willofmemory

The preceding entries are the sum of the evidence as I have recorded, collated and structured  it up to now in terms of establishing a link between the British experience of the First World War and the architecture of the 1960s. As I mentioned earlier on, I see the latter decade as the main expressive phase along a complex path that lasted for almost six decades - and that was subconscious in its second half. The object of that path was to deal with trautmatising experience.

To sum up my understanding of this reconstructive phase, I see the unreal city of the Western Front, with all its ironic streetnames and parodic homely reminders, as having been rebuilt in the 1960s.

Expanding on this: in its scarcely imaginable, unreal way, the Western Front had been only too real. So, when the soldiers returned to the London of the Twenties, the reality of the great capital was hollow, a place without memory; all that was real for them, as for TS Eliot, was the Unreal City, the Wasteland, the city without history. The world had been turned upside down: the Front was real, the city unreal. Only when this was apprehended could the past be left behind. Only when the actuality of hideous memory was made real again, in all its unreality, could it be accepted as an aberration in time, a moment that could be left behind.

Architects were unwittingly charged with making real the memorial reality of the Front by building homes fit for heroes. This grew into the moment of the Modern Movementwhen its leading role in the Thirties was characterised by a passion that was almost missionary. Its principles and rationalisations were much more malleable than it let on, but it was driven by a commonly felt need to facilitate the emergence of memory that was urging expression.

If seen like this, the Modern Movement architects were as much psychoanalysts as builders. Their underlying motivating resources came not only from their own imaginations, but from the images held by others. Behind the tabula rasa of their drawing boards and their white walls were designs that demanded realisation. The tabula rasa, the white walls, did not rest against solid ground but against memories, often others' memories, which demanded projection through the blinding screen of the drawing board and which the architect could guide to realisation. Like good analysts they picked up on their clients’ needs, their neuroses, their memories; then they allowed the buildings to tell their story.

Seen in this light, ‘Sixties architecture’ is an astonishing success. The almost compulsive drive to untie the Gordian knot of having to build homes as trenches, with public approval, achieved its goal.

Perhaps TS Eliot’s Wasteland can be seen as prophecy: not only was London an unreal city to soldiers after the war, but it became an unreal city for its inhabitants in the early 1960s. They were living in the unreal city of the trenches, brought home.

With perhaps some inevitability, it came to be inhabited by the homeless.

War dead in a German trench                  Lillington Gardens, 1962, photo 2004

I have concentrated so far on sites in London, but I would briefly like to show that perceiving projected memories of the Western Front in the brutalist architecture of the Sixties need not be confined to the capital. In fact, once you start seeing parallels, it can be quite difficult not to feel a strange frisson at the sight of uncannily intrusive concrete ramparts or red-brick cuttings.

As an example, I have chosen Gloucester, a medieval city complemented by 18th century developments around the inland docks. The exception to this well-built urban patchwork is Kings Square, the commercial heart, which was redeveloped in the mid-1960s. Its most prominent feature is an astonishly elaborate ramp system leading to nothing more than public conveniences and a subterranean passageway out of the square to the bus station. The passageway has been closed off.

The points to remember are that this insertion in the urban fabric is almost wholly unnecessary, and that, being within the square, it becomes an object for gazing at from all the buildings around.

It was built in 1967, just as the peak of commemoration for the war was passing, and 50 years exactly since Passchendaele:

As with so many of these site, Kings Square is about to be redeveloped again. Soon, this site of memory made real will become a memory itself.

As with the previous two examples, the Lillington Gardens estate in Pimlico has an evocative similarity with a trench map:

Thiepval trench system, Somme           Lillington Gardens, phase 1

The Lillington Gardens estate in Pimlico feels like a caveman's troglodyte world, full of dark passageways and tunnels leading round unknowable corners.

A, particularly neat, German trench          Lillington Gardens, public alleyway

All that seems to be missing from the photo on the right below is the soldiers lounging.

Night watch in the Ypres Salient               Lillington Gardens

The point to make about the trench-alleyway in this picture on the right below is how unnecessary it is, apart from mirroring the Bayou. Steps leading directly down to the footpath would have sufficed and would not have set up the divisive alternative to the street.

Bayou de la Mort, Ypres           Lillington Gardens

The winding, defensive nature of trenches is brought out in these two images, fifty years apart. (The corners were inserted in the line of the trench to muffle blast forces from exploding shells.)

Sanctuary Wood, Ypres            Lillington Gardens

The Lillington Gardens estate in Pimlico is a dense, cloistered development that, for me, resonates with the quasi-mythical landscape of the Western Front of 50 years previously.

It was designed by John Darbourne and Geoffrey Darke after a national open competition in 1960-61, when the momentum for commemorating the First World War was gathering pace. Darbourne won the competition in 1961, aged only 26, and set up a partnership with Darke to see it through. This competition seems significant in terms of memory-images as it is the sort of committee-driven forum in which subconscious memories would evoke approval for designs without the conscious knowledge of selectors.

Construction was in three phases, from 1964 to 1972, mostly at the expense of some of Pimlico's characteristic terraces designed by the early Victorian master builder Thomas Cubitt. Again, the desire to wipe away 19th century remnants, suggestive of the conditions that led to war, is evident.

Being one of the first attempts in London to move on from high-rise planning typologies, the critic Nikolaus Pevsner said the estate held a special place in the history of British housing as a model of how low-rise dwellings could reach the same densities (210 per acre) as tower blocks.

The estate comprises 540 units built as council housing, some of which are now privately owned. It was one of the largest comprehensive developments of its time, with more than 2,000 people accommodated (comprehensive refers to the fact that social amenities such as a doctor's surgery, library and pubs were also provided).

As with the previous examples, the reactions to Lillington Gardens are striking in their range. I will present some examples before looking at the estate through photographic images and maps.

Positive critiques include:
"The housing blocks lining the perimeter project into the central landscaped area, creating a series of intimate inter-connected gardens and play spaces. The design, allowing almost half of homes to have a front door at ground level, creates a safe, overlooked public realm."

"This large, complex red-brick building, with cantilevered balconies, ‘streets in the air’, irregular profile and ample external planting, offered a popular and expressive alternative to the drab postwar tradition of mixed development."

"The brown Hasting-made brick is unusually dark for the Sixties, but the effect is never monotonous. The centre is traffic-free. The buildings seem without any overall system, reflecting the intricate internal planning, which makes use of scissor-plans and split levels. The general plan is no less ingenious, with internal courtyards and cross wings threaded through with paths and ramps. Higher levels are reached by brick-paved internal streets. In general the character is tough, not amiable, but then so is the church. But toughness does not dominate, not least because of the exceptionally careful landscaping."

"The Library was built last (1973-74). It has a split-level interior, and is claustrophobic, but was considered progressive when new."

On the other hand:
"Economics have been carelessly thrown overboard for a warped aesthetic of crumpled facades and disordered dwellings that sometimes fail to fit a recognisable structural plan; some homes have the kitchen one-and-a-half floors from the entrance and furthest from the front door; wide ‘roof-streets’ lead to cramped door access, sometimes three sharing one doormat half a flight of steps away; many living rooms have no sunlight to satisfy the architects' desire that everyone would live looking into the community garden (surely facing south over the real street is a valid as well as more interesting experience?); an even more alarming failure is the connection of the roof-streets with the real ones below – there are sordid windy porches on the ground floor and blind lifts to the upper streets, ferrying people like they were crossing the Acheron."

"The sequence of moving from one garden to the next shows a hit-and-miss picturesque anti-plan that disorientates one even more than Chesterton’s ‘rolling English road’. This is disturbing since it shows a lack of understanding of the essence of city planning – it is as though the authors had misread Camillo Sitte [an Austrian town planner who rebelled against straight boulevards and regular, grid-iron street plans]."

"John Darbourne wanted ‘a feeling of one thing opening out on to another rather than a huge, easily assimilated rectangular area’. The result is more like the Illustrated London News's comment on GE Street’s high-Gothic church on the site: 'rising … as a lily among weeds'."

"Lillington Gardens heralds a change to continuous structures on more intricate and introverted plans."

This wide range of views of itself would seem to demand a closer look.

As with the example of the Robin Hood Gardens estate in previous entries, perceiving the Park Lane traffic system as a projection of memory-images from 1914-18 can be suggested by using graphic rather than photographic images.

To find a root source for the impressions I sense around Park Lane, I went to old Trench maps from the war, available today in reproduced form at map shops such as Stanfords on Long Acre. Chief among them are detailed maps from the Somme area, site of the worst disasters of the British Army in its history. Beaumont Hamel, in particular, was the site of some of the most horrific engagements on the Somme in 1916.

It had an intricate system of trenches which, because they had been stable for months on end, had acquired names, many taken from places back home, often London streets.

A detail of the British lines can be expanded, and the familiar names stand out:

Curiously, just around here, a concentration of names from the West End and Mayfair in particular seems to have occurred. These names I have emphasised in red:

It appears as if, on finding themselves settled in the troglodyte world of the Somme for months on end, soldiers stationed there named their trenches as if they were streets and, in a mood probably of nostalgia more than anything else, called them after familiar streets back home. They were reminding themselves of home.

However, after the opening of the Battle of the Somme on the 1st of July 1916 and the traumatising horror of that day when 20,000 British troops were killed, and the subsequent bogging down in the same place of horror for four more months of grinding battle, that streetscape of trenches ingrained itself as a home of its own, replacing to a certain extent the original back in England.

When, years later, it came to settling down back home again, the same nostalgic process of reminding oneself of home re-occurred, only this time, instead of bringing the names back from France, the trenches themselves were brought back, in the guise of a traffic system. In the map below, I have marked out the trenches in brown. Thus, in 1958-62, the soldiers' home in the trenches was repatriated to Piccadilly. In red, I have marked the names used on the trench map from Beaumont Hamel, and the features of the traffic scheme I think have resonance with a trench system.

In this way, in 1958-63, the home made in the trenches of the Somme was repatriated to Piccadilly, and another layer was added to the meaning of the final line from "Tipperary" traditionally sung by the soldiers heading up to the Front:
"Goodbye Piccadilly,
farewell Leicester Square,
it's a long, long way to Tipperary,
but my heart lies there".

A series of double images helps to suggest why memory-images of the First World War seem to be implicated in the Park Lane landscape (here restricted to images taken at Marble Arch as later renovations have been made further south).

German trench                   Steps to sub-surface piazza, Marble Arch

French General inspects trenches                Sub-surface piazza, Marble Arch

Underground trench junction                            Pedestrian subway, Marble Arch

German bunker                                          LU Tube entrance, Marble Arch

French troops crossing the Yser                  Pedestrian bridge, Marble Arch

Casualty on barbed wire    Traffic barrier, Marble Arch

The Park Lane traffic system runs from Marble Arch in the north along Park Lane to Hyde Park Corner in the south. The need to record such a feature now is important here because Hyde Park Corner has already been recently renovated and plans have been submitted for major redevlopment of Marble Arch which will erase many of the elements that I find intriguing.

The conscious layer of 20th century commemoration along Park Lane is evident, from the recent memorial to animals lost in war at the north end, to the Cavalry Memorial (1920-24) further south (moved westwards into the park in 1961 to make way for the widened road) and on to Hyde Park Corner itself with the Artillery Memorial by Charles Jagger (1921-5) and the Machine-Gunners' Memorial (1925).

However, in the late 1950s, the growth of car traffic and completion of the most pressing post-war reconstruction meant focus was turned towards adapting the area for future demands. Accordingly, the London County Council approved a scheme for widening Park Lane and installing two large gyratory systems at either end. Given the timing (1958-62), and considering my previous comments on the nexus of memorialising relating to the First World War at that particular time, it is my suggestion that the entire system became imbued with a subconscious memory-projection of the Western Front.

As with the previous entries on Robin Hood Gardens, I will first present comments by architectural critics on the road scheme to give a flavour of how it came to be perceived (and it should be kept in mind that this scheme had the full backing of a team of highly trained and experienced traffic engineers and town planners whose intentions were explicit and conformed to accepted practice).

At Marble Arch, ‘the little curving cross street, the old Tyburn Way where the triangular gallows stood, is a parking place for buses, since its incorporation in the rather awkward roundabout traffic plan led, not to freedom and Oxford Street, but to hopeless congestion.’

'The lack of polish (marble works poorly in London) and [Marble Arch's] miserable setting in the middle of a poorly designed traffic roundabout, make it look a little wan.'

'Marble Arch’s present formal and forlorn setting dates from the road widening of 1961-62.'

'In the pedestrian underworld around the island are mural mosaics by William Mitchell, 1962.'

Hyde Park Corner was: 'always regarded as the most important entrance to London from the West. It is characteristically English that this important place should be called merely a Corner – perhaps it was this name that allowed the traffic engineers of the 1950s to rape it so shamelessly.

'Apsley House - the Duke of Wellington's former home with the singular address 'No 1, London' - is now marooned in the midst of the Hyde Park Corner traffic intersection, and the former neo-classical ensemble has been all but destroyed. In the 1960s the adjoining buildings were demolished for road widening.'

'Since the reconstruction of Hyde Park Corner as one of the biggest traffic roundabouts in Europe in the late 1950s, the setting of Constitution Arch has been less than satisfactory.' [This has been improved in recent years with pedestrian crossings increasing access to it].

Ironically, half-way along Park Lane is the 'Joy of Life' fountain, installed in 1963 to a design by TB Huxley Jones, after a competition in 1958. By installing it, it is as if an effort was made to counter-balance the layer of subconscious, and in some ways morbid, memorialising that I will try to show in coming entries, and that is consciously evident in Jagger's Artillery memorial (below).

Artillery Memorial, Hyde Park Corner, Charles Jagger (1921-25)

By changing the form in which we perceive the Robin Hood Gardens estate, from photographic images to graphic illustration, an uncanny convergence becomes perceptible with one of the iconic battles of the First World War, that of Hill 60 in the Ypres Salient:

Hill 60, Ypres Salient, 1917                    Robin Hood Gardens, Poplar

Now, the image of the battle-scarred hill that so impressed the painter William Orpen and the soldiers who survived its horror seems to achieve greater significance, as an object for gazing upon.

And, perhaps, it is possible to blend the two impressions together.

More recent photographs of the Robin Hood Gardens estate in Poplar indicate its air of other-worldliness.

From outside, the outer walls rear up with astonishing aggression (on first approaching the estate, I didn't recognise where I was and thought this might be a nearby prison).

On the other side of the wall is a place for reflective contemplation, cut off from the world except for the roar of distant engines and the pressing sight of rough concrete walls.

Within the walls, a rearward trench cut deep below the surface allows supplies and personnel to arrive at the front and waste to be removed.

And within the front, looked down on from the flats, the bare hill.

In the next entry, I will transfer these contemporary images and descriptive words, deliberately suggestive of past significance, into juxtaposed, graphic form which may indicate a link between war and its aftermath.