Brutal London: A Photographic Exploration of Post-War London

by Simon Phipps

A photographic exploration of the post-war modernist architecture of London.This collection of unique and evocative photography by Simon Phipps casts the city in a new light. Arranged by inner London Borough, BRUTAL LONDON takes in famous examples such as the Trellick Tower, the Brunswick Centre and the Alexandra Road Estate, as well as lesser known housing and municipal spaces. It serves as an introduction to buildings the reader may see every day, an invitation to look differently, a challenge to look up afresh, or to seek out celebrated Brutalism across the capital.

Genres: Photography, Architecture, Art, Nonfiction, Design, London

192 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 8, 2016

Reviews

[Mind the Book · Rating 4 out of 5]

Från nya designmuséets shop. Informativ fotobok med exempel på brutalism i London, kvarter för kvarter. Bra förord. Se även instakontot @new_brutalism

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simon Phipps has produced an invaluable photographic record of the brutalist architecture of London, borough by borough. He gives us its rugged beauty with only the most essential of commentaries. And he raises questions for me about what went wrong?

Brutalism is, of course, not to everyone's taste but its virtues are a functionality in and of itself and an authenticity in its presentation of materials. It solved major post-war social problems only to create new ones but the failures (as I shall argue) are failures of society rather than of the architecture.

In general (with a few exceptions) this was public sector architecture, fruitfully competing with the equally important Scandinavian 'social democrat' model. It died with the death of corporatist Britain, the rise of private sector Britain and the sell-off of social housing under Thatcherism.

Its patrons were not from the private sector (in general) but the democratic representatives of the taxpayer. They expressed an idealistic generosity of spirit (long since abandoned) that actively wanted to house every working class family in a home albeit one still owned by the community at large.

At their best, these projects were never rabbit hutches but integrated into the environment with space to play for children, greenery and community facilities built into the design. Of course, the most magnificent still stands as a rich man's version - the City of London's Barbican, a model of its type.

They also need not have been Corbusian high rises, an intellectual attempt to enforce standardised living and functionality on a humanity defined by its refusal to be merely functional. The best of these are low rises. A good example in design terms is that of the Brunswick Centre.

Within two or three decades, many of these projects (London was not alone in having such architecture) became the opposite of the intention of their creators. The estates became bedraggled, sometimes crime-driven, unattended, miserable and without the promised infrastructure.

I doubt that we will ever see the revival of an architecture that was so much of its time if only because technologies have moved on even if we were to have the imagination to reintroduce badly needed mass social housing. But did brutalism fail or did society fail? I tend to think more of the latter.

I suspect there were two failings - economic and intellectual. The first is quite simply the problem of paying for maintenance when maintenance also includes the park and garden infrastructure. The Barbican has the funds and so is close to pristine. Working class estates died with austerity.

Since austerity was a logical outcome of decades of economic mismanagement in the decades between the war and the rise of Thatcherite shock tactics, failure was built into the ideal from the start as local authorities simply ran out of the funds required to meet mounting social needs.

The intellectual failing was equally important. Architects are the most prone of all artists to pure reason because they deal with materials. They are invariably attracted, like engineers, to the ideal of humanity rather than the actuality of our chaotic species. Pure reason is a-human.

The estates were the new society but only in its theorising. They presumed a type of human who would be happy to be functionally assigned their bit of space and play their role in society but this assumed they would have an autonomous role in society not merely be atomised by capitalism.

The result was the worst of worlds. We saw the emergence of a population without a property stake in its own environment or the resources to take over maintenance issues once the local authorities abandoned their commitment to do so because of lack of funds.

Thatcher thought that having a property stake (with the value, however, unrealisable without departure) was the solution but it was only the half of it. The new property holders needed to have the resources not only to buy their property but to maintain not only it but their community.

Social cohesion, necessary to build a community that would take control of its environment, collapsed with de-industrialisation, rapid migration in and out of a locality, social dumping and a breakdown of community and policing authority over anti-social behaviour.

The architectural experiment, the result of noble minds wanting to do rational noble things, broke on the fact that the ultimate local authority patrons of the experiment lost interest because of political, social, economic and cultural pressures out of their control.

Where we are now is that the nation has a massive housing crisis which does not affect the asset-rich older upper middle classes who have no incentive to do anything to change things - the worst poverty is out of sight, liberal ideology is individualistic and no one dare raise the necessary taxes.

We are also about to go into another lengthy period of austerity after another even lengthier period of economic mismanagement by elites who represent that upper middle class interest before all others. If the Bank of England is to believed we face three years of zero growth.

When, finally, and probably not under the Tory look-alike Labour Party which has long since disconnected from its working class base, investment in social housing is considered as a political necessity it may only be after some quasi-revolutionary change at the heart of the nation.

Assuming effective economic managers (which is a big assumption) and the will to house the population (especially young families), the next step is to delegate financial and decision-making powers to plenipotentiary local authorities (reversing policies of the last thirty or more years).

Rate increases under circumstances where a self-perceiving middle class feels under severe economic pressure from new nostrums like energy security and the Green Agenda as well as inflation and high interest rates are going to be difficult to sell. Without taxes or debt, there will be no houses.

A (probably inflationary) surge of building will need socially concerned architects who we hope will have the common sense to investigate what went wrong with the estates of the 1960s and 1970s and build with a mind to sustainability and durability (rather than to meet eco-fashion).

One has to be pessimistic at so many levels. The reliance is likely to remain on a market that cannot deliver the subsidised mass solutions to the misery of homelessness and of young people not being able to start families (alongside yet more migrants making the problems worse).

So this is a celebratory but perhaps a not unintentionally rather sad book of a world long since lost and never to be recreated, a world built by idealistic and good people that could never match their ideals. The opportunity for social betterment has probably now been lost.

Phipps' photographs are superb. The quick notes of the properties at the back are highly informative. The book is a nostalgic pleasure even when it is clear that workers' houses, if they can be reconditioned, are increasingly only to be reconditioned by developers to serve the urban wealthy.