Austerity Britain, 1945–51 by David Kynaston Read Free Book Online Page A

11 to the strain of a competitive examination on which not only their future schooling but their future careers may depend,’ wrote Dent about the White Paper in wholly sanguine mode. ‘In the future, children at the age of 11 should be classified, not on the results of a competitive test, but on assessment of their individual aptitudes largely by such means as school records, supplemented, if necessary, by intelligence tests, due regard being had to their parents’ wishes and the careers they have in mind.’ Just in case anyone was worried, he added that there would be arrangements for children to transfer at 13 in the unlikely event of a mistake having been made two years earlier. 9.
     
    If for Keynesians, social reformers and educationalists the war provided unimagined opportunities for influencing the shape of the future, this was even more true for architects and town planners and their cheerleaders. In their case a momentum for fundamental change had been building inexorably between the wars, and now the heady mixture of destruction and reconstruction gave them their chance. That gathering impetus was perfectly encapsulated as early as 1934 by a young architectural writer answering the question ‘What Would Wren Have Built Today?’ After diagnosing the City of London as overcrowded, badly lit and generally impossible to work in either efficiently or pleasantly, he went on:
     
We must give up the building rule which restricts the height of buildings, and we must not only do that, but we must build office blocks twice as high as St Paul’s, and have green spaces and wide roads in between the blocks . . . Two dozen skyscrapers, though they would obviously dwarf St Paul’s, would not take away from its beauty if they were beautiful themselves. They would alter the skyline, certainly, yet we should not sacrifice health, time, and comfort to one skyline because we have not the courage to create another.
     
    The author of this confident, uncompromising clarion call? John Betjeman, that future doughty conservationist.
     
    Crucially, this rapidly swelling appetite for the new embraced not only the horrors (real and perceived) of the unplanned Victorian city – above all, understandably enough, the horrors of the industrial slums. It also addressed the much more recent blight, as received ‘activator’ opinion had it, of the suburbs, sprawling outwards through the 1920s and 1930s, especially around London, in a spectacular and apparently unplanned way. They were, declared the Welsh architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis in 1928, full of ‘mean and perky little houses that surely none but mean and perky little souls should inhabit with satisfaction’, while ten years later, according to Osbert Lancaster (cartoonist, architectural writer and coiner of the derogatory term ‘Stockbroker Tudor’), the certainty that the streets and estates of the suburbs would ‘eventually become the slums of the future’ unless they were obliterated did much ‘to reconcile one to the prospect of aerial bombardment’. Even George Orwell could not see their point. In his last pre-war novel, Coming Up for Air , he wrote contemptuously of ‘long, long rows of little semi-detached houses’, of ‘the stucco front, the creosoted gate, the privet hedge, the green front door’, of ‘the Laurels, the Myrtles, the Hawthorns, Mon Abri, Mon Repos, Belle Vue’, and of the ‘respectable householders – that’s to say Tories, yes-men, and bum suckers who live in them’. To someone like Thomas Sharp, a planning consultant as well as a university lecturer in architecture and town planning, ‘suburbia’ – where by the end of the 1930s about a quarter of the population lived – was complete anathema; without compunction he condemned ‘its social sterility, its aesthetic emptiness, its economic wastefulness’. In short: ‘Suburbia is not a utility that can promote any proper measure of human happiness and fulfilment.’
     
    Sharp had