarding community centres evidence a distinct post-war tension between the positive, though nebulous, aim of creating ‘communities’ to counteract a perceived trend toward suburban individualism on the one hand, and a vagueness over exactly how prescriptive and interventionist the state should be in the running of the centres on the other. The centres rarely comprised much more than a series of variously sized rooms, toilets, usually a kitchen and often a games room with billiards or card tables.18 Thus, whilst both local and central government bodies sought to map particular usages and outcomes onto centres, the spatial unspecificity of the buildings and the tension at the heart of guidance on usage emanating from the state meant they were particularly susceptible to the interpretation of inhabitants, who sought to map appropriate usage onto the space of the centres as they saw fit. Here, then, readers should once again detect the influence of de Certeau’s notion of strategies and tactics, but also see further reasons for

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caution.19 The three community centres studied here – those in the Rack House, Benchill and Royal Oak areas of the Wythenshawe estate – were not all new buildings.20 So, whilst they were subject to the spatial rules of Manchester Corporation, they were not always new spaces. Nevertheless, the Corporation attempted to map meaning and uses onto them, whether newly built or extant dwellings converted into community centres. Understanding the process of contestation as ‘placemaking’ allows for the idea that the governmental strategies associated with the provision of community centres lay in attempts to map meaning onto the space: to make particular places of them, infused with certain rules and uses. In 1944 the Ministry of Education produced its report on community centres (better known as the Red Book) to offer guidance for local corporations on the structure and provision of community centres on new and existing housing developments.21 Its production was predicated on a notion, which had been growing in acceptance since the 1930s, that shorter working hours had produced a demand amongst the working and lower-middle classes for forms of leisure which could not, or perhaps should not, be met entirely by ‘commercial enterprise’.22 The Red Book argued that: Community centres, in the sense in which the term is used in this Report, exist … so that neighbours can come together on an equal footing to enjoy social, recreative and educational activities, either as members of groups following particular hobbies and pursuits, or on the basis of their common needs and interests living in the same locality.23

There was a palpable sense in the Red Book of vagueness in how the twin aims of providing the greatest variety of activities and engendering community might function. A similar vagueness is detectable in a 1938 statement from the Community Centres and Associations Committee (CCAC): It [the community centre] should provide a home for as many and as diverse activities, physical, recreational and cultural, as may be needed to meet the spontaneous desires of the residents in the neighbourhood.24

Community centres, from their inception were thus conceived of in a rather general sense and, given this vagueness, it is unsurprising that they became subject to a variety of influences attempting to map different definitions of their purpose onto them. Royal Oak Community Association stated a general but modest aim for the centre in the brochure they produced to commemorate the laying of the foundation stone, claiming that the community centre was ‘to form a centre of social activities for the residents on the Royal Oak Estate’.25

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Advocates who had been influential in promoting the need for community centres in the 1930s, however, often had loftier aims. Ernest Barker, the Cambridge political scientist and mouthpiece of the community associations movement, argued in a 1935 report for the National Council of Social Services (NCSS) that community centres and associations, through provision of educative recreation, might help make British cities ‘something like Athens in the great days: the homes of men and women who are working together to govern themselves, but can also find time to cultivate together the fruits of beauty’.26 The Ministry of Education’s 1944 Red Book similarly (though in less grandiose terms) saw community centres as an opportunity for educating the inhabitants of the new estates though it was not ‘the education of the classroom … [but] education in the sense of putting people in the way of making their own entertainment and bringing out their latent abilities for the better use of life outside working hours’.27 In a section entitled ‘The needs and use of leisure’ the amount of excess leisure time available as a result of improvements in industry was presented as a ‘social problem’. There was, they argued, no ‘tradition of leisure amongst large classes of those to whom it has come’.28 The notion of ‘community’ seems to have been conceived of in these passages in a very formal way. Community, as depicted in the Red Book, was not a cross-cutting agglomeration of social interactions of differing lengths and purpose but a wholly positive, constructive and goal-oriented structure in which all involved were organised in a single network. There was also an inherent sense that there were correct and useful types of recreation. So, ‘dances, whist drives and raffles’ – commonly undertaken to raise money for the centres – were seen as low-brow, even wasteful uses of leisure time, whilst ‘classes in economics, international relations, psychology and the rest’ were seen as desirable and valuable.29 The community centre was thus intended to focus efforts to create a particular type of community through the availability of a space in which these activities could occur. Olechnowicz, in his study of the Becontree estate, argues that during the 1930s community centres were conceived of as a way of controlling the places and types of working-class assembly by the Conservative government, out of a fear that working-class associations might produce radical politics or disorderly conduct.30 This type of prejudice may have still been present in parts of the Red Book, but a close reading suggests that fears over the associative habits of the inhabitants had rather ­softened. In a section on ‘Controversial issues’ it argues that political activities and the provision of a licensed bar should be left in the hands of the community association.31 The Red Book thus evidences something of a tension between paternalistic attitudes towards

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working-class leisure and a democratising desire to allow community centres to be used as inhabitants saw fit. Another section of the Red Book also sheds light on the expectations of membership and seems to have been largely ignored in the historiographical assessment of community centres. In a section which sets out the aims of the centres the following is stated: It should not be assumed that everyone desires or can enjoy community centre life. A neighbourhood does not completely circumscribe the lives of those who dwell there. The more lively, active and developed inhabitants will have interests which require contact with the outside world … and by no means all those of a more restricted outlook will naturally gravitate to the community centre.32

The importance of this passage is it shows that by 1944 there was no emphasis on attracting all the inhabitants of the neighbourhood. Nor was there any concern raised by the plurality of associations that Norman Dennis and Clapson argue did so much to damage the importance of the community centre as an organising factor in the formation of a territorial community.33 The section goes on to say: The community centre is not intended to serve as a substitute for home, church or other traditional rallying points of social life … [The community centre] can supply an absolutely neutral meeting place … Nearly all other social agencies … tend to draw people together on a corporative basis. In the community centre … they should meet as individuals.34

The post-war community centre was conceived of as a politically neutral space which would provide an alternative to activities and associations that were more exclusionary or divisive. This aim, however, presented a number of challenges in terms of defining exactly what the centre was for, who might use it, which activities were neutral and which might fall within the remit of the elusive idea of ‘the community’. In 1938 the Rack House Residents’ Association had granted permission for several groups including the Labour Party, the Society of Friends, the Co-operative Party and several small Christian groups to use the community centre, but the Wythenshawe Estate Special Committee (WESC) objected.35 Discussing the matter internally, the town clerk summed up the issue at hand: ‘[T]he tenancy agreement provides that the Association shall not use the premises … otherwise than as a Community centre of the Wythenshawe Residents’ association’, noting that the problem was that ‘there is no statutory definition of the term “Community Centre”’. Despite the town clerk’s opinion that the letting of the centre to the various groups was allowed, the Corporation passed a resolution

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that  the community centre was expressly not for political or religious use and amended the terms of the lease.36 In 1940 the WESC once again reproached the Rack House association for renting the centre for use by the minority religious group the Christadelphians, reminding them of the 1938 prohibition.37 Interestingly, no prohibition against the use of community centres for religious purposes was ever made later in the Red Book: the decision to prohibit religious use appears to have been taken entirely by the WESC in isolation.38 Why this might be the case might only be speculated upon. Perhaps with minimal space the Corporation believed that religious activities were provided for elsewhere in church halls (although this would hardly have been true for a small group like the Christadelphians). It is more likely that the Corporation saw the community centres as places which, since they were meant to be a unifying focal point of community life, should avoid potentially sectarian affiliations. The prohibitions of the Corporation’s 1938 resolution were once again put to the test in August 1945 when the local Labour Party again requested to host a meeting in the Rack House centre. The Residents’ Association referred the matter to the Corporation, stating they could not grant the request. The Corporation responded, suggesting that: consideration of the application made by the Wythenshawe Labour Party be deferred pending a meeting between representatives of this committee and the Wythenshawe Residents Association as to the extent to which rooms can be made available for meeting of outside organisations without interference with the normal activities of the Community Centre.39

The Corporation considered that the Labour Party’s activities were outside the ‘normal activities’ of the community centre, whilst the Labour Party members likely considered political meetings to be very much a part of the remit of community activities. The Labour Party’s argument was that: accommodation for the bringing together of Organisations and Associations is sadly below its requirements [in Wythenshawe] … and [we] feel that the Community Centre is failing in its purpose in refusing accommodation to a section of the local residents wishing to meet regularly.40

They added that they did not believe their actions were political in the sense meant by the prohibition. The Corporation, as per the advice contained in the Red Book, deferred the decision to the Community Association, who rejected the Labour Party’s request.41 The above examples suggest that the space of the community centre was not merely being disputed by contesting what it was appropriate to

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do in it, it was also acting as an arena where competing interests sought to map out the meaning of community. The debate between the various groups, at least two of them groups of residents, suggests that community was envisioned as both secular and non-political in its nature by the Corporation, which was at odds with the models of community being deployed by the Labour Party, religious organisations and the Residents Association. Far from being the politically neutral venues for community activities then, centres like the Rack House were contested by differing groups, motivating a language of community. Clashes involving the local corporation were, however, not the only way the residents’ attempts to define the usage of the centres played out. The centres were used to organise and accommodate a variety of social and recreational activities. These included those designed to deepen ties to the community from Rose Queen parades and Civic Pride weeks, to gardening clubs, boys’ and girls’ associations, seniors’ clubs, theatre groups and dances, as well as provision of games like billiards and cards.42 Though each centre was used differently, centres like the Rack House and the Cedars (the Benchill centre) were merely old houses with internal facilities and dimensions that influenced the activities which were possible. The Rack House was described thus in M.P. Hall’s 1945 report on Manchester’s community centres: The rooms are low, the windows small, the passages and staircases narrow. The largest room is long and narrow with a low ceiling and very poor ventilation, and in practice was found to be very unsuitable for Keep Fit and similar purposes. It is on the first floor, above the billiard room, with the result that the billiard players were always complaining of the noise … and this was one of the factors in creating friction between the different ­sections. … The two rooms on the ground floor are the billiard room, which is immediately opposite the front door, and hence one receives the impression that billiards are the central activity of the Association.43

Hall was adamant that by 1945 the Rack House was a ‘failure’ because it had become ‘little more than a social club run by a few men’.44 Yet, Hall’s observations illustrate how conflicts might arise over which group had the right to define what appropriate usage was. Both billiards and Keep Fit classes had a legitimate claim to be suitable community activities, but only one could take place at a time. At both the Benchill and Royal Oak centres, as with Manchester’s earliest community centre on the Wilbraham estate, there were issues over who might be allowed to define what suitable activities were. This particularly pronounced in the interactions of adults with ‘young people’.45 The purpose-built Royal Oak centre had planned to add an additional

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floor (it was single storey) to make sure adults and young people had separate spaces, due to the perception that the two groups found each other’s presence antagonistic.46 There was very little rationale given for the inability of youths or the young to enjoy themselves in close proximity to adults, but the 1944 Red Book does suggest that the experience of inter-war community centres was not positive. In asking whether community centres should be for the exclusive use of adults, it advised that: there is a good deal to be said for excluding the under 18s. Young people tend to enjoy themselves boisterously, older people more quietly, and both cannot enjoy themselves at the same time and in the same place. It is said, too, that young people ‘knock the place about’, and are careless and untidy with equipment.47

In the name of balance the section goes on to offer the alternative view of the Youth Service, which believed community centres were a ‘bridgehead’ that might assist young people in traversing from childhood into adulthood. Ultimately, though, the Ministry of Education concluded that community centres must provide sufficient space and time for separate activities to avoid conflict between adults and youths.48 However, with limited space the two groups could not be separated in the surroundings of many community centres like the Cedars or the Royal Oak. Furthermore, separating them by making sure neither group was present at the same time was also difficult, since both adults and youths naturally wished to use the centres in the evenings or at weekends. Concerns over juvenile delinquency and a statistical focus on youth crime began to generate a discourse on youth and the young as a problem subject from the at least the 1920s, and these concerns were reflected in the community centre movement.49 In a 1935 meeting of the New Estates Federation of Manchester and District it was recorded that due to lack of space in one (unnamed) Manchester community centre: the hardest hit of all the Sections is the Juvenile. It is becoming quite a common sight on this Estate to see bands of youths lounging on street corners because they have nowhere else to go. Unless steps are taken to provide an alternative, they will rapidly develop into hooligans.50

In a letter to Manchester Corporation in 1943 the Benchill committee evidenced a similar idea of the troublesome youth in its request for funding for a full-time warden: As you are no doubt aware the problem of youths and girls between the ages of 15 and 19 is becoming very serious … There are quite a number of these young people … who do not attend any Sunday School or an

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­ rganisation, but who frequent our premises every night of the week. … o [W]e have decided that only when we have a full time warden on the premises can we organise our affairs to such a degree that it is possible for us to retain full control at all hours with these young people.51

In both examples the suggestion appears to be that beyond the controlling surveillance of the adult, young people’s inherently troublesome nature would come to the fore. The language used by the Benchill association, though, situates the local ‘youth and girls’ neither as members of the community nor as stakeholders in the centre, but as visitors to ‘our centre’ and as a problem to be managed and tolerated. It is apparent that the young could only use the centre within patterns of usage set by a group of adults who had laid claim to it. At a time when, as Osgerby shows, youth culture was beginning to flourish but become more commercialised, the centres offered an opportunity for the young to pursue leisure activities in a non-commercial setting in which, as members of the community, they shared some ownership. However, the negotiation between youths and adults necessitated mapping usage onto spaces which were inadequate for the task, bringing the young into conflict with adult authority. The young were effectively being excluded from the idea of community as defined through the usage of the centre, with the views of the young being delegitimised as contrary to the ‘correct’ behaviour of the adults. The evidence above points to several conclusions: first, there is support for Clapson’s assertion that a contributing factor in the waning interest in community centres was that too many of the centres were run by enthusiastic but narrowly focused groups who excluded competing interests;52 secondly, it suggests that the process of contestation may have contributed to a lack of usage amongst groups who felt marginalised. However, it is wise to move beyond judgements of success or failure and instead use the community centre as a tool to examine the notion of community and the contestation of governmental control on new estates. When the community associations were first formed to govern the centres, the new (although not necessarily newly built) community centre was an ephemeral space full of possibilities. Yet, once in use, each centre was subject to competing groups, all motivating and mapping different definitions of appropriate activities and community onto the buildings. It was perhaps inevitable that, with a reliance on committed volunteers to define the remit of the centres, quite a narrow idea of what the centre was for would emerge. Consequently, groups like the Labour Party, young people and religious groups had to find other homes and

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had, by implication, been excluded from the definition of community. More importantly though, the community centres diverged from the ambitions of planners by failing to provide the neutral ground they promised. Through the inevitable processes of contestation and practice they became just as much the focus for particular interests as any other space. Just as the natural desire to shop and consume had undermined the spatial model of the neighbourhood outlined in chapter 3, a similar process worked to undermine the socio-spatial role of the community centre as a component in the neighbourhood unit.

The quiet conflict of the everyday The lack of clarity concerning how community centres should be used certainly invited differing interpretations from the inhabitants of the new estates, but they did have some vague, if rather intangible, sense of purpose. In the following sections my analysis shifts from community centres to the even less well-defined, outdoor communal or ornamental areas of the new estates. Grass verges, fields, hedgerows, trees, flower beds and pathways formed part of the detailed plans for each estate, yet their purpose was unclear to inhabitants, despite the faith of planners in their positive effects. In the 1945 Manchester Plan Rowland Nicholas argued that: Nothing has more power to enhance the appearance of a city than the contrast in colour and texture and the variety in form and outline obtained by planting the streets with trees.53

Nicholas’ words illustrate the importance planners attached to the provision of greenery and trees in the design of post-war estates, though their ‘power’ seems to have been no more complex than a degree of visual pleasantness.54 Green and communal spaces were just as crucial, at least in the minds of planners, to the success of the estates in improving the inhabitants’ lives as shops, amenities and community centres. However, from the moment the inhabitants of the new estates moved in, these rather ill-defined spaces were used in ways that caused consternation in local government and tensions between the residents. Contestation of public spaces has often been a successful outlet for contentious politics: in America Kevin Krause and Thomas Sugrue’s The New Suburban History has shown how suburban space became a site of contestation connected to inequalities in class, race and politics.55 The instances studied here, however, generally represent far less organised or overt forms of contestation than examples of protest movements

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or campaign groups. The resistance to dominant interpretations of space examined here is instead what we might call ‘passive resistance’, although the distinctions between ‘passive’ and ‘active’ resistance are unreal dichotomies, since individual desires, actions, choices and tactics resist any simple division into the political and apolitical.56 They may not have always been cognised as resistance by the inhabitants, yet, as the evidence here will show, these everyday actions contested and subverted the meanings attributed to space by the state. In this sense the resistance studied here is not the internal passive resistance that historians of Nazi Germany did much to refute; it is, whether cognised or not, a form of resistance that manifests itself in material ways like marks on lawns, damage to fences or in patterns of movement.57 Here, again, de Certeau’s assertion that the practice of individuals’ everyday activities subverts the homogenising designs of the producers of physical space, though perhaps too formal and starkly delineated to describe reality, points to how highly practical actions can unintentionally contest what spaces are for.58 Studies of social housing estates have highlighted a discrepancy between planners’ visions of how certain spaces should function and the reality of lived experience. These discrepancies created confusion over what certain spaces were for and who had responsibility for maintaining them, leading to problems of neglect, vandalism and, ultimately, poor public image.59 The urban regeneration projects of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries also experienced conflicts that stemmed from the gap between governmental expectations of dominant usage and a diversity of ‘incorrect’ or ‘undesirable’ public uses of space.60 As geographer Mike Raco has observed, there is an increasing acceptance amongst planners that ‘an inability to mark a particular territory as “owned” or belonging to an organisation is seen as an opportunity for deviant behaviour’.61 The following sections illustrate the ubiquity of conflict over space to suggest these incidents of spatial contestation played an important part in the emergence of discourses that labelled housing estates as ‘failures’ or ‘sink estates’.62 The early disputes over the use of space on the estates of Manchester and Hull often stemmed from rigid governmental prescriptions of how certain spaces should be used. The inability of planners to anticipate and homogenise behaviours through provisions of correct space was, however, also an important landmark in the undermining of the core assumptions of urban modernism. Local corporations, already inexperienced landlords, learnt harsh lessons about the limits of their ambitions and the size and scope of the state through the multitude of small spatial transgressions that challenged their prescriptive designs for living.

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However, to argue that poorly designed spaces inevitably produced the problems of degradation and subsequent governmental neglect on the estates seems too spatially deterministic. It is perhaps correct to suggest, as Alice Coleman does, that ‘confusing’ grassed areas attracted litter, canine waste or unruly children.63 Yet, there is still a problem of who is producing the litter, why they feel they can drop it or why their interpretation of the space is so at odds with or apparently ignores the aesthetic aims of the planners. The problems created by the estate designs need to be understood within a framework that attempts to determine the ways varied inhabitant responses challenged dominant interpretations of space. There was no single homogenous response from inhabitants; rather, they contested spaces in differing ways, clashing both with local government and with groups of other residents. Local government responses also varied, sometimes criminalising transgressions – ­especially amongst youths – but also accepting differing uses where they seemed unable to prevent them or did not deem them a challenge to the spatial order. I argue against a binary interpretation of the clash between the everyday tactics of the residents and the strategies of the powerful. Inhabitants almost certainly would have understood or appreciated the benefits of trees and green spaces, whilst seeing no conflict between appreciating the aesthetic qualities of a grassed area and its utilisation of part of it as, for example, a place to grow vegetables or to play games. The new estates of Manchester and Hull, in common with almost all mid-twentieth-century estates, featured generous provisions of parks and greenery. Alongside larger plots, smaller green areas, often in the form of swards, verges and shrubberies, were also incorporated amongst the new houses.64 In the Manchester Plan, Rowland Nicholas outlined their purpose as follows: Ornamental gardens, lawns, trees and shrubs should form a fresh and attractive setting for housing estates softening the hard lines of buildings and relieving the frequently monotonous appearance of suburban development.65

A similar approach was also evident in Hull, where the Anlaby Road estate was punctuated by ‘small domestic “greens” and “closes”’ to enhance the everyday experience of living there.66 Across Britain planners adopted interspersed housing developments with scattered green spaces as an exercise in aesthetic determinism, producing spaces designed to improve the quality of daily life, yet with no obvious use beyond the ‘visual amenity’ of the area. Consequently, from the earliest days of the estates, these ambiguous spaces were subject to acts of placemaking through both mundane practices and more formal forms of protest.

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On 5 March 1938 the Manchester City News ran the following story: Ruining of the grass verges bordering the roads on the Anson Estate, Longsight by people who take ‘short cuts’ across the turf instead of keeping to the paving has led the local Tenants Association to step in, and to issue an appeal to the people of the district, requesting them to keep to the footpaths. ‘The provision of these grass verges has not been as successful as was first hoped’ an official from the Corporation Highways Department commented.67

The article serves as a microcosm of the debates and disputes that could spring up over these green spaces. By taking a short cut, certain people were engaged in a highly practical, perhaps barely cognised process of movement. Yet they were also mapping their own ideas of how the verges might be used, or at least traversed. This was at odds with the views of a group of organised local residents who, through their appeal, tried to impose their own vision of what the grass verges were for. Although on a small, hardly noticeable scale, by using the verge as a short cut, individuals were marking the grass and diminishing the visual amenity. The Highways Department’s statement shows how the verges had been conceived of as a spatial mechanism with a specified outcome; for the verges to have not been successful the Corporation obviously had in mind what would constitute success. Whilst walking across the verges was almost certainly a practical act to save time, the use of them as a short cut reveals how quotidian movements by ordinary people could quite unintentionally challenge dominant strategies aimed at delineating appropriate use. It also shows the difficulties of administering lived-in spaces with such powerful and rigid spatial logics as the new estates, difficulties which concerned planners and councillors alike. Records of several other incidents on the Wythenshawe estate throw up further examples of the consternation experienced by planners and local government when individuals’ choices and habits ran contrary to the uses of spaces prescribed in their plans. In September 1947 the WESC resolved to erect ‘Care of Green Spaces’ signs, which drew attention to the fact that proceedings would be taken against persons found damaging lawns, trees and shrubs.68 The erection of notices was a response to a spate of incidents which placed the attitude of local inhabitants at odds with governmental visions of the estates. Similarly, in March 1949 the city surveyor told the WESC that ‘a large number of the shrubs and trees which have been planted have been destroyed by vandalism and careless walking on the verge’. In response he was experimenting with a temporary fence to protect the shrubs whilst they developed.69

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Environmental sociologist Patsy Eubanks Owens has demonstrated how signs are often used to exclude certain groups from spaces by limiting the practices that are appropriate, and the actions of the WESC echo her arguments.70 Yet, the erection of signs and fences was also a self-defeating action, since the aesthetic qualities of the green spaces were now disrupted by intrusive physical elements. Once again, the motivations of the individuals who were damaging the trees or verges are unknowable, but it is not necessary to understand their motivations, merely the outcomes of their unconscious actions.71 In a sense, what is important is not the exact motivations but that instances of transgressive behaviour had the power to alter the environment in terms of both usage and physical changes. In some instances, though, the causes of conflict were not as obviously negative as the destruction of shrubs or trees. In May 1943, in a document entitled ‘Occupation of Land Rear of 13 Banstead Avenue, Northenden’, the city surveyor reported that: in December last it was observed that four tenants of houses on the Roundwood Estate, whose gardens adjoin a strip of land 10 yards wide, forming a plantation, dividing the Easter Industrial Area from the residential development, had dug small plots in this area and utilised it for garden purposes. … The City Surveyor considers that it is most undesirable that any tenant of adjoining property should be permitted to establish what would become a precedent, for other people could justly claim a like privilege. This would endanger the growth of the whole belt of trees and defeat the scheme of development of the Estate.72

Whilst the Corporation’s belief in trees and green space both as a boundary between industry and residential areas and a fundamen­ tal element in the curative properties of the estate’s design is evident here, there is also an indication that the Corporation understood that practices left unchecked could be hard to dislodge. Their eagerness to avoid setting a precedent, whilst practical in a legal sense, also hints at the power of practice in normalising transgressive behaviours. For the tenants’ part, it is perhaps no coincidence that this incident took place in 1942, when dig for victory campaigns stressed the potential uses of parks and greens as allotments.73 Indeed, in this respect the Corporation were not inflexible and throughout the early years of the war they were happy to allow temporary use of undeveloped land abutting Corporation properties.74 They only objected when usage challenged the coherency of the visual environment by exploiting green spaces in ways that went beyond or destabilised their utility as design features. The use of land to grow vegetables was just one example of local residents recasting supposedly aesthetic features as practical resources

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though. On 25 September 1945 the city surveyor reported that ten youths, aged 9 to 16 had been fined by the courts the sum of 10s. for cutting branches from trees to make a VJ Day bonfire.75 Furthermore, on 7 March 1947 the city surveyor again reported that, owing to the recent persistent cold weather and the shortage of fuel, a great deal of damage had been done to the trees on the estates, one of four reports recorded that year dealing with similar events. Extraordinarily, the Corporation undertook severe measures to prevent further damage, noting that ‘under the circumstances constant patrols have been organised to cover all the development areas and spinneys’.76 The records of the WESC show multiple similar incidents throughout the post-war years, with youths being arrested and fined for damage to trees and shrubs.77 It is clear that whilst most of these incidents were recorded as vandalism, damage was also caused by residents viewing the trees as a resource. Whether the aesthetic qualities of the trees were not apparent, went unappreciated or whether at times when fuel was short practicality trumped visual delight is not apparent. The most revealing aspect of the prosecutions for vandalism was the lengths the Corporation were willing to go to preserve the environment they had created. The April 1946 case of two girls arrested and fined in Manchester after being caught picking bunches of forsythia from the grass verges on the Parkway, shows the Corporation taking a severe attitude bordering on the absurd to prevent transgressive behaviours becoming routine or acceptable.78 Similarly, in the Easter holiday of the previous year the WESC reported several instances of people taking flowering branches and flowers from trees and shrubs on the Parkway and requested that the police mount extra patrols. They also instructed the Department of Education to request to all schools in the area that ‘appeals to be made to children … not to spoil the amenities of the estate by breaking branches of trees or taking flowers therefrom’.79 In June 1946 the problem became severe enough that the Corporation decided to erect signs along the Parkway warning against further damage to the trees and shrubs.80 What is perhaps most noticeable about both the arrests and the complaints lodged against the flower- and branch-stealing activities of the inhabitants is that they were largely directed towards youths and children. Indeed, the intersection of ill-defined spaces and young people seems to have been presented as a cause of some concern, as the following letter, dated 26 September 1957, to the Hull Housing section from a Mr A. Wright, then resident on the Longhill estate demonstrates: I would like to register a complaint against the two large trees opposite the  living room window. When in full leaf they make the room

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very dark,  they also obscure the sun from the gardens of no’s 13, 15, 17, respectively. The trees are the attraction of dozens of children who  come  to  ­practice climbing – using them as a urinal, and making a general nuisance of themselves, there is a lot of stone throwing; one window has already been broken. Unfortunately the matter does not end there; young men are now finding it amusing to climb in and look through the bedroom windows. I cannot quote the replies given when ordering them away.81

There is far more going on in Mr Wright’s letter than merely a dispute over the presence of trees. The close-packed terraces that many of the occupants of the new estates would have previously occupied had their own set of constantly evolving rules. Garden and yard walls for example, lacking on many of the new estates due to the design principles adopted, clearly delineated spaces which were not to be transgressed in normal practice (though that is not to say they never were).82 Furthermore, public communal spaces like back alleys were, through practice, infused with a set of rules and were monitored and regulated by knowledge of the local populace that was typically familiar and often bonded by kin, employment and common practices (for example, use of similar shops and schools). Whilst there were no completely homogenous, rigid or unchanging rules to working-class communities of the 1930s and 1940s, as historian Robert Colls has pointed out, there were at least long-standing negotiations of practice in familiar and welltrodden spaces.83 The area of land outside Mr Wright’s new home represented something different and new: an area which Hull Corporation, Mr Wright, the children and the youths all saw differently. Mr Wright’s letter thus encapsulates the issues that arose as differing groups and individuals all mapped what constituted appropriate behaviour onto spaces configured in unfamiliar ways. The children and the youths were likely exploiting this lack of rules, perhaps away from the eyes of their parents. In writing to the Corporation Mr Wright invoked ideas of light and hygiene that were common to discussions of housing provision and public health. He also cast the children and young men as insolent and anti-social, delegitimising the appropriateness of their behaviours and buying into a discourse which increasingly cast the young as a distinct and troublesome cultural entity as never before.84 Yet, what this type of dispute shows is the ways that discourses of failure, anti-social behaviour and undesirable people were related to the spatial arrangements of the estates and the inability of the corporations to remedy the flaws of the places they had tried to create.

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A defensible space of one’s own The incident involving Mr Wright also highlights the way that the value individuals placed on the privacy and spatial integrity of their home and its surroundings could frequently lead to conflict. The importance attached to privacy is one of the most notable trends to emerge in mid-twentieth-century suburban Britain and is exemplified in Mass Observation’s survey of 1942, which concluded that ‘the most important psychological aspect of the home is as a place of privacy and freedom’.85 Yet, evidence suggests that there was a demonstrable discrepancy between the standards of privacy envisioned by planners and the expectations of the inhabitants. The tensions over what exactly constituted public and private space were particularly emphasised where green spaces and pathways adjoined houses, or front gardens remained unfenced. In a number of histories of social housing these ambiguous, semi-public spaces appear to have a kind of direct agency in the rapid degradation of the estates. Coleman, for example, argues that ‘all care and control [of adjoining land]’ was ‘surrendered to the housing authority’, yet the evidence presented here suggests people were able to not only contest these spaces and how they were used but, in some cases, remake them through tactics of usage and movement.86 Indeed, whilst practices are shaped by the spaces in which they occur, spaces themselves can be appropriated and altered beyond the intentions of their designers.87 The source of much of this conflict was the trend, exemplified in the designs of housing estates in Manchester and Hull, to do away with the traditional fences or hedges of the delineated 1920s and 1930s suburban homes. Added to the ambiguity of adjoining land next to maisonettes and flats and the prevalence of swards and verges that served an ornamental purpose, there were significant amounts of land abutting dwellings that were not recognisable as either public or private. Nevertheless, residents were keen to keep people away from windows and doors and understandably wished to mark out the boundaries of their homes. In June1939 a Mr A.A. Clarke submitted a typical application for permission to erect a six foot fence around his plot on one of the estate’s few privately owned dwellings on Homewood Road. Mr Clarke ‘desire[d] to obtain a reasonable amount of privacy, which a privet fence [did] not give’. In response, the Corporation refused to ‘entertain’ the request under the assumption that it would set an undesirable precedent amongst other residents.88 Mr Clarke’s request and the rationale for refusal from the Corporation are representative of many other requests to erect fencing that were

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rejected, but it reveals the increasing dissatisfaction inhabitants felt at the lack of privacy the new estates offered. On 9 November 1953 the Manchester Housing Committee received a petition from 120 Baguley Hall residents requesting that hedges be allowed around their then open gardens. Subsequently, the aldermen of the committee visited the houses, concluding that there was a need for hedges and that the experiment in constructing houses without hedges or fences to mark out the front garden had not been entirely successful.89 The drawings produced for the Southcoates estate development in Hull (figure 4.1) show houses without fences at the design stage; however, a photograph taken during construction (figure 4.2) shows that the houses were being built with front railings to mark out the garden. The desires of the inhabitants it seems were, in a very direct way, challenging the aims of planners and actively altering the suburban environment that did not suit their ideas of privacy. Planners insisted in their post-war plans that provision of front hedges and fences interfered with the aesthetic qualities of the estates, which were to be open to promote a communal feeling. In contrast, hedges and fences reinforced spatially a cognitive break between the public and private and, at least in the minds of planners, seem to have dredged up their worst prejudices about inter-war suburban isolation. Open gardens did not tally with the movement or practices of people on the new estates.

4.1  Drawing of the ideal view of the Southcoates Lane development, Hull.

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4.2  Photograph of the Southcoates Lane development, Hull.

In a letter to the Housing Section of Hull Corporation in July 1956 a D. Wilson of the Bilton Grange estate wrote that he was angry that cycles were being ridden down the paved area outside where he lived, which formed a thoroughfare to the incomplete shopping centre. Additionally, he complained that the lack of fencing on his front garden was causing people to use the actual garden as part of the route, not just the path. Children, he added, frequently strayed into his garden and stole his children’s toys. He added: ‘we have asked and told, adults and children, not to ride their cycles, but we have been mostly ignored, or received a lot of abuse’. Mr Wilson’s attempts to map the ambiguous boundaries of his home were clashing with the practices of other inhabitants and the spatial strategies of the government. There was no sense that Mr Wilson, like Mr Wright, felt any great sense of communal feeling stemming from the lack of fence, only resentment. He argued that ‘a better idea would have been to have made thoroughfares through the backs of the houses, and so made our fronts a bit more private and respectable … the position could be eased by the fencing off of our front gardens’.90 The desire to define the boundaries of the home and the strong preference for a private and defensible space was also in evidence on the temporary estates that sprung up after the war. In March 1944 the ­government unveiled plans for the construction of a revised total of 300,000 prefabricated homes through the Housing (Temporary

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Accommodation) Act 1944 to make up for the shortfall in housing.91 These ‘prefabs’ were only ever conceived of as a temporary solution, with lifespans expected to run only to 10 or 15 years. Perhaps understandably, the Manchester and Hull corporations seemed to not conceive of the temporary estates in the same manner as those they saw as permanent. In Manchester the Corporation struggled to apportion responsibility for the cleaning and maintenance of the roads, which fell both outside the remit of the Highways Committee, who believed the temporary estates were part of the city’s parklands, and also the Cleansing Committee, who refused to clean them because they were not adopted roads.92 Similarly, in 1946 the Manchester Housing Committee concluded that there was a severe flaw in the central government plans for temporary estates because they did not allow for the erection of shops on temporary sites.93 Yet, there is little to suggest that the inhabitants went about the process of defining and contesting their environment in a different manner than on permanent estates. Letters of complaint and concerns raised in the records of Hull Corporation request action be taken about the areas of the temporary estates that remain unfinished. In one example, the East Hull Prefab Tenants’ Association sent a deputation with a detailed list of complaints to the Housing and Town Planning Committee, amongst which were complaints about the provision of fences, the lack of which was allowing ingress from strangers.94 Other tenants of the temporary estates made similar complaints concerning local farmers driving cattle across what the residents considered to be their land and yet more submitted a petition requesting action be taken to prevent the unsavoury activities of youths in their gardens due to lack of suitable fencing.95 Echoing the attitude of planners to front fences on permanent estates, the government handbook on temporary housing only specified the provision of fencing for back gardens.96 In October 1946 the Manchester Housing Committee received petitions from the six occupants of temporary bungalows in Levenshulme about the provision of fencing for their front gardens. The report also indicates there were several other petitions on the same subject. The Housing Director reported that ‘they point out that the houses lack privacy and the cultivation of their gardens is impractical unless they are reasonably fenced’.97 Whilst the concerns of the inhabitants were ultimately derived from a practical approach to privacy, their complaints evince the same practices and preferences as the inhabitants of the permanent houses. This suggests that, whilst the process of defining places like homes was never static but constantly evolving through practice, the inhabitants began to define their environment immediately, seeking

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to infuse the spaces of their homes with similar notions of ­appropriate behaviour that would be expected in permanent homes. In return, though, the local corporations seem to have had a great deal of difficulty conceiving of the temporary settlements in the same way that they regarded permanent estates. Rather, they were casting them as transient and liminal spaces, or almost, in anthropologist Marc Augé’s terminology, ‘non-places’.98 Yet, any space in which an individual or group spends time is infused with meanings, making them places, even though they may be temporary. Residents of both permanent and temporary homes appear to have had fixed notions about the spatial components – fences and hedges – that made for a private home that planners and local corporations seemed unwilling to acknowledge. The preceding examination of privacy suggests that a crucial element in delineating any place in a given space is demarcation through signage (as seen in Manchester Corporation’s attempts to prevent vandalism of trees and grassed areas) or the curtailing of movement through fencing and other obstacles. De Certeau argues that mobility plays an important role in both the strategies of the powerful, which seek to classify, territorialise and confine movement, and the tactics of ordinary people that fleetingly appropriate spaces by using, transgressing and recomposing them through practice. Movement, then, as a practice of everyday life has the potential to use and rework spaces whilst the individual goes about the process of using them.99 On and around the 27 May 1957 a series of letters was sent to Hull City Council concerning the damage done by residents to areas on a farm near the new Bilton Grange estate.100 ‘Continual trespassing’ by residents of the local housing development and the filling in of the dyke by local children had, according to the owners of the farm, caused maintenance to become impossible. The farmer requested that the council purchase the land if they planned to use it, since the responsibility for maintaining fences and a local dyke was not clearly defined. The letters indicate a confused set of responsibilities between the farm owners, the Housing Section (which managed the estate), other bodies of the Corporation and East Riding County Council (a separate body from Hull City Corporation), which was responsible for agricultural land. Meanwhile, the farmer stated that the adjoining field had ‘effectively become a public park’ and was consequently unusable as agricultural land. This clash between the legal/formal delineation of boundaries and the placemaking habits of people on the estates shows how spaces which were never intended to be part of the estate could become incorporated into the residents’ mental maps of what constituted the coverage of the estates and what was public land.

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It is, unfortunately, unclear what ultimately became of the land and whether the practices of the residents – which had effectively claimed the farmer’s land as public property – resulted in the land changing hands. What the previous example of the farm in Hull suggests though is that by moving through and using certain spaces people were not only defining public places but also defining what might be a public space. In several cases the evidence of remedial action taken by local government shows how this process of placemaking was countered by planners and corporations eager to maintain their conviction that the spaces they had produced were fit for purpose. However, on 4 May 1946 a letter from a group of residents to the WESC demonstrated how the process of everyday contestation could ultimately change the formal usage of space. Several residents complained about the use of undeveloped Corporation-owned land and the damage to fencing stating the following: Regarding the formerly enclosed field at the rear of houses in Homewood Road … The fencing originally erected by you closing off the two openings to the field … was pulled down in the early years of the War, presumably by children … The field is now used as a shortcut by pedestrians and cyclists, and is rapidly deteriorating into waste land. Children use it for cricket and football etc. even on Sundays. The brook … is continually blocked with rubbish, so that pools of stagnant water are formed, possibly to the danger of public health. Persons crossing the field also, on occasions, force their way through the fence and shrubbery between Homewood Road and Princess Parkway. The residents listed on the attached sheet ask that action be taken as early as possible to erect suitable stout fencing to the two openings to end this mis-use.101

The complaint is rich in the language deployed by an interested group in their attempts to control what might go on in a specific space. The letter attempts to curtail activities the complainants deem unsuitable by casting them as disruptive and contrary to what should take place in the space. The complainant’s attempt to establish the legitimacy of his or her view of appropriate use is also advanced by emphasising that the activities continued unabated ‘even on Sundays’, thus seeking to show the severity of the transgression of acceptable behaviour regularly taking place. Since merely objecting on the grounds of it being something they dislike would have little impact, especially for a group with little manifest power, they also appealed to public health concerns (although the validity of this seems doubtful) and try to cast the damage to the fencing as juvenile by equating (without proof) both the destruction and the nuisance with children. As with previous cases the discourse of youth and

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juveniles as a growing problem is evinced as evidence of the illegitimacy of the use of the field. The Corporation responded to the complaint promptly, re-erecting the fencing and seemingly demonstrating their commitment to controlling the use of the space. Yet, on 27 August it was reported that the residents of houses on three local roads had presented a counter-petition to the Corporation requesting the removal of the fence so that access to the previously mentioned short cuts could be restored.102 What is important here is that the Corporation, despite the arguments of the town clerk, who recommended the maintenance of the fences to prevent any future ‘right of way’ claim being brought against the Corporation if they wanted to use the land, agreed to remove some of the fence, allowing access to the interior of the estate, but not to the Parkway.103 It appears, then, that the tactics of the inhabitants could not only contest spaces but subvert the strategies of the planners, both by establishing the legitimacy of their claims and through practice. Whilst corporations frequently proved tenacious in their attempts to preserve the usages and purposes they ascribed to various areas, the willingness to adapt or concede ground hints at a broader conclusion. Their actions seem to suggest a recognition not merely that the control of space was desirable but that all constructions of order were inherently spatial. If the way people used poorly defined spaces could not be entirely anticipated or accounted for, the corporations could allow changes within its own framework of spatial order. Placemaking, though often played out in overt conflict, could also be imprecise and unconscious, though no less effective in challenging dominant interpretations of space. In November 1947 the Director of Housing wrote to the Manchester Housing Committee to request a decision on the issue of several corner plots in Wythenshawe: ‘Many of the corner plots at Wythenshawe have been damaged by pedestrians taking short cuts across the grass, with the result that an earth footpath becomes a permanent route.’104 The director’s comments indicate that practice had already changed the material of the corner plots. The earth footpaths were thus tangible productions of the practice of the tactics; they were not an intended consequence, merely a mark that subverted and destroyed the aesthetic purpose of the green spaces themselves. The director rejected the idea of putting in footpaths (the areas were too small) and continued: ‘the only satisfactory method of dealing with these corner plots would be to incorporate them in the house gardens’.105 The conversion of the plots into gardens was no small undertaking: there were 90 plots in Benchill and Brownley Green alone, and these were only intended to be trial areas.106 The significance of this incident is that

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a wholly unintended consequence had arisen out of a simple practice, designed only to shorten a journey by a matter of seconds. Walking across the corner plot is unlikely to have constituted an act of planned resistance, but it forced a change to the material environment, subverting the strategies of the powerful and eliminating the short cut altogether. This final example shows the difficultly of achieving the lofty aims that planners had for estates. The way people behaved could not be predicted and allowing only for a fixed, homogenous model of how space should be (and could be) used left no room for the desires, obstinacy, practicality or unpredictability of individual responses to space. Whilst planners conceived of the neighbourhoods both as material improvements to the lives of the inhabitants (and with heat, light, toilets and gardens, they were), the less tangible socio-cultural benefits they hoped to achieve were often subverted by practices they either ignored, wilfully built out or failed to anticipate. These failures were not catastrophic, though they may have been the precursor to some of the more pronounced aspects of degradation, poor perception and neglect that would plague the image of some estates in the later years of the twentieth century; rather, they illustrate the difficulties of achieving the less tangible goals of planning against the unpredictable responses of the people who moved in.

Conclusion The inhabitants of the new estates that were built between the 1930s and 1950s were, in varying degrees, subject to attempts by planners, central government, local corporations and various others to define different uses and meanings through the spaces of the new estates. Just as they attempted to engage in processes of placemaking by mapping ideas of appropriate usage onto the spaces, the inhabitants themselves contested them through everyday practice. Whilst the problems of lack of facilities, unfinished roads and poor service provision were enormous factors in the difficulties of these estates, there were also issues created by the ambiguity of certain spaces and their inevitable contestation by inhabitants and planners alike. Community centres were manifestations of a desire to direct the forms of association available to the inhabitants and stemmed from misgivings about working-class association and suburban anomie. They represented a method of mapping ideas of what community was and how it functioned in new or extant buildings, but the vagueness of their aims and the contestation of the space of the centres undermined the aim of making the centres apolitical, neutral spaces from which associative

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behaviours might stem. The green spaces, trees, gardens and pathways of the new estates were, if anything, more ambiguous and subject to competing models of use than the community centres. Conceived of for aesthetic reasons, the grass verges, trees and open gardens soon became subject to competing concepts of what they were and what they were for. In both cases many of the practices and acts of contestation were almost certainly unconscious and highly practical responses to environments which had unknown purposes or ambiguous demarcation. Where spaces were formally contested, as had been the case for community centres, the variety of tactics used showed the range of methods and discourses people were willing to deploy in achieving their aims. Notions of youth, community and privacy were all mapped onto the various spaces and this suggests a distinctly spatial relationship in the formulation of discourses and understandings of them. These instances are important for our understanding of the process of post-war urban renewal because they show how the basis of urban modernism was undermined at the most basic level. The transgression of a grass verge may seem insignificant, but thousands and millions of short cuts started to damage the aesthetic qualities that planners had envisaged. Broken fences, damaged trees, streaks of bare grass and denuded flowerbeds, and the inability of corporations to take any remedial action clearly delineated the limits of planners’ power to influence behaviours.

Notes 1 Princess Parkway was, and still is, the major route through the Wythenshawe estate that leads from the south to the city centre. 2 Greater Manchester Country Record Office (GMCRO)/GB127/Council Minutes (CM)/Wythenshawe Estate Special Committee (WESC), Footpaths adjoining Princess Parkway, 27 August 1946, vol. 9, p. 590. 3 Nicholas Bullock, ‘Plans for post-war housing in the UK: the case for mixed development and the flat’, Planning Perspectives, 2:1 (1987), 71–98; Alice Coleman, Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing (London, 1985); Nick Tiratsoo, ‘The reconstruction of blitzed British cities, 1945–55: myths and reality’, Contemporary British History, 14:1 (2000), 27–44. 4 Anne Power, Estates on the Edge: The Social Consequences of Mass Housing in Northern Europe (Basingstoke, 1997); Anne Power, Hovels to High Rise: State Housing in Europe since 1850 (London, 1993). 5 Mark Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns: Social Change and Urban Dispersal in Post-war England (Manchester, 1998); Andrzej Olechnowicz, Working-class Housing in England between the Wars: The Becontree Estate (Oxford, 1997).

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6 Ben Jones, ‘The uses of nostalgia: autobiography, community publishing and working class neighbourhoods in post-war England’, Cultural and Social History, 7:3 (2010), 355–74. 7 Don Mitchell, ‘The end of public space? People’s Park, definitions of the public, and democracy’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 85:1 (1995), 108–33; Patsy Eubanks Owens, ‘No teens allowed: the exclusion of adolescents from public spaces’, Landscape Journal, 21:1 (2002), 156–63; Steve Pile and Michael Keith (eds), Geographies of Resistance (London, 1997); Paul Routledge, Terrains of Resistance: Nonviolent Social Movements and the Contestation of Place in India (Westport, 1993); William Sewell, ‘Space in contentious politics’, in Ronald Aminzade, Jack Goldstone, Doug McAdam, Elizabeth Perry, William Sewell, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly (eds), Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 51–89; Charles Tilly, ‘Spaces of contention’, Mobilization, 5:2 (2000), 135–59; Charles Tilly, ‘Contention over space and place’, Mobilization, 8:2 (2003), 221–5. 8 Mark Harrison, ‘Symbolism, ritualism and the location of crowds in earlynineteenth century English towns’, in Dennis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (eds), The Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 194–213; Dan Healey, ‘Masculine purity and “gentlemen’s mischief”: sexual exchange and prostitution between Russian men, 1861–1941’, Slavic Review, 60:2 (2001), 233–65; Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Bristol, 2005); Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-century London (London, 2000); Chris Philo, A Geographical History of Institutional Provision for the Insane from Medieval Times to the 1860s in England and Wales (Lampeter, 2004). 9 Mike Crang, ‘Relics, places and unwritten geographies in the work of Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)’, in Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift (eds), Thinking Space (Abingdon, 2000), pp. 136–53 (p. 137); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (London, 1984). 10 Patrick Dunleavy, The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain 1945–1975 (Oxford, 1981); Power, Estates on the Edge; Anne Power, ‘High-rise estates in Europe: is rescue possible?’, Journal of European Social Policy, 9:2 (1999), 139–63; Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture: The History of a Social Experiment (London, 2001). 11 Deedes was a brigadier general and the heir to a country squireship. However, after serving in the First World War and as part of the British mandate in Palestine he renounced his title and lived in Bethnal Green as local councillor, air-raid warden and vice-chair of the NCSS. 12 Read by Richard Cottram at the September 1943 inaugural meeting of the National Federation of Community Associations, quoted in Raymond T. Clarke (ed.), Enterprising Neighbours: The Development of the Community Association Movement in Britain (London, 1990), p. 34. 13 Ministry of Education (MoE), Community Centres (London, 1944), p. 4. 14 Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, p. 185; MoE, Community Centres, pp. 3–7.

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15 Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs; Norman Dennis, ‘The popularity of the neighbourhood community idea’, in R.E. Pahl (ed.), Readings in Urban Sociology (Oxford, 1968), pp. 74–92 (pp. 84–5); Olechnowicz, Working-class Housing. 16 Clarke (ed.), Enterprising Neighbours; Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs. 17 Tami Davis Biddle, ‘British and American approaches to strategic bombing: their origins and implementation in the World War II combined bomber offensive’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 18:1 (1995), 91–144 (96); Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Harmondsworth, 1984), p. 290; Olechnowicz, Working-class Housing. 18 M.P. Hall, Community Centres and Associations in Manchester: A Survey Made in 1945 by the Manchester and Salford Council of Social Service (Manchester, 1946), pp. 21–45. 19 De Certeau, Everyday Life. 20 GMCRO/GB127/CM/Housing Committee (HC), Community centres, 26 February 1943, vol. 25, pp. 29–30; GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, Rack House Community Centre, 22 February 1943, vol. 8, p. 170; Derick Deakin, Wythenshawe: The Story of a Garden City (Chichester, 1989); Hall, Community Centres, pp. 29–46. 21 MoE, Community Centres. 22 MoE, Community Centres, p. 3. 23 MoE, Community Centres, pp. 7–8. 24 Clarke (ed.), Enterprising Neighbours, p. 41. 25 Quoted in the brochure issued for the laying of the foundation stone by the Minister of Health, Sir Kingsley Wood. Quoted in Hall, Community Centres, p. 40. 26 Ernest Barker, New Housing Estates and their Social Problems (London, 1935), Preface. 27 MoE, Community Centres, p. 3. 28 MoE, Community Centres, p. 3. 29 MoE, Community Centres, pp. 3–7. 30 Olechnowicz, Working-class Housing. 31 MoE, Community Centres, p. 14. 32 MoE, Community Centres, p. 6. 33 Dennis, ‘Neighbourhood community’, in Pahl (ed.), Urban Sociology, pp. 84–5. 34 MoE, Community Centres, p. 6. 35 GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, Rack House Community Centre, 3 August 1938, vol. 6, unpaginated. 36 GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, Rack House Community Centre, 18 September 1945, vol. 9, p. 167. 37 GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, Rack House Community Centre, 18 September 1945, vol. 9, p. 167. 38 MoE, Community Centres, pp. 14–15. 39 GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, Rack House Community Centre, 18 September 1945, vol. 9, p. 167.

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40 GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, Rack House Community Centre, 18 September 1945, vol. 9, p. 167. 41 GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, Rack House Community Centre, 18 September 1945, vol. 9, p. 168, and 29 October 1945, p. 267. 42 Deakin, Wythenshawe, pp. 111–14; Hall, Community Centres. 43 Hall, Community Centres, pp. 32–3. 44 Hall, Community Centres, p. 34. 45 It is not always apparent exactly what is meant by ‘young people’, with the definition seeming to range from anywhere between 14 and 24 years of age. 46 Hall, Community Centres, pp. 18, 35 & 40. 47 MoE, Community Centres, p. 13. 48 MoE, Community Centres, p. 13. 49 John Davis, Youth and the Condition of Britain: Images of Adolescent Conflict (London, 1990), pp. 71–5; Bill Osgerby, Youth in Britain since 1945 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 5–16. 50 GMCRO/GB127/M740/2/8/3/53, New Estates Federation of Manchester and District meeting, c.26 February 1935, p. 3. 51 GMCRO/GB127/CM/HC, Letter to the Chair of the HC from Irene Salisbury, 8 March 1943, vol. 25, pp. 37–8. 52 Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, p. 170. 53 Rowland Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan (Norwich, 1945), p. 113. 54 The trend was not exclusive to the post-war plans and can be found in evidence throughout the twentieth century, stemming from ideas founded in the garden city movement. See: Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (Eastbourne, 1985 [1898]) and Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1996), pp. 45–7 & 68. 55 Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue (eds), The New Suburban History (Chicago, 2006). 56 Colin Gordon, ‘Afterword’, in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Colin Gordon (ed.) (Brighton, 1980), pp. 257; Brenda S. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment (Singapore, 2003). 57 There is a vast literature on what constitutes resistance. Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (London, 2000), ch. 8 is an effective attempt to dismiss the idea that forms of dissent or resistance can be entirely internal to the individual. See also: Michael David-Fox, ‘Whither resistance?’, Kritika, 1:1 (2000), 161–5; Brent L. Pickett, ‘Foucault and the politics of resistance’, Polity, 28:4 (1996), 445–66; Lynne Viola, ‘Popular resistance in the Stalinist 1930s: soliloquy of a devil’s advocate’, Kritika, 1:1 (2000), 45–69. 58 De Certeau, Everyday Life. 59 Coleman, Utopia on Trial, pp. 45–7; Power, Estates on the Edge. 60 Mats Franzén, ‘Urban order and the preventive restructuring of space: the operation of border controls in micro space’, Sociological Review, 49:2 (2001),

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202–18; Peter Jackson, ‘Domesticating the street: the contested spaces of the high street and the mall’, in Nicholas Fyfe (ed.), Images of the Street: Planning, Identity and Control in Public Space (London, 1998), pp. 176–91; Andy Merrifield, ‘The dialectics of dystopia: disorder and zero tolerance in the city’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 24:2 (2001), 473–89; Mike Raco, ‘Remaking place and securitising space: urban regeneration and the strategies, tactics and practices of policing in the UK’, Urban Studies, 40:9 (2003) 1869–87; John Urry, Consuming Places (London, 1995); Sharon Zukin, The Cultures of Cities (Oxford, 1995). 61 Raco, ‘Remaking place’, 1881. 62 Dunleavy, Politics of Mass Housing; Power, Estates on the Edge; Power, ‘Highrise estates’; Ravetz, Council Housing. 63 Coleman, Utopia on Trial, pp. 45–7. 64 See: Ministry of Health/Ministry of Works (MoH/MoW), Housing Manual 1944 (London, 1944), p. 16. 65 Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan, p. 105. 66 Edwin Lutyens and Patrick Abercrombie, A Plan for the City and County of Kingston upon Hull (Hull, 1945), p. 68 and Plate XLI. 67 GMCRO/GB127/M723/61, Manchester City News, 5 March 1938, unpaginated cutting. 68 GMCRO/GB127/HC/WESC, Damage to lawns, trees and shrubs, 25 September 1947, vol. 10, p. 494. 69 GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, Formation of verges etc. on the Baguley Hall and Newall Green neighbourhood units, 1 April 1949, vol. 11, p. 602. 70 Owens, ‘No teens allowed’, 156–63. 71 De Certeau, Everyday Life. 72 GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, Occupation of land rear of 13 Banstead Avenue, Northenden, 20 May 1943, vol. 8, p. 196. 73 In Queen’s Park, Manchester, as part of 1939’s ‘Grow More Food’ campaign, vegetables were grown in place of flowers and there was a 120-foot long salad border, 6 feet deep with chives, onions, Swiss chard, spinach, beetroot and endive. See: Hazel Conway, ‘Everyday landscapes: public parks from 1930 to 2000’, Garden History, 28:1 (2000), 117–31 (123). 74 GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, Cultivation of land, 18 October 1939, vol. 6, p. 227. 75 GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, Damage to trees, Wythenshawe Estate, 25 September 1945, vol. 9, p. 171. 76 GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, Damage to trees, 7 March 1947, vol. 10, p. 264. 77 For example, GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, Damage to trees, Wythenshawe Estate, 29 December 1947 and 31 May 1948, vol. 11, pp. 72 & 190; 4 February 1949, vol. 12, p. 534. 78 GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, Damage to Princess Parkway, 23 April 1946, vol. 9, p. 447. 79 GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, Damage to trees in [sic] Princess Parkway, 27 March 1945, vol. 9, p. 72.

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80 GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, Visit of Sub Committee to Wythenshawe, 20 June 1946, vol. 9, p. 498. 81 Hull History Centre (HHC)/CTAH/2/Box 2193/File 36, Letter to the Housing Section from Mr A. Wright, 26 September 1957. 82 In the 1945 Hull Corporation Housing Section report on the Anlaby Road development it is explicitly stated that ‘it is anticipated that the days of the front railings and enclosing fences are over, and in this area, as in others, the short front gardens either of grass or paving, might be treated as open forecourts’. HHC/CTAH/2/Box 2020/File 24, The Anlaby Road reconstruction scheme, undated but c. May 1945, p. 5. 83 Robert Colls, ‘When we lived in communities’, in Robert Colls and Richard Rodger (eds), Cities of Ideas: Civil Society and Urban Governance in Britain, 1800–2000 (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 283–307. 84 Davis, Youth; John R. Gillis, ‘The evolution of juvenile delinquency in England 1890–1914’, Past & Present, 67:1 (1975), 96–126; Osgerby, Youth in Britain; Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (London, 1983). 85 Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs; Claire Langhamer, ‘The meanings of home in postwar Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History, 40:2 (2005), 341–62; Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998); Olechnowicz, Working-class Housing; Mass Observation File Report 1616, Some Psychological Factors in Home Building, 3 March 1943, p. 2. 86 Coleman, Utopia on Trial, p. 45. Coleman bases much of her criticism on Oscar Newman’s notion of defensible space; see: Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: People and Design in the Violent City (London, 1973). 87 Healey, ‘Masculine purity’; Houlbrook, Queer London; Leif Jerram, Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe’s Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2011). 88 GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, Permission to erect a close boarded fence at No.70 Homewood Road, 28 June 1939, vol. 6, unpaginated. 89 GMCRO/GB127/CM/HC, Baguley Hall and Newham Green neighbourhoods, open gardens, 7 December 1953, vol. 38, p. 559. 90 HHC/CTAH/2/Box 2020/File 24, Letter from D. Wilson, Bilton Grange, 2 July 1956. 91 For figures, see: Richard Harris and Peter J. Larkham, Changing Suburbs: Foundation, Form, and Function (London, 1999); Greg Stevenson, Palaces for the People: Prefabs in Post-war Britain (London, 2003); Brenda Vale, Prefabs: A History of the UK Temporary Housing Programme (London, 1995). 92 GMCRO/GB127/CM/HC, Temporary roads, 5 March 1948, vol. 30, pp. 245 & 369. 93 GMCRO/GB127/CM/HC, Temporary houses on Hough End Fields, 28 June 1946, vol. 28, p. 211. 94 HHC/CTCR/1.16.6, Report 37, 13 October 1947. 95 HHC/CTAH/6.3/FG4, FG5/1, FG5/2 and FG10, Assorted reports 1946–48 listing complaints to the Corporation concerning temporary estates. 96 MoH/MoW, Temporary Accommodation: Memorandum for the Guidance of Local Authorities (London, 1944), p. 7.

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97 GMCRO/GB127/CM/HC, Temporary housing schemes, 9 October 1946, vol. 28, p. 431. 98 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London, 2008). With regard to liminal spaces, I do not mean to suggest that these are viewed as ritual spaces as in the work of van Gennep or Turner, rather that they are spaces that are conceived of as ‘in-between’ one state and another. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London, 1960); Victor Witter Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (London, 1969). 99 De Certeau, Everyday Life. 100 By 1957 Hull Corporation were now Hull City Council. 101 GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, Letter from G. Hibbert to the ‘Wythenshawe Committee’, 4 May 1946, vol. 9, p. 522. 102 GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, Fencing of land at the rear of houses in Homewood Road and Yew Tree Land, Northenden, 21 August 1946, vol. 9, p. 590. 103 GMCRO/GB127/CM/WESC, Fencing of land at the rear of houses in Homewood Road and Yew Tree Land, Northenden, 21 August 1946, vol. 9, p. 590. 104 GMCRO/GB127/CM/HC, Corner plots at Wythenshawe, 12 November 1947, vol. 30, p. 61. 105 GMCRO/GB127/CM/HC, Corner plots at Wythenshawe, 12 November 1947, vol. 30, p. 61. 106 GMCRO/GB127/CM/HC, Corner plots at Wythenshawe, 12 November 1947, vol. 30, p. 61.

Conclusion

At the core of this book have been two central questions: who was responsible for shaping British cities in the decade or so that followed the Second World War, and what were the consequences of their actions and experiences for the trajectory of urban renewal in the twentieth century? It is worth dealing with these questions together before coming to some more general conclusions about the study of urban modernism presented in this book. The primary drivers of change, both well before the war and in the immediate aftermath, were the city corporations. They had long coveted the legislative tools and support to reshape their ageing, unplanned cities in order that they might function in a world for which they seemed increasingly unsuitable. Beginning during the war, corporations scented an opportunity to realise their ambitions through a host of new planning advice and legislation emanating from central government. Their outlook – a potent cocktail of municipal pragmatism combined with a radical, yet functional form of urban modernism – produced an approach to redevelopment primarily characterised by a belief that space might be shaped in such a way that greater order and functionality might also produce a set of desirable social outcomes. The successes, failures and lessons learnt in this period became crucial for the character of urban renewal and modernism in the 1960s and 1970s. Far from being a period of inertia or a mere proving ground that preceded the triumph of Modernist architecture, the decade that followed the war was characterised by incremental victories and harsh lessons in the engine room of urban renewal – the committees and departments of local corporations – that had important implications for the long-term future of redevelopment plans. Corporations were remarkably successful in some elements of their approach to urban space: they succeeded in radicalising the control of advertising and they began to make inroads that would in the long-term yield legislation aimed at curbing poor air quality, noise and other forms of disturbance. The importance of these changes, which profoundly

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altered the experience of the city at street level, should not be underestimated, but has rarely formed part of discussions of modernism as either a style or a practice of governance. In other areas they were less successful: both central government and a host of powerful semi-state actors – p ­ rimarily commercial interest groups like chambers of trade, landowners and retailers – opposed schemes to acquire and control large amounts of land and to make major changes to city centre shopping districts. Here, the shorter-term demands of economic recovery trumped the long-term desire to replan cities. Development schemes and the spatial schema that governed them were also challenged on a much smaller, though no less effective, scale by individual retailers and inhabitants. Growing consumer trends moved shopping habits away from the patterns anticipated by planners, which in turn destabilised the models of interaction, sociability and community inherent in plans for neighbourhoods. In contests over green spaces, trees and community centres, inhabitants’ practices and quotidian acts eroded the rigid socio-spatial models at the heart of plans for social housing. The practices of everyday life thus gradually ate away at confidence in planners’ ability to produce social outcomes through spatial manipulation. Crucial to understanding the role of corporations here has been a close examination of continuity and change alongside the interplay between the different levels of the state and various non-state actors. The instances covered in the preceding chapters can, of course, only form a series of case studies, but these are enough to suggest there is still much to be uncovered that might further clarify our picture of post-war modernism and urban development. The potential of comparison between local and national approaches to redevelopment to question and destabilise established narratives certainly bears further investigation beyond this volume. Advertising and smoke control are just two of the ways that the state sought to mediate the sensory environment at street level. The variety of ways the language of ‘visual amenity’ or ‘psychological amenity’ was deployed appears to have been more multifarious and meaningful than this book has been able to do justice to. The potential exists to cast a critical eye over many more aspects of spatial governance and over a longer period, which might truly illustrate the complexity of the story of this quiet, yet radical urban modernism (something upon which I have only begun to touch here). Post-war discourses of town planning situated British cities at a crucial moment of transformation and posited expert-led planning as the means to create modern cities fit for the people who had lost homes and loved ones during the war. Narratives of sacrifice and national duty

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were enmeshed with debates concerning damaged and destroyed cities, and the invocation of these interrelated debates presented local governments with an opportunity to articulate their desire, evident in inter-war schemes and post-war spatial policies, to holistically control the space of the city. As planning historian Phil Jones has asserted: ‘World War II provided a stimulus, and intellectual breathing space, for considering radical solutions to long-term problems with the fabric of British cities.’ Yet, the importance of the war also lay in providing a rhetorical framework to legitimise long-held desires to enact more totalising forms of urban governance.1 The apparent radicalism of the solutions presented at the end of the war appears not merely as an overly ambitious product of a period where planners dreamt of utopia, but as a specific and useful tool which communicated ideas of progress and planning expertise to an expectant population. Planners and local corporations asserted their right to plan the city through the exploitation of a language of progress, both in the form of spoken or written communication, and through visual depictions of the future contained within the 1945 Plans. In doing so they seem to have deliberately obscured significant continuities with pre-war projects, which in turn have pushed histories of the post-war period to accept too readily both the Plans and national policy as evidence of radical change. As chapters 1 and 3 both argued, the high degree of actual continuity between inter-war and post-war plans for city centres and housing estates meant that, by emphasising progress and modernness, the 1945 Plans for Manchester and Hull attempted to create a largely imagined break with the past. During a period when officials of the state, popular media and planning experts stressed the necessity for a newness of approach in tackling urban problems – problems like squalor, traffic congestion, road accidents, lack of facilities and pollution – both Plans utilised a variety of detailed maps, tables and illustrations to produce a kind of fantasy of progressive, scientifically planned newness. Whilst the evidence in this book shows that many of these ‘new’ approaches were nothing of the sort, it appears that many of the historiographical assessments of the period have rather overestimated the extent to which the modernist visions in the 1945 Plans were intended to be completed. Maps and tables, as Chris Perkins and Martin Dodge have argued, invoked a notion of expertise to the reader, tying the 1945 Plans into wider discourses of British planning that stressed the scientific and expert basis upon which the restructuring of the post-war nation was to rest.2 Some of the schemes contained within the Plans, nevertheless, were enacted, or at least attempted, in the post-war period. Plans for zoning,

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housing estate design and traffic planning were, however, not much more than repackaged versions of inter-war schemes. Their presentation reflected a desire to legitimise the right of planners and local corporations to guide the shape of cities by buying into the post-war discourse of expert planning, rather than a new trend emerging entirely from the war. In a discursive environment where constructions of modernity were characterised by a sober, distinctly British form of architectural Modernism, illustrations of Modernist buildings also served to illustrate the progressive nature of post-war plans. However, there was little accompanying commitment to the actual architectural designs displayed in the extensive illustrations of the 1945 Plans. The text of the Plans, when examined carefully, tended to be vague, multi-vocal and present the more radical elements of the Plans as tentative and suggestive of the future, rather than visions to be realised wholesale. In this sense, the Plans and their framers have rather been victims of their own cunning. Those who have looked back to the Plans have tended to be so captivated by the boldness of the visions presented in the illustrations that they have memorialised the authors as either hopelessly utopian daydreamers or wantonly destructive, modernist louts. In the closer reading of the text we see a rather more nuanced picture that suggests the relationship between built form and radical modernism in the postwar years needs to be somewhat tempered. Architectural historians Nicholas Bullock and Elizabeth Darling have done much to show the emergence and influence of architectural Modernism on mainstream inter- and post-war planning, yet the evidence here suggests that specific architectural form was not a particularly important consideration in the minds of post-war planners.3 John Gold’s assertion that modernism was much more fractured and Simon Gunn’s argument that urban modernism tended to be technocratic but less concerned with specific architectural forms point in a similar direction to the examination of spatial policy in chapter 2.4 Viewing architectural Modernism as part of a constructive and powerfully useful fantasy, rather than one of the main aims of the Plans, thus explains some of the difficulties historians have experienced in separating the rhetoric from the reality in post-war planning. Whilst beyond the scope of this book’s investigation, it is possible that the highly visible, emblematic examples of Modernist architecture evident in high-rise flats and shopping centres have done much to condition perceptions – particularly popular ones – of the influence of Modernism in the post-war period.5 A strong commitment to architectural Modernism in local government is thus hard to substantiate. Naturally, some councillors and planners favoured Modernist architecture, but it was never central to their

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aims. Corporations had been agitating for the powers to achieve a more complete control of their urban environments since the 1920s. In an era where the role of local corporations was uncertain, the right to holistically plan the city was a way of consolidating their powers and position within the state. Attempts to enact stringent zoning laws, to apply and expand controls over land use (particularly through the application of compulsory purchase orders) or to control ‘visual amenity’, noise and air quality were all indicative of a technocratic attitude by local corporations to shaping the future of the city on a holistic basis. These attempts to shape the city were characterised by two approaches: first, by a very general notion of what cities should look like, based on principles concerned with spaciousness, road widths and improved amounts of daylight. Corporations, however, were largely untroubled by the actual shape of buildings that were erected (within certain broad parameters), only seeking to shape general form through the use of zoning, regulation of building heights and widths, or by dictating the distance they were from the street. In this sense the local corporations were not obsessed with Modernism but with a much more far-reaching, less-specific notion of how the city functioned and how people might use it – an approach that others have named ‘urban modernism’ and I have chosen to use here. Secondly, by a wish to produce certain desirable outcomes through the control and manipulation of space in an effort to regulate the streetlevel experience of the city. These were the main tenets of the type of urban modernism at the core of local corporations’ thinking, a form of modernism that looked both to the functional aspects of the modernist movement and also to a profoundly practical set of concerns about municipal governance that were far from new. Central to corporations’ spatial policies was an attempt to shape exactly what happened where, and this can be seen in disputes over advertising, attempts to create shopping centres and in the design of housing estates. A belief in the potential of the correct spaces to shape a more ordered and functional city emerges as the defining feature of the type of post-war urban modernism practised in cities like Manchester and Hull. Corporations utilised their ability to create new spaces whilst testing new legislation to the limit to expand their capacity to intervene in extant spaces. These approaches were aimed at defining what might transpire where, how people interacted with each other and how they might move through the spaces of the city. Here, Charlotte Wildman’s work on the way local corporations sought to shape the shopping spaces of inter-war Manchester and Liverpool points to the considerable lineage of attempts to create a homogenous civic subject by defining how the city might be used and experienced.6 Parallels might also be drawn

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with Leif Jerram’s depiction of planners in early twentieth-century Munich, where the approaches to urban space emanating from planners were characterised by a kind of architecturally pragmatic, technocratic localism.7 In their attempts to limit advertising, improve air quality and increase light, to curtail the licensing of fun fairs or to acquire large areas of their cities for development, the local corporations were attempting to manage society through the management of space. Neighbourhood units, shops, bomb sites, green spaces and community centres were components in a socio-spatial schema aimed at engendering certain selfconsciously modern interactions through the creation of homogenous subject-citizens. Chapter 2 in particular highlighted the manner in which corporations’ spatial practices conceived of the experience of the city as instrumental in engendering correct behaviours. The book has argued that these attempts to acquire, shape and define behaviours within given spaces amount to strategies designed to produce specific places; in other words, ‘placemaking’. Strategies of urban governance revolved around imbuing spaces with specific meanings and rules in order to produce them as places with highly specific purposes. Yet, as chapters 2, 3 and 4 argued, the meanings generated through use by inhabitants were often radically different from those envisaged by planners. The importance of these conclusions for the wider historiography lies in their ability to reframe debates that have, for example, emphasised problems in post-war social housing as a failure of planning or as a symptom of state neglect. Understanding the way contestation of ambiguous spaces and the manner in which people consciously and unconsciously resisted attempts to shape their behaviours has significance beyond the study of this period. Studies of urban regeneration, for example, have acknowledged the difficulty of how ambiguous ownership of urban space creates problems of crime, exclusion and neglect that still have relevance to twenty-first-century urban development.8 The pertinence of these conclusions, however, remains somewhat tentative. Precise understandings of why and how people use space remain elusive, and perhaps always will. However, evidence suggests that on both housing estates and in city centres conflicts erupted over contradictions in the strategies of governmentality and the conscious and unconscious actions of inhabitants. The local people of Manchester and Hull, it seems, had a great deal of agency in shaping and remaking their urban and suburban environments, for better and for worse. The question that remains concerns what significance the preceding conclusions have for the wider understanding of the trajectory of urban renewal between the 1920s and the 1970s. The picture I have painted

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suggests that local corporations motivated a form of urban modernism that was founded on very pragmatic concerns, yet was quietly radical in its vision and methods. It had little regard for specific architectural form but was deeply technocratic in its application of and belief in space as a precision tool for social engineering. The importance of these conclusions for how we understand the path of urban renewal lies in the consequences of their successes and failures. The approaches of local corporations may not have been Modernist in the architectural sense in this period, but ideas stemming from CIAM were always at least as concerned with functionality in the broader sense as they were with rigid ideas about functionality expressed strictly in form. Of course, both ideas informed each other, but there was a strong streak within the Athens Charter of 1933 that stressed functionality in terms of order and control of space that is recognisable in the approaches of planners and local governments alike.9 The end of the war offered a moment when it seemed possible to achieve the revolution in the acquisition and control of space that would facilitate the urban modernist project, although couched within a pragmatic, municipal vision. As I have argued, this moment swiftly receded in the face of the obstacles, opposition and failures discussed in chapters 2, 3 and 4; but it did succeed in other areas. The significance of the failures lies in the conclusions we might draw about the trajectory of urban renewal. For architectural historians the post-war period can seem like a testing ground for the new ideas that gave way to the final triumph of architectural Modernism in the late 1950s and 1960s.10 It is hard to argue with these conclusions when applied to building techniques or materials, and I have not sought to do so here. Instead, I have attempted to complicate the all too easily assumed link between the dominance of an architectural style and the governmental project that accompanied it and was intrinsically bound up with it. I have argued that the core urban modernist beliefs centred on functionality and socio-spatial outcomes had already taken serious damage from central government, local elites, commercial concerns and the behaviours of the inhabitants. These setbacks and obstacles challenged the ability of planners to achieve the less tangible aims of urban modernism that were unrelated to an architectural aesthetic. Opposition to urban modernism may not have truly gathered momentum until the 1960s, but the experiences of the 1940s and 1950s precipitated its demise.11 The reactions of local people to the spatial logics of new estates not only questioned the efficacy of planners’ schemes but also exposed the limits of the state’s power in shaping citizens and society. Alongside these, more traditional forms of opposition from central government and commercial elites stymied the crucial attempts

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to gain control of land, but also exposed the impracticality of long term plans in the face of economic practicalities. The effect of these setbacks was to question the central assumptions that were the foundations of urban modernism: that the holistic control and development of space was both achievable and desirable. The neighbourhood unit, though still used in the period after 1960, was widely discredited by 1961 and in fact had been challenged by Lewis Mumford as early as 1954 for its inability to deliver the communities it claimed it would.12 Planning legislation evolved under the Conservative government of 1951 so that it became more difficult and expensive for corporations to acquire and develop land, whilst alterations to licensing procedures greatly increased the attractiveness of partnerships with private companies.13 Shops on housing estates continued to struggle and attempts in the late 1950s by local governments to strike a happy medium between the need to provide sufficient facilities and the demands of consumerism had mixed success. It is too bold a conclusion to suggest that urban modernism had failed, or even that it was damaged beyond repair by the middle of the 1950s. Nevertheless, it had moved into a new phase. The neighbourhood unit may have proved unsuccessful for example, but housing projects of terrific socio-spatial ambition and scale would still be attempted in places like Sheffield’s Park Hill and Manchester’s Hulme Crescents through the 1960s into the early 1970s. Likewise in city centres corporations may have proved unable to gain control of the land, yet ambitious redesigns of shopping centres like Birmingham’s Bull Ring or Manchester’s Arndale Centre were produced with private partners. Urban modernism is, of course, not a single set of spatial solutions, nor have its forms proved entirely static. Perhaps, given these considerations, we might argue that the debate at stake is actually more semantic than about the character of urban modernism. There is little question, for example, that when Bullock talks about modernism he is referring to something distinctly architectural, not something largely rooted in function and municipal politics. I am aware that it would be easy to simply move the terminological goalposts to suit my own argument. Accordingly, I have tried to be sensitive to the vagaries of the terms used by myself and the other historians who have tackled the subject. It is also difficult to speculate on the extent to which the experience of Manchester and Hull reflects the wider experiences of post-war renewal in other cities. Manchester, as the ‘shock city’ of the industrial revolution, is a historically emblematic city, which has self-consciously promoted its own exceptionality throughout its history.14 Hull, in comparison, has rarely troubled historians. There are exceptional e­lements highlighted

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here – Wythenshawe as a social housing project was somewhat ahead of its time, though hardly unique when compared to Dagenham’s Becontree Estate; Hull’s people felt (with some justification) that official histories of the Blitz had marginalised their part in the story, but then so did many cities; Manchester was years ahead of other cities in demanding tighter control of air pollution – yet, for all their differences, there are remarkable similarities in the approaches of both cities to spatial governance and town planning both before and after the war. Studies of cities like Coventry, Birmingham, Portsmouth and a host of others hint that conclusions about the character and importance of local government as drivers of modernity, the technocratic nature of urban governance and the conflict between national and local government were common features of post-war experience. The vigour and quiet radicalism with which local corporations tried to bolster their capacity to govern the city was perhaps the most salient feature of the period studied here. The post-war period was not a moment where holistic replanning of cities became possible – though the rhetoric of the Plans and discourses of planning claimed it was – nor was it the moment when architectural Modernism awakened. What this book has argued is that the post-war period produced a rhetorical ‘moment’ when discourses of citizenship, bomb damage and modernity produced a belief amongst local corporations that the conditions existed in which they might realise a particular kind of local-based urban modernism rooted in a technocratic desire to control the future of the city in the long term. Their approach did not reflect the ‘soft, relatively humanist modernism’ that David Kynaston observed in British architecture of the time; rather, it represented a radical, if somewhat mundane, low-key approach to holistically shaping and controlling the urban environment.15 The disappointments and the triumphs, the frustrated ambitions and planning failures, the harsh lessons and unrealised schemes were part of a learning process that had profound and lasting effects for the project of urban renewal in the decades that followed.

Notes  1 Phil Jones, ‘Historical continuity and post-1945 urban redevelopment: the example of Lee Bank, Birmingham, UK’, Planning Perspectives, 19:4 (2004), 365–89.  2 Chris Perkins and Martin Dodge, ‘Mapping the imagined future: the roles of visual representation in the 1945 City of Manchester Plan’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 89:1 (2012), 247–76.

200

Reconstructing modernity

 3 Nicholas Bullock, Building the Post-war World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain (London, 2002); Elizabeth Darling, Re-forming Britain: Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction (Abingdon, 2007).  4 John Gold, The Experience of Modernism: Modern Architects and the Future City, 1928–53 (London, 1997); Simon Gunn, ‘The rise and fall of British urban modernism: planning Bradford, circa 1945–1970’, Journal of British Studies, 49:4 (2010), 849–69.  5 For examples of popular conceptions of post-war modernism, see: Colin Amery and Dan Cruickshank, The Rape of Britain (London, 1975). For examples of the focus on high-rise flats, see: Alice Coleman, Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing (London, 1985); Patrick Dunleavy, The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain, 1945–1975 (Oxford, 1981); Anne Power, Property before People: The Management of Twentieth Century Council Housing (London, 1987).  6 Charlotte Wildman, Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918–1939 (London, 2016).  7 Leif Jerram, Germany’s Other Modernity: Munich and the Making of Metropolis, 1895–1930 (Manchester, 2007).  8 Mats Franzén, ‘Urban order and the preventive restructuring of space: the operation of border controls in micro space’, Sociological Review, 49:2 (2001), 202–18; Andy Merrifield, ‘The dialectics of dystopia: disorder and zero tolerance in the city’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 24:2 (2001), 473–89; Mike Raco, ‘Remaking place and securitising space: urban regeneration and the strategies, tactics and practices of policing in the UK’, Urban Studies, 40:9 (2003), 1869–87.  9 On CIAM and Athens, see: John Gold, The Practice of Modernism: Modern Architects and Urban Transformation, 1954–1972 (Abingdon, 2007), p. 10. 10 Bullock, Post-war World, particularly ch. 12; Gold, Experience of Modernism, especially chs 8 & 9. 11 Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal (Chicago, 2011). 12 Anthony Goss, ‘Neighbourhood units in British new towns’, Town Planning Review, 32:1 (1961), 66–82 (66). 13 Harriet Jones, ‘“This is magnificent!”: 300,000 houses a year and the Tory revival after 1945’, Contemporary British History, 14:1 (2000), 99–121; Peter Weiler ‘The rise and fall of the Conservatives’ “grand design for housing”, 1951–64’, Contemporary British History, 14:1 (2000), 122–50. 14 Alan Kidd, Manchester: A History (Lancaster, 2006); Harold Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago, 2005). 15 David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (London, 2008), p. 613.

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221

Index

Index

A City Speaks (film) 30 Abercrombie, Patrick County of London Plan 128 Hull Plan 36, 44, 47–8, 51–60, 70–1, 74, 83, 86–9, 91, 93–5, 116, 119, 132, 136–7 influence on post-war planning 70, 91, 116 neighbourhoods 132, 136–7 suburbs 134, 136 Aberdeen 99 Advertisers’ Weekly 103 advertising central government view 100–4 disputes over 96–103 in planning theory 96, 99 status during inter-war period 97, 99 Advisory Panel on the Redevelopment of City Centres 38 Agate, C. Gustave 41, 45 air pollution 6, 12, 15, 108–10, 193, 199 alleyways 175 amenity concept 9, 15, 79, 96–100 psychological amenity 101, 192 value 97–9, 101 Visual Amenity 6, 97, 101, 171–2, 192, 195 Ancient Monument Status 85 Anlaby Road, Hull 37 Ansell, W.H. 41–2, 45 anti-social behaviour 175 anti-suburban sentiment 128–9, 134, 158 architecture Beaux-Arts 29, 43, 60 Classicism 29, 43, 60, 87

Georgian 11, 87, 42 importance of in post-war 7, 10, 15, 60–1, 197 and Modernism see Modernism Areas of Extensive War Damage 82–4 Army Bureau of Current Affairs 61 Arthur Maiden Ltd. (advertisers) 99–100 Association of Municipal Corporations 84, 100 Athens Charter (1933) 15, 197 Auge, Marc 180 austerity 7, 11, 34, 79–80 Barker, Ernest 163 Barlow Report (1942) 7, 10 Barlow, Thomas 46 Bauman, Zygmunt 16, 139 Baxendale and Co. 86 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 30 Beaux-Arts see architecture Becontree Estate 132, 134, 163, 199 Bellfield Avenue, Hull 140 Benchill, Wythenshawe 140, 162, 166–8, 182 Bethnal Green Bomb Sites Association 106 Betjeman, John 135 Beverly Road, Hull 2 billboards see advertising Bilton Grange Estate, Hull 126, 138, 143, 178, 180 Birmingham 11, 70, 198–9 Blitz effects of 17, 33–9, 52–3, 88–91, 106–9 in planning rhetoric 33–9

222Index Board of Trade (national body) 84, 88 Body, Cllr W. 91, 94 Body Plan (for Hull, 1947) 91–5 Bolton, Lancashire 109 bombing see Blitz bomb sites 19–20, 99, 106–8 bonfires 174 boys’ and girls’ associations 166 Bradford 78 Bramwell Cox, Leonard 124 Bricknell Avenue 140 Bristol 38, 88–9 Brownley Green, Wythenshawe 141, 182 building height restrictions 5, 80, 86–7, 90, 108 Bullock, E.H. 86 Bull Ring see Birmingham bushes 157 Cannon Street, Manchester 43, 83 Care of Green Spaces signs 172 carnivals see fun fairs cars 146 cartography see maps Cedars see Benchill Chadwick, Dr W. 105 chemists 140–1 Chetham’s Hospital 41 children 106, 138, 171, 174–5, 178–81 Christadelphians 165 churches 164–5 Churchill, Winston 41 CIAM (Congres Internationaux d’architecture Moderne) 7, 9–10, 15, 197 cinemas 45 circus performers 107 civic boosterism 4, 40, 65 Civic Diagnosis (report) 45, 52 civic pride weeks 166 Classical architecture see architecture Clean Air Act (1956) 109, 111 clean air laws 96 Clutter Code 104 Co-operative Party 164 Co-operative Society 141, 143 cognitive space 16 Collyhurst, Manchester 126 community concept of 136, 146, 158–9

during inter-war period 122, 128, 133, 135, 158 neighbourhoods 121–2, 133–4, 138, 147 organisations 128, 160 retail 142–3 villages 136–7 working-class 135 community centres 126, 138–9, 158–68 disputes over 160, 165–6 political parties’ use of 165 purpose 160–5 religious use 165 youths 167–8 Community Centres and Associations Committee 162 Compulsory Purchase Orders 38, 44, 79, 82, 195 Conservative Party 10–11, 163, 198 Consultative Council of Community Associations 160 consumerism 12, 95, 123–4, 138–46, 192, 198 consumption see consumerism Corporation Highways Department, Manchester 172 costermongers 107 council housing see social housing County of London Plan 128 Coventry 17, 34–5, 38, 88, 199 Daily Mirror 105 Dalton, Hugh 84–5, 103 dancing 163, 166 Dantzic Street (Manchester) 86 Davidge Plan for Hull (1947) 91–6 Davidge, William 91 daylight 83, 90, 195 de Certeau, Michel 16, 159–61, 170, 180 Deansgate, Manchester 107 Declaratory Orders 82–9 Deedes, Sir Wyndham 160 Deep England 122, 137 delinquency 158, 167 demolition 48, 100 density general building 4, 42 housing 53, 132 Department of Education, Manchester 174 department stores 87

Index Derringham Bank, Hull 138 Design of Dwellings Manual 7, 126, 135 Development Plans 1909 82 1947 34 District Heating scheme, Manchester 109 Dougill, Wesley 128, 151 Dover 99 Drummond, William E. 134, 152 Dudley Report 126, 133 Duncan Sandys, Baron Edwin 103 East Riding County Council 180 Edinburgh 99 elections 10, 124 Emergency Committee, Manchester 127 Endike Road Estate, Hull 126–7 English village, idea of 136–7, 146 everyday life (practice of, theory) 17, 180 Existenzminimum 126 fantasy 19, 33, 47, 57, 60, 65, 122–32, 145–6, 193–4 farms 179–81 fences 106, 170–84 Ferensway, Hull 42–4, 83, 87 Festival House (Hull) 87 Festival of Britain (1951) 125 flats 4, 37, 61, 126, 129 flowers 169–74, 184 Free Trade Hall, Manchester 87 fun fairs 96, 105, 196 gable ends see advertising garages 98, 111 Garden City 133–4 gardening clubs 138, 166 gardens 20, 126, 171, 173–9, 182–4 Gatliff, Herbert 89–90 Georgian architecture see architecture Glass, Ruth 198 Gorton, Manchester 126 governmentality 17, 63, 79, 133, 196 Granada Studios, Manchester 87 grass verges 6, 20, 155, 169, 172–4, 184 green spaces 42, 63, 97, 106, 133, 157–8, 171–3, 176, 182, 184, 192, 196

223 Hall, M.P. 166 Hammond’s Department Store, Hull 87 Harvey, J.D.M. 51–9 hawkers 107–8 Health Committee, Manchester 105, 108 hearths 109 hedges 160, 169, 176–7, 180 high-rise flats see flats Hill, G. Noel 45, 52, 98, 109 Hitler, Adolf 33, 41, 44 homes British attitudes concerning 108–9, 158, 176 see also housing; social housing Homewood Road, Wythenshawe 176, 181 House of Lords 105 housing Housing Committee, Hull 37, 140, 143 design 198 Housing Committee, Manchester 86, 126, 177, 179, 182 Housing Manual (1944) 7, 126, 132, 135 Housing Repairs and Rents Act (1954) 10–11 Housing Section, Hull 174, 178, 180 Housing Subsidies Act (1956) 11 Housing, Town Planning &c Act (1909) 82 policy 123, 125–7 see also homes; social Housing Howard, Ebenezer 134 Hull and District Chamber of Trade 52, 79, 91–5 Hull and District Property Owners’ Protection Association 85 Hull Chamber of Commerce and Shipping 52 Hull Corporation Association of Municipal Corporations 84 attitude to Abercrombie Plan 51–2, 88 attitude to in central government 52 emergency rebuilding 38 inter-war housing 126–7, 132 inter-war planning 42 shops 144–5

224Index Hull Corporation (cont.) temporary estates 179 zoning 84–6 see also zoning Hull Regional Survey (1943) 33 Hull University 11 Hulme, Manchester 4, 126, 198 industry 18, 78, 80, 83, 86, 90 inter-war suburbs 133, 136–7, 177 Jackson, W.P. 50–1, 141 Jacobs, Jane 10 Jowitt, William 88 juveniles 167, 181–2 Keep Fit classes 166 Kingston-upon-Hull Corporation Act (1924) 42 Labour Party 93, 164–6, 168 land-use zoning see zoning Latour, Bruno 94 Le Corbusier 15 Lefebvre, Henri 16 leisure 109–10, 122–3, 133, 137–8, 159–64, 168 Leverhulme Trust 45 Liverpool 39, 43, 99, 125, 195 Lloyd, Harry 128 Lock, Max 33, 45, 52 Lodge, Cllr Ottiwell 50–1 London 4, 17, 34–6, 48, 60, 128, 132 London and North East Railway 52 London County Council 132 Longhill Estate, Hull 143–5, 174 Lords see House of Lords Lutyens, Edwin 51–3 Macmillan, Harold 103 maisonettes 176 Manchester Cathedral 41, 52 Manchester Chamber of Trade 107 Manchester City News (newspaper) 172 Manchester Corporation advertising 99–102 attitude to architecture 80, 86–7 attitude to green space 157, 167, 180 fair grounds 105–8 jurisdiction 18 private bills 84, 105, 108 reputation 51

shops 143, 145 smoke control 108–10 temporary estates 179 and Wythenshawe Estate see Wythenshawe Estate zoning 80–6 see also zoning Manchester Corporation Act (1946) 108 Manchester Corporation Bill (1950) 105 Manchester Evening News (newspaper) 43 Manchester Guardian (newspaper) 41, 107 Manchester Society of Architects 41, 45 Manchester Town Hall 30, 48, 49, 54, 60 Mancunian Way, A57(M) 2 maps purpose of 48, 61–2 Market Street, Manchester 107 MARS (Modern Architectural Research) Group 7, 9–10 Mass Observation 176 Miller Street, Manchester 86 Ministry of Education 126, 161–3, 167 Ministry of Health 7–8, 46, 126, 140 Ministry of Housing and Local Government 43, 103, 104 Ministry of Town and Country Planning 82, 84, 88, 93, 99, 100, 103, 105, 143 Modernism (architecture) 1–15, 29–30, 33, 44, 47, 60–1, 65–6, 80, 87, 129, 137, 194–7 modernity, concept of 5–6, 8, 13–15 More O’Ferrall (advertisers) 101–2 Morrison, William 88 Moss Lane West, Manchester 99 Moss Side, Manchester 101, 104 Munich 97, 196 Municipal Affairs Group (MAG), Hull 52 Myles Wright, H. 1 National Council of Social Services 134, 163 National Picture Theatre, Hull 2–3 neighbourhood principle 122, 128, 137 neighbourhood unit 122–3, 128–9, 132–9, 146–7

Index Newcastle-upon-Tyne 11, 89 New Estates Federation of Manchester and District 167 new towns 121, 138 New York 133–4 Nicholas, Rowland 37, 82, 128, 169, 171 Niemeyer, Oscar 15 noise pollution 12, 18, 78, 96–7, 105–6, 166 non-places 180 North Hull Estate, Hull 132, 138 Northenden, Manchester 142, 173 Orwell, George 135 Osborne Streeet, Hull 91, 95 Parker, Barry 42, 127, 138 pathways 169, 176, 184 peddlers 107 Pepler, George 46 Perry, Clarence 133–8 Peter House, Manchester 11 pharmacies 140–1 photographs, use of 29, 38, 101, 129, 146 Piccadilly Plaza, Manchester 11 Pickard, Alexander 43 place, as a concept 15–16 placemaking 16, 17, 20, 79, 159, 162, 171, 180–3 planning exhibitions 29–30 Hull 53, 93, 132 Manchester 45, 49, 61–2 Planning in Action (1958) 37 planning, origins of 8–9 Plymouth 34–8 Portland Street, Manchester 46 Portsmouth 17, 38, 199 post offices 142 posters see advertising prefabs see temporary homes Princess Parkway, Manchester 157, 181 Priory Road, Hull 140 private developers 10–11, 45, 82, 87, 145 Prospect Street, Hull 91 Public Health Act (1936) 105, 107 public houses 85, 127, 138 public space 97, 159, 169, 176, 181 Queen’s House, Hull 87

225 Rack House, Wythenshawe 162, 164–6 raffles 163 railings 177 railways 52, 88 Rankine, Andrew 52, 132 Reckitt and Coleman (manufacturer) 45–6 Red Book (1944) see Report on Community Centres (1944) Regional Plan for Manchester (1926) 10, 42 Reith, Lord 34–5, 46 Report on Community Centres (1944) 162–7 respiratory diseases 108 Retailers Advisory Committee on Town Planning 143–4 Royal Institute of British Architects 41 Royal Institute of Town Planning 91 road traffic accidents 29, 63–4, 193 roofing materials 98 rose queens 166 Royal Manchester Institution 41, 45 Royal Oak Estate, Wythenshawe 140–1, 162, 166–7 Salford 18, 37, 44, 108, 109, 143 Salthouse Road Estate, Hull 140 schools 61, 121–4, 138, 174–5 Schultz, Alderman J.L. 1, 36, 38, 44, 50–1, 93, 124 Scott, James C. 97, 101 Scott Report (1942) 7, 99 Sharp, Thomas 91, 128, 116 shops difficulties in building 173 lack of on new estates 128, 140, 144 shopping centres 20, 52, 91, 94–6, 143–5 shopping habits 94, 124, 140, 146, 192 Showmen’s Guild of Great Britain 105, 106 shrubberies 171–4, 181 signs 172 Silkin, Lewis 100, 103, 135 Simon, A.P. 42, 45 Simon, E.D. 42, 45, 46 slum clearance 9, 11, 19, 37, 42, 91, 95 smog 108

226Index smoke abatement 9, 108–10 smoke control 108, 192 smokeless fuels 109 smokeless zones 80, 96, 108–11 social housing accusations of failure 128, 139, 147, 158, 170, 175, 196 neighbourhoods see neighbourhood units see also homes; housing; named estates Soja, Edward 16 Southampton 38 Southcoates Lane Estate, Hull 140, 177–8 space, as a concept 13, 16–17 spatial transgression 170 spinneys see trees St Clement’s, Manchester 126 Stamp, Dudley 52 Stockport Road, Manchester 101 street traders 106–8 street widths 5, 80, 195 strongmen 107 subliminal geography 60 suburbs 42, 133–6, 146 Sunday schools 167 supermarkets 144, 146 Swansea 38 Tarran, R.G. 45 television 122, 139 temporary homes 178–80 tenants’ associations 140, 172, 179 The Size and Social Structure of a Town (book) 135 The Times (newspaper) 44 Thirdspace 16 Town and Country Planning Act 1932 82–3, 99–100 1944 38, 82–5 1947 10, 85, 99, 100, 105, 109 1962 104

Town Planning Committee Hull 37, 98, 179 Manchester 37, 105 Town Planning Review (journal) 128 traffic 6, 32, 43, 80, 85, 95, 122, 136, 193–4 trees 41, 97, 126, 169, 171–5, 180, 184 Tuan, Yi Fu 16 Unwin, Raymond 134 urban dispersal 34, 110 urban modernism, as a concept 1–15, 78, 191–9 urban renewal, trajectory of 9–12, 196–7 urban sprawl 133 Uthwatt Report (1942) 7, 38 utopianism 4–5, 9, 19, 30–1, 57, 125 vandalism 170–4, 180 variety chain retail 144 villagisation 122, 146 VJ Day 174 warehouses 43, 46, 98 Wellington Inn, Manchester 85, 115 whist drives 163 Woolworth’s 143–5 Worthington, J. Hubert 41, 52 Wythenshawe Estate design of 42, 126–32, 138 Estate Committee 140–1 Estate Special Committee 128, 142, 164 Residents’ Association 140, 164–5 Shelter and Protection Committee 140 Youth Service 167 youths 167–8, 171–5, 179, 181, 184 zoning 5, 9, 18–19, 29, 42, 76 see also individual corporations