From Plotlands to Basil-lands
On Wednesday I was in Basildon doing a talk as part of a month long arts and culture festival The Great Gathering, which later in the month will include a screening of Christopher Ian Smith’s 2018 film about the place, New Town Utopia. The talk was in what had once been a carpet shop in the centre, next door to the town’s most glamorous landmark, Brooke House, designed by Anthony B Davies, chief architect and planner to Basildon Development Corporation. One-time resident Christine Townley told me how she met her husband, who also lived there, when in the 1970s she’d been an engineer for the corporation and he a landscape architect. She’d seen this guy from her fifth floor flat who was always wandering off to the library, but they didn’t meet in the building because of the way it was divided up: one lift visited only the odd numbered floors, where she lived, the other the evens, where he did. It was a sliding doors moment that brought them together. One day the lift for the even floors was out of order. They met and got chatting. It’s a new town love story.
Basildon has a fascinating pre-new town history, having been the site of one of the largest plotlands developments, self-build houses going up with no real infrastructure to keep them going. When Patrick Abercrombie was touting round his County of London Plan and the first new postwar satellite towns for London were being discussed, Basildon was not part of the picture. But the local authority made a case to government that it should be included, as the existing plotlands were in dire need of roads and communal facilities, which a new town would naturally bring. The contested nature of plotlands as part of the new town, being seen as unofficial and therefore outside of the rules of the new settlement, meant that the children of the plotlanders struggled to get housing in Basildon because they were not seen as local residents under the development corporation’s rules. As a result many of those plotlands families dispersed, and that history has remained curiously counter-cultural to this day.
The thing that struck me walking round the centre, which had been originally planned in consultation with Basil Spence, was how beautiful all of that original new town architecture is: the parades of shops, market squares and precincts, the wavy canopies and mosaic panels, the subtle and faded optimism of it all, a kind of old Butlins postcard faded in the rain. Short-sighted interventions down the decades have introduced useless new buildings into the plan rather than invigorating or refurbishing the old. So now they stand empty, shells of perfectly good shops and office space with their aged electrics and single glazing needing an upgrade but unlikely to get it because some developer will just build a cheap shed somewhere else and the local authority will have no money to intervene, because thanks to those Cameron-era decisions there is no cash for local councils any more. Still here is sculptor Geoffrey Clarke’s 1958 mosaic, on one of the almost deserted and threatened parades of shops. Clarke worked with Spence on Coventry Cathedral, designing stained glass and a crown of thorns. The mosaic is subtle and beautiful. We are allowed that, surely?
Over the whole town centre stands Davies and Spence’s modernist icon. So distinctive is it, with those waves of windows and outrageously long legs, this is a tower that would sit comfortably in Berlin’s Interbau. In fact, so strong is its presence, it single-handedly seems to be holding the centre together. Something about it still speaks confidently of a future that we can still imagine, but which now feels part of an alternate reality, through other sliding doors, where rather than a love story, disaster capitalism hasn’t hollowed out our town centres and institutions. It may have been put up in an impatient moment, when progress was in need of visible symbols to make it feel real. Today it bides its time patiently, waiting for a lost world to circle back round and catch up again with it, to appreciate what we have had, and here still have. Even while it is casting shadows it is catching the light.
Interwar Inspirations
I was lucky enough to get the chance to review Gavin Stamp’s final book, Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39 for the FT. The joy of it is how he untangles different strands that were all running concurrently in that era - not just Deco and Modernism, but stripped classical, neo-Georgian, the last gasp of neo-gothic, and a particularly fine chapter on mock-Tudor.
Also just about to be published is Thaddeus Zupančič’s much anticipated London Estates: Modernist Council Housing 1946-1981, a beautiful and informative photographic record of modernist estates around the capital. Thaddeus’s work is as much street photography as it is architectural, and what is remarkable is the amount of lightly worn research in this book, revealing information about council housing that has remained hidden in obscure council minutes and records for decades.
You can find more about both books on a list I’ve started of interesting new architecture books, which I’ll keep adding to. Do recommend stuff for me to add!
A great read John and thanks for the heads up on the Brutal Wales book 👍
Great article. Thanks for the mention