agoraphobia and a tendency to animize at the same time. The small, the child-like, seems to haunt them, they transpose their feelings for persons to geographical units.
He added, with a final put-down from a considerable height, that such infantilism was ‘noticeable not only in Garden City circles, but in a large section of well-meaning, so-called progressives’.
Fundamental to Le Corbusier’s vision was the high-rise, with his ideal city featuring at its centre towers of as many as 60 storeys. However, even though a fair number of new blocks of flats (rarely above four or five storeys) were built in the 1930s, that aspect of his vision elicited relatively little enthusiasm before the war, with even a modernist like Fry somewhat sceptical. The real flats versus houses (or, as they were often called, ‘cottages’) controversy only seriously flared up during the war. ‘It is eventually undeniable,’ insisted Sharp in his 1940 Pelican, ‘that the flat, if its own particular problems of design are sufficiently studied, can afford the pleasantest possible conditions of living for a very considerable proportion of the inhabitants of our towns.’ And although he conceded that flats were not ideal for everyone, there were ‘hosts’ of people who ‘could live far more happily in a block of flats, among all the communal facilities and advantages which that form of dwelling can offer, than in the social isolation of the small house, burdened with a private garden which they have neither the time nor the inclination to cultivate’. 12
Two key documents produced during the second half of the war tilted the balance towards flats. The first was the 1943 County of London Plan , the work of Patrick Abercrombie (the leading town planner of the day, with a foot in both camps) and J. H. Forshaw. They concluded that if even six out of ten former inhabitants of bombed-out inner London (above all of the East End) were to be rehoused in their own familiar districts, this would entail a density of 136 people per net residential acre – which in turn meant that only a third of these resettled residents would be in houses and almost two-thirds would be in flats of eight or ten storeys. A deeply disappointed Osborn was convinced that Abercrombie had been nobbled by the London County Council (LCC), to which Forshaw was Architect. He was probably right. The LCC, which unlike the subsequent Greater London Council did not include the new outer suburbs, was dominated by inner-London Labour boroughs; and their councillors were naturally fearful that excessive dispersal would not only play havoc with rateable values but significantly diminish their reliably loyal working-class electorates.
The other pivotal document appeared a year later, with the Dudley Committee’s report The Design of Dwellings , which for ‘large concentrated urban areas’ recommended a maximum density of 120 per acre – again, in other words, with significant high-rise implications. Importantly, the submissions that seem to have pushed the committee towards this conclusion were not from zealous architects but from thoroughly ‘sensible’ organisations like the National Council of Social Service, which argued that most of the low-rise housing estates built between the wars by the LCC had lacked adequate communal facilities, something that well-designed blocks of flats could provide, thereby obviating social problems. Between them, with fateful consequences, the plan and the report went a long way towards making the flat officially acceptable as a standard form of housing, especially public housing.
What gave such matters a new urgency was the Luftwaffe. ‘Hitler has at last brought us to our senses,’ declared Max Lock, a young architect and planner. ‘We, the British public, have suddenly seen our cities as they are! After experiencing the shock of familiar buildings disembowelled before our eyes – like an all too real surrealism – we
He added, with a final put-down from a considerable height, that such infantilism was ‘noticeable not only in Garden City circles, but in a large section of well-meaning, so-called progressives’.
Fundamental to Le Corbusier’s vision was the high-rise, with his ideal city featuring at its centre towers of as many as 60 storeys. However, even though a fair number of new blocks of flats (rarely above four or five storeys) were built in the 1930s, that aspect of his vision elicited relatively little enthusiasm before the war, with even a modernist like Fry somewhat sceptical. The real flats versus houses (or, as they were often called, ‘cottages’) controversy only seriously flared up during the war. ‘It is eventually undeniable,’ insisted Sharp in his 1940 Pelican, ‘that the flat, if its own particular problems of design are sufficiently studied, can afford the pleasantest possible conditions of living for a very considerable proportion of the inhabitants of our towns.’ And although he conceded that flats were not ideal for everyone, there were ‘hosts’ of people who ‘could live far more happily in a block of flats, among all the communal facilities and advantages which that form of dwelling can offer, than in the social isolation of the small house, burdened with a private garden which they have neither the time nor the inclination to cultivate’. 12
Two key documents produced during the second half of the war tilted the balance towards flats. The first was the 1943 County of London Plan , the work of Patrick Abercrombie (the leading town planner of the day, with a foot in both camps) and J. H. Forshaw. They concluded that if even six out of ten former inhabitants of bombed-out inner London (above all of the East End) were to be rehoused in their own familiar districts, this would entail a density of 136 people per net residential acre – which in turn meant that only a third of these resettled residents would be in houses and almost two-thirds would be in flats of eight or ten storeys. A deeply disappointed Osborn was convinced that Abercrombie had been nobbled by the London County Council (LCC), to which Forshaw was Architect. He was probably right. The LCC, which unlike the subsequent Greater London Council did not include the new outer suburbs, was dominated by inner-London Labour boroughs; and their councillors were naturally fearful that excessive dispersal would not only play havoc with rateable values but significantly diminish their reliably loyal working-class electorates.
The other pivotal document appeared a year later, with the Dudley Committee’s report The Design of Dwellings , which for ‘large concentrated urban areas’ recommended a maximum density of 120 per acre – again, in other words, with significant high-rise implications. Importantly, the submissions that seem to have pushed the committee towards this conclusion were not from zealous architects but from thoroughly ‘sensible’ organisations like the National Council of Social Service, which argued that most of the low-rise housing estates built between the wars by the LCC had lacked adequate communal facilities, something that well-designed blocks of flats could provide, thereby obviating social problems. Between them, with fateful consequences, the plan and the report went a long way towards making the flat officially acceptable as a standard form of housing, especially public housing.
What gave such matters a new urgency was the Luftwaffe. ‘Hitler has at last brought us to our senses,’ declared Max Lock, a young architect and planner. ‘We, the British public, have suddenly seen our cities as they are! After experiencing the shock of familiar buildings disembowelled before our eyes – like an all too real surrealism – we
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