Portrait of a postwar people: Modernity Britain, A Shake of the Dice, 1959-62

Modernity Britain: A Shake of the Dice, 1959-62

Author: David Kynaston

ISBN-13: 978-1408844397

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Guideline Price: £25

In June 1961, amid “hoarse cheering, vast dusty crowds and a million flags”, Queen Elizabeth paid a visit to Glasgow, where she toured the slums and unveiled a plaque on one of the massive new high-rise housing blocks rising from the ruins of the old condemned tenements. The development was named after her, Queen Elizabeth Square.

It was meant to be the beginning of a new era. The high-rise blocks had been designed by the architect Sir Basil Spence. They had bathrooms, hot water and central heating – all features lacking in the crumbling tenements that they replaced. There was much fancy talk of “gardens in the sky”. High-rise living was going to be the future. One Glasgow planner envisaged building 500 such blocks, and indeed many more were built.

It was not long before problems arose. By the 1980s the four 20-storey blocks that comprised Queen Elizabeth Square had become crime-ridden, infested by muggers and drug-dealers. Residents rechristened them with the names of some of the world’s grimmest prisons: Alcatraz, Barlinnie and Sing Sing. They were riddled with asbestos, and, in 1987 and again in 1989, after disastrous floods, they had to be evacuated. Many of the evacuated residents refused to return. In 1993 Glasgow finally bit the bullet: Queen Elizabeth Square was dynamited. The high-rise experiment was over.

The rise of brutalist town planning is one of many phenomena documented in the latest volume of David Kynaston’s masterly history of postwar Britain. It wasn’t just Glasgow where brutalism was all the rage. All over Britain, council leaders – urged on by demented town planners and greedy developers – were laying waste to the country’s Victorian and Georgian heritage. Enormous quantities of concrete were poured on to Britain’s green and pleasant land.

The late 1950s and early 1960s were also the beginning of an era of mass car ownership. To accommodate the motor car, motorways were built, starting with the M1 as far as Birmingham. Entire cities were surrendered to the tyranny of the car. Nowhere was the affliction worse than in Birmingham itself where swathes of the inner city were destroyed to make way for a three-lane ring road more suited to Grand Prix racing – indeed, it was later used for exactly that – than the transport needs of a modern city. The pedestrian was almost an irrelevance. The Birmingham redevelopment was described by a contemporary as “the most drastically thorough example of traffic engineering yet seen on this scale in Britain”. You can say that again.

Nowhere was safe. At the height of the madness there was even a plan to drive a highway across Christ Church Meadow, in Oxford. Mercifully it was seen off, but such victories in the face of the new barbarism were rare. Resistance was minimal and confined to a handful of alleged eccentrics, such as John Betjeman.

In Newcastle, T Dan Smith, at that time seen as the model of a dynamic, far-sighted council leader, and his chief planning officer, William Burns, unveiled plans for enormous destruction. “It’s Motorway City” screamed the headline in the city’s evening newspaper over an uncritical report of what the future held.

Smith, in due course, was destined for prison on account of his corrupt relationship with the notorious Bradford architect John Poulson, but in the early 1960s he was at the height of his powers. In any case, the collective fit of madness that afflicted city councillors, planners, architects and most commentators cannot be attributed to corruption. They believed in what they were doing and, in fairness, to begin with at least, multistorey housing developments were seen as an efficient, low-cost solution to the awful slums that blighted so many of Britain’s cities in the decade after the war.

Kynaston writes about much more than motorways and multistorey housing. All of life is here. So much of what, for better or worse, we take for granted today had its origins in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This was the era in which postwar austerity was giving way to consumerism. More and more households were acquiring cars, television sets, washing machines and those who didn’t aspired to them.

Haunting Britain

The result was a change in the political landscape. Increasingly the Conservative Party was seen as the party of aspiration, and Labour, having lost three successive elections, was struggling to broaden its appeal. And yet, as Kynaston notes, the seeds were being sown of problems that would haunt Britain in years to come. Its economic competitors, unburdened by the legacy of empire and bloated defence spending that went with pretensions to great-power status, were catching up. Economic growth was slowing, exports were declining, the value of the pound was falling. Trade unions, unwilling to contemplate much in the way of belt-tightening and immured in outdated practices, were becoming increasingly militant. Result: the books no longer balanced.

Popular culture was changing, too. An evening in front of the television replaced a visit to the cinema. The first episodes of Coronation Street (rejected by the BBC as too low-brow) were broadcast. People were becoming less deferential. The magazine Private Eye was just taking off. Dixon of Dock Green was about to give way to Z Cars as popular perception of the police began to change. Stars who were destined to become household names – the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Cliff Richard and a young MP called Margaret Thatcher – were just beginning to make a ripple on national consciousness.

This is a monumental piece of research, elegantly written and mined from a huge array of sources. If I have any criticism, and it is a small one, it is that there is sometimes too much to take in. There are pages of what amount to little more than lists. Kynaston is at his best when exploring the big themes.

Racism and mass immigration is one such big theme. Britain at the time enjoyed more or less full employment with the result that tens of thousands of immigrants from the Commonwealth migrated to the UK in search of work. Astonishingly, until 1962, there were no barriers to entry. Anyone from Jamaica, Pakistan or India who could afford the fare could board a plane or a boat and move to the UK – and when the government did attempt to introduce controls, they were controversial. Unsurprisingly there was a backlash, much of it very nasty. Kynaston documents shocking levels of racism. A Bristol letting agent claimed that only 1 per cent of the landlords on its books would accept a “coloured” tenant and a quarter specifically stated that they would accept “no coloureds”. A vicar who remarked that he would not object to his daughter marrying a black man was flooded with hate mail.

There are reasons to be cheerful, however. As Kynaston demonstrates, for all its faults and despite the best efforts of the tabloid press, Britain became a much more tolerant society. Attitudes on race and towards women and homosexuals are light years away from where they once were. That goes for brutalist architecture, too, though there is still a lot of clearing up to do.

Chris Mullin was a British Labour MP from 1987 to 2010. He is the author of three volumes of diaries.