Carve up
Simon Jenkins
Goodbye Britain? Tony Aldous (Sidgwick and Jackson £4.50) 1975 was without doubt the year of the conservationist. The collapse of the property boom and the crisis in local authority finance provided a breathing space after two decades of unremitting pressure for architectural destruction from private developers and public authorities. It ceased to be considered quite natural to tear down old buildings in the centres of our towns and cities for the sake of some unrealisable utopia of comprehensive redevelopment. At the same time, European Architectural Heritage Year subjected us all to a barrage of publicity for the more cosmetic aspects of preservation, and public awareness of the value of the architectural environment began slowly to command real political weight — at last embracing Victorian and Edwardian buildings as well as earlier ones. The listing of a building for its architectural interest still gives it no certainty of protection, but it does ensure that a battle will be fought over its demise; the activities of local and national amenity societies have brought to an end the day when a planner, on hearing the words "old building", simply reached for his bulldozer.
The changing climate cif opinion has been reflected in a plethora of books and reports with such strident titles as Goodbye London, the Sack of Bath, the Rape of Britain and the Save Report. Now they have been capped by Goodbye Britain? by Tony Aldous. In view of the devastation wrought on British towns and cities over the past twenty years, it is perhaps churlish to object that Aldous's tale is much the same as the others. For the story needs telling and retelling.
I believe that what we have allowed to happen since the War, in our name and chiefly with our money, to cities like Glasgow and Manchester, Newcastle and Liverpool, Leeds and Gloucester, Westminster and the City of London will rank in history with the great destructions and social upheavals of the Reformation and the Civil War. In terms of loss of the best of British architecture, the impact of the Blitz was gentle by comparison — Coventry, for example, has lost far more of its characteristic timber-framed buildings through post-war council demolition than it ever lost through "fire-storm" saturation bombing.
The forced migrations of the working-class population, as a result of city centre and inner suburban clearance schemes, have also been more drastic than anything experienced this century. Sceptical Londoners should inspect the wastelands of inner Liverpool or Glasgow, or even of their own East End — and inspect, too, the grim blocks rapidly degenerating into slums into which tens of thousands of families have been compulsorily decamped. They might also reflect on history's view of the planners and architects who demolished so many homes as obsolete, while themselves happily rehabilitating equally old properties in more fashionable parts of town (usually at far lower unit cost than the new council estates).
The cause of this absurdity was simply that one government after another gave housing
Spectator The
January 24, 1976 subsidies only for "new" housing and only if a council could show it had demolished a given number of "slums". The Greater London Council has admitted ruefully that as much as 60 per cent of the housing it destroyed in the 'fifties could have been simply modernised instead. Meanwhile soaring building costs Will mean that much of the land cleared will remain derelict for the foreseeable future: a permanent loss in every sense to the comma' ities thus torn apart. , Aldous takes us once more over the salient points in this story. His anger is controlled and the book is excellently illustrated and laid out. He identifies the worst-hit towns and also some new ones — I could have done without such previously unknown losses as the original centres of Northampton and Tamworth! In both cases, it was as if the local councillors had walked round a distinguished art gallery with a flame-thrower. And he discusses areas in which economic growth has had particular imeact' such as North Sea oil and motorways: including the extraordinary proposal for a two-1evel motorway interchange in open country in the, Lake District; it was apparently needea because, however light the traffic, ministrY engineers could not bear to dilute the purity of a full-scale motorway with anything s° unobtrusive (or cheap) as a roundabout. Motorway building is surely the only area of public expenditure where the public has t° plead with the Treasury not to spend ever larger sums of public money. It is clear from all this that something in the' recent past has gone badly wrong. In most of our towns and cities we have failed to temeer social and economic needs to the variety and attractiveness of British town scape. And in failing, we have produced an eruption of public feeling, which demands that the planning machinery stop altogether. People have lost faith in architects who seem unable to imerove,, on what they have destroyed. So now what( Somehow we must change this state of mind' however understandable its cause. There are both in Britain and abroad, examples 01. success: Norwich, York, parts of Edinburgh: parts of Leeds (though only parts), even parts or London. But we still have little idea why sorne places found answers to the problems posed bY modern planning while others have not. In almost all the cases described in Goodbye Britain? the analysis ends with a "turning oft! ' tide of local opinion": a turning which InaY have been too late to prevent death hY,. drowning, but which still leaves the problem or the corpse — and the threat of another tide tot come. The shortcoming of Aldous's book is tha it makes the reader angry but rarely g°es beneath the immediate problems to hell) ti_s answer the questions, why? and what next? Conservation is now becoming a major force in British planning, but it has hardly begun to formulate a coherent and constructive philo: sophy. The social and economic arguments for conservation now need stating in a hard-headed manner, even at some risk to the gentlert aestheticism which has run through mos. conservationist discussion in the past. it ist curious that we hear so much these days abouf the conservation of energy and the recycling hoe manufactured goods, when the case for t e conservation of the built environment (who! replacement is both unnecessary and singulaly expensive of natural resources) is still largtehye couched in aesthetic terms. Or has this been the conservationists' past mistake: to appeal to hs sEengsleisohfmparanc'stisceanitsty d e and beauty ra n ther than his
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