Loose Change
From a 75-year-old housing manual to a forthcoming book combining beautiful car design and architecture
Change. It’s the word of the hour. Not the chaotic churn of tactics and short-term advantage, but a wholesale change of attitude to government. We hope. These fundamental change points come along infrequently, the ushering in of a new party in government, the sweeping way of the old. They bring with them promises and hope, ideas of progress and renewal through ever changing means. The Attlee government of 1945-51 was one of the most radical and successful, ushering in the birth of the NHS and the welfare state, of the new towns programme, new codified ideas of town planning, to cope with the urgent rebuilding of blitzed towns and cities.
You can find evidence of this change in endless publications and reports from the time. Two I found recently in a second-hand bookshop help illustrate this optimistic turn. The 1949 Housing Manual, published by the government 75 years ago, sets out standards and ideas that local authorities, architects and planners could adopt in their work. Immediately noticeable is that these companion volumes have been produced by different government departments. The Housing Manual was written by the Ministry of Health, then still responsible for housing, and the technical appendices were put together by the Ministry of Works and the Ministry of Local Government and Planning.
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The Manual is a breezy 150 page mood board to help inspire those building housing to embrace new ideas and to think communally with them, rather than in the piecemeal private developer estates of the interwar period, which sold personal aspiration and delivered little in the way of social infrastructure.
In this manual there are pages of plans for everything from old people’s homes to blocks of flats, semi-detached houses to terraces, places called ‘the kitchen-living room house’ or ‘the working kitchen house’. They take inspiration from the work of a varied bunch of architects of the day, such as Tayler and Green, FRS Yorke, Louis de Soissons and TP Bennett, and so the aim here seems to be less prescriptive about ‘modernism’ or ‘classicism’ than it is about giving quick practical examples to people looking to solve large urgent problems with speed.
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There’s encouragement to use new methods of construction, developed from the temporary housing programme prefabs of the war, and also local materials and vernacular architecture for rural sites. What comes across is not dogma but a desire to set people free to build well and quickly, with some handy guidelines.
I can’t pretend to be as familiar with the technical details of its companion volume, but even here beside the tables and calculations are explanations of timber pitched roofs or protecting steelwork against corrosion that are straightforward and easy to understand. And from that you can see a desire to democratise information and skill, not to keep them the preserve of the already well informed and established. And so behind the tips and examples is a generous-spirited desire to bring along people with different sorts of expertise, from local politicians to builders and architects, to make everyone see clearly some achievable solutions to overwhelming problems.
We can only hope that the next five years brings with it something of the same.
A Time ⋅ A Place
From a book published 75 years ago to one about to be published. Those Manchester Modernists have surpassed themselves here with a beautifully produced volume that puts buildings and cars from the same year together in photographic harmony.
A Time ⋅ A Place is photography by Daniel Hopkinson and words by John Piercy Holroyd. It begins in 1964, pairing the glassy magnificence of Crystal Palace National Recreation Centre with the sturdy frame of the Rover P6, and continues through the 1970s up tintil 1982, where we meet the gritty brick and concrete Potteries Museum and Art Gallery with the high-tech Renault 9. Along the way we meet Preston Bus Station, the Camberwell Submarine, and the SPAN houses of New Ash Green, alongside various groovy Citroëns, Fiats and Lancias.
Each photo is peopled and brings colour to places often presented in more chilly architectural photography. The accompanying text gives fascinating insights in the work of the architects and the car designers, and putting cars and buildings together helps create a new perspective on progressive design from the period.
My dad was a car mechanic, so I’ve always been besotted with cars of this period, the kind of motors he’d be working on and whose greasy Haynes manuals would sit around the house like a glimpse into some other impossibly complex world. This book really brings two passions of mine together, without any of that macho Top Gear bollocks to spoil the view. Best of all, it’s listed as Volume One. Always good to have something to look forward to.
You can find this book in the Modernists’ shop, and I’ve created a list of several other interesting new titles on Bookshop.org.