Morrison, among others, wanted nothing to do with that, but in 1956 the Labour Party conference endorsed the policy. Arthur Greenwood, in recommending this ‘full-blooded Socialism’ to the conference, commented accurately that it was ‘probably the biggest socialization project that has yet been attempted in the democratic world’.31 Its object was to ‘take the profit out of private landlordism’ and ‘make housing a social service’. Had such a policy ever been implemented, housing would indeed have become just that, with well over 60 per cent of homes council controlled. This policy of mass municipalisation was balanced by the promise of more generous local authority mortgages for home owners. But even Greenwood could see that ‘entirely new problems’ would be created if the local authority was ‘virtually the only landlord in the area’.32 Needless to say this never happened, although the idea survived into the 1959 manifesto, hedged with let-out qualifications about timing. Nothing, however, could better illustrate the real differences that would remain over the public sector/private sector divide in the welfare state. Where Bevan was right, as Macmillan much later conceded, was that the ‘repairs increase’ he allowed in rent was too small to have much effect. (Bevan, having his cake and eating it, had dismissed the increase as ‘a mouldy turnip’.)
If Macmillan hit his targets by relaxing controls on the private sector and by cutting standards in the face of overwhelming demand, his immediate successors Duncan Sandys, Henry Brooke, Charles Hill, Sir Keith Joseph and then Labour’s Dick Crossman all helped grow the bitter harvest that became the real disaster of post-war housing – system build, the high-rise towers and the great slab blocks of deck-access flats. It started almost by accident. Up to the mid-1950s traditional houses dominated. In 1953 just 23 per cent of public sector housing approvals were for flats, and only 3 per cent of those were for high-rise: blocks of six storeys and above. But from 1956, Sandys started paying higher subsidies for high-rise blocks. Up to then, he told the House of Commons, all flats had received the same subsidy.
Since construction, in practice, costs more as you go higher, the result has been that flats in low blocks have been more heavily subsidised in relation to costs than flats in high blocks. Apart from being inequitable, this has unintentionally influenced local authorities to concentrate on building blocks of three, four and five storeys, which, I believe, many honourable members will agree are most monotonous.33
No one dissented. From then on, the taller the block the bigger the subsidy in order to eliminate the financial advantages of erecting low-rise buildings. On such wonderfully egalitarian and aesthetic grounds, the explosion in high-rise was, almost unintentionally, launched. Within four years, the proportion of high-rise had risen five-fold to 15 per cent of the construction programme, and by 1966 it accounted for 26 per cent of all homes started.34
The guilty men – they were almost all men – were not just those in government. An unintended conspiracy of town planners, builders, engineers and architects, together with local councillors who believed they were doing their best but frequently failed to consult those they were rehousing, produced what became a costly and alienating fiasco. ‘Tower blocks were part of architectural and municipal prestige,’ the architectural historian Patrick Nuttgens has recorded, ‘– a desire to make a mark on the landscape, to display technical proficiency and to announce the arrival of a new age.’35 In Birmingham, Harry Watton, the Labour leader known as ‘little Caesar’, was taken to see one of Bryant’s new system-build blocks at Kidderminster. Sheppard Fidler, the city architect recalled:
To get to the block we passed through a marquee which was rolling in whisky, brandy and so on, so by the time they got to the block they thought it was marvellous – they wanted to change over the whole [housing] programme [to these]. As we were leaving, Harry Watton suddenly said: ‘Right! We’ll take five blocks’ – just as if he was buying bags of sweets. ‘We’ll have five of them and stick them on X’ – some site he’d remembered we were just starting on.36
Rod Hackney, an architecture student in Manchester in the early 1960s, has caught the flavour of the time as well as anyone in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, his autobiographical account of the road to community architecture. The road ran from the 1930s and Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, via the Modern movement to Le Corbusier’s ‘cities in the sky’. In 1946, Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture was published in Britain with its ringing declaration that ‘we must create the mass-production spirit. The spirit of constructing mass-production houses. The spirit of living in mass-production houses. The spirit of conceiving mass-production houses.’ In well under a decade, the spirit had turned into a flood of buildings. ‘By the mid-fifties traditional building methods were considered slow, cumbersome and a hindrance,’ Hackney records. ‘The only way to build new homes on a massive scale was unrestrained use of the standardized mass-produced materials advocated by the Modernists. A vast proportion of these systems had to be imported from France, Denmark and – ironically – West Germany. Entire rooms were shipped over and were then slotted together like Lego on site.’ There was ‘blind faith in “hip” modern building materials – off-the-peg panels, concrete, glass, metal, plastics and aluminium … if one dared question the long-term performance of the new, the reply was swift: in the same way that technology had developed the materials, it would also develop solutions to problems as and when they were required.’37
The modern movement and its sub-section the new Brutalism, which believed in the ‘honesty’ of bare concrete, seemed to meet the demands of cheapness, speed and what rapidly became the lack of space as the Town and Country Planning Act preserved green belt and put pressure on inner city land. The only answer seemed to be a version of the approach adopted by the first Tesco supermarkets: pile ’em high and sell ’em quick, or in this case build ’em quick, for in theory high rise gave savings on drains, roads, services and other infrastructure. This suggestion proved to be an illusion; high rise was eventually found to cost more than traditional ways of building. Politically, however, the numbers game was all there was. In later years, Keith Joseph’s hand would go over an anguished face and he would mutter ‘disaster, disaster’ when he contemplated what he had built when housing minister in the early 1960s. ‘I was genuinely convinced I had a new answer. It was prefabrication and, Heaven help me, high blocks … the best of intentions and the worst of results.’38 He was to recall sadly: ‘I didn’t have a philosophy. I was just a “more” man. I used to go to bed at night counting the number of houses I’d destroyed and the number of planning approvals that had been given … Just more.’39 Almost no one asked the families from the massively expanding slum clearance programme what they thought of all this. Nicholas Taylor, an assistant editor at the Architectural Review, recalled the massive arrogance still present as late as 1967 when he proposed that some evidence should be sought on what people actually wanted, to go with an issue on ‘the best of current housing’. He was scornfully dismissed by the proprietor with the words: ‘But we KNOW what should be done!’40
Initially, many of these housing schemes attracted awards and international recognition. But, as Rod Hackney has put it, ‘Utopia showed early signs of cracking up.’41 Flat roofs that were fine in sunnier climes soon succumbed to British rain. Concrete became stained, crumbled, and spalled – partly the result of additives slung in to speed setting. Key joints leaked, sometimes because they had been packed with newspaper and concrete bags by builders on piece rates who were too impatient to wait for the right fittings. The result too often was ‘sodden walls and squelching floors’,42 and high fuel bills even when residents could control their own heating rather than having to rely on whole block systems which were often inefficient. Maintenance costs proved awesome. Lifts and rubbish chutes failed. As the physical environment deteriorated it was found that whole buildings and even estates could spiral down