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Remembering Post-War Reconstruction:
Modernism and City Planning in Coventry, 1940-1962
PHIL HUBBARD and LUCY FAIRE
Department of Geography,
Loughborough University,
Loughborough, UK. LE11 3TU
Tel. 01509 222747
Email: P.J.Hubbard@lboro.ac.uk
and KEITH LILLEY
School of Geography
Queenís University Belfast
Belfast
Northern Ireland. BT7 1NN
Tel. 028 9027 3363
Email: k.lilley@qub.ac.uk
Introduction
In this paper we argue that the making of Modern cities in the post-war era involved attempts by planners to impose a particular ëway of seeingí on the city. We draw out the implications of this by discussing the redevelopment of Coventry city centre between 1940 and 1962, particularly the way this was represented through a series of maps, models and films. While these images and representations were seductive and powerful, we suggest that they do not tell the whole story of Coventryís redevelopment in this era, and that they need to be complemented by the stories of those who lived through this period of intense redevelopment. Here, we seek to provide this ëview from belowí using oral history interviews with residents, showing that they often challenged plannersí conceptions of space as they sought to adapt to life in a ënewí city. The paper concludes by arguing that planning history needs to bring such different perspectives together to illuminate the complex and contested process of city planning.
Re-Thinking Reconstruction Planning
The period of intense civic rebuilding and city centre reconstruction that immediately followed the Second World War continues to hold the imagination and interest of urban geographers and planning historians both in Britain and around the world. While some of these have focused on the development of government policy during this pivotal period in state-led planning , others have examined the role of architects and planners in the planning and redevelopment of post-war British towns and cities using analyses of archival and published records. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the attention of many is drawn to the remarkable and seductive images contained in the many plans and documents that guided post-war reconstruction. Stressing both the desirability and necessity of mass reconstruction, these images and maps juxtaposed the deficiencies of the pre-war city (e.g. congestion, pollution and disorder) with the promise of an aesthetically and morally ordered ëModerní townscape. New horizontal or vertical perspectives were used to emphasise the striking nature of the proposed townscape, and although these images were both sanitised and idealised, they seemingly exercised a remarkable hold over the public imagination in the post-war period. Hence, while these images and maps may have been interpreted at the time as objective representations based on rational ëscientificí procedures, more recently they have been exposed as attempts to impose a particular spatial and moral order on the city. Emphasising certain facets of urban life, but repressing others, these images encapsulated a particular ëway of seeingí implicated in the reproduction of power relations and the creation of new socio-spatial orders.
Such ideas about the scopic regimes used to imagine and represent the city feature prominently in post-structural writing on technologies of power, and the influence of theorists such as de Certeau, Foucault and Lefebvre is becoming widely evident in geographic accounts of urban change. For example, Foucault wrote of the importance of legible, ordered space in the making of Modern subjectivity, with his close attention to the panoptic regimes that underpin the evolution of building types making his work a key influence for architectural historians and geographers alike. More widely, Henri Lefebvreís work on the significance of urban space in capitalist society suggested that those who design space have a particular way of seeing ëfrom on high and afarí. This ëplannerís eye viewí creates the discursively-constructed ërepresentations of spaceí that Lefebvre contended are crucial in ensuring the domination of ëabstractí capitalist space (based on exchange values) over fully lived, spontaneous and creative space. Lefebvre accordingly outlined the importance of representations of space in seeking to imposing a (capitalist) spatial order on the rhythms and rituals of everyday life in the city:
What space signifies is dos and doníts - and this brings us back to power. Space lays down the law because it implies a certain order - and hence also a certain disorder. Space commands bodies. This is its raison díêtre
In highlighting the role of planners and plans in this process of socio-spatial ordering, Lefebvre thus suggested that ëimaginedí and ërepresentedí space could be as important as ërealí space in the reproduction of everyday life. Nonetheless, he argued that there was a constant tension between representations of space (the knowledges, images and discourses that seek to order space) and ëspaces of representationí (which are created bodily by the inhabitants and users of the city), albeit that the former tended to dominate the latter.
Lefebvreís assertion that the plans and knowledges deployed by architects and planners constitute a form of control resonates with de Certeauís discussion of the strategies (of power) that, collectively, create a mode of administration. These strategies are those practices of ordering that produce un espace propre which represses ëall the physical, mental and political pollutants that would compromise ití. In essence, this renders invisible those things that architect-planners regard as ëout of placeí in the city as conceived of from their ërationalí, phallocentric, Cartesian perspective (Lefebvreís ëview from aboveí). In post-war Britain, plans for the future city the ëcity of tomorrowí were certainly highly idealised, emphasising spaciousness, speed and cleanliness by effacing many of the complexities and ambiguities of street life. As such, post-war urban planning has been seen predominantly as the realm of the professional planner and architect, who claimed to be able to ëreadí and represent the city through an objective and distanced gaze.
Following de Certeau, we might suggest that post-war planning was underpinned by this dominant way of seeing; a view from above that feigned an objective view from nowhere. But crucially, plannerís representations of space did not just exist as paper landscapes, being projected onto the level of lived space and impacting on the bodily, lived experiences of the cityís inhabitants. Hence, in this paper we argued that it is vitally important to understand the ëview from belowí as well the plannerís ëview from aboveí, as reconstruction planning and plan-making was a process that also occurred at street level. Post-war British planning should be thus understood not solely by examining the documents that guided the shaping and organisation of space: we need to be mindful of the changing expectations, fears and experiences of those who lived and worked in the reconstructed city. As de Certeau writes, often the space of the pedestrian is a ëpoeticí space of resistance which defies the attempts of the planners and improvers to discipline the contingencies of everyday life. Analysing this relationship between the rational discourses of planning and the often irrational experience of living in planned cities helps us ultimately to understand that planning is about the fears and expectations of citizens as much as it is about the hopes and dreams of planners.
In the remainder of this paper we briefly elaborate on this argument by contrasting disembodied ërepresentations of spaceí with embodied ëspaces of representationí in the post-war redevelopment of Coventry city centre between the blitz of 1940 and the symbolically important consecration of the new cathedral in 1962. In the first section, we consider the form and content of the plans that offered a vision of Coventry as Modern city. While these are characteristic of the type of plan that guided post-war development in other British cities, we stress that there was not just one Coventry plan one ëview from aboveí - but many. In the second section of the paper we draw on oral history interviews to explore the concrete experience of the cityís development and the way that the idealised representations of planners intersected with the textured spaces of everyday life. Indeed, interviews with surviving residents suggest that attempts to re-order space according to Modern precepts were not universally successful, and that Coventry's citizens often defied the planners' attempts to repress and order certain aspects of city life. The paper thus concludes by highlighting the role that oral history, autobiography and ethnography may play in planning history by revealing experiences of Modernism.
Representations of Space Plans for the New Coventry
While Donald Gibson is widely-identified as the key influence on the shaping of post-war Coventry, there were in fact several planning and redevelopment schemes put forward by him and his colleagues for the rebuilding of the city, the earliest dating back to the creation of the municipal Architectís Department itself, in 1938. The pressing need for planning a new city centre was at that time already evident: Coventry was booming on the back of the motor industry, and the suburban built-up area of the city had expanded dramatically during the 1930s, leading to growing problems of traffic congestion and urban blight in the commercial core. A 1936 Editorial in the Midland Daily Telegraph put it bluntly:
Coventry is now emerging from the shackles of a purely utilitarian era, ...an era of commercial revolution allied with civic stagnation...Generations of bad planning - slums, narrow streets, overcrowding, sewers - all the trouble saved up for the future from an unimaginative past must be tackled.
The creation of the Architectís Department under Donald Gibson indicated the intention of the new Labour city council to tackle these deficiencies and pave the way for planned redevelopment. But disputes between the Architectís Department and the City Engineers (headed by Ernest Ford) meant that the former department was restricted to the design of individual buildings and street furniture with street layout deemed a matter for the engineers!
Nonetheless, by 1940 Gibsonís department had sketched out new plans for the city, working largely in their own time to do so. Seeking to generate local enthusiasm for their ideas, the department mounted a publicity campaign in Coventry, culminating in the week-long Coventry of Tomorrow exhibition in May 1940. Six months later, on 14 November 1940, Coventry suffered the first of two major aerial bombardments which destroyed much of the existing city centre, and damaged two thirds of the cityís housing stock. Amid scenes of some panic (and the near introduction of martial law as looting became endemic) , the initial concern was with public order, but as this was restored, the need to redevelop ëboldly and comprehensivelyí emerged as a new mantra for the city council. Encouraged by Lord Reith, then Minster for Public Works, the Town Clerk commissioned Gibson and Ford to work on a redevelopment plan but they were unable to agree on several points. Two plans were therefore submitted, and Gibsonís prevailed, retaining many of the features of the plans that had been exhibited in 1940. Proposals for the redevelopment of the city underwent several iterations through wartime, and various publications offered the populace tantalising visions of ëthe city that will beí (Fig. 1).
Early in 1941, Gibsonís Plan for the New Coventry appeared as a pamphlet reprinted from an article in Architect and Building News. Subtitled Disorder and Destruction: Order and Design, this Plan counter-posed perspective elevations of the ënew Coventryí with an aerial photograph of the pre-war city, stressing to readers that ëthis must not happen againí. A further publication showing further redevelopment proposals appeared in 1945, with the title The Future Coventry, and this accompanied a town planning exhibition held in the Drill Hall in Coventry. The imagery of both these brochures and the 1940 and 1945 exhibitions make it evident that at this time the plans for Coventry were actually remarkably fluid, and that although the broad principles were ëfixedí in Gibsonís mind, the details of the plans were far from decided. To illustrate the proposals, scenographic perspectives and elevation sketches were drawn by members of Gibsonís team. One of them, Percy Johnson-Marshall (later a leading figure in the GLC Architectís Department), was to recall subsequently that although some of his ërough sketchesí of ënew skylinesí appeared in these published plans, he had in fact ëdrawn them on a wallí in his office only ëto illustrate some of the principles of the scheme to visitorsí, and had not intended them to be used for publication (Fig. 2).
All of this suggests that Gibson in particular was largely unconcerned about architectural style, being more preoccupied with the general layout and coherence of the streetscape. In fact, Gibson seemed to be remarkably ambivalent about modern architectural design, believing that ëwell-designed, proportioned Modern buildings can still be as dull as ditchwaterí . Hence, as the redevelopment of Coventry unfolded, hampered by inquests, appeals and disagreements between architects and engineers, Gibson seemed less and less concerned by the appearance of individual buildings, and more concerned with attempts to enliven the townscape with ëspecial and interesting thingsí. In many ways, Gibsonís attitude reveals apparent tensions at the heart of British Modernism; with the ëno-frillsí Modern aesthetic being perceived by Gibson a self-proclaimed Modernist - as dull and repetitive. Here then we see the influence of the townscape approach later refined by Thomas Sharp and Gordon Cullen which was little enamoured with ëtoothpaste architectureí but concerned with monumental vistas, points of interest and the broad ëart of civic designí.
So although the plan evolved through various iterations and continued to evolve as redevelopment proceeded it is clear that the Coventry ëplaní represents an attempt to impose a particular order on the city. Influenced by arguments of the MARS group and CIAM, the Coventry architectsí plan was a blueprint for redevelopment that tempered Le Corbusierís radical urban surgery with a peculiarly British concern for the aesthetics of townscape and a loosely-defined concern with civic identity. For all this, it was still a ëview from aboveí, a proposal that was intent on ordering the variety and character of the city according to the planner-architectsí perspective.
Spaces of Representation Remembering Coventryís Reconstruction
Exploring the way that individuals engaged with the planned city retrospectively is clearly fraught with difficulties. For example, in Holstenís anthropological critique of Brasilia (published in 1991), contemporary ethnographic observations are taken as evidence of the failure of the city inhabitants to adapt to the new precepts of urban space design. When looking back to post-war reconstruction, however, it is difficult to relate current social and spatial experiences to those that would have been evident in the 1940s and 1950s. This means that we are seemingly reliant on published sources that convey something of the experiences of living in the planned city. Nick Fyfe has used poems to explore the contestation of the Clyde Valley plan in the 1950s, suggesting poetic visions of Glasgow offered a ëthick interpretationí of the modern city, richly complex and contradictory. In other studies, autobiography, written testimonies and letters to local newspapers have been studied to reveal something of the experience of living through urban change.
In contrast, the use of oral history methods has been relatively under-employed in planning history. Exceptions here include work which uses oral history interviews with planners and architects to explore the nuances of the planning and design process, such as John Goldís interviews with leading figures in post-war planning practice and Daniéle Voldmanís analysis of post-war planning based on ëreconstructorís talesí provided by architects and decision-makers in the French Ministry for Reconstruction and Town Planning. More recently, Ruth Finnegan has explored experiences of life in Milton Keynes by recounting the memories of those who have lived there over the last thirty years. Juxtaposing the memories of people of different class, gender, race and age, Finneganís ëtales of the cityí provide a neat contrast to the official accounts of Milton Keynesí development.
Finneganís work demonstrates that the recounting of life histories can be a key means of establishing how people made sense of their day to day lives and their surroundings at particular times in the past. What is perhaps most crucial here is that oral history offers a valuable corrective to ëgrandí stories of Modernism that subsume local and individual experiences in the interests of reifying the view from above. The geographer Kenneth Hewitt argues this point when he considers the abstract and essentially de-humanised way that World War Two bombing campaigns were documented in official histories. By including testimonies of those caught up in such disasters, he challenges what he terms ëdisaster pornographyí and its institutionalisation.
Hence, our interviews with those who lived through the bombing and redevelopment and Coventry shed considerable light on personal experiences of the Blitz and the way that Coventry was reconstructed. All respondents had urgent stories to tell, their desire to recount their life in the city was very obvious. Within these different stories, the impact of the destruction of the city centre on peopleís lives differed depending on what stage they were at in their life cycle, as well as their occupation, marital status and place of residence. Those who were old enough to work and were working in the centre of the town as well as those who actually lived in the city centre - were naturally affected by the devastation of Coventry in quite a different way from those who only saw it burning from a distance. For some, the destruction of the city centre was not just one of physical loss, but of personally-felt pain:
On the night of the November blitz, it was like the end of the world because I went down town with a friend the next morning and I thought weíd all have to move away for ever. We were walking over bricks all though the middle of town. And well, there was nothing left.
Indeed, many familiar streets and landmarks were wiped in one night, so that when people did go into centre they were unable to orient themselves:
After the Blitz, the first time I went into Coventry, you did not know where you were at all. The only thing that you could eventually get an idea from was the fact that the council house clock was still there. If you could get somewhere where you could see where that was, you could more or less decide where other things used toÖI can remember my husbandís boss coming home on leave and coming into the town and just standing and not knowing where he was at all.
Feelings of loss and disorientation resurfaced once rebuilding begun. Although people had become accustomed to familiar buildings no longer being there, at least the actual street pattern had remained the same after the Blitz. Reconstruction drastically changed this, as one interviewee recalled:
ëI remembered watching the redevelopment of Smithford Street because that was a street that just disappeared completely and I couldnít understand it. You know, why was it disappearing?í
Many people interviewed also appear to have regretted what they saw as ëneedlessí destruction of buildings during reconstruction. This was partly on account of their contribution to Coventryís townscape but mainly because buildings held specific memories. One recalled her fatherís reaction to destruction of some buildings in the part of the city centre where he had lived as a child. ëI remember him telling me how upset he was about the buildings where Agers shoe shop and things is. Something was pulled down to put them up and he found that quite upsetting.í Some respondents had very personal reasons for mourning the loss of particular landmarks, such as the location of a first date or special purchase, while others lamented the loss of places connected to a period of employment. The demolition of workshops and factories that had provided work for generations in the city centre was also a recurring theme.
Here, the use of testimony provide a rejoinder to the somewhat dispassionate accounts that depict the bombing as a providing a welcome opportunity to redevelop a pre-war Coventry that was dirty, congested and unloved. It is clear that local people regretted the loss of a pre-war city that they often described (positively) as ëmedievalí. In this respect, the disagreements over the future trajectory of the city concerned more than just those different individuals who were central to the planning process (for example, members of the architects department, engineers department, city council reconstruction committee). Rather, we have found that the reconstruction of Coventry generated a diversity of opinions and experiences. For example, those who were married-with-young-children at the time said they were simply not interested in reconstruction, because, compared to other things in their lives, the planning of Coventry was not really that important: ëYou were so busy building your life that things like what the town looked like was not a priority in your life you just wanted to provide for you family.í Another respondent explained that she went along with the rebuilding in a ëZombie-likeí fashion because her husband had returned wounded and it was so difficult looking after him and getting used to him being around that she had a nervous breakdown. These family adjustments were no doubt exacerbated by the chronic housing shortage in the city during the 1940s and early 1950s.
The lack of interest in rebuilding was not just confined to this age group. Those who were teenagers at the time blamed their indifference on their age, as one person explained: ëI donít think that when youíre that young you read the papers as much as what you do when youíre older, if you see what I mean. Me Mum and Dad used to discuss it I know. I donít think when youíre that age youíre that much interested, are you really?í However, the emergence of a new city was a significant memory for some of the younger generation:
Well the first memory was that I can remember was standing in Broadgate waiting for a bus to go to Bedworth and there was all this activity going on of building and I got totally engrossed in it. And then I must have been looking at it for ages and the next minute a very excitable Mother came running up to me. Sheíd got on the bus and I hadnít and she was half way down Corporation Street or Bishop Street and I was still standing there engrossed in all this building that was going on!
In the immediate post-war years, however, this sort of excitement was the exception. Ambivalence about the redevelopment was much more widespread, with feelings of optimism and excitement tempered by feelings of loss or simply disinterest.
As the redevelopment unfolded, punctuated by notable events such as the completion of Broadgate House (1953) and the opening of the Upper Precinct (1955), it became clear that the plannersí vision was not shared by all residents of the city. Criticisms of ëan architecture of concrete and breeze blocks, with eye-like windows in iron, battleship doorways, and cocktail lightingí began to be articulated in the local press, and the inclusion of public art in the redevelopment ridiculed: ëThey kept putting little flower plots and raised bedsÖbut it was only to break up the concrete. It was a concrete city centreí. Official responses to this included a council notice board in the precincts designed to explain what the art around the city centre symbolised, and articles in the local municipal newsletter Civic Affairs proclaiming the virtues of the new buildings.
What perhaps symbolised the dissonance between plannersí conceptions and residentsí lives most clearly was the way the new spaces of the city came to be
used. For instance, the new Broadgate traffic island was intended to be consumed visually (Fig. 3), although people recalled many examples of people sunbathing or picnicking on it before the council erected railings around it:
When that island was developed that was sacrosanct. You never walked across the grass. I think if anybody did they were likely to be arrested for the breach of the peace. I remember that at some point during either a carnival or somethingÖ somebody got up on to the statue and put various things on it. Oh dear, outcry in the newspaper.
Reluctance to use the upper level of the new precinct, resulting in its virtual abandonment by retailers, was also reported by many of our respondents, who instead preferred to use the Old Barracks market to the chain stores in the newly-completed Precincts. The provision of the City Arcade in the 1960s was one response to this, an attempt to provide space for smaller and specialist retailers displaced by the redevelopment of the Precincts (and official recognition that retail provision in the city did not match demands). More widely, the tendency of children and teenagers to ëhang outí and meet friends in the Precincts highlighted obvious limitations in Gibsonís planned zoning of the city. Put simply, the type of mono-functional planning on which the redevelopment of Coventry was based proved unpopular, so that the shopping Precincts became the focus of civic, social and cultural life in the city, despite Gibsonís best intentions to separate out these functions. His reminiscences reveal his own despair that, although his plan provided civic spaces and space of education, all the citizenry seemed to be interested in was ëdogs, cinema, pubs and speedwayí, a reference to the increasingly vocal demands for enhanced drinking space and leisure facilities in the city.
Conclusion
Focusing on the redevelopment of Coventry city centre in the 1950s and 1960s, this paper has suggested that oral histories can play a significant role in adding to our understanding of Modern planning in the post-war period. However, it is dangerous to assume that these oral histories necessarily reveal the ëtruthí of someoneís experience of the city. Instead, the act of recounting oneís experience is both selective and reflexive, with the experience of the past taking on different meanings in the light of the present. While this is an obvious limitation when employing oral history methods, when considered alongside the stories of Modernism recounted ëfrom aboveí we begin to acquire a much better sense of the way Coventryís redevelopment proceeded riddled by compromise and conflict. Gibsonís conceptions of the city, embodied in his scenographic representations of space, took markedly different forms and connotations as it was projected into the level of lived space at street level.
Noting the tensions between these embodied experiences of space and dominant 'representations of space', our paper thus suggests that the planning of the post-war city can be understood as the outcome of the ongoing dialectic between representation and experience. Consequently, the paper reaffirms the importance of some of the key ideas spelt out in Lefebvre and de Certeauís analyses of everyday life in the city, particularly their distinction between the ëview from aboveí and the ëview from belowí. Ultimately, it is necessary to examine both to understand why (and how) post-war plans for reconstruction failed, with the attempt to impose visual and spatial logic on the city contested by citizens who felt increasingly alienated from ëtheir ë city. As we have shown, oral history methods offer a useful way of exploring these views from below, though in other situations their use is clearly impossible. In such cases, we have to look elsewhere for evidence of how people experienced Modernism, but the wealth of sources available autobiographies, family histories, newspaper reports, Mass Observation Archives suggests that there is no reason to neglect this important dimension of planning history.
