On Tuesday I went to speak to the Harlow Civic Society at their AGM. Because the weather was so fine I got there at lunchtime and spent the afternoon walking around, from its handsome teak and tiled railway station to the fractured but still remarkable remains of the town centre. Then I continued out to some of the earliest parts of the new town, The Stow and Mark Hall North, before ending up in Old Harlow, the small town that was there before.
‘Sorry about the state of the centre,’ a couple of the civic society said to me, as if they were personally responsible for the council’s exercise in self-harm. And sure, there were large patches of demolition and boarding-up to be seen as I wandered around, but what struck me was how fantastic so much of it still looked. This first wave of new towns generally gets tarred with a reputation for being low-energy and low-density, but the town centre is a reminder that actually there’s a lot of spirited urban design going on here, to rival bigger towns such as Coventry. I thought about Coventry a lot as I wandered round, the city that recently celebrated its year of culture by knocking down some of its most notable postwar buildings. While many thousands of us may appreciate these places, the most ambitious of local politicians see only an opportunity to rebuild in their name, can see only that what was new once could be made new again, not through restoration but erasure.
Harlow was one of the first four postwar new towns in England, work starting in 1948. Masterplanned by architect and planner Frederick Gibberd, Harlow benefitted from the fact that Gibberd lived there, and that as one of the pioneering new settlements they got first dibs on a lot of the talent of the day. Which is why, as a place for mid-century modern art, its only rival is Basil Spence’s Coventry Cathedral. The Water Gardens, tucked beside a lumpy shopping mall, step down from the town centre and offer a viewing point of the low-rise suburbs beyond. Here there’s a smooth and towering Henry Moore (Upright Motive No.2 thank you very much), the quivering alertness of Elizabeth Frink’s Boar, which was accompanied by several large and very real golden carp, and the wall of cheeky concrete reliefs by William Mitchell, each of them spouting water into the ponds below.
The modernist market square clock, one of the new town’s most celebrated landmarks, now sits above the fibreglass Victoriana of a chain pub. Many of the shop units are empty, not just a challenge for Harlow, but for all high streets everywhere. Before we start knocking them all about we need to have a proper strategic think about what a future town will need. We need a realistic and optimistic vision of how we might live. We need a new Frederick Gibberd.
As I was marching about the town (17 kilometers walked) Kier Starmer was being sprinkled with glitter and giving a rather more grand address than the one I was about to do. At the Labour Party conference he talked about housing and new towns, and the priority to change planning laws, get building, and allow developers to push ahead with new schemes. It’s exciting to think that a politician is talking so positively about addressing a problem that has for so long been throttling the country. I can’t help thinking it needs more of a philosophical underpinning, just as the postwar new towns had: of building for the future, not just for the immediate present; and for building for people and their needs, not for the profits of developers. These are not simply engineering challenges or data sets, they are fundamental issues about how we want to live now and in the future. We have the added pressure that the postwar towns did not have, of trying to solve these problems in a climate crisis, and so any major new town developments today need to address that as fundamental to their mission. And that’s not going to be through some abstract and meaningless carbon offsets.
I walked out to Mark Hall North, Harlow’s first modern neighbourhood, along one of the busy arterial roads. Crossing these busy roads is horrible. Living in Milton Keynes I am used to seeing out of towners walking along a verge beside the grid roads, very much not where they should be, lost and frustrated about the baffling pedestrian routes that are away from the roads. Here I was trying to find one of the new town’s most prominent landmarks, and I couldn’t find out how to cross at the roundabout, where the traffic never stopped and the underpasses only led the other way. Roads was something the first new towns didn’t quite get right, vastly underestimating the amount of traffic there would be in a couple of decades, and then trying to retrofit some ugly solutions after. Eventually in a fractional break in the traffic I ran across the road, Harlow drivers rolling their eyes at another lost idiot. And there almost immediately was The Lawn, Britain’s first tower block. It still looks like a Ladybird book illustration, and demonstrates a kind of cute efficiency that Gibberd explored in his 1930s book The Modern Flat, and in his modernist interwar flats in Streatham.
After a quick diet coke in a really terrible pub in Old Harlow (sample playlist: Kyrie by Mister Mister; Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits) I’d found my way to the hall for the civic society talk, and was immediately greeted with a cheery ‘Professor Grindrod!’, which I had to apologetically correct. A more exploratory ‘Dr Grindrod?’ followed, though again we needed to scale that back. I worried that they might have been expecting an academic, and I had to explain that, no, I was just a self-taught geek, and even ‘Mr Grindrod’ makes me sound a bit too serious a prospect. But what a brilliant group of people. As so often when I turn up to do a talk somewhere there will be people I know who I’m not expecting to se. This time it was David Devine, which if you’ve read Concretopia you may recall was the archivist from Harlow Museum who shared the amazing records and his knowledge with me. In the time between our interview and the book being published the museum was closed, the archive moved into another collection, and David lost his job, so I was never able to contact him about the book and thank him for his help. So it was very moving to encounter him here, a decade later, smiling shyly and still full of enthusiasm for the new town and its heritage.
I shared the snaps of the town I’d taken on Instagram and was amazed by the response. Of course, it was a sunny day and everything looks great in bright sunshine, but that day Harlow really did look handsome. Sometimes it takes an outsider to appreciate what is there, even while they curse at road layouts they cannot fathom. But then, speaking to the members of the civic society, it was clear too that it also takes an insider to appreciate the details of life lived in what was once an experimental settlement and is now a long establshed town settled into the landscape – perhaps not covered in glitter like Kier Starmer, but still plenty handsome and thoughtful enough to do the job.
Concretopia – A Brutal Decade
If you enjoyed Concretopia then, like me, you will be slightly terrified that it is ten years since it was published. The book launch was held in Bookseller Crow in Crystal Palace, and now to celebrate A Brutal Decade we are putting on an event there to talk about some stories from behind the scenes of writing it, and to look at what has happened to some of these places since. It promises to be a fun night, do come along! Details here.
Arvon Masterclass – Bringing Landscape to Life
Are you writing about architecture or place? Do you fancy a few tips and suggestions to get started and to work out how to turn your thoughts into written work? Well, in December I’m doing an online Masterclass with writing school Arvon. The idea is to help you think of new ways to write yourself into buildings and landscapes, working out what makes a great setting to write about, and how to find a new angle to explore in the most familiar of locations. We’ll think about how we can synthesize research with on-the-ground responses and will try some exercises to help us think differently about place: how to evoke its mood, character and strangeness, to make it exciting afresh for the reader. Perhaps most importantly, we’ll free ourselves from the expectations of how certain places ‘should’ be written about and responded to. Instead, we’ll find new ways of expressing our own voices and personalities through our experience of different landscapes – and to help turn those disparate responses and places into a strong idea for a book or essay. Details here.
In memory of Fern Grindrod
A month ago my glorious sister in law Fern died suddenly. It has been a terrible shock for us all, my brother and their daughters particularly. Fern was a very funny, opinionated, kind and generous woman, she did huge amount of work running a preschool for children with special educational needs in Sutton, fighting for kids who might otherwise have fallen through the system. And she was brilliant company, constantly curious, living for day trips and visits to gardens, museums and places of interest. Her passing leaves a terrible hole in our lives, but she will continue to be an inspiration to me and many others, a reminder to fight for the important things, and to enjoy escape wherever you can find it.
Really interesting piece John. I'm from Harlow and make frequent visits to see family so good to see this perspective. I get very defensive about the new town movement and the aspirations behind them - too easy to criticise without seeing the positives!