Epilogue

Summary

The Isokon building, Lawn Road Flats, was an expression of British Modernism that found its hubris in 1960s brutish architecture, ‘brave, bold and very British’. Emerging from the architectural offices ‘of the postwar British state between 1950 and the 1970s’, brutalism has been described as ‘an architecture of the welfare state’. Certainly, Jack Pritchard's early vision for the Flats as a model for working-class housing that wasn't Peabody, fitted this description, even if it did take the Conservative MP Thelma Cazalet to see its advantages for middle class professionals.

In recent years the British contribution to modernism has been neglected. In March 2013, however, the Financial Times reported on the scheme to refurbish Preston bus station – ‘a supreme example of 1960s brutalist architecture’ – in more appreciative terms:

Built in 1969, it is marked by its grand size – the passenger area with 80 gates was designed to evoke an airport arrivals hall - … five layers of sweeping, curved concrete…. Preston bus station, like so many brutalist buildings, is a monument to a bygone public realm, generous, sculptural, civic and genuinely public. Once they are gone, nothing like them will ever be built again.

The article depicted Preston bus station as very much an organic concept, less raw concrete more dependent on the life-cycle of those travelling to and from Preston by bus.