The Biggest Problem With Le Corbusier

The interview did not go well. I was in Liverpool as a journalist being shown a model for the city’s future by its proud architect, Graeme Shankland. I told him I regarded his city as the most magnificent port in Europe. He corrected me and said Liverpool was “glaringly obsolete”. His plan, produced in 1965, was to demolish two-thirds of the city centre as well as much of Everton, Toxteth and Sefton. A new metropolis of towers and slabs would rise, pierced by swooping motorway overpasses and tunnels. A few historic buildings might be allowed to survive.

I was horrified and said so, making a tactless reference to the RAF’s “Bomber” Harris. I was much moved by a visit I had just made with a colleague to see a similar scorched-earth project in Manchester’s Hulme. We watched as Mancunians were herded on to buses with their belongings, to be dumped miles from their old homes on out-of-town estates. Many were in tears or dazed. We compared them with wartime refugees. They were to make way for Europe’s biggest council estate, Hulme Crescents, its blocks bizarrely named after Georgian architects such as William Kent and Robert Adam.

Liverpool and Manchester were not alone. A similar plan was under way in Glasgow, where the city engineer Robert Bruce was about to drive 25 miles of motorway, including the M8, through the centre. A cluster of eight towers of council flats would rise at Red Road, said to be the highest in Europe. At the same time in Birmingham, most of the Victorian centre had simply disappeared, including the main market, the central library, the Liberal Club, Mason Science College and the Bishop’s House. An urban motorway took their place.

London was no exception, although progress on Patrick Abercrombie’s 1944 plan was slow in starting. Like Liverpool, it was based on the thesis that the existing city was obsolete. Traffic volume forecasts demanded five rings of motorways and 10 radials, destroying more houses than had been lost in the blitz. Apart from selected “villages” and famous buildings, most of the centre would be cleared. Whitehall was to be demolished from Downing Street to Westminster Abbey. A tunnel would run from Parliament Square to Aldwych. Also set to be demolished were Carlton House Terrace, Piccadilly Circus, Covent Garden, Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury. Shopping hubs would be replaced with large traffic gyratories. A glimmer of humanity lay in the proposal for a green belt and “green wedges”.

Abercrombie’s plan for London – and for other cities such as Plymouth, Hull and Coventry – had been inspired by the utopian collectivism of the Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier. He became a cult among young interwar British architects. The stylistic debates between classicists and gothicists, neo-Elizabethans and neo-Georgians were cast aside. Le Corbusier’s dream was of vast blocks of buildings as “machines for living”. His bare modernism took hold of architecture schools and town-planning departments. After the war, the doctrine was that the nation should start afresh.

There is no doubt that, by the end of the 1960s, there was a growing reaction against this radicalism. Its cost to the taxpayer would be enormous. Modernist style had lost the cool elegance of the interwar Bauhaus school. Cities now erupted with the so-called brutalism of concrete council estates, shopping centres and motorways. Le Corbusier’s aversion to streets, which he thought fostered disease, and the isolating of people into flats, turned architecture into social engineering, exemplified by London’s Barbican.

Shankland’s Liverpool vision soon collapsed for lack of money, though not before 30,000 habitable houses had been cleared and the city’s population nearly halved. Manchester’s Hulme Crescents proved a disaster. Within two years, they were declared unfit for families and were eventually demolished as they were impossible to let. Replacing them would cost £400m.

Newcastle council’s assertive leader, T Dan Smith, began to demolish the city’s Georgian Grainger Town but was jailed for corruption. In Glasgow, the Red Road towers were uninhabitable. In 2014, there was a plan to celebrate the opening of the Commonwealth Games in the city by blowing them up. Instead, they were more discreetly demolished. In south-east London, Thamesmead new town was so unpopular it was eventually privatised in 2010. The new owners, Peabody, claimed it needed £1bn to become lettable.

Nobody was ever held responsible for these fiascos. The press and politicians showed little interest. Billions in public money had been wasted and acres of unusable social housing had to be destroyed. There was no apology and no public inquiry into any of them. Architecture was somehow anonymous. If it had gone wrong, it must be an act of God, not of architects.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the worm turning: in 1974, for the first time, the British public rose in protest against this style of urban planning. A scheme for Covent Garden, inherited from Labour by the now Tory Greater London Council, was to clear and redevelop an area of London twice the size of the Barbican. This time, the plan was not to evict working-class tenants. It was to drive out an estimated 17,000 businesses, including 34 publishers and thousands of residents. The micro-economy was to be torn apart – merely because someone thought it “obsolete”.

Protest marches clogged Covent Garden’s streets. Labour councillors, once ardent modernists, sided with the residents. The chair of the relevant GLC committee, Lady Dartmouth, defected to the protesters. Finally, secretary of state for the environment Geoffrey Rippon spent a weekend walking round Covent Garden and “listing” more than 250 buildings for preservation. He thus sabotaged his own party’s plan.

The 1974 Covent Garden revolt sparked a flame. A similar uprising took place in Liverpool against the clearance of the Eldonian docks area. People refused to be evicted and instead demanded a say in the style of any new houses. They decided on an exotic neo-Tudor. A rebellion also occurred in Cheshire’s Macclesfield. Slowly but surely, the public insisted their voices be heard.

That same year, a Labour government returned to power and did a U-turn on the London plan. In one sweep, the Corbusian revolution was swept aside. The ringways were dropped, apart from the M25. Piccadilly Circus was rescued, as were Whitehall and the Foreign Office. Bloomsbury was reprieved. St Pancras station was saved.

In October that year, the V&A museum marked the counter-revolution with an unusually political exhibition, The Destruction of the Country House, inspired by the fact that one historic mansion a week was being demolished for redevelopment. The show attracted much publicity and had an immediate impact. Government preservation orders on historic houses soared. Demolitions came to a virtual halt.

Architects had not been used to criticism and they took the events of 1974 badly. When Prince Charles later attacked what he saw as the ugliness of modernism, the head of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Owen Luder, told colleagues to ignore him and just say: “Sod you.” Critics of this arrogance dubbed brutalist buildings “sod you architecture”. Luder’s Tricorn Centre building in Portsmouth, which the Prince had called a “mildewed lump of elephant droppings” was torn down.

Change was clearly at hand. When, in 1965, a housing minister, Richard Crossman, had visited brutalist Cumbernauld in central Scotland, he delighted in its “austere, exhilarating, uncomfortable style”, and dismissed the fact that “the vast majority of people” who might have to live there did not like it. What did they know of architecture? Well, now the people could fight back – and they did. In particular, they demanded the protection of buildings and streets they had grown to love in conservation areas.

The legacy of 1974 was eventually a hotch-potch. British cities still showed little of the concern for context and skyline that is second nature to urban planners elsewhere in Europe. An Italian friend of mine could gaze aghast at London’s skyline and assume it resulted from huge corruption. I had to persuade him that the fault lay merely in the philistinism of British architecture.

What 1974 did create was a public voice and a politics that had to listen. The trouble lay in finding it something to say. Few Britons know the language of architecture. At school, they are taught literature, music and painting – arts they can enjoy in private. Yet architecture is an art gallery from which there is no escape. It is everywhere around us. Fifty years on, however, its styles, forms and features are still untaught. The achievements of 1974 will not be realised until Britons learn to speak architecture.

• A Short History of British Architecture by Simon Jenkins (Penguin Books Ltd, £26.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.