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Refabricating the Imperial Image on the Isle of Dogs: Modernist Design, British State Exhibitions and Colonial Policy 1924–1951

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Rhodri Windsor Liscombe
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Extract

Historical analysis of the 1951 Festival of Britain has tended to overlook its ideological genealogy, and also to give less consideration to the Exhibition of Architecture, Town Planning and Building Research at Lansbury in Poplar on the Isle of Dogs than to the architecture and displays at the South Bank site (Figs 1 and 2). That genealogy reflects an intersection between the formulation of colonial policy and the adaptation of Modern Movement theory and practice during the final phase of British imperialism. Consequently the purpose of this paper is to recover various aspects of this intersection, during the nearly three decades from the British Empire Exhibition of 1924. Focusing on design practice in the Empire, especially the national exhibition buildings erected at those major international expositions that led up to and culminated in the Festival of Britain, it also examines the wider representation of architectural and colonial development in professional media and public propaganda.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 49 , 2006 , pp. 317 - 348
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2006

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References

Notes

1 The most comprehensive study of the Festival is Conekin, Becky, The Autobiography of a Nation. The 1951 Festival of Britain (Manchester, 2003)Google Scholar, considerably expanding on the discussion of ideological factors briefly reviewed in Adrian Forty’s essay ‘Festival Polities’, in the anthology edited by Banham, Mary and Hillier, Bevis accompanying the exhibition A Tonic to the Nation. The Festival of Britain 1951 (London, 1976), pp. 26–39 Google Scholar. Conekin does refer to the 1924 British Empire exhibition and devotes her seventh chapter to ‘The place that was almost absent: the British Empire’; she notes not only the paternalism within the colonial reformist policy of the Labour Party but also the financial constraints inherent in Commonwealth representation and (exacerbated by the Korean War) the cognisance of United States criticism of imperialism interspersed with reinterpretation of Empire and Commonwealth as a British enterprise. The essays in Twentieth Century Architecture, 5 (2001) (special issue, ‘Festival of Britain’, ed. Elain Harwood and Alan Powers) enlarge the analysis of both the socio-cultural scene and the architecture and planning, including Harwood’s ‘Lansbury’ (pp. 139–54). The ideological content pertaining to science and technology is examined by Forgan, Sophie in ‘Festivals of Science and the two cultures: science, design and display in the Festival Britain, 1951’, British Journal for the History of Science, 31.2 (June 1998), pp. 217–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Aspects of the relationship between the last phase of British imperialism and the Modern Movement, including some discussion of national pavilions at inter-war international exhibitions, are examined in Crinson, Mark, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (Aldershot, 2003).Google Scholar

3 Crinson, Modern Architecture, ch. 4 (pp. 72–99).

4 Crinson, Modern Architecture, p. xiii. Evidence for the longer gestation of British imperial devolution comes in the political thinking of the Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan. In his celebrated ‘Wind of change’ speech delivered to a predominantly Afrikaner audience at Cape Town in February 1960, Macmillan spoke positively about ‘the tide of national consciousness’ already responsible for the independent status in the Commonwealth of India, Pakistan, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Malaya, ‘which is now rising in Africa’ and ‘for which you and the other nations of the Western World are ultimately responsible’; Macmillan, Harold, Pointing the Way 1959–61 (New York, 1972), p. 157 Google Scholar. Macmillan’s biographer, Alistair Home, noted how an earlier Conservative Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, had in 1934 declared, ‘There is a wind of nationalism and freedom blowing around the world’, amid negotiation to enable constitutional reform in the Indian Raj: Home, Alistair, Macmillan 1957–1986 (London, 1989), p. 195.Google Scholar

5 Le Corbusier recorded his talk for the BBC Third Programme on 10 July 1951, and it was broadcast on 19 August; transcript, ‘Le Corbusier Parle … 1951’, trans. Emmanuelle Morgan, Festival of Britain, pp. 8–10.

6 The Guide to the Exhibition of Architecture Town Planning and Building, compiled by H. McG. Dunnett and published by His Majesty’s Stationery Office, clearly articulates a collective social ethos that includes a corporate and consumerist vein typified by an advertisement for the Esse Cooker: ‘The Esse is the modern cooker/That makes life easier.’ In advocating a ‘Plan for Posterity’ (p. 5) which combined urban, architectural and social reconstruction, Dunnett denounced ‘I’m alright Jack’ attitudes and purely materialist definitions of progress. The collaborative paradigm was applied to the design process, bringing together the scientist (specifically that associated with the Building Research Establishment at Garston in Hertfordshire), the planner and the architect; the latter was charged ‘to visualise and create out of a great variety of materials, a design for a building or group of buildings that will not only be fine in appearance, but will also be practical in arrangement’ (p. 45). In a wider perspective, Winston Churchill, although opposed to both the Festival of Britain and colonial devolution, had declared (in a speech of 9 November 1943): ‘The policy of waging war until victory would be incomplete, and indeed spoiled, if it were not accompanied by a policy of food, work and houses in the period following the victory for the men and women who fought and won’ (quoted in Planning our new Homes. Report by the Scottish Housing Advisory Committee on the Design, Planning and Furnishing of new Houses [Edinburgh, 1944], p. 1). Andrew P. Thornton recognized the connexion between socialist home policy and decolonization, writing that, ‘as the Welfare State began to live the Empire began to die’ ( Thompson, Andrew P., For the File on Empire [London, 1968], p. 156 Google Scholar).

7 Quoted in the case study of Lansbury in Gaskell, S. Martin, Model Housing. From the Great Exhibition to the Festival of Britain (London, 1986), pp. 121–26 Google Scholar, together with Gibberd’s praise for its ‘friendly and human character’ (pp. 125–26). The wider historical and cultural contexts of the post-war decades are discussed in several publications, including: Jackson, Anthony, The Politics of Architecture. A History of Architecture in Britain (Toronto and London, 1970)Google Scholar; Saint, Andrew, Towards a Social Architecture. The Role of School-Building in Post-War England (New Haven and London, 1987)Google Scholar; Gold, John, The Experience of Modernism. Modern Architects and the Tuture City 1928–1953 (London, 1997)Google Scholar; and Glendinning, Miles and Muthesius, Stefan, Tower Block. Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (New Haven and London, 1994)Google Scholar. Glendinning and Muthesius reproduce a page from the 1944 Daily Mail Book of Post-War Homes showing a soldier pointing out pictures and plans of houses to a group of school children above text including this sentence: ‘Are we, in fact, going to build for ourselves or for the great future?’ (p. 15).

8 The social and aesthetic radicalism inherent in Modern Movement architecture and planning is effectively summarized in: Curtis, William, Modern Architecture since 1900, 3rd edn (London, 1996)Google Scholar; Frampton, Kenneth, Modern Architecture. A Critical History, rev. edn (London, 1991)Google Scholar. The public debates concerning design and planning are related by Ockman, Joan, Architecture Culture 1943–1968 (New York, 1993)Google Scholar, and with particular reference to housing, by Rowe, Peter G., Modernity and Housing (Cambridge, Mass., 1993)Google Scholar. The relationship of Modernism to modernity is analyzed by Heynen, Hilde, Architecture and Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 1999)Google Scholar, while the discursive nature of the movement is argued by Goldhagen, Sarah, ‘Something to Talk About: Modernism, Discourse, Style’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (henceforth JSAH), 64 (December 2005), pp. 144–67 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The everyday application of Modernism is discussed from a (Canadian) Commonwealth perspective in Liscombe, Rhodri Windsor, The New Spirit: Modern Architecture in Vancouver 1938–1963 (Montreal and Vancouver, 1997)Google Scholar. The close relationship between social and architectural planning reform was noted by Maxwell Fry in an article on tropical design, ‘Architecture and Planning in the Tropics’, in Optima, 4 (March 1969), pp. 52–60; among its final sentences one reads: ‘Since the early days of the century Britain has evolved a favourable attitude to architecture and planning which is now firmly embedded in the welfare state.’

9 This problematization deliberately engages with structural and post-structural hypotheses about the communication of meaning through form and in cultural practice. Those are usefully collated with respect to architectural design in Rethinking Architecture. A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London and New York, 1997). For the wider cultural issues, see The Visual Cultural Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London, 1998), and especially part four, ‘Race and Identity in Colonial and post-Colonial Culture’, with essays by Timothy Mitchell and Annie McClintock. This problematization also relates to what might be termed the liminal space between consciously formulated ideology and popular cultural expression, as is discussed by MacKenzie, John M. in the ‘Introduction’ to Imperialism and popular Culture (Manchester, 1986)Google Scholar, and throughout his Propaganda and Empire. The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880–1960 (Manchester, 1984). A further dimension is developed in Morton, Patricia, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition Paris (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).Google Scholar

10 Besides those studies cited in note 8, the relative conservatism of the architecture – essentially an Anglo- continental Modernism developed by those associated with CIAM and MARS in the 1930s – was acknowledged by Misha Black, who regretted that the Festival ‘suddenly proved that Modern Architecture with a capital M was in fact acceptable’ (Banham and Hillier, Tonic to the Nation, p. 11). The lack of innovation in expressive mode was remarked by John Haywood in his introduction to Poems 1951. The Prize-Winning Entries for the Festival of Britain Competition (Harmondsworth Middlesex, 1951); this competition had been funded by the Arts Council of Great Britain. Among the verse included was a lengthy ‘Conversation Piece’ by Gerald Walker entitled ‘The Impertinent Friend’, including these lines evocative of the contradictory tenor of the times:

[Cordex speaking] Will Sebastian, still dreaming of the future,

And living in the past? We are all ghosts

And you are the ghost of many aspirations.

The relict of my own still hoping death.

11 The post-war decolonization process is comprehensively summarized, with extensive bibliography, in Low, David A., Eclipse of Empire (Cambridge, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Up to 1948 a major new naval and military base was to be established at Haifa with an enlarged administrative centre at Jerusalem. The expansion of Jerusalem was to follow Neighbourhood Unit planning principles as set out in Kendall, Henry, Jerusalem City Plan (London, 1948).Google Scholar

13 In 1954 the Colonial Service was re-designated Her Majesty’s Overseas Civil Services; for the bureaucratic and related structures, see Thurston, Ann, Sources for Colonial Studies in the Public Records Office (London, 1995)Google Scholar. The Colonial Office ceased to exist in 1962, being replaced by the Commonwealth Office in 1965 and then, from 1968, by the present Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

14 This aspect of the Festival is addressed from a more nationally specific perspective by Conekin, 1951 Festival, notably ch. 4 (pp. 90–104), ‘The Festival’s representation of the past’, and by Forty in ‘Festival Polities’.

15 The history of modern British and continental exhibitions is reviewed in Greenhalgh, Paul, Ephemeral Vistas. The Expositions Universelles. Great Exhibitions and World’s Fair, 1851–1939 (Manchester, 1988)Google Scholar; see also Greenhalgh, , ‘Education, Entertainment and Politics: Lessons from the Great International Exhibitions’, in The New Museology, ed. Vergo, Peter (London, 1989), pp. 74–98.Google Scholar

16 The phraseology recurs in such widely-read magazines as The Illustrated London News, especially in issues just prior to and at the time of the Coronation in 1953.

17 Sir Edward Elgar had included A. C. Benson’s imperialist verses at the end of his own ‘Ode’ for the 1902 Coronation of King Edward VII; its subsequent elevation to the status of a second national anthem is noted by several contributors to MacKenzie, Imperialism.

18 This was a widespread phenomenon in the British Dominions and Commonwealth, being expressed most powerfully by Jewish settlers in Mandate Palestine, a number of whom had direct links with the German and central European centres of Modernism. For example, the Shikun Workmen’s Housing Company based in Tel-Aviv declared, in their 1945 publication Workers Housing in Palestine: ‘In all modern civilized countries it is axiomatic that the responsibility for initiating a housing programme for the working-classes by the erection of low-cost dwellings shall fall on the government’ (p. 6).

19 The commission and design of the 1851 Model Houses are examined in Curl, James S., The Life and Work of Henry Roberts 1803–1876. The Evangelical Conscience and Campaign for Model Housing and Healthy Nations (Chichester, 1983), pp. 50–53 and 97–98 Google Scholar; see also Gaskell, Model Housing; and more generally Auerbach, Jeffrey A., The Great Exhibition of 1851: a Nation on Display (New Haven, 1999).Google Scholar

20 The Brussels pavilion, designed by Robertson, Howard, was reviewed in the Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects (henceforth JRIBA), 42, 29 June 1935, pp. 932–39 Google Scholar, and the Glasgow Exhibition, predominantly designed by Thomas S. Tait, filled the July 1938 issue of the Architectural Review (vol. 84). Two examples of the adverse criticism of the theme and contents of the 1937 Paris Pavilion, designed in a rather bland Modernist mode by Hill, Oliver, appeared in the JRIBA, 44 (17 July 1937), pp. 910–11 Google Scholar, and in the article by Richards, J. M., ‘The Problem of National Projection. What is the function of a national pavilion? Where does Britain stand?’, published in the Architectural Review, 82 (September 1937), pp. 105–06 Google Scholar. In the former, Hill’s building was barely mentioned besides reference to the ‘Stilton cheese or hat-box erection’ over the entrance. But the external display of a neon map of British railways, and exhibits inside of sporting pursuits (beginning with fox hunting and pheasant shooting) were dismissed as banal. The author further noted that the best pavilions were ‘those which show a comfortable assimilation of modern forms and modern materials and a lively understanding of the modern aesthetic’ (p. 910). Richards, author of the popular Introduction to Modern Architecture (Harmondsworth, 1940), concurred that the exhibits were narrow and unrepresentative, and wrote: ‘It may unhappily be true that we have no national town-planning programme and perhaps much of our latest housing is not a thing to be proud about on the continent; but, to speak at random, what of London’s Green Belt (a programme that would lend itself excellently to dramatic exhibition display)?’ He further suggested displays about the London Underground Railway and British Broadcasting Corporation, together with those that demonstrated British ‘social as well as commercial’ activity (p. 106).

21 Besides Low, Eclipse, and Mackenzie, Imperialism (especially Mackenzie’s essay ‘The B.B.C. and the Empire’, pp. 165–91), these changes are recounted in The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Twentieth Century IV, ed. William R. Louis (Oxford, 1998), and briefly in McIntyre, W. David, British Decolonisation 1946–1997 (London, 1998), pp. 84–87 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The ideological transitions are also studied in Madden, Frederick and Fieldhouse, David K., Oxford and the Idea of Commonwealth (London, 1982)Google Scholar. The erosion of established authority, accelerated by the Great War, was anticipated in lectures delivered at New York in 1916 by Boudin, Louis, printed as Socialism and War, rev. edn (New York: J. Weinstein, 1972)Google Scholar. The impetus of the war for Modernist design was described by ProfessorHughes, T. H. in an address to the RIBA, ‘The Modern Movement – A False Start’, JRIBA, 42 (29 June 1935), pp. 911–14 Google Scholar, including this assertion, ‘The Great War introduced to our tastes Corbusier and Tony Gamier’ (p. 913). See also the autobiography of Clement Attlee (British Prime Minister in 1951), As it Happened (London, 1954), and his 1960 Chichele Lectures Empire into Commonwealth (Oxford, 1961).

22 The popular enthusiasm for the social application of scientific method and technology in the immediate post-war years extended the argument of such authors as Read, Herbert, Art and Industry: The Principles of Industrial Design (London, 1934)Google Scholar, and Teague, Walter, Design This Day. The Technique of Order in the Machine Age (New York, 1940)Google Scholar. Its everyday consumerist manifestations are recovered in such recent exhibitions and complementary catalogues as Jet Dreams: Art of the Fifties in the Northwest, ed. Barbara Johns (Seattle, 1995). For the British scene, see Annan, Noel, Our Age: The Generation that Made Post-War Britain (London, 1991).Google Scholar

23 The colonial administrations also published a range of planning documents reflecting various degrees of influence in terms of Modernist theory. Among the more conservative and racially segregated is Walker, Henry E., Housing Schemes in West, East and South Africa. Report and Plans (Lagos, 1946)Google Scholar; a more liberal approach is taken in The Town and Country Planning Board. Model Clauses for use in the Preparation of Schemes (Accra, Ghana [Gold Coast], 1947), and in the Town and Country Planning in the Gold Coast Bulletins, completed 1947–54 by A. E. S. Allcock. Interestingly, Allcock, while noting the wide distribution of Fry, Maxwell and Drew’s, Jane Village Housing in the Tropics (London, 1947)Google Scholar, opined in his second Bulletin (1949): ‘The spate of advisory schemes drawn up at the end of the war by world renowned architects and planners often printed in well bound volumes and copiously illustrated by maps, diagrams and photographs led the man in the street to believe that Utopia was around the corner. The gradual disillusionment which followed, coupled with growing financial stringency, has brought planning temporarily into disrepute in many circles.’

24 Lansbury (1849-1940) was an Anglican who joined the Christian Socialist League and opposed imperialism. His career is summarized by Shepherd, John in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Matthew, H. G. G. and Harrison, Brian (Oxford, 2004), pp. 32 and 541–42 Google Scholar. The sources of this brand of political thought and action are examined in Hilton, Boyd, The Age of Atonement. The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1795–1865 (Oxford, 1988).Google Scholar

25 For example, many British settlers in the African colonies resisted the political consequences of the substitution of local for indirect rule after 1947, and especially majority government, as is related in Low, Eclipse, ch. 9 (pp. 226–64). With regard to Britain, the election of the Conservative party in 1952 signalled the moderation of central government control and restitution of consumerist economic policy, condensed in Irwin, John L., Modern Britain, 3rd edn (London, 1994).Google Scholar

26 Gibbon’s illustrations included a design for the ‘Amelioration and Transformation’ of a civic thoroughfare in an incisive Modernist style (plate opposite p. 211). In reviewing public housing policy in Britain, Gibbon was complimentary about Le Corbusier’s theory (pp. 173–75), and about much of the legislation proposed for social housing and services in Britain. But he warned that government controlled planning was unlikely to ‘rise much above the mediocre’ (p. 118), and warned against the ‘single-minded expectations of easy post-war Utopias’ (p. 217). Gibbon also used the phrase ‘a new Elizabethan age’ (p. 35), which would accompany the British response to ‘the challenge of the new world’.

27 Phil Hubbard, Lucy Faire and Keith Lilley question the extent of broad public support in ‘Contesting the modern city; reconstruction and everyday life in post-war Coventry’, Planning Perspectives, 18.4 (2003), pp. 377–97. See also Malpas, Peter, ‘Wartime planning for post-war housing in Britain: the Whitehall debate, 1941–3’, Planning Perspectives, 18.2 (2003), pp. 177–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Dunnett, Guide, p. 3. He was surely aware of Pick’s, Frank Britain Must Rebuild (London, 1941)Google Scholar, and such quasi-official publications as E. and McAlister, G., Town and Country Planning (London, 1943).Google Scholar

29 Dunnett, Guide, p. 43. The most important British documents were the Uthwatt Report on ‘Compensation and Betterment’ and the Scott Report on ‘Land Utilization in Rural Areas’; Dunnett’s definition also corresponded with the 1949 US Congress Declaration on Housing Policy. In addition to the sources cited in note 4 above, the United States situation is studied in World War II and the American Dream: How Wartime Building Changed a Nation, ed. Donald Albrecht (Washington, D.C., 1994), and Radford, Gail Modern Housing for America. Policy struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 Dunnet, Guide, p. 8.

31 A photograph of this brick and half-timbered house is reproduced in Gaskell, Model Housing, p. 125.

32 The Corbusier pavilion is discussed in Udovicki-Selb, Danilo, ‘Le Corbusier and the Paris Exhibition of 1937’, JSAH, 56.1 (March 1997), pp. 42–63.Google Scholar

33 Both published in London, respectively by the Architectural Press and by George Allen and Unwin.

34 Sheppard, Building for the People, p. 28. The opening sentence of Sheppard’s Introduction reads, ‘Architecture is a social art’, and is shortly followed by his statement that the built fabric expressed ‘the ideals and symbols prevailing in society’. He was at pains throughout to emphasize communal and aesthetic values while believing that ‘utility and austerity are not inimical to beauty’ (p. 117).

35 The JRIBA printed useful reports by the architect Anthony M. Chitty on the Festival buildings in JRIBA 58 (June 1951), ‘The South Bank Exhibition Reviewed’ (pp. 316–25), complaining of the ‘pettifogging small scale treatment’ (p. 321); and in 58 (August 1951) by the planner Gordon Stephenson, ‘Lansbury Poplar: The Live Architecture Exhibition’ (pp. 379–89), again criticizing the limited scale, and chiefly praising the shopping centre and Ricardo Street School. Vol. 59 (December 1951), advertised a film, ‘Houses in the Town’, including a segment on Lansbury. Robert Matthew, Architect to the London County Council (1946-52) and responsible for concerted housing construction, was architectural advisor to the Festival. The most important legislation was the National Health Act (1946), and National Insurance Act (1946), both in operation from 1948.

36 There is also a resonance between the Festival Hall and the didactic institutions erected as a consequence of the Great Exhibition, among them, eventually, the Imperial Institute. The Imperial Institute is examined in Crinson, Mark, ‘Imperial Story-lands: Architecture and display at the Imperial and Commonwealth Institutes’, Art History, 22.1 (1999), pp. 99–123 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and in Bremner, G. Alex, ‘Some Imperial Institute: Architecture, Symbolism and the Ideal of Empire in late Victorian Britain, 1887–93’, JSAH, 62.1 (March 2003), pp. 50–74.Google Scholar

37 For New Delhi, see Irving, Robert G., Indian Summer. Lutyens, Baker and Imperial Delhi (New Haven and London, 1981)Google Scholar, and for late imperial classicism elsewhere in the Dominions, see Kalman, Harold, A History of Canadian Architecture II (Toronto, 1994), ch. 10 (pp. 533–66 Google Scholar), and Gibbney, John, Canberra 1913–1953 (Canberra, 1988).Google Scholar

38 Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, discusses these features extensively. The official Guide to the British Empire Exhibition (1925) printed telling comments on the Gold Coast [Ghana] exhibit, which included a ‘Native Village’. The exhibit, said to bear ‘tribute to the prosperity that follows British administration’, displayed ‘wooden idols of unattractive aspect, dishes and much artistic work in brass, ivory and copper [which] serve to arrest attention on all sides’ (p. 80). The Guide also commented on the Amusement Park, ‘In a sense, the keynote of the new British Empire Exhibition is enjoyment. The public is to be attracted first and last’ (p. 105).

39 Cottam, David and Stamp, Gavin, Sir Owen Williams 1890–1969 (London, 1986).Google Scholar

40 Souvenir of the British Empire Exhibition including the State Opening Ceremony (London, 1924): they also opened the revised exhibition on 9 May 1925.

41 Souvenir of the British Empire Exhibition (London, 1924), pp. 1 and 2.

42 Souvenir of the British Empire Exhibition 1925 Opening Ceremony by H.M. The King accompanied by H.M. the Queen (London, 1925), p. 25.

43 Souvenir of the British Empire Exhibition 1925, pp. 2–3.

44 The Pavilion of His Majesty’s Government. The British Empire Exhibition 1924 (London, 1924 and 1925).

45 Examples of the imperial and continental influence of Garden City principles are studied respectively in Herbert, Gilbert and Sosnovsky, Silvina, Bauhaus on the Carmel and the crossroads of Empire (Jerusalem, 1993), pp. 58–103 Google Scholar, and in Koehler, Karen, ‘Kandinsky’s Kleine Welton and Utopian city plans’, JSAH, 57.4 (December 1998), pp. 432–47.Google Scholar

46 Guide, p. 46. The concentration on middle-class consumption, and indeed on the alliance of late feudal social hierarchy with modern capitalist practice, is obvious in the promotional material for the gas industry exhibit in the Guide: ‘Very attractive is a chauffeur’s parlour, with kitchen and dining-room adjoining a gas-heated scullery and workshop’ (p. 40). Nevertheless the Guide also carried an advertisement for the contemporary Exposition Universelle de l’Art Décoratif in Paris.

47 The impact of Canadian – and especially United States – ferro-concrete industrial and commercial architecture, together with the organizational theories associated with Henry Ford and Charles Taylor, are explored in Banham, Reyner, A Concrete Atlantis. United States Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture 1900–1925 (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar, and in Cohen, Jean-Louis, Scenes of the World to Come. European Architecture and the American Challenge 1843–1960 (Montreal, 1995).Google Scholar

48 The inter-war developments are comprehensively reviewed in Gibbon, Reconstruction, and Sheppard, Building for the People, including the major schemes at Becontree, near London, for the LCC (1919-24), at Wythenshawe, Manchester (1926-33), and at Speke, Liverpool (1928-36); in addition to the more recent studies cited in note 7 above, see also Pioneers in British Planning, ed. Gordon Cherry (London, 1981), and Morris, Eleanor S., British Town Planning and Urban Design: Principles and Policies (Harlow, 1997)Google Scholar. Another large urban housing development, using steel fabrication (Mopin system) and new service technologies (Garchey refuse system) was Quarry Hill, Leeds, designed under the direction of Livett, R. A.: ‘Housing and Slum clearance in Leeds’, JRIBA, 44 (5 June 1937), pp. 765–78 Google Scholar; JRIBA, 44 (11 September 1937), carried a report on ‘Experimental [low-rent] flats, Kings Cross [London]’ designed by John Dower using hollow sheet steel flooring, pp. 995–1000.

Another type of low-income housing was the company town, represented by Dormanstown, near Middlesborough, e. 1921–25, for the steel manufacturer Dorman Long & Co., which had a substantial exhibit at the British Empire Exhibition of 1924–25. The aerial photograph in the pamphlet on Dormanstown distributed there shows that a major component was a semicircle of semi-detached and terraced housing around open and communal facilities, comparable with Bruno Taut’s more Modernist Britz Estate near Berlin (1924-32); for illustration, see Rowe, Modernity, p. 112.

49 Bauer’s main emphasis, however, was on Scandinavian and European developments. Her influence is assessed in Oberlander, H. Peter and Newburn, Eva, Houser: The Life and Work of Catherine Bauer (Vancouver, 1999).Google Scholar

50 Coughlin’s conservative viewpoint, while complimenting the more collective housing policy of Holland and Scandinavia, emerges in his enthusiasm for segregated ‘Native Townships outside Municipal areas’ in South Africa, p. 25.

An addendum to this Canadian connexion is the book reviewed in Crown Colonist, 8 (June 1938), pp. 303–04 – Piddington, Richard A., The Next British Empire (London, 1937)Google Scholar – which proposed the removal to Canada of the imperial centre, as being racially, economically and militarily preferable to all other locations within the Empire.

51 Coughlin, New Housing, p. 22.

52 Pavilion of H.M. Government. This likened the architecture of the pavilion to the ‘great monuments of antiquity’ while also defining the imperial mission as the application of science and technology for economic and social development: ‘the preservation of national riches’ material and cultural, as well as the defence of the colonies.

53 Crown Colonist, 3, 19 June 1933, p. 267.

54 Crown Colonist, respectively 13 (July 1943), p. 482, and 15 (July 1945), pp. 481–85, with an article by Harry Rosenthal entitled ‘Architecture in Palestine. The Jewish Approach’, pp. 485–86.

55 Crown Colonist, respectively 8 (July 1938), p. 305, and 20 (April 1950), p. 128.

56 Crown Colonist, 15 (5 February 1945), reported on the function of Stanley House opened on Merseyside in 1943 as a ‘community [centre] for colonial people and their white friends’ with the purpose of ‘giving concrete form to the Imperial ideal of common rights, common opportunities, and community of interests among the various races’ (p. 85). The centre represented an attempt to modernize the negative racial stereotyping related by Ben Shephard: ‘Showbiz Imperialism. The Case of Peter Lobengula’, in MacKenzie, Imperialism, pp. 94–112.

57 Beveridge was on the editorial board for the series of publications entitled Target for Tomorrow, the second of which was A Plan for Town and Country (London, 1944), written by Flora Stephenson and Phoebe Pool; the board also included Sir Julian Huxley and Sir John Boyd Orr. Crown Colonist, 23 (March 1943), pp. 167–69, published an article by Eric Macfayden, ‘British Empire’s Role in Post-War Rebuilding’, containing this sentence: ‘But if Britain is to hold its place as leader in an expanding world system, its own economy must be broad-based upon a people active, intelligent and characterized by internal harmony: a people well-fed, well-clothed and well-educated, whose vigour and initiative is not cramped by the inhibitions of insecurity’ (p. 169).

58 Crown Colonist, 14 (February 1944), p. 113. Fry was specifically appointed to the Resident Minister in West Africa.

59 Fry Drew Knight Creamer: Architecture, ed. Stephen Hitchens (London, 1978); see also Fry, Fine Design (London, 1945), and Art in a Machine Age (London, 1969), recounting his work in Africa, and later collaboration with Le Corbusier and Jane Drew on the design and construction of Chandigarh in India. Together with Drew, Fry also published Tropical Architecture in the Dry and Humid Zones (London, 1947).

60 An indication of the professional significance accorded to Kensal House is the laudatory article in the JRIBA, 44, 20 March 1937, pp. 500–06. This socially progressive development, including community facilities such as a nursery school, was financed by the Gas Light and Coke Company. Besides Fry, the design team included Robert Atkinson, C. H. James, G. Grey Wornum, and Elizabeth Denby as ‘Housing Consultant’.

61 Minutes of meetings held in 1944 by the Research Group have survived: Public Record Office, Colonial Office 1005/1; PRO, CO 859/309 and 321–22 contain fragments of the deliberations of the Research Council 1948–52, latterly stressing the severe housing shortages in Hong Kong and Singapore, and the value of both prefabrication and attention to ‘local methods and designs’. The Council was organized by George Atkinson, who after serving as Assistant Architect to the Miner’s Welfare Commission from 1938, joined the Building Research Establishment in 1946, assuming the posts of Colonial Liaison Officer in 1948, Housing Advisor to the Colonial Office from 1952–62, and latterly also heading the Tropical Building Section: Colonial Office List (London, 1955 and 1962). Atkinson edited Colonial Building Notes and advised on the selection of British architectural firms for Commonwealth and Colonial commissions.

62 Besides the criticism cited in note 20 above, see Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas (p. 133), discussing the exhibition policy of the Department of Overseas Trade. A more positive reading of the emphasis on sport, craft and clothing as being in deliberate contrast to the militaristic and technocratic displays of the fascist and totalitarian powers is presented in Taylor, Paul, The Projection of Britain. British Publicity and Propaganda 1919-39 (Cambridge, 1981).Google Scholar

63 Dawn of a New Day. The New York World’s Fair 1939/40, ed. Helen D. Harrison (New York, 1980); Gelertner, David H., 1939. The Lost World of the Fair (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; and Upton, Dell, Architecture in the United States (New York, 1998), pp. 183–84.Google Scholar

64 Guide, p. 20. The Section on the Welfare Hall (including the sub-sections on the ‘Town of Today, ‘Leisure in Freedom’, ‘New Homes for Old’, ‘Mother and Child’, ‘Children at School’ and ‘Social Security’) occupied pp. 20–40, in excess of any other subject; p. 99 describes the photo mural illustrating the ‘public services and social work in the Dependencies, [and] tells how Great Britain, in fulfilling her trusteeship, is advancing the physical and cultural development of the peoples of the Colonial Empire’, adding with an astute diplomacy intended to pacify American anti-imperial attitude, ‘and to what extent the United States is assisting in the developments’.

65 The MARS exhibition was held at the New Burlington Galleries from 11–29 January 1938 and was opened by Le Corbusier. The exhibition reproduced photographs of international Modernist design and the catalogue included a summary of Modern Movement objectives, used as the text to the ‘architecture garden landscape’ exhibit. This caption emphasized the need to relate architecture to natural setting and continued, ‘The modern architect’s aim is not to create a “style” but to pursue a realistic unity of form and purpose, a concept whose implications are eligible not only for this or that type of building, this or that climate, but for all building problems wheresoever. Modern architecture is universal, infinitely adaptable’ (p. 20). The section on Town Planning (p. 12), presented the group’s plan for counteracting the uncontrolled growth and decay of London.

66 The work of TECTON and of contemporary British architects is examined in Allan, John, Berthold Lubetkin; Architecture and the Tradition of Progress (London, 1992)Google Scholar; see also Forty, Adrian, ‘Le Corbusier’s British Reputation’, in Le Corbusier: Architect of the Century (London, 1987), pp. 35–41.Google Scholar

67 The Lansbury Guide included a summary of the 1943 London Plan, pp. 6–7, and endorsed its emphasis on comprehensive urban planning devised around issues of traffic circulation, housing renewal, equitable provision of open space and separation of industrial from residential areas. On pp. 36–37 Dunnett discussed the fourteen New Towns, which significantly included the extension of Welwyn Garden City, begun in 1920. This programme had been the subject of a smaller exhibition held at London in 1946 entitled ‘Building Now’, reviewed in JRIBA, 53 (May 1946), pp. 267–73.

68 A contemporary view of Modern movement planning, and especially of CIAM theory, appears in Sert, José Lluis, Can our Cities Survive? An ABC of Urban Problems. Their Analysis. Their Solutions (Cambridge, Mass., 1944)Google Scholar. Creech Jones’s career and politics are summarized in the entry by Patricia Pugh in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 30, pp. 443–45.

69 These schemes are discussed in Allan, Lubetkin, and in Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block. The exception to concentrated residential building is the Hallfield Estate in Padddington; designed by TECTON and Drake and Lasdun, from 1949, it included school and community facilities but had higher structures.

70 This nostalgia, evident in the medieval enthusiasm of the entrepreneurial classes and their aristocratic allies (see, for example, Girouard, Mark, The Victorian Country House, 3rd edn [New Haven and London, 1979]Google Scholar) is noted by Jacqueline S. Bratton, ‘Of England, Home and City’, in MacKenzie, Imperialism (p. 77), repeating Donald Home’s descriptor for the phenomenon: ‘Southern Metaphor’.

71 Corona (February 1949), pp. 3–4. Jones was extending his 1947 ‘local government despatch’ (Mclntyre, Decolonization, p. 34) that replaced the Indirect Rule policy with one aimed at the gradual transfer of power to the majority of inhabitants. The somewhat simplistic assumptions and equally undefined intentions in Jones’s foreword to Corona recur in much of the journal’s discussion of colonial reform and devolution. Another instance is the article by Basil Taylor on the Festival-related exhibition of ‘Traditional Colonial Art’ at the Imperial Institute (Corona, 3 [May 1951], p. 164). Taylor, surely innocent of colonial pretension and post-colonial anxiety, understood the object of this exhibition as being to ‘demonstrate that there are in the colonies cultural traditions which have produced works of art entitled in their merits to rank among the great achievements of the human race’.

72 A colonial reflection appears in the Corona. The June 1951 issue (p. 208), would characterize the Lansbury exhibition as ‘the modern and the educational’ component of the Festival, while the May 1951 issue (p. 117), had published, and complimented as ‘New’, the neo-Palladian style design unbuilt for the Colonial Office in Westminster Square.

73 Edwards, Brian, Basil Spence 1907–1976 (Edinburgh, 1995)Google Scholar, citing Spence’s publications on Coventry Cathedral in the competition for which he defeated an experimental Modernist proposal by Peter and Alison Smithson.

74 Post-war British school design is assessed in Saint, Social Architecture; see also for the Smithsons, Banham, Reyner, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic (New York, 1966)Google Scholar, and Modernism without Rhetoric: Essays on the work of Alison and Peter Smithson, ed. Helen Webster (London, 1997).

75 Guide, p. 5. Dunnett also declared that this Modernist approach at Lansbury would ‘not reduce us all to a dull uniformity’ but ‘release each one of us from the restrictions imposed by squalour and irresponsibility’.

76 The decline of Modernist prestige and practice in public housing is recounted in Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block. The Poulson scandal is contextualized in Saint, The Image of the Architect (New Haven and London, 1983).