A pride of Lyons
What did the great modernist SPAN architect Eric Lyons have to do with the New Towns?
At the start of last month I returned to New Ash Green, a place I’d written about in Concretopia. There I met members of the Arts Community and did a talk about Eric Lyons, the inspirational architect behind Span, and the connections and contrasts between New Ash Green and the postwar new towns. I also met up with Patrick Ellard, who I’d interviewed for Concretopia and whose love of the place really bowled me over all those years ago. I thought I’d share a brief edited bit of the talk with you – some of the images I used and a short section of the script too, much of which was taken from much larger chapters in Concretopia.
The creation of satellite towns was a key recommendation of Patrick Abercrombie and John Henry Forshaw’s County of London Plan. The first four new towns to be approved were all around London: Stevenage, Crawley, Hemel Hempstead and Harlow. This map of the English and Welsh new towns is from 1968 and shows almost all of them.
Harlow’s general manager described the corporation as a developer with a conscience, which is interesting to hear that with regards to what Eric Lyons would later do with his company SPAN. Frederick Gibberd in Harlow was particularly fascinated by landscape architecture, and hired the mother of the modern form, Sylvia Crowe, to make the most of rural features such as wooded valleys.
Gibberd said that ‘housing, instead of being spread all over the town as a mixture of buildings and open space, was concentrated together in a more urban form. The land thus saved was added to the broad belts of landscape which separate one built up area from another.’ There is an echo here of what Eric Lyons was keen to do in his developments too, to integrate his buildings into the landscape and to create clusters that would not sprawl about.
Gibberd had been a rising star before the war, and brought in some big name architects to design the housing in these early areas in Harlow: married modernists Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, who later worked with Le Corbusier; F. R. S. Yorke, fresh from an architectural partnership with Bauhaus refugee Marcel Breuer; and Powell and Moya, a dynamic pair of 20-somethings who’d designed the Skylon for the Festival of Britain. Eric Lyons designed some later housing in Harlow, in 1966, at Shawbridge. Here his repeated brown brick houses with monopitch roofs and white weatherboarded flats cluster tightly together, design features familiar to anyone who knows his work. In a new town like Harlow Lyons is working with a sympathetic layout from the off, the separation of pedestrians from cars, an understanding of new ways of living built into the fabric of the place, rather than introduced by the architect into somwhere that remained slightly baffled by it. Shawbridge was built just before New Ash Green, and with it’s staggered terraces it feels like a trial run for some of the ideas, though it also has an air of municipal modernism that perhaps Span’s more hippyish creations shrugged off.
Frederick Gibberd wrote that ‘with the advent of the later new towns with new concepts, like Redditch and Milton Keynes, the Mark I new towns found it harder to attract the same calibre of staff, and their work on the whole became less imaginative.’ And so attracting Eric Lyons was something of a coup, especially as he would go on to work in only one other new town.
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It was Span developer Leslie Bilsby who initially suggested that the company should branch out from building small housing estates to creating a whole town. He was eventually talked down to a village. When two adjacent farms in Kent – Newhouse and North Ash – came on the market in the early sixties, Span snapped up the 430 acres with an eye on building something more ambitious than just another suburban estate. It was a change not just in scale, but philosophy. ‘We thought the village was exciting,’ said Geffrey Townsend, Span’s other principal developer. ‘It was trying to create a society for people; it wasn’t just doing a spec-built job of selling houses.’ Eric Lyons was in no doubt of the potential, remarking that ‘this is the most exciting scheme I have ever undertaken.’
The Greater London Council committed to buying 450 houses for council tenants moving out of central London. Here, then, was a mixed community of council and private houses built not by the state, but by a developer. In effect, it was a market-funded new town. Buildings would be grouped in small terraces, angled in staggered ‘saw-toothed’ layouts. Gardens were designed with steel hook fencing to allow the residents to look straight out onto the minnis – the old Kentish word for open spaces. And people could look back in too, over the lawns and low fences, through the picture windows and glass doors. New Ash Green was all about relaxed informality and openness.
1968 saw a national financial crisis, resulting in a devaluation of the pound and Harold Wilson’s empty promise to the electorate that the ‘pound in their pocket’ would not be affected. By May 1969 the Greater London Council were mired in a huge financial crisis of their own – partly because they had been lumbered with the unforeseen £3 million cost of strengthening their estate of multi-storey system-built flats following the partial collapse of Ronan Point. Faced with a huge bill from Span for their 450 houses in New Ash Green, the council made their excuses and left without paying, and the developers found themselves perilously exposed. Some 226 people were also turned away by building societies after putting up deposits for these non-standard construction homes. Struggling with £2 million of debt, Span decided that the game was up.
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Another GLC change of heart would affect one of the other planned new towns of the era, Hook in Hampshire. Planned in the mid-fifties by the London County Council as a private scheme rather than an official government-sponsored new town, Hook was meant to create urgent housing for 100,000 people, mostly former Londoners. After much scouring of land around the capital they chose to site the town in fields around Hook, a village in rural Hampshire between Basingstoke and Farnborough, quite a similar site to New Ash Green.
The Hook Book is a wonderful snapshot of an optimistic moment in British history, with the planners rightly seeing themselves at an important crossroads in modern history. ‘Ten years ago there was a shortage of consumer goods and many items, including petrol, were rationed,’ they noted, pointing out the decline in cinema attendance and the rise in television viewing as important signs of the way in which family life was evolving in the postwar world. Their solutions were state-of-the-art for 1960.
First, there was the urgent need to separate pedestrians and cars. Hook’s planners predicted that in the future most families would own more than one car, and designed the central area to cope with 8,150 vehicles under the pedestrian platform level at any one time. The footpaths, away from the road network, ‘would form a new kind of town “street”. They would become the focus of activity and outdoor social life.’ Naturally, as a town of the future, Hook was to have its own heliport ‘designed to meet the requirements of an inter-city service’.
In the end it was decided to expand nearby Basingstoke and Aldershot, so Hook was never built as planned.
Interestingly one of Eric Lyons’s last projects was in one of the second wave new towns, Telford, in 1979.
Telford was masterplanned by another successful architect in private practice, John Madin. It has a strange history as a new town, one which carries slight echoes of the two stage development of New Ash Green. It started off as a 1963 new town plan for Dawley. By 1968 Dawley had become just one of the districts of a bigger new town, called Telford. Lyons produced a plan for an area, Aqueduct Village, and designs for houses and flats around Majestic Way, whose pitched roofs and buttresses shows there was a lot more to Lyons than his reputation for tile hanging and picture windows.
In the postwar period where today people tend to lump everything together it’s always refreshing to remember how varied a lot of these ideas were, and how these different projects work, both as a conversation with each-other and the way the we live now. A little of their optimism, civic fellow feeling and inspirational spirit wouldn’t come amiss today, in our perma-housing crisis and timid thinking. And it’s always fascinating to see how people navigated a few bumps in the road…
Thanks so much to everyone who bought a copy of The Paint Job. It’s now sold out, but I’m hoping to produce more pamphlets in the future. I have a talk at South Norwood’s brutalist Library and two Croydon walks coming up as part of Open House festival, details of those TBC, and am featuring in a panel discussion about the Southbank Centre in September too, so keep an eye on the events page of my site for more details if you fancy any of those.
Also, I wrote a piece for the Twentieth Century Society about Energy World in Milton Keynes, a 1986 housing expo of energy efficient houses in Milton Keynes. You can read the piece here.
Enjoy all that rain stained architecture… x