Susan Pedersen: Worker, Hipster, Banker

Susan Pedersen

Afriendly ghost hovers over The Modern British City, the collaborative project of a crack team of historians of urban life. H.J. (Jim) Dyos died in 1978, still in his fifties, but as the UK’s first professor of urban history and still more through his enthusiastic collaborations and magpie methods, he indelibly shaped the study of city life. Dyos was a thoroughly mid-century and social democratic character: the son of a works manager, he left school at fifteen and joined the Royal Artillery for the Second World War, before returning to school and then taking a BA and PhD at the LSE. He then taught at the University of Leicester for the rest of his (too short) life. ‘Energetic, enthusiastic, intellectually receptive, sociable, and ever on the watch for new talent,’ according to his friend and colleague Brian Harrison, Dyos was just the sort of ‘bridge-builder’ a new field needs.

The Southgate Estate, Runcorn New Town, designed by James Stirling with porthole windows to evoke the maritime history of Merseyside (1978).

In 1973, Dyos and the literary scholar Michael Wolff, then at MIT, brought out The Victorian City, a copiously illustrated two-volume compilation of essays on everything from railway termini to pubs, slums to suburbs and poets to prostitutes. The defining publication of this infant field, it is the model for this new, beautifully produced collection, which is dedicated to Dyos’s memory. He’d be thrilled by the tribute. Dyos thought we should study the city by tramping the streets, using all our senses, as well as spending time in archives, and the editors here – Simon Gunn, Peter Mandler and Otto Saumarez Smith – clearly told their contributors something similar. Like its predecessor, this collection is variable but sparkly, travelling down scholarly alleyways and shooting light into one forgotten corner after another. Best read in fits and starts, it resists summary but will, I think, inspire readers and students for decades.

The editors offer us some paths through the book. In their introduction, Gunn and Saumarez Smith highlight five long-term processes that shaped the city after 1945: planning, deindustrialisation, decolonisation, consumerism and ‘automobility’. In the afterword, Mandler complements this with a chronology of five city types: recovering cities in the years just after the Second World War; cities in the 1960s with ‘big plans’; ‘cities in motion’ as variable pressures mounted; and then the deepening end-of-the-century divergence between ‘resurgent cities’ and the (usually smaller and post-industrial) ‘cities left behind’. Both are helpful framings, but once one dives into the essays, it is the heterodox, intersecting and often bottom-up nature of urban change that stands out. No process operated in isolation, and as planning bumped up against profit-seeking and deindustrialisation prompted a turn to ‘heritage’, new interests were mobilised and new narratives appeared.

Take ‘planning’. The word carries elitist and top-down overtones, evoking remote bureaucrats forcing brutalist tower blocks on a homely and garden-loving people. But as Nicholas Bullock shows in his survey of postwar housing policy in Newham (formed by the merger in 1965 of East Ham and West Ham), this solidly Labour council’s planning was piecemeal and reactive, shaped by forces far beyond its control. Initially focused on low-rise building to replace decayed or war-damaged stock (40 per cent of houses in West Ham were unfit for habitation in 1945; 60 per cent lacked an internal bathroom), by the early 1950s, with pressure on supply mounting, the council was approving eleven-storey housing blocks and in the 1960s built more than a hundred between fifteen and 23 storeys. By that point, Newham’s population had changed, as rapid deindustrialisation and the decline of the docks decanted its white working class to Essex, leaving a poorer, more vulnerable and now disproportionally immigrant population to bear the costs of deprivation, crumbling services and the rise of the National Front. True, at the century’s end private development and university expansion revitalised Newham, but in a way that often displaced existing council tenants. The area might carry the same name on a city map, but just who lived there, in what sort of conditions and why, had gone through more than one transformation.

War, deindustrialisation, suburbanisation, immigration, gentrification and the expansion of universities and the City all shaped Newham’s urban landscape – and this is just one study. Around the time those tower blocks were going up, as John Pendlebury recounts, local preservationists and councillors in York teamed up to imaginatively restore and repopulate the historic precinct inside the city walls – an early example of a heritage-driven strategy that Newcastle and Liverpool would seize on a few decades later. Southampton usually escapes urban historians’ notice, but Owen Hatherley shows how it took advantage of relative prosperity and strong traditions of civic building to avoid Newham’s fate and construct attractive modernist housing for tenants across class lines.

The architects and planners Guy Ortolano examines in his essay had no common project and drew inspiration from eclectic sources. By the 1960s some of them – Alison and Peter Smithson, Ruth Glass – had come to see Victorian forms more appreciatively. Indeed, as a clever piece by Sarah Mass shows, urban planners deliberately evoked the bogeyman of the European ‘piazza’ to build consensus around proposals that would preserve but also renovate the quintessentially ‘English’ market hall. The sketches reproduced in Divya Subramanian’s essay on the plans for developing the village of Maryculter in Aberdeenshire, which feature clusters of attractive, pitched-roof houses surrounded by greenery (while subtly incorporating garages), recall garden-city precedents.

Maryculter, planned by the firm of Christian Salvesen to house North Sea oil workers, was, however, never built. The local authority, citing adequate existing housing and protests from student radicals squatting on nearby farms, but perhaps also wary of the project’s private financing, shelved it in 1976. Everything about that failure is revealing. It reminds us how important private financing was to urban redevelopment even in the social democratic 1950s and 1960s – a point made more fully in Alistair Kefford’s study of the Capital & Counties Property Company, which built office blocks and shopping centres across England in the 1950s and then expanded into Europe and North America. But the mid-1970s date of Maryculter’s mothballing is also significant, for Capital & Counties ran into trouble around then after the 1973 oil shock sent the values of its overseas assets plummeting. And don’t overlook those squatters, 1970s types arising from the collision of youth politics and the housing crisis. The pieces in The Modern British City showing the way development projects created and mobilised new urban identities, interests and movements bring the book alive.

Deindustrialisation, we learn, was not a long, slow process but a very quick one, erasing whole occupations and transforming one community and family after another. Britain was still a manufacturing and distinctly national economy for the quarter-century after 1945, producing the consumer goods (cars, radios, clothing) its population demanded. Our understanding of that national economy owes much to David Edgerton, who in a smart piece on port cities explains that inner-city docks declined not just because of containerisation but also because Britain – like France – was once again growing most of its own food; when imports shot up again in the 1980s (of food and everything else), they were transported by sea or air or lorry into new near-unmanned ‘flatscapes’ or roll-on-roll-off terminals. Such low-cost transport accelerated the shockingly quick demise of manufacturing: from the mid-1970s, as Christopher Lawson shows, whole industries withered away. Coventry, not a large town, lost 53,000 manufacturing jobs between 1974 and 1982; shipyards on Tyneside and in Belfast went into rapid decline. These once industrial cities now sometimes built museums or heritage parks to display their maritime pasts, but the ageing men living on the edges of those sites tended to avoid them. I can understand that. If AI devastates the universities the way deindustrialisation hollowed out shipbuilding, I wouldn’t want to live next to my former workplace, giving guided tours of a now obsolete lifeform.

For a quarter-century, ‘planning’ progressed with those men and their families in mind. But not all families fit that form, and when they didn’t, as Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite’s study of London homelessness shows, authorities were unsympathetic. Even though housebuilding never kept pace with demand, homelessness was always treated as exceptional, with officials repurposing Victorian buildings – Newington Lodge in Walworth (a former workhouse) for families, Camberwell Reception Centre for single men – and, worse, falling back on Victorian practices to meet what they insisted were temporary needs. Both institutions were cheerless, bureaucratic, had nasty food, and in a thousand small ways made it clear that the people they housed were supplicants and not citizens. Newington Lodge wouldn’t let fathers stay with their wives and children; Camberwell required men to leave the centre during the day, driving those who couldn’t find day labour to take shelter in libraries or public toilets or under bridges. Homeless families turned to such statutory accommodation only as a last resort, and most left not for a council placement but for some temporary solution they found on their own. Only in 1977, following campaigning by Shelter and other charities, was a law passed giving ‘vulnerable’ homeless people the right to permanent housing, which in practice meant they joined the queue of families waiting in ‘temporary’ B&B accommodation for one of a dwindling number of council flats.

Immigrants too were often forced onto their own resources, treated poorly by the country many had served in the war. As Saima Nasar’s essay on Notting Hill details, private landlords offered poor, crowded and costly accommodation to West Indian immigrants, who were then blamed for deteriorating conditions, harassed and attacked. Neighbourhoods were racialised, their borders harshly policed, sparking the protests of the early 1980s. Belfast, too, saw boundary-making and violence during these years, but Erika Hanna – who has a great historian’s eye for the unexpected and revelatory – argues persuasively that when manned checkpoints sprang up, the common experience of the city’s residents, across confessional lines, was boredom and queuing. The securitisation, Hanna notes, was performative and pointless, as anyone actually transporting weapons knew to use the unmonitored local roads. Checkpoints and searches just made children late for school, adults late for work and everyone short-tempered.

The tempers of mothers trying to live out the postwar script of domestic family life frayed too. We need to remember, as Jon Lawrence’s re-examination of social survey data shows, that many working-class families were eager to leave damp and crumbling houses for a new-build estate and a bit of greenery, but the transition could be hard, especially if (as was often the case) schools, shops, playgrounds and that promised greenery were slow to materialise. As Krista Cowman recounts, Netherley, a council estate built outside Liverpool between 1966 and 1972, had no schools for its first year and no shops for two and a half years. The estate emptied of men during the day, leaving mothers marooned with young children and dependent on traders who sold a few goods from mobile vans; a photograph of one, parked next to a housing block on an expanse of dirt, documents the desolation. Married women’s employment rates rose steadily in the postwar years, not only because families wanted to share in the new consumerism but also because – as Betty Friedan understood and oral histories confirm – young married women everywhere were going mad with loneliness, frustration and boredom.

These essays show how, in one place after another, policies aimed at sustaining families produced new inequalities. Such inequalities were magnified, as Colin Pooley shows in his piece on transport, by the hegemony of the car. For two decades, families who could afford it moved to suburbs or new towns (and bought cars); a riot of road-building followed. Highways cut through urban centres, forcing those still on foot up onto pedestrian flyovers or down into dank underpasses; those multistorey car parks ubiquitous in gangster films (someone or other is always getting tossed off the top of one) blighted market squares. Public transport, especially in smaller towns, grew spotty, stigmatised and unreliable; some amenities of modern life shifted out of reach of anyone not behind a wheel. Pooley tells us who lost out: the elderly (who often couldn’t drive, had to live close to shops and services, and needed more time to get across a busy street); women (only 29 per cent of whom could legally drive in 1975-76, compared to 69 per cent of men); and especially children, who lost space to play and indeed the freedom to do almost anything on their own. In 1971, 70 per cent of seven-year-olds walked to school by themselves, but by 1991 that number had fallen below 10 per cent, their parents citing traffic as the main reason for the change (‘stranger danger’ came second). The goal many urban planners espouse today – that the full range of essential services be within a fifteen-minute walk of every city dweller – was further out of reach in 1980 than in the 1950s.

It’s unsurprising, then, that some urban residents exploded in fury or engaged in new forms of political mobilisation. The Belfast traders who could see their customers languishing behind metal barriers in security queues sometimes mounted spontaneous protests. Women on housing estates campaigned for nurseries and drew attention to dangerous traffic by blocking roads. Architecture students, Holly Smith shows, supported ‘self-build’ housing initiatives and squatters. Immigrant communities created festivals and cultural institutions: Elizabeth Buettner sensitively recovers Naseem Khan’s decades of effective and joyful activism. Gay enclaves emerged in London, Manchester and Bristol and mobilised to defend themselves when Aids hit. In the late 1970s, feminist ‘Reclaim the Night’ marches started, and in 1985 the Anglican Church enraged Margaret Thatcher – as William Whyte shows – with Faith in the City, its bestselling report committing the Church to address the social crises affecting urbanites of all faiths and none.

‘Reclaim the Night’ march in Liverpool, 1979.

These movements, stirred though they sometimes were by frustration and neglect, made British cities more interesting places to live and, in time, much more attractive. I lived in Stepney in the winter of 1980, when the National Front were confronted by the Anti-Nazi League in East London, and on Sandringham Road in Hackney half a dozen years later, when every third or fourth house was derelict or taken over by squatters – but those protesters and squatters were harbingers of things to come. Gentrification, John Davis tells us, isn’t confined to a particular time or place but is a process that might serially overtake one area after another. What Chelsea went through in the 1930s, Islington and Camden would go through in the 1960s, and Stoke Newington or Bethnal Green a few decades later; Hoxton, Davis remarks, went ‘from hipster to banker in two decades’. By the 1990s, that transformation was apparent in Manchester and Bristol. In an imaginative piece on the urban types or tropes thrown up by the media – from the jogger and the mugger to the hipster – Mandler shows how the globalising city was made legible and tamed.

If people drove that change through their actions, they sometimes did so inadvertently, in response to stimuli of which they were almost unaware. The early 1980s, remembered by many (if not me) as London’s nadir, was also the moment the flight from the capital ended and the city started growing again, a pattern later seen in other large cities. This book doesn’t explicitly foreground age as a key variable, but as Keith Vernon’s essay on students and Gunn’s on the music scene of the 1960s both show, much urban revitalisation was driven by the young. The postwar baby boomers, who turned eighteen in the 1960s, found jobs and spent money on clothes and clubbing, reviving inner-city nightlife along the way. The significant numbers of immigrants – disproportionately energetic and striving and young – who arrived over the next decades built businesses and families. University students – their numbers expanded on the recommendation of the Robbins Report, increasing fourfold to 1.8 million in the 1990s – drove the demand for more urban accommodation, better public transport, interesting places to eat and other urban amenities. One-third of Manchester’s end-of-the-century demographic growth and three-quarters of Sheffield’s, Mandler points out, can be accounted for by students.

The effects were uneven, however. The vibrant multicultural cities of the turn of the century made the deprivation of some older, smaller and often whiter cities more apparent. This book confines itself to the 20th century, and only a few authors – notably Saumarez Smith in a luminous piece on the fate of a few once industrial towns – peer beyond that end date. But as global forces bit deeper, the fissure between ‘resurgent cities’ and ‘cities left behind’ widened. The 2011 census revealed how energetically young Eastern Europeans responded to EU expansion and ‘free movement’; by 2021 almost 17 per cent of the population of England and Wales – or ten million people – were foreign-born (up from 7.5 million a decade earlier), and the most commonly held foreign passport was Polish. London became uniquely polyglot and prosperous, its inhabitants 40 per cent foreign-born and on average eight years younger than those of Scotland, its skyline transformed by one striking building after another (the Gherkin, the Cheesegrater, the Shard), its young professionals embracing high-rise living, ostensibly alien to Britain. Someone like me – born and raised in Tokyo, teaching and living in New York – might feel most at home in a city like this one, but my comfort is a measure of the problem. Already by the 2010s, I noticed that some West London streets were virtually uninhabited, their Georgian terraces little more than safe-deposit boxes for foreign investors. Some 20 per cent of flats in other neighbourhoods are regularly listed on Airbnb, even as homelessness skyrockets.

A future generation of urban historians, making sense of the last two decades and the ones that come next, will have their work cut out for them. But just as the contributors to this volume look back to Dyos and Wolff, those coming scholars might look back to this collection – for subjects, but also for method, sensibility and, frankly, conviction. Urban sociology and history took root in the provincial universities, not so much in Oxford and Cambridge, and in this respect too this project is loyal to its disciplinary forebears. Of its 27 contributors, less than a quarter have an Oxbridge affiliation, and another quarter are at North American or European universities, but more than half teach either in London or in one of the provincial universities: Bristol, Liverpool, Exeter, Newcastle, Warwick etc – including two from Dyos’s home perch of Leicester. The reach of the book – Belfast to Southampton (though Scotland is almost absent and London, as always, over-represented) – is one payoff, but the civic commitment shown by scholars from these now beset history departments is another.

For this book doesn’t just document the way university expansion has driven urban renewal; it also shows how historians, if scattered across Britain and not confined to Oxbridge and London, become rooted in, and defenders of, its urban life. A surprising number of these essays include personal reminiscences (Edgerton’s account of port cities, for example, draws on his childhood in Bristol and a spell working as an 18-year-old in a chemistry lab at ICI in Runcorn); others openly defend their subjects from misunderstanding or condescension. Suburbanites in Oadby outside Leicester weren’t apolitical escapees, Laura Balderstone insists; on the contrary, they brought improvements to their new town while sustaining strong ties to the city nearby. Hatherley writes that Southampton, his hometown, weathered the challenges of deindustrialisation and postwar redevelopment well, its flagship postwar housing complex – the low-rise, ocean-liner-inspired, Portland stone and concrete Wyndham Court – the equivalent of London’s Barbican or South Bank, ‘and every bit as good’. Social commitments and empathy become assets: ‘I have tried,’ Sutcliffe-Braithwaite writes, ‘to reconstruct what it looked, sounded, smelled, tasted and felt like to enter Newington Lodge and Camberwell Reception Centre in the postwar decades’ – and she has succeeded. Saumarez Smith, in tramping around Middlesbrough and the Potteries to find Wedgwood’s house mouldering next to a slag heap and St Hilda’s Italianate town hall isolated amid wasteland, forces us to see what becomes of ‘heritage’ unrescued by universities, tech corridors or tourism. In this mode, urban history melds into the kind of reportage George Orwell and J.B. Priestley wrote a hundred years ago.

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