Concrete Poetry: Exploring Britain's Brutalist buildings

It was a childhood visit with the Brownies to the pantomime at Nottingham’s Playhouse that first turned Elain Harwood on to modern architecture: “The Demon King popped up from a trap door right in front of my nose!” she recalls of its intimate stage, a world away from the traditional proscenium arch and dusty red velvet curtains.

Growing up in the East Midlands “every escape from the normal and humdrum was in buildings from the Fifties and Sixties — the theatre, the swimming baths, the library”. She is a child of the welfare state, the post-war settlement and what the French call the Les Trente Glorieuses — the 30 years of stability and growth following the carnage.

Harwood, senior architectural investigator for Historic England, has just completed an 18-year labour of love with the publication next month of her book, Space, Hope and Brutalism.

It is a hugely important volume: the first comprehensive survey of Britain’s post-war buildings. Weighing in at just shy of 5kg, it is lush with photographs and full of wit and wonder. She wrote the first of its 240,000 words when the British Library was still at the British Museum.

It is a national account but London looms large because, as Harwood notes, this is where the money and demand for building was when cash and materials were otherwise still in short supply (building materials were rationed until November 1954). The London County Council had the largest architecture department in the world, while Camden, Lambeth and Southwark were building innovative housing and the city was slowly getting its swing back: “It was about giving London a capital city image,” says Harwood. “Centre Point was described as ‘Mary Quant architecture’ — it backed Britain.”

Her accessible book explains the reasons why large chunks of London and Britain look like they do — from bus stations to theatres, power stations to council estates. She talks about the move from private houses with servants to open-plan living with central heating and why children’s libraries came about. She explains how a shortage of steel and British expertise in casting concrete — developed during the building of wartime defences — helped lead to a particular penchant for concrete utopias such as the National Theatre or her beloved Barbican complex.

She defends such Brutalist buildings from criticisms that while they are wonderfully sculptural, they can be anti-social as neighbours, and work against legible, lively city streets: “Between 1948 and 1958 the number of cars doubled on London’s streets and between 1958 and 1963 they doubled again,” she points out. “There were an awful lot more accidents.” An influential traffic planning report of the time had a “bashed-up pram” as its first image. The Barbican’s segregation of cars from people was an attempt to address this, argues Harwood: “It was a time of the Green Cross Code and cycling proficiency tests.”

Likewise, the National Theatre’s front door may not be in the most obvious place but this was a deliberate design decision, not an oversight: “There was more time then, things were slower, anti-hierarchical, more picturesque. How you got there was part of the experience. Use your eyes! Use your noddle!”

Harwood’s characteristically drôle delivery is there in print too. Of architect Alison Smithson’s invention of the term Brutalism, she gleefully reports her husband, Peter Smithson, saying: “Alison coined it on the john.”

Yet the book is also academically rigorous, with years spent tracking down plans in archives and searching out elderly designers for their recollections. “No architect is allowed to die before September,” she says, worried that the book will start to date immediately.

Harwood grew up in the suburbs of Nottingham, where her father was a telephone engineer and her mother worked on production lines. She took a degree in modern history at Bristol and was influenced by books such as Paul Addison’s Now the War is Over, which describes how wartime collectivism led to the birth of the National Health Service and education for all. Viscount Esher’s book, A Broken Wave, which examines the effect of Modernism on our cities, also had a profound effect.

Harwood got a job at English Heritage answering the phones while taking a conservation course on the side. When a researcher’s job came up in 1987 she went for it. “I was an internal candidate so, reluctantly, they had to interview me.” She’s had much the same job ever since, with breaks here and there to write books (another Harwood title about England’s post-war listed buildings is out next month too) or to make the appearances on TV programmes such as the BBC’s One Foot in the Past.

Space, Hope and Brutalism (the title is a play on Sigfried Giedion’s classic book from 1941, Space, Time and Architecture) has its origins in the steering committee that English Heritage set up when it first considered listing post-war buildings. Brutalism was still a “very damning phrase,” says Harwood, and the architecture of the welfare state was out of fashion for a generation. “The baby boomers who it was designed for reacted against it. They wanted freedom. They wanted bedsits not halls of residence. And there is something directive about public housing,” she notes.

Today, we should stop thinking of quality post-war architecture as ubiquitous because, she argues, so much of it has already been destroyed. “Half the new towns have been trashed, schools and hospitals demolished, factories have disappeared and offices have mostly lost their interiors.” Good buildings from the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies are now rare. Many are demolished or mutilated just before they are 30 years old and eligible for listing.

Harwood’s book is a celebration of the achievements of those times as well as the losses. The account stops before the oil crisis of the mid-Seventies and the arrival of Thatcherism and Hi-Tech and Postmodern architecture (“People like Rogers and Foster don’t need a book from me”).

Hope, says Harwood, is the most important word in the title, the hopes of the post-war society and the hope that the book will encourage more protection of the architectural legacy that survives. She doesn’t have much hope that we will see another round of Les Trente Glorieuses, however.

1. Royal College of Physicians, NW1 (completed 1964)

Brutalist legend Sir Denys Lasdun’s masterpiece. Being beautifully crafted didn’t stop it being called a “sausage factory” when it opened.

2. The Barbican Estate, EC2 (1965-76)

Chamberlin, Powell and Bon’s concrete fortress is softened by water gardens and planting to make it a traffic-free oasis.

3. National Theatre and Southbank Centre, SE1 (1967-1976)

Lasdun’s newly restored National Theatre is an inhabited cliff, while across the road is the sublimely sculpted Hayward Gallery (Bennett and Jack Whittle) and the Queen Elizabeth Hall (Higgs and Hill).

4. Keeling House, E2 (1957)

Lasdun again. This time an innovative cluster block of maisonettes, each one designed to replicate the scale of a terraced house. The Grade II*-listed building is now luxury apartments.

5. Balfron Tower, E14 (1967)

This Grade II block is an older cousin to Ernö Goldfinger’s celebrated Trellick Tower. A request to list the entire Brownfield Estate in which it sits is now with government.

6. Lambeth Towers, SE11 (1968)

Designed by George Finch for Lambeth council, this utopian housing scheme was built incorporating a medical centre and an old people’s luncheon club.

7. Economist Plaza, SW1 (1964)

Peter and Alison Smithsons’ office towers and plaza in St James’s were designed to complement the neighbouring 18th-century housing. Their success in that is debatable but they are an elegant arrangement in themselves.

8. Elephant and Rhino House, London Zoo, NW1 (1965)

Rough like the hide of a pachyderm, this amorphous London Zoo landmark is by Sir Hugh Casson, who argued that the way to rob elephants of their dignity would be to “make them stand in a straight line”.

9. Space House, WC2 (1966)

Lesser known than nearby Centre Point, this drum-shaped tower is one of architect Richard Seifert’s poptastic commercial hits. The business end of Brutalism.

10. Institute of Education, WC1 (1977)

One for the aficionados, Lasdun’s late Brutalist megastructure is powerfully modelled if you can forgive it destroying a chunk of Bloomsbury to stake its chunky claim. RB

Space, Hope and Brutalism: English Architecture, 1945-1975 (Yale University Press, £50), is published on October 8