I feel like I’ve spent the last decade talking about Concretopia and the postwar architecture and planning of Britain. But usually that is telling the stories of the remarkable places themselves. As the book turns ten, here are some behind the scenes recollections of my experience writing the book, a kind of DVD extras commentary…
My pal and agent Nicola Barr helped me shape a book proposal and she sent it to various editors at publishing houses. There was a fair bit of uinterest until the sales departments got involved and unanimously decreed that the subject was unsellable. The book was originally titled Britain by Jetpack, the idea being that this was a tour around futuristic dreams from another era. The editor who finally bought the book, Ben Yarde-Buller from Old Street, hated the title and so I came up with a list of twenty alternatives, from which he chose Concretopia. I still love Britain by Jetpack as a title so don’t be surprised if I write something else called that.
I had a full time job at Faber in the marketing department. Even so, they turned the book down when we hawked it round a few publishers. It was unsurprising really, I had absolutely no education in architecture, planning or history, so why on earth I (or anyone else) thought I could write this book was a mystery. At the time I’d been reading those postwar histories by David Kynaston and Dominic Sandbrook, and the council estate in Croydon I’d grown up on was exactly the kind of the place they were being rather dismissive about. So I thought there had to be a more positive version of this story, but I just couldn’t find a narrative history that told it. So I taught myself about the subject through academic books and trips round and about, and thought I could give it a go, to tell the story for a general reader, like me.
The first person I spoke to about the book was the architect James A. Roberts, most famous for designing the Rotunda and the Ringway Centre in Birmingham and the Radio City tower in Liverpool. I spoke to him on the phone after sending an email to his company. I was delighted to find one of the leaders of that postwar generation still going (he died in 2019 aged 97). We spoke at length about the book, and his advice was that it was a terrible idea, and I should drop it. His main contention was it was all corruption and failure, that the people in charge had been idiots, and that his great rival Richard Seifert had won projects from him through unfair means – though he didn’t offer any evidence of this. Instead he was full of ideas which would have been absolutely brilliant for the book, but he refused to be interviewed. After 45 minutes of bracing chat on the shortcomings of my book idea and the planners’ failure to cope with traffic, my first conversation with an architect from that era was over, and I felt entirely crushed.
My second interviewee was a guy who said he remembered the whole of the rebuilding of Croydon town centre and had loads of stories, so we met up on Wellesley Road near the underpass. He spent ages telling me about watching a flat bed truck reversing with some scaffold poles in 1962. When I did finally manage to steer the conversation around to the construction of the post-war town centre landscape around us he shook his head and said, all this crap, no, I don’t remember anything about that at all.
After a couple of notable false starts the first people I successfully interviewed for the book were the two old me, an architect and a planner from Cumbernauld, an interview that came about thanks to my friend Kirsten Bruce McTighe, who had grown up there and knew that all the elderly development corporation people still hung out in the Rotary Club. It was that trip and interview that convinced me that there was a book in this. I’d interviewed them before I even had a book deal so it was a huge punt, and it wad very entertaining hearing them try to cover up memories of Cumbernauld Hit, the strange James Bondy-y promo film for the town starring Fenella Fielding.
A glance back at Britain by Jet Pack’s proposed contents shows a lot of waffle and things all in the wrong place. I really didn’t know what the story was or how to tell it. Chapters called things like the Shack of the New, Attlee Rampant and Skylon and the Invaders from MARS never made it into the book. Then there’s a later proposal when the book was briefly going to be called This Concrete Isle, which is more like the finished book but includes lots of subjects colour coded in red (NO LEADS, which at the time included Arndale Centres, the Post Office Tower, and the Excalibur prefab estate in Catford) and blue (FURTHER INTERVIEWS NEEDED including the Smithsons, Centre Point and the Barbican).
I ended up taking 3 months off unpaid from work to research the book and travel round. I didn’t have any savings and only got a grand for the book deal, so I ended up having to get a loan to pay for my rent and travel. And so I made a big old loss writing the book. It was a big risk and it sort of paid off, eventually, as a life change if not financially.
One of my favourite stories was when I went to interview Professor Miles Glendinning at Edinburgh University. He’d written a number of amazing books on the subject. I arrived at the university and told them I was here to see Miles, and waited in reception. Eventually I was collected by an excitable woman who was very keen to hear what I’d been doing. I was shown into a small room and we sat down for a chat, she began grilling me about what I was up to and how my research was going. No-one had taken this much interest in the book. And then after about five minutes, as the questions began to get more specific, and there was still no sign of Miles, it suddenly dawned on me: I had been collected by the wrong person and was in the middle of a job interview. I made my excuses and left.
I would work on the book anywhere, trying to fit in the writing around my day job. I used to write up the interviews, which I’d recorded on my phone, in the evenings in one of the offices at Faber when everyone had gone home. A lot of it was written on trains, or in the Wellcome Institute café and particularly at Benugo in Waterloo Station, which was so freezing I used to type with gloves on. I used to write before I got home because, as a middle aged man I knew when I got in I’d immediately be dozing in front of Spooks rather than writing.
One of the big coups was tracking down Ray Fitzwalter, the journalist who broke the John Poulson corruption scandal. I didn’t have any leads for the story, until by chance at Faber we were publishing a book by another former World in Action journalist, and he put me in touch with Ray. Meeting him was a revelation, the story he told unfolding to me like All the President’s Men, if it had been set in Pontefract. Ray died not long after the book was published and I was so pleased to have helped bring his incredible journalism to the fore again.
I met Elain Harwood and Catherine Croft of the Twentieth Century Society on a trip to Smithdon School in Hunstanton, AKA Britain’s first New Brutalist building, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson. I was really overawed by them, and the building, and this feeling was exacerbated when I went outside to take some photos of the building in the bright sunshine. Elain came too, and while I was snapping away with my bottom of the range digital SLR she had a huge camera and tripod, and I was very aware that I kept getting in the way of her perfect shots. But she was nothing but generous and helpful all the way through.
Another Twentieth Century Society coach trip I took was to see John Madin’s work in Birmingham. It was fascinating to get access to all these fantastic buildings, such as the Chamber of Commerce’s wood-panelled boardroom. Towards the end of the day I bunked off and went to the brutalist Central Library to do a spot of book research. As I was frantically scribbling notes I could suddenly hear our tour guide approaching with the group in tow. I hid behind a large brochure for the Bull Ring Shopping Centre, and thought I’d got away with it until I peeped out and caught the eye of the tour guide who was giving me a hard stare…
I found interviewees through all sorts of means. I pounced on people who had been in the audience at an event at the Festival Hall who had been at the Festival of Britain, and John Gyford, one of them, turned out also t have been a planner at the LCC and had worked on Space House; I contacted the amazing Bob and Irene via a spec email to Coventry Cathedral; one of the curators at the Barbican put me in touch with the delightful John Honer who’d worked for Chamberlin, Powell and Bon.
I was constantly being chased by security guards. I had to climb a fence at Park Hill while being pursued trying to take a few snaps, and retired planner Jim Griffiths and I ended up being frog marched into the office of the security management company at Cwmbran’s shopping centre because I’d taken a snap of William Mitchell’s mural rather than buying a baguette.
Peter Barry, my final interviewee, had helped build the early roads in Milton Keynes and was one of its first residents. As I was leaving his house after our chat I said how great it was to talk to him, and how hard I was finding it to find a prefab dweller for the opening chapter. He said, I grew up in a prefab, and at the moment he single-handedly he saved the book.
One of the last things I did was I totally blagged my way into the BT Tower with my friend Richard taking photos (his book of the pics is available), and we had the most amazing day with BT’s archivist, exploring bits of the tower no-one now gets to see – not just the viewing floors but an equipment room half way up filled with the original 60s technology, and the concrete base below. It felt like the cheekiest I got with the book, though now of course I wish I had been even cheekier all over the place. Why didn’t I go into those penthouses in Cumbernauld?
Donna Payne, my friend from Faber and the then art director, designed the amazing cover, perhaps the single most persuasive element about the book.
When the book was finally finished I was very lucky that the BBC News Channel’s Meet the Author slot with Nick Higham had had a last minute drop-out. They decided to feature my book as a replacement because Martin Roberts who was doing the camera wanted to go on location and film at the Barbican. And so I was suddenly on national TV talking about the book. You can see the interview here.
At that point I was actually a bit embarrassed I had written a book. I assumed everything was wrong and it was terrible. So it was really only with the help of some very generous readers that six months later I calmed down and started to think it wasn’t all a great big disaster after all.
Thanks so much to everyone who has read the book, talked about it and enthused, I really appreciate it.
A Child’s Christmas in Croydon
While I’m cataloguing bits of Britain’s almost forgotten modernist postwar past a few cipies of the essay I wrote about the Woolworths silver sputnik Christmas is still available. It is published with Ambitious Outsiders and designer Richard de Pesando has recreated wrapping paper from the era to act as chapter breaks in the pamphlet. You can order copies here, or pick them up from Bookseller Crow in Crystal Palace or the Modernist shop in Manchester.
Present ideas…
It would be remiss of me to mention that Iconicon came out in paperback this year and would make the perfect gift for the design obsessed geek in your life (possibly you). But I’ve also put together some book lists of related reading on Bookshop.org: further reading around Concretopia, Outskirts and Iconicon, plus an Elain Harwood list too.
Subscriptions
This is my final post for 2023, and I just wanted to say thanks so much to everyone who has subcribed to this Substack, either free or paid, I really appreciate it. I try to write some new content for it each month, and now that I have given up my day job it’s helped me feel connected to something. The paid subscription was just a default thing that Substack offers, and I hadn’t expected anyone to take one uo, but it’s been fantastic that people have, I really appreciate it. I probably need to think of some special stuff you get if you pay to subscribe, don’t I? If you do feel like supporting my work then subscribing or sharing posts can be incredibly helpful, thank you!
Here’s to more modernism and dancing in 2024 x
Sorry to disagree John, I think Concretopia was a great title. The book was the first to open my eyes to Brutalist architecture. I appreciated my last visit to the Barbican more the last time I went.
Concretopia is one of my favourite books although Iconicon and Outskirts are close behind. All three books have opened my eyes and allowed me to enjoy and appreciate architecture and what surrounds me on an everyday basis. Thanks John. Looking forward to your next writing endeavour no matter what the subject is!