A few years ago when I was in Glasgow my friends Rose Ruane and Jack Kibble-White gave me a brown envelope. ‘We have a stack of these,’ said Rose. ‘Do you know what it is?’ I pulled out the contents and there was a poster, printed on a rough newsprint kind of stock, not a high end glossy print but some sort of functional, mass produced item. I could see straight away why they’d thought of me. The image showed a surveyor standing on a vast building site, tower block over in one corner, half-assembled slab block in the background, concrete panels being craned in. And the image, well it was pure Ladybird books, rendered in the busy, romantic and curiously flat style of the ‘People at Work’ series. ‘Do you know anything about it?’ they asked expectantly. I stared hard at the print, but no, there was nothing here that immediately told me why this had been produced, whether this was a real place, or who’d illustrated it. I felt as if I’d let them down, surely I was going to be the perfect person to ask, with my fetish for both old Ladybird non-fiction books and modernist architecture. If I didn’t know, then who would?
It sat in the envelope for almost exactly two years, until we recently decorated the bedroom, and decided that what would absolutely set the room off – would say sleep and rest – would be a framed print of a surveyor on a building site. We had an Ikea frame that was slightly too big, and decided to get the print mounted to fit. The framers did a good job, though the cost breakdown did include the line ‘clean dirty old frame’ which was hard not to take personally. We put the picture up in the bedroom and it just looked so right, the muted tones and flat depiction of flats going up feeling both heroic and anticlimactic, the image somewhere between depicting the optimistic vision and the grimy reality. Adam had a particular fondness for the image because his dad had been a surveyor for the Greater London Council, and so in some ways the image acts a talisman, his dad keeping us safe.
Now it was up I took to observing it from different angles, pondering it from the bed or while I was getting changed for a run. Presumably it had been produced for an educational purpose, perhaps for a school of geography or construction. If only there had been a signature or some labelling that would help with the artist. And then one day last week while I was hopping about trying to get a sock on I squinted a bit more closely in one corner, where a horizontal brown line in the watery mud I’d not seen before caught my eye. My eyesight is not so good these days, and so I took a photo of the line on my phone and enlarged it. And there, clear as day, was a name: Robinson.
BH Robinson, or Bernard Robinson, happens to be my favourite Ladybird artist. And even without a first name, this proved it was undoubtedly by him. Between 1965 and 1980 he illustrated some of my favourite of their books: How It Works – The Computer; Printing; Hovercraft; The Story of Plastics; Making a Transistor Radio. There is a beautiful biography of him by Helen Day on her site Ladybird Fly Away Home. One of the things that made me especially fond of his work was that I later found he was a fellow Croydon boy: we’d both attended John Ruskin (he when it was a grammar school, me when it was a truly awful a-level college) and he studied at Croydon Art College. He spent many years pre-Ladybird as a commercial illustrator, and his attention to detail was well known. One of my favourite of his images is from Roads (1977) where he painted his own kids emerging from, and descending into an underpass outside the Fairfield Halls, the towers of East Croydon and Wellesley Road clearly visible in the background, the post-war vista little changed today. If I ever write a book about Croydon I’d like this as the cover.
The final mystery was what it was depicting. Although some of these images were comped together from different sources, generally the Ladybird non-fiction artists worked form life, or from photography, and employed little trickery in their work. It was only after realising that Robinson was the artist, and thinking of that Croydon vista, that I began to think that perhaps this landscape with its posed heroism might actually be a more or less genuine one. And so suddenly I paid more attention to the detail. The big clue was the tower on the right hand side. It was very recognisable, and one I’d seen on various estates around London: The Morris Walk estate in Woolwich and the Ledbury Estate in Peckham. What was most famous about these blocks was they were constructed by Taylor Woodrow Anglian using the Larsen Nielsen system, a Danish large panel concrete system designed for building low-rise blocks. The most infamous use of Larsen Nielsen was at the Freemasons Estate in Canning Town, where one of the nine 23 storey towers, Ronan Point, partially collapsed after a gas explosion in 1968. Two factors exacerbated the collapse: the system was only ever intended for low rise construction and had been misused; and fast turnaround targets and a relatively unskilled workforce led to rapid and careless construction, with key elements tying the building together missed. For some reason its presence on the Ledbury Estate in particular remained undetected until the aftermath of the Grenfell fire, when safety of high-rise blocks was again investigated.
Looking at both of these estates, Morris Walk and Ledbury, didn’t provide me with the right answers. The Morris Walk towers, although of the same basic design, were four storeys too short. And around Ledbury I could find no slab slocks of the same sort of construction as shown in the image. I wondered if I’d missed something. Then yesterday, when idly looking again for more twins of these old sixties towers I came across the Aintree Estate in Fulham, constructed a few years after the others, in 1968, the year of the Ronan Point collapse, presumably making them among the last to be built using that system. The two towers – Hartopp Point and Lannoy Point – were the right height, and what’s more the estate also featured a number of lower rise slab blocks of a similar construction. At last, it seemed I had found the location for the illustration.
And so that gift from Rose and Jack has led me on an unexpected journey, and has connected the image up with all sorts of other stories: Ronan Point, Croydon town centre, Ladybird books and the Aintree Estate. Those towers were pulled down in 2021, and so this image, of their construction – those large panels of Larsen Nielsen being craned in – has now become a historic image, capturing the use of one of most ill-fated systems at an innocent moment, and recording their rise before their fall. You can watch a great video of the Aintree Estate at the Tower Block Archive here, and read about the residents being forced out after decades before demolition. John and Pat Bownes had lived for 40 years in Lannoy Point before being asked to leave in 2019. ‘This place is special. I don’t want to leave,’ John told FulhamSW6.com. ‘And these flats are nice and spacious. Most flats these days are built much smaller. And if you’re being forced to leave somewhere you love, you want somewhere nice. I’ll never have a view of the Shard or over Chelsea Harbour again. It’s a shame.’
Wonderful detective work John. This is a particularly significant image now, and you’re one of the very few people who could have made those connections. It links a couple of stories for me - I worked on precast concrete panel systems for schools at the GLC Architect’s Dept in the late 1960s/early 1970s, and my father Douglas Keen was Editor at Ladybird Books til 1974 so Bernard Robinson’s work was very familiar.
So interesting story, John, thanks! And greetings from Poland! I’m a big fan of brutalism, and have just found your books and ordered! Looking forward to reading all of them, especially now when I’ve read this :)