10 amazing official postwar plans

 The official story of postwar planning and rebuilding got written over and over. There were the pre-war and forties plans for cities such as London and Plymouth, the fifties and sixties versions of the rebuilding by the architects of the day, and then the later official reports on the great schemes, such as new towns. Written variously as propaganda, manifestos and self-justification, these books are a fascinating glimpse into the confidence and excitement of postwar planning and architecture. Here's a selection of ten of my favourites, used extensively in research for Concretopia.

1. A Plan for Plymouth, 1943, by Patrick Abercombie and J. Paton Watson.   

Famously devastated in the blitz, the post of Plymouth in Devon called in Britain's foremost planner and monocle wearer Patrick Abercombie to replan the city fit for the postwar world. His plan and the progress of rebuilding was documented in Jill Craigie's 1946 film The Way We Live.

 

2. The County of London Plan, 1943, by Patrick Abercrombie and John Henry Forshaw.
The daddy of all wartime rebuilding plans, this was  breakthrough for Abercrombie: former head of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, champion of the green belt and Liverpool University professor. He was subsequently asked to produce a number of other influential city plans.

 

3. Our Birmingham, 1943.

Other cities weren't fussed by the Abercombie bandwagon and ploughed their own furrow. Birmingham City Council here took its citizens on a whistle-stop tour through the history and proposed future of the city, where zeilenbau-style towers loomed over the skyline.

4. Coventry: the Development Plan, 1951, by Donald Gibson, Charles Barratt and A. H. Marshall.

On a much more modest scale than Plymouth's bumper effort, fellow blitzed city Coventry had been planning for rebuilding even before the blitz, and this short book, aimed primarily at schoolkids, takes you through the ideas in a rather plodding format considering how exciting it must have been to imagine the contents at the time. Contains some stylish illustrations of buildings already planned and in some cases, like the Broadgate, built.

 

5. The Festival of Britain Guide, 1951.

The most exciting story in early postwar architecture was the Festival of Britain, and here in the original guidebook to the exhibits, the organisers led by Gerald Barry had the opportunity to explore and describe their show in a bit of depth. Each pavillion is discussed, and the route around the south bank site is described. It also contains some amazing adverts from the time, which help place it even more in the historical moment.

6. Pheonix in Coventry, 1962, by Basil Spence.

When Basil Spence won the competition to design Coventry Cathedral he was on the verge of being consigned to history as merely a designer of exhibition pavilions. This massive and symbolically important project catapulted him to worldwide fame, and here he talks about the making of a work of art, from the architecture through to the individual commissions for windows, tapestry and sculpture. His warm, witty, avuncular voice makes this one of the most enjoyable (if unreliable) books on the list, suitably so for a man who could have sat quite happily between Arthur Marshall and Frank Muir on Call My Bluff.

7. Traffic in Towns, 1963, by Colin Buchanan.

One of the most significant books published in the postwar period on planning, this is the Buchanan report for the government on the growing threat to cars on our towns, and what we could do about it. Favouring keeping pedestrians and cars apart on walkways, different levels, bridges and underpasses, his ideas for creating pedestrian decks were taken up by many city centre designers, though few plans were completed that matched the ambition Buchanan had, with perhaps only some of the later new towns like Cumbernauld truly separating pedestrians and traffic as much as he would have liked. Features incredible drawings by Kenneth Browne.

8. New Life in Old Towns, 1967, by RMJM.

Another government report here, this time into the idea of regenerating existing homes instead of demolishing them. Particularly fascinating that this report was written by researched from RMJM, the company set up by Robert Matthew, arch-modernsit of the LCC and Gorbals redevelopments, and by the early 70s saviour of Edinburgh's Georgian architecture. As an object it couldn't look more 1967.

9.  Collapse of Flats at Ronan Point, Canning Town, 1968 by Hugh Griffiths QC.

A rather more sobering report here, this is the inquiry into the partial collapse of flats at Ronan Court, caused by a faulty gas fitting in the 18th floor, but exacerbated by sloppy construction techniques and a misuse of a bulding system, Larssen Nielsen, designed only for low rise buildings and not 22 storey blocks. This incident and the inquest into the four deaths it caused would change the government's position on the building of high flats and the subsidies available to promote their construction.

10. The New Towns Story, 1970, by Frank Schaffer.

Frank had spent his career in central government overseeing the construction of new towns. This book is his overview of the project as a whole, more than he'd expected, as by 1976 the whole scheme had been abandoned, the funding going instead into the inner cities. It's as geeky as you'd like, full of stats and so a version of New Town Top Trumps is made possible.

BONUS TIME! 11. Harlow: The Story of a New Town, 1980, by Frederick Gibberd, Ben Hyde Harvey and Len White.

Harlow was one of the first new towns, and many of the projects had official histories written as their development corporations were wound up. In this one planner and architect Gibberd gives up a lot of his thinking for the layout and structure of the town, and that's supplemented by both sumptuous photos of the town its prime (much of which now has been completely altered, or in the case of the photo below, demolished), and loads of anecdote from other workers and residents.