Otto Saumarez Smith

Sociology and architecture were two areas of expertise that played a key role guiding the state’s approach to working-class community in postwar Britain. It is unsurprising that they have been pivotal areas for historical research into the period; but this work has often been done in silos from each other. Peter Mandler’s seminal essay ‘New Towns for Old’ has been my model for the placing of architectural production within its wider political, cultural and social contexts.¹ The following chapter presents a case study that gives an interwar origin for telling a history of architectural modernism in Britain alongside the growth of a sympathetic sociology into working-class communities. This history is potentially transformative because it is common to see the two professions of architecture and sociology as being at loggerheads, not least because modernist approaches to slum clearance have frequently been castigated by social scientists and historians for destroying close-knit working-class communities.²

The argument of the 1957 sociological study by Peter Willmott and Michael Young, Family and Kinship in East London, has been especially important for our understanding of the changes wrought on working-class communities in the postwar period. The book contrasted the tight-knit community of Bethnal Green with what it saw as the social disintegration of a new London County Council out-of-town estate in Greenleigh (in fact Debden, in Essex). There have been criticisms for its methodological weaknesses both on publication and since.³ Willmott himself would later recognise that much of the movement out to suburbs was spontaneous rather than enforced – and that it reflected real aspirations.⁴ Nevertheless, it has been enormously influential and the book has been read as an attack on the architectural and planning orthodoxies of postwar slum clearance – even as a British equivalent to Jane Jacobs’s anti-modernist broadside Death and Life of Great American Cities.⁵ This indeed was the way it was presented in Willmott and Young’s new introduction to their book in 1986, where they characterised the book as a protest during a period of ‘collective madness’ and attacked ‘clever architects’.⁶ This was disingenuous, as both Willmott and Young had close collaborative relationships with many in the architectural profession, not least the architect and housing specialist Oliver Cox.

Oliver Cox is in many ways representative of the modernist mainstream of his profession. Throughout his career, he was committed to an approach that eschewed excessive displays of personality, subsuming his work collaboratively, whether in the public sector of local or central government or in private practice. His aim, as he summed it up in 1978, was to ‘design as if people mattered’.⁷ What this meant in practice was a commitment to try and understand through social scientific investigation what residents would want, and to design in accordance. He had a longstanding friendship and professional partnership with Peter Willmott, and cross currents of influence flowed between the two through their entire careers.⁸ During the 1950s they were both key members of the Kenilworth Group, which considered ‘some of the problems of the town planner and architect and the contribution which the sociologist could make to town planning’.⁹ Willmott’s 1963 study of The Evolution of a Community: A Study of Dagenham after Forty Years ends by explicitly deploying many of the arguments of the London County Council’s Hook New Town project, which Cox had led.¹⁰ Cox attempted to hire the Institute of Community Studies while at the Ministry of Housing, and sociological thinking was at the root of projects Cox carried out in Oldham, Stevenage and West Ham.¹¹ The Institute of Community Studies collaborated extensively with Shankland Cox, the private architectural practice Oliver Cox set up with Graeme Shankland in 1965, culminating in the co-authorship of the Inner Area Study for Lambeth in 1977.¹²

This chapter provides a foundation for this later collaboration between architecture and sociology, by describing Cox’s architectural training at the Architectural Association in the late 1930s, including an episode where he conducted two surveys of working-class streets in Fulham in collaboration with Mass Observation. Cox is interesting as a representative figure rather than as an outsider or a critic of architectural modernism. Through Cox we can begin to understand how elite architects conceived of, and interacted with, the working-class public whom they increasingly saw as their clients.¹³ In an era when state provision was expanding and social citizenship was becoming more democratic, architects and experts attempted to mediate between top-down reforming projects with bottom-up demands for social changes and better standards of living. By focusing on this biographical episode it will be seen that Cox’s interest in working-class communities developed not in opposition to other aspects of his education, but was a symbiotic part of an intellectual ferment that included radical politics and modernist aesthetics. Cox’s student career accords with John Summerson’s account of the changes that were happening among emerging architects in the late 1930s:

The first incentive was psychological – the novelty, strange beauty and allure of foreign architectural experiments. The exploration and mastery of these led to a wider conception of what architecture is, of its relation to siting, to town-planning, and thus to politics: then, from politics back to sociology and the sociological position of the architect himself.¹⁴

Oliver Cox was often in the shadow of his brother Anthony Cox (1915–93), also an architect, and one of the founding members of the firm Architects’ Co-Partnership.¹⁵ Oliver’s Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry is appended as a couple of paragraphs at the bottom of his brother’s more detailed life story.¹⁶ Children of a senior civil servant, they were both educated at Mill Hill, and it seemed inevitable that Oliver would follow his brother to the Architectural Association (AA), having been practical and artistic at school. The familial encouragement brought Oliver into the slipstream of the modernist avant garde, and a milieu at the AA that was at once posh and bolshie.¹⁷ The AA student body was almost exclusively drawn from public school in these years, and was housed in Bedford Square: a location which had the atmosphere of a club as much as a school. Although the AA was in leftist political ferment, the students absorbed something of an older Liberal tradition of public service and didn’t question that they would go on to form part of an elite.

Oliver was popular in the AA for his accordion playing, and a rendition of a song written by Anthony for him called ‘Hermione and Jezebel’ was long remembered.¹⁸ What exists of Cox’s student work from the 1930s is suffused with a sense of enjoyment and his ease and stylishness of draughtsmanship. There is an AA bar co-designed with Anthony, for which Oliver was responsible for the colour scheme: ‘The first thing to ask yourself about a colour scheme is: “Does it go with beer?” … it would have all the charm of a William Morris wallpaper with twice the kick.’ He also produced a drawing in the style of Osbert Lancaster of a baroque church façade for Robert Furneaux Jordan, and a lovely cantilevered band stand. A narrative drawing of a day to the country to conduct a ‘Rural Plan’ (Figure 7.1) is funny (fuelled by many pints of ‘very owd owd beer’.)¹⁹ Cox would continue to produce comics to document his architectural process throughout his career, and they give unexpected comedy to studies of issues ranging from motorway bridges to the Inner City crisis.²⁰

Although Oliver joined the AA only after Tony had already graduated, Oliver’s glamorous elder brother continued to cast a long shadow across the institution in these years, with his mixture of modernist evangelism, student rebellion, public school confidence and far left politics. Tony had been the first student at the AA to embrace pure continental modernism, and his second-year project for a house in Norfolk has been described as being ‘without precedent’ for its continental modernity in Britain at the time.²¹ A group 1936 project for a new town (Figure 7.2), plonking down the Radiant City on a site near Faringdon in Berkshire (now Oxfordshire), was a remarkably bellicose piece of modernist Épater la bourgeoisie.

Tony was a leading figure in the student unrest at the school, termed by its protagonists a ‘revolution’, protesting against the Beaux Arts curriculum of the Head of School Harry Goodhart-Rendel (Figure 7.3).²² Tony wrote the 1937 AA Pantomime which called for Goodhart-Rendel’s resignation, and ended with a song that culminated in the ditty, ‘Here’s the reason for our recovery, we’ve made a great discovery, that Corbusier is the only way. Get a new master, get a new man. We are building a new community, men and women will live in unity, we can guarantee perfect liberty. Free Love, Free Plan!’²³

Tony was the founding co-editor of the short-lived, but significant student magazine Focus, which had its explosive first issue published in the year that Oliver arrived at the AA.²⁴ It was a potent mixture of student work and contributions from a distinguished international roster of architects. Le Corbusier was inveigled to write for the first issue – exhorting his student acolytes not to merely follow his style, but hectoring them, in his distinctive majuscule, that, ‘YOU ARE AN ORGANISER, NOT A DRAWING BOARD STYLIST’. It is perhaps ironic to note, considering Oliver’s later opposition towards the Corbusian wing of English architectural culture, that it was precisely this organisational rather than the stylistic element of architectural modernism that Oliver would be inspired by.

Oliver himself designed the chic ring-bound covers for Focus, and was complimented by the artist Ben Nicholson that the covers gave an exact flavour of the punchy contents. The journal opened with a radical salvo, which is worth repeating as it captures the fusion of leftist politics and modernist design electrifying the school at the time:

We were born in the war … We were born into a civilisation whose leaders, whose ideals, whose culture had failed. They are still in power to-day. But we, the generation who follow, cannot accept their domination. They lead us always deeper into reaction that we are convinced can only end in disaster. We have set out to produce a journal where we can develop our still chaotic ideas on the foundations of those built by certain older men (in age, not in spirit) who early in this century had realised contemporary problems.

Richard Llewellyn Davis (1912–81), whom Oliver remembered as another influence on him in these early years at the AA, had arrived as a student at the Architectural Association having completed a degree in engineering at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had been an Apostle, and joined the Communist Party. Anthony later remembered him as being the catalyst for bringing the school into an orbit of left-wing ideas.

Richard was the catalyst, but no doubt most of us would have moved to the Left had he not been around, although it might have taken us a little longer. A strong groundswell in that direction became very apparent during our second year; Gollancz launched his successful Left Book Club that spring and soft-back volumes of quasi revolutionary literature were arriving monthly by post. Perhaps we did not read them very regularly or with the excitement with which we had already read Le Corbusier’s ‘Towards a New Architecture’ (which I had bought the previous winter and soon followed with the 1929–34 volume of his ‘Oeuvre Complete’) but the social and political message of the literature of the Left and the technical and visual freshness of Modern Architecture combined to produce an effervescent mixture in whose heady vapours could be glimpsed a hazy image of the Promised Land.²⁵

There are conflicting accounts of whether Oliver followed his elder brother in actually joining the Communist Party in the 1930s.²⁶ I think not, but he was certainly close to many who were party members. Oliver will have absorbed this mixture of politics and architecture, but a third, and arguably more lasting, cultural influence on him in the years leading up to the Second World War was Mass Observation – for whom he led two groups of students, in 1938 and 1939, to make surveys of Fulham.²⁷ The interest in Mass Observation aligns Cox with an intellectual and political current among the British left, which was shifting towards studying ‘everyday life’, and a belief that political action should be based on these insights.²⁸

In the summer before he started at the AA, Anthony took Oliver to the 1937 Paris World Fair, and they sought out Le Corbusier’s buildings, as well as Picasso’s Guernica, housed in the modernist Spanish Republican pavilion by the Catalan architectural collective GATEPAC, whose corporate approach to modernist design was also an influence on the brothers. It was a highly charged moment, and the stark horror of seeing the German Nazi pavilion stayed with Oliver. While on holiday with his brother in Paris, they had stumbled across two other AA students, Bruce Martin (1917–2015) and David Medd (1917–2009),²⁹ making measured drawings of the Petit Trianon, with the help of a Parisian fireman’s ladder.³⁰ Oliver remembered having a strong reaction:

this is not right, I felt I had a strong social conscience, I thought here we are, I was a public school chap, and had no contact with working class people, and here we are measuring up palaces for royalty, it would be far better to measure up a working class street in the middle of London.³¹

Oliver’s idea was relayed to Anthony’s friends, and Cox was introduced to another AA student, John Madge (1914–68), whose brother Charles had recently set up Mass Observation to conduct ethnographies of everyday life in England.³² It was however Tom Harrisson, the other founder of Mass Observation, who appears to have been the key figure guiding the students’ investigations – presumably as Charles Madge was by then in Bolton. Guided by advice and contacts from Harrisson, in the winter term of 1938 Cox led a team of four students³³ to make a survey of Strode Road, a terraced street of Victorian bye-law, tunnel-back houses (Figure 7.4).³⁴ The 1938 group wrote their work under the AA moniker Unit 4, but it does not appear to have been part of their official course, so was plausibly taken as part of their ‘vacation studies’.³⁵ Despite the group-work nature of the enterprise, Cox clearly was the leader, signing off other students’ work. Cox lived with a widow on the street, perhaps inspired by Harrisson’s recent experience of ‘going native’ among the working class in Bolton.³⁶ In the summer of 1939 a larger group of students, again led by Cox, returned to the area to make a fuller survey. Tom Harrisson again vetted the students’ questionnaires, and helped them with local contacts. The research was eventually fed into the Mass Observation 1943 book An Enquiry into People’s Homes, where Fulham was fictionalised as Metrotown – although the students aren’t officially acknowledged in this publication.³⁷ The students might nevertheless have been influential in shifting the focus of Mass Observation towards issues of housing, a major feature of its work in the war years and beyond.³⁸ Cox later said he was in touch at this time with the housing consultant Elizabeth Denby,³⁹ whose focus on ‘rehousing from the slum dwellers point of view’⁴⁰ is the most obvious forerunner of the Fulham project. The Mass Observation Archive only holds the full archival working notes for the 1938 survey, as Cox reports that the architect-planner Max Lock had asked to see the drawings for the second survey, but he left them on a train.⁴¹ Nevertheless, the students produced a written statement detailing the second survey, The Fulham Housing Survey 1939 Report, which goes into more depth about their motivations and methodology (see Figure 7.4).⁴² In it they explain that the motivation to carry out the survey was due to seeing the nature of architectural practice shifting from private commissions towards mass housing by the public sector. As they put it, ‘there was beginning a drift from private practice towards something bigger scale, and that where the culmination of an architectural education in the past had invariably been the design of private buildings for private patrons, we felt that this situation no longer held good.’⁴³

When he conducted the first Fulham survey of Strode Road Cox was still a teenager, an upper-middle-class architectural student, and his memory of the experience was one of culture shock: ‘a traumatic experience suddenly to find myself confronted with people and surroundings and living conditions which were totally strange to me’.⁴⁴ One gets the sense the students must have been extremely intrusive.⁴⁵ His account in 1962 of his student forays into sociological observation, in conversation with Peter Willmott at an AA event linking sociologists and architects, were self-deprecatory:

It had begun as a student in the AA, and then, together with Tom Harrisson of Mass Observation, he had led a ‘floundering band of students’ into Fulham, where they did their measured drawings of a sordid little row of converted houses. They consisted of plans with complete furniture lay-outs and so on.⁴⁶

Floundering or not – and certainly the Fulham survey shared some of the amateurism and methodological eccentricities of Mass Observation when seen from the perspective of a later more professionalised sociology – Cox’s time in Fulham is a fascinating precursor to his postwar work merging sociology and architecture. It places Cox right at the beginning of a new attitude towards the everyday lives of working-class communities, and how this appreciation would feed into wider housing questions.⁴⁷ A reported conversation with a resident Mr Morland, who asked ‘What are you doing this for?’ gives a sense of what the students were hoping to gain from such a survey, with more candour than in the final official report:

I then explained that we were architectural students, who were interested in working class housing: we wanted to find out how this class of people live, consequently we were trying to find out as much as possible about this street, and the people who live here. Mr M. then asked of what use such information could be. I further explained that the knowledge of the requirements of working class people would later prove very useful when it came to designing dwellings for the working class. Mr M. then said ‘Well I’ve been in the building trade all my life, but I don’t see the use of measuring up these old homes.’ I replied that our job could possibly [sic] carried out in working class homes: because it was the people we wanted to find out about, also the people’s tastes and distastes: what kind of wallpaper they liked on their walls and so on. I said that it might be the case that we might never discover all the facts but the impression gained – however limited – was bound to be very valuable to us.⁴⁸

Alongside more standard methods of survey, including interviews, questionnaires, and Mass Observation ‘day surveys’, which record in minute-by-minute detail the life of the street, Cox and his team made architectural drawings. Careful dimensioned measured elevational drawings of an everyday Victorian terraced house (Figure 7.5) subverted the beaux arts activity of drawing an historic building like the Petit Trianon, by applying it to an architecture of the everyday – recording peeling paint and cracked cornices with the kind of focus traditionally placed on grand classical ornament.

The archival record of the 1938 survey contains a large quantity of undigested data.⁴⁹ It is nevertheless possible to track in the notes what the students are looking out for, and what they notice.⁵⁰ Doing so enables us to tie the students into an emerging current of thinking about working-class life. Jon Lawrence has used the archival material of 1960s social scientific data to make an argument of a shift occurring between earlier forms of social inquiry that were defined by the inequalities of power between the interviewed and the interviewer, stating that by the postwar period cross-cultural exchange was possible in these encounters.⁵¹ Despite its gaucheness, the Fulham survey is a notably early example of such a shift, with the students looking to document, and perhaps even valorise, ordinariness, much more than they are attempting to seek out problems.

Although the students were attentive to issues of overcrowding, damp and vermin, and are occasionally censorious about standards of housekeeping – the kinds of things that an earlier tradition of social enquiry might have been expected exclusively to notice – this is not their primary focus. In the cumulative visual evidence they accrue, they recorded evidence of working-class affluence and respectability as much as of poverty, and the mood of the files is largely celebratory of working-class culture and taste.⁵² The political background of the Munich crisis and the beginnings of Air Raid Protection measures often appears in the interviews, whether it was solicited or not, and Popular Front politics of the period may well help to account for some of the motivation behind the solicitude towards the working-class everyday.⁵³ The archive includes human details, such as a family who aim to build on a plotland in Benfleet, and another whose deceased son had wanted to become an architect, which suggests that the students broke beyond the strictures of the social scientific interaction. Although the questionnaire has not survived, Question 7 was clearly intended to discover something about the neighbourliness and community of the street, an interest that it is more common to locate in postwar social surveys. Interestingly, inhabitants of Fulham nostalgically located a heterogeneous community and friendliness as something that had already declined.⁵⁴

The notebooks contain exhaustive inventories of home contents, with extensive ‘analysis of ornaments, furnishing, utensils etc.’. The contents of the houses give an impression of working-class respectability rather than Orwellian poverty.⁵⁵ While one might expect modernist upper-middle-class students brought up in a cultural atmosphere of ‘design reform’⁵⁶ to sneer at the overwhelming evidence of lingering Victoriana in the 1930s home, including chintz curtains and patterned wallpapers, that they were confronted with, these are instead recorded and drawn with respectful precision (see Figures 7.6 and 7.7). They seem particularly interested in the various mantelpiece knick-knacks, not least the Staffordshire figurines, which at this date were increasingly becoming fashionable among Modernists for their indication of a popular anonymous culture.⁵⁷ Mantelpieces were of particular interest to Mass Observation, as they varied ‘according to district and class … They show some quite unexpected features, which concern class, religion, superstition, personal taste, and the whole life of the home’.⁵⁸ A full illustrated survey of the street’s doorknockers, however, notes disapprovingly that no. 17’s is ‘moderne’. The tone though is almost exclusively respectful.⁵⁹

Cox returned to Fulham in 1939 with a larger group of fourteen students, taken from various units across the AA.⁶⁰ Both the architectural historian Elizabeth Darling and the historian of Mass Observation James Hinton have written accounts of the importance of the first Fulham survey, but these accounts are limited as they miss this second much more extensive survey of Fulham.⁶¹ In 1939 the students surveyed two streets in what would now be called West Kensington: Fairholme Road, a grander terrace of 1880s Victorian three-storey houses which would have originally been built for upper-middle-class occupation, and nearby Hillmer Street, which has since disappeared through slum clearance. The streets were chosen as they displayed heavy incidence of multi-occupation.⁶²

The students rented a house as an office nearby, and while the majority of students came to Fulham on a day-to-day basis, five of them (including Oliver) stayed in the area for a week at a time. The survey was abandoned around halfway through due to the outbreak of war, which confused the results of the survey. Homes in the area were visited in groups of three or four students, and while one student obtained answers to the questionnaire, the others ‘went round the house noting down furniture, ornament and decoration’. The visits would last between an hour and two hours.

When writing up the findings the students felt that the questionnaire had been too loosely conceived, and accepted that its objective value was probably limited. A preserved copy of the questionnaire shows fifty-two separate questions, some of which could elicit quite extensive replies, asking residents everything from what their favourite chair was, to what fuel they used to cook their meals, as well as what they ate (a lot of bacon and eggs). The results only had a limited use in giving a suitably scientific account of the surveyed population – not least because the sample was smaller than hoped for (around thirty households) due to the outbreak of war. As with the 1938 survey, it gives a stronger sense of the student surveyor than the working class surveyed. Nevertheless, one thing that does come across clearly is how little sense of neighbourhood there was, and a question intended to elicit ‘attitude to neighbourhood’ brought forth a lot of complaints that it was rough, dirty and noisy, and had declined into a slum in living memory.

Unsurprisingly, the students were particularly interested in attitudes towards rehousing: whether the interviewee would like to stay in their present accommodation, be rehoused on a cottage estate or rehoused in a flat on the same site. The answers from this small survey are inconclusive. Four of the questions involved showing respondents a set of options, and asking them to comment whether they liked them or not: styles of wallpaper, paint colours, styles of furniture, and different building types (Figure 7.8). Perhaps the most interesting were an illustration of six different 1930s housing types. If the students were hoping for an endorsement of modernist aesthetics, this badly backfired as the Fulham residents were blandly polite about the two celebrated modernist blocks of flats included, Highpoint I and Kensal House (‘no pets allowed I expect’) – but were overwhelmingly positive about the example of semi-detached, mock-Tudor suburbia, then much loathed by the architectural establishment.⁶³

It would be easy to criticise the methodology of the students; indeed they were extremely self-critical in the written-up report, stating that their questions had been curtailed by ‘the lack of imagination and previous experience of the people who drew it up’. In the attached notes on their conversations one can see something of the different strategies of residents in facing the students. Some were very candid about their life and problems: one talked about their son who had died from a venereal disease contracted from his new wife, another suffered from shell shock, while another woman told the students about a recent nightmare with a dead body in the bath. Others were defensive about their homes, perhaps conflating the intrusive visit with that of a sanitary inspector (‘I’m not ashamed for anyone to see my rooms – they’re clean; the district nurse will tell you I’m spotless’ – as one woman put it.) One resident seems to have comprehended what the students were looking for and gave very detailed descriptions of what they would like from a new house, down to describing what cupboards they would need in a kitchen.

By the architects’ own account, the value of the experience had only been ‘subjective’:

We were able to take from Fulham the memory of a hundred and one everyday actions that were unfamiliar to our living routine, and it is these that now act as a powerful stimulant towards our finding practical, and above all, acceptable solutions when we now consider the problems of people of their class.

There is much in the archive that speaks of difficulties in comprehension between the upper-middle-class students and the working-class inhabitants they were surveying. The main impression of working-class culture in the period is that the residents of Fulham were extraordinarily patient and generous in allowing themselves to be surveyed so intrusively.

It risks being ridiculous putting too much intellectual weight on the Fulham survey, which was carried out by teenagers out of their depth in a cross-cultural encounter with working-class subjects whom they were honest enough to admit they found deeply foreign. The archival material they gathered is far more revealing of the surveyors than the surveyed. Nonetheless, it is notable that the students didn’t fall back on dehumanising, snobbish, censorious, or paternalistic interpretations of what they were looking at – attitudes which were rife in the culture at the time, especially around issues of working-class taste.⁶⁴ Their aims, if not their methods, were laudable, and were stirringly summed up in the final report:

This was our conception of the duty of an architect (of our class) to the working class. He [sic] must be democratic in his work, that is to say he must not force a personal, synthetic conception of living on his clients, through the medium of a building ill-adapted to their present living routine. On the other hand he must improve on present conditions. It is thus his duty to know what it is that controls their happiness, where they are fundamentally different from him, and how he can get an understanding of them sufficient for him to be able to see things from their angle.

Cox was prophetic when he identified the changes that would happen to the architectural profession in the coming decades, especially when it came to his own future career. Modernist architecture and progressive politics pointed towards a new role for the architect in society, and Mass Observation seemed to offer a way to understand what working-class residents needed. The failures of Cox’s team to adumbrate any useful data from the mass of impressions and conflicting viewpoints was in many ways shared on a larger scale by Mass Observation as a whole, whose publication An Enquiry into People’s Homes disarmingly opened with the admission that:

Anyone who has ever tried to consider what housing policy should be followed after the war will have been perplexed and puzzled by the variety of contradictory opinions and desires expressed. People demand so many and such different things from their homes that it seems almost impossible to satisfy all needs and wants.⁶⁵

The need for a new architecture to be based on a sociology of everyday life was obvious to Cox from a young age, but how this would be achieved in practice was not so straightforward.

Although a large number had moved by this date, six residents of Hillmer Street, by then badly bombed, were reinterviewed by Celia Fremlin in 1941, again for Mass Observation. Fremlin wanted to know about the changes of diet since the outbreak of war.⁶⁶ Mrs Wilson remembered the experience of being interviewed in 1938 with self-deprecatory humour:

I remember when the gentleman called, I remember now, they said to me: ‘What did you have for breakfast’ and I said ‘Sausages’ and they said ‘What did you have for dinner’ and I said ‘Sausages’ and when they asked me ‘What did you have for tea?’ I didn’t dare say sausages again, though tell you the honest truth, that’s what we did have. I couldn’t help laughing.⁶⁷