These pictures capture Britain’s Brutalist vision of urban utopias
Lecture slides tour the inspirations and realizations of a national housing program
Decaying urban centers were overcrowded and infrastructure was outstripped. England’s best and brightest surveyed a homeland on the brink and enacted a series of policies to physically recreate the social order, clearing slums and packing entire communities into meticulously planned housing developments.
Postwar England was a brave new world with technocrats in ascendancy, and John Richings James stood at the vanguard of a housing revolution. The urban planner had risen to bureaucratic prominence immediately following World War II, fostering the birth of the towns of Newton Aycliffe and Peterlee in his native County Durham. These so-called New Towns were an answer to suburban sprawl — self-sufficient communities built far from established cities complete with shops and schools, just like older towns all around the world, except that these had been drafted on paper as a cohesive whole to avoid the ramshackle growth which government planners saw as the heart of urban rot.
Promoted to chief planner of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government in 1961, James oversaw the rapid implementation of council estates across the UK. But while overcrowding in the cities spurred development of his preferred New Town approach, he also had to answer demand for the more contentious high-density apartment towers which would directly replace substandard tenements which had been torn down or bombed out, or built on abandoned industrial sites. Authorities wanted to clean up their inner cities but they didn’t want to see their entire tax base and voting blocks move away.
The massive scale of population redistribution required the efficiency of concrete and standardization, but while some developments mimicked the oppressive human warehouses preferred by Soviet states, some architects working in Britain took inspiration from the emerging Brutalism movement’s melding of functionality and aesthetic ebullience. Like their country cousins, inner-city tower complexes were also designed to act as microcosms of a city, built to include community spaces, shops, and other high street amenities.
By 1966, more than a quarter of all new homes were being built in high-rises. By the beginning of the 1970s, almost 30 communities had been conceived, drawn up, hammered together, and populated. It wouldn’t take long before the first generation of hastily built housing projects began to lose their gloss, but that would be some other bureaucrat’s problem. James left government for academia in 1967 and became the first professor of the University of Sheffield’s newly formed town and regional planning department. He brought with him thousands of slides taken across the country and overseas, shots of architectural inspiration and poorly conceived urban planning alike, to train the next generation of England’s designers.
