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The Rise and Fall of British Urban Modernism: Planning Bradford, circa 1945–1970

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Simon Gunn
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 4 , October 2010 , pp. 849 - 869
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2010

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References

1 Daily Mail, 11 April 1962.

2 Mort, Frank, “Fantasies of Metropolitan Life: Planning London in the 1940s,” Journal of British Studies 43, no. 1 (January 2004): 120–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Cityscapes: Consumption, Masculinities and the Mapping of London since 1950,” Urban Studies 35, nos. 5–6 (1998): 889–907. The many recent works on London include Breward, Christopher, Gilbert, David, and Lister, Jenny, eds., Swinging Sixties: Fashion in London and Beyond (London, 2006)Google Scholar; and White, Jerry, London in the Twentieth Century (London, 2001).Google Scholar On the new towns, see Clapson, Mark, Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns: Social Change and Urban Dispersal in Postwar England (Manchester, 1998)Google Scholar, and A Social History of Milton Keynes: Middle England/Edge City (London, 2004)Google Scholar.

3 There are, however, the beginnings of such a literature on these cities; see, e.g., Todd, Selina, “Affluence, Class and Crown Street: Reinvestigating the Post-war Working Class,” Contemporary British History 22, no. 4 (2008): 501–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which examines Liverpool.

4 An early exception is Esher, Lionel, A Broken Wave: The Rebuilding of England, 1940–1980 (London, 1981)Google Scholar, which looks at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Sheffield, and Liverpool alongside London and Milton Keynes. More recent studies approach the subject from other perspectives: from that of public housing in Shapely's, PeterThe Politics of Housing: Power, Consumers and Urban Culture (Manchester, 2007)Google Scholar; and from that of the history of architecture in Gold's, JohnThe Practice of Modernism: Modern Architects and Urban Transformation, 1954–1972 (London, 2007)Google Scholar. Also instructive is Larkham's, Peter “Rebuilding the Industrial Town: Wartime Wolverhampton,” Urban History 29, no. 3 (2002): 388–409CrossRefGoogle Scholar, though it has little to say about the industrial dimension per se.

5 Kynaston, David, Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (London, 2007), 613Google Scholar; Mandler, Peter, “New Towns for Old,” in Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–64, ed. Conekin, Beckie, Mort, Frank, and Waters, Chris (London, 1999), 215Google Scholar; Larkham, Peter, “The Place of Conservation in the UK Reconstruction Plans of 1942–1952,” Planning Perspectives 18, no. 3 (2003): 295–324.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 For the now classic literature on bomb-damaged cities, see Diefendorf, Jeffrey, Rebuilding Europe's Bombed Cities (Basingstoke, 1989)Google Scholar; Hasegawa, Junichi, Replanning the Blitzed City Centre (Buckingham, 1992)Google Scholar; and Tiratsoo, Nick, Reconstruction, Affluence and Labour Politics: Coventry, 1945–1960 (London, 1990)Google Scholar.

7 The existing historiography only provides a limited guide here, but see Cherry, Gordon, Birmingham: A Study in Geography, History and Planning (Chichester, 1994)Google Scholar; and Pendlebury, John, “Alas Smith and Burns? Conservation in Newcastle upon Tyne City Centre, 1959–1968,” Planning Perspectives 16, no. 2 (2001): 115–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 The Athens Charter was established at the 1933 conference of the Congrés Internationale d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and laid down basic principles of modernist town planning that endured to the 1960s and beyond. Mumford, Eric, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (Cambridge, MA, 2002)Google Scholar; Gold, John, The Experience of Modernism: Modern Architects and the Future City, 1928–53 (London, 1997)Google Scholar.

9 Gold, Practice of Modernism, 10.

10 Ibid., 108.

11 The city's population in 1889 was 216,000; in 1951 it was 284,600; in 1971 it was 294,172 (Development Plan of the County Borough of Bradford [Bradford, 1953], 4; 1971 Census of England and Wales [London, 1971]).

12 Development Plan, 58.

13 Oral History Collection, Interview CO158, 40, Bradford Central Library; Olive Howarth and Smith, Tim, Textile Voices: A Century of Mill Life (Bradford, 2006), 97–110.Google Scholar

14 For a survey of prewar planning, see the speech of Councillor A. F. Mombert to the Council's Reconstruction Committee, Bradford City Council, Minutes of the Reconstruction Committee, 12 February 1946, West Yorkshire Archive Service, Bradford (WYAS).

15 Abercrombie, Patrick, Town and Country Planning (London, 1933), 26.Google Scholar

16 Bradford City Council, Minutes of the Reconstruction Committee, 22 January 1946, WYAS. For Lock's Middlesbrough work, see Lock, Max, ed., The Middlesbrough Survey and Plan (Middlesbrough, 1946)Google Scholar.

17 “Stanley Gordon Wardley,” Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers 34 (1966): 318–19.

18 Bradford Telegraph and Argus, 19 February 1965, 11.

19 “The Grand Designer,” Bradford Pictorial (December 1964), 74; Matless, David, “Appropriate Geography: Patrick Abercrombie and the Energy of the World,” Journal of Design History 6, no. 3 (1993): 167–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Development Plan; SirCook, Frederick, Design and Layout of Roads in Built-Up Areas (London, 1946)Google Scholar; Ministry of Town and Planning, Country, The Redevelopment of Central Areas (London, 1947)Google Scholar.

21 Bradford City Council, Minutes of the Street Planning Committee, 4 June 1947, WYAS; Yorkshire Observer, 13 December 1952.

22 Development Plan, 1, 50; S. G. Wardley, “Planning for Traffic in the Provincial City,” Anonymous, in, The Institution of Civil Engineers, Convention on Planning for Traffic, 1961 (London, 1961), 28.Google Scholar

23 Development Plan, 48.

24 For a discussion of the industrial certificate system, see Gracey, Harry, “The Planners: Control of Employment,” in The Containment of Urban England: The Planning Process, vol. 2, ed. Hall, Peter (London, 1973), 99–118.Google Scholar

25 Bradford Chamber of Commerce Incorporated Minute Books, 1944, 21 November 1944, 192, WYAS; “Rebirth of a City,” Bradford Chamber of Commerce Monthly Journal 43 (July 1963): 21–24.

26 See, e.g., the meeting between the mayor and Lord Woolton, minister of reconstruction, recorded in the council minutes, Bradford Corporation Reconstruction Committee Minute Book, no. 1, 30 August 1944, WYAS.

27 Report on Slum Clearance by the Medical Officer of Health, July 1968, WYAS; “Rebirth of a City,” 21.

28 Witness the stream of articles and advertisements in the Bradford Chamber of Commerce Monthly Journal in the 1950s and 1960s emphasizing the need to improve road, rail, and—increasingly—air links, the last through Leeds-Bradford airport.

29 Apart from the Abercrombie and Forshaw plans for London, Coventry and Plymouth are two well-known examples of towns in which the original plans were modified and watered down. Ken Young and Garside, Patricia, Metropolitan London: Politics and Urban Change, 1837–1981 (London, 1982)Google Scholar; Tiratsoo, Nick, Reconstruction, Affluence and Labour Politics: Coventry, 1945–60 (London, 1990)Google Scholar; Essex, Stephen and Brayshay, Mark, “Boldness Diminished? The Post-war Battle to Replan a Bomb-Damaged Provincial City,” Urban History 35, no. 3 (December 2008): 437–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 See City of Bradford, Council Summonses and Epitome of Minutes of Committees, WYAS, 1955-56 and 1965-66.

31 Yorkshire Post, 9 November 1960; Yorkshire Evening Post, 13 November 1963; Daily Mail, 11 February 1962.

32 Yorkshire Post, 6 April 1963; Bradford Chamber of Commerce Monthly Journal 45, no. 6 (June 1965): 13.Google Scholar

33 Bradford Telegraph and Argus, 19 April 1963. Poulson was later indicted for corrupt practices involving local and national government.

34 Mandler, “New Towns for Old,” 216–17.

35 The evolution of these zones can be traced through the successive updatings of the development plan between 1951 and 1966.

36 Reconstruction Committee and Town Planning Minutes, 12 February 1946, City of Bradford, Official Records of Council Meetings, 1945–46, 146–49, WYAS; Development Plan (1951), 78. See also the comments by a retired wool merchant and chair of the Yorkshire and Humberside Regional Council of the Confederation of British Industry, Oral History Archive, Interview A0007, Bradford Central Library.

37 The description of road systems as “engineered” into the city was widely used in the later 1950s. Gold, Practice of Modernism, 146; Wardley, “Planning for Traffic,” 25.

38 Tripp, Alker, Town Planning and Road Traffic (London, 1942)Google Scholar; Cook, Design and Layout of Roads in Built-Up Areas.

39 Starkie, David, The Motorway Age: Road and Traffic Policies in Post-war Britain (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar.

40 Wardley, “Planning for Traffic,” 25.

41 Firth, Gary, A History of Bradford (Chichester, 1997), 134.Google Scholar

42 Wardley, “Planning for Traffic,” 36.

43 S. G. Wardley, “A Civil Engineer and Town Planning,” in Anonymous, Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers 17 (December 1960): 389–404.

44 Bradford Telegraph and Argus, 19 February 1965; Bradford Bystander, August 1966. The John Milton quotation is from Paradise Lost, book I, 1.730.

45 Richardson, Clement, A Geography of Bradford (Bradford, 1976), 159Google Scholar; this figure was some 12 percent higher than the national average.

46 The growing minority communities were likewise unacknowledged in the 1958 version of the plan and in Wardley's 1963 paper, “Rebirth of a City.”

47 See, e.g., the series “Yorkshire from the Air” that appeared in the Bradford Bystander in 1966 and 1967.

48 Oral History Archive, Interviews A0100 and C0089, Bradford Central Library; Glucksmann, Miriam, Cotton and Casuals: The Gendered Organisation of Time and Space (Durham, 2000)Google Scholar has especially valuable sections on temporality in the lives of mid-twentieth-century Salford textile workers.

49 Ravetz, Alison, The Government of Space: Town Planning in Modern Society (London, 1986), 69Google Scholar; McKenna, Joseph, Birmingham: The Building of a City (Stroud, 2005), 127Google Scholar; W. Turner, medical officer of health, “Report on Slum Clearance,” 1 October 1968, BBD1/7/T13600, WYAS.

50 Development Plan, 140.

51 Yorkshire Post, 26 March 1957; Bradford Pictorial, December 1964, 74.

52 See letter to the Bradford Telegraph and Argus on historic buildings, 30 October 1967.

53 Wardley, “Planning for Traffic,” 35. Hence, Wardley's preference for underground pedestrian subways. The Konrad Smigielski quotation is from Yorkshire Post, 5 November 1955.

54 Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT, 1998), 4.Google Scholar

55 “Nine Storey Building for Swan Arcade Site,” Bradford Telegraph and Argus, 19 April 1963.

56 Daily Mail, 11 April 1962.

57 “Chartist,” Bradford Chamber of Commerce Monthly Journal, August 1970, 25; Ravetz, Government of Space, 61–62. For an example of early use of computers in British urban traffic planning, see Smigielski, Konrad, The Leicester Traffic Plan (Leicester, 1964)Google Scholar.

58 Yorkshire Observer, 1 December 1952; Bradford Telegraph and Argus, 29 August 1989.

59 Firth, History of Bradford, 135.

60 Bradford Telegraph and Argus, 15 February 1965.

61 Bradford Telegraph and Argus, 25 October 1967; Sheeran, George, The Buildings of Bradford (Stroud, 2005), 116.Google Scholar

62 R. G. Jennings, deputy managing director, Arndale Trust, cited from a speech to the Bradford Rotary Club, Bradford Telegraph and Argus, 17 November 1967.

63 Bradford Telegraph and Argus, 9 January 1967; Richardson, Geography of Bradford, 145.

64 Bradford Chamber of Commerce Monthly Journal, 10 October 1966, 13–15.

65 Sandbrook, Dominic, White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (London, 2007), 615Google Scholar; Dunleavy, Patrick, The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain, 1945–1975 (Oxford, 1981), 293–94.Google Scholar

66 Report of a Special Investigation Carried Out by the District Auditor of the No. 3 Audit District into the Accounts of Certain Departments of the Bradford City Council, 11 March 1970, file 28D94/13/1, WYAS. See also City Architect's Department Investigation into the Clerk of Works, W. C. Brown, file 1/7 1359 (1969–73), WYAS. No charges were made by the auditor against Wardley or any staff of the city engineer's department.

67 Bradford Pictorial, December 1964, 74.

68 “For Better, For Worse,” Bradford Telegraph and Argus, 25 October 1967.

69 Letters page, Bradford Telegraph and Argus, 26, 30, 31 October 1967.

70 Councillor Fawcett, Bradford City Council, 5 October 1971, Index of the Official Proceedings at Meetings of the City Council, 1971–72 (Bradford, 1972).

71 Councillor Vincenzi, Bradford City Council, 17 April 1973, Index of the Official Proceedings, 1972–73 (Bradford, 1973).

72 “The Wool Year Reviewed,” Bradford Chamber of Commerce Monthly Journal, 12 December 1966, 19.

73 Richardson, Geography of Bradford, 168.

74 Richardson, Geography of Bradford, 165, 168. Badra Dahya gives a figure of 12,000 for Pakistanis alone in 1964 (“The Nature of Pakistani Ethnicity in Industrial Cities in Britain, ” in Urban Ethnicity, ed. Abner Cohen [London, 1974], 80).

75 Dahya, “Nature of Pakistani Ethnicity,” 86; Richardson, Geography of Bradford, 174.

76 “Survey of City's Immigrants,” Yorkshire Post, 20 July 1962; “Slums of the North,” Yorkshire Post, 24 July 1962; Bradford City Council, “Commonwealth Immigrants Advisory Council: Houses in Multiple Occupation” (1964), BBD1/7/T9771, WYAS.

77 Cherry, Gordon, Cities and Plans (London, 1991), 176–77.Google Scholar

78 Ravetz, Government of Space, 81, 91. Structure plans replaced development plans as the main instrument of local authority planning in England and Wales following the 1968 Town and Country Planning Act. Broadly, they were intended to be more easily responsive to demographic and physical changes than the old twenty-year development plans. J. B. Cullingworth, Town and Country Planning in Britain, 10th ed. (London, 1988), 78–84.

79 Bradford Chamber of Commerce Annual Report, 1946–47 (Bradford, 1947), 1–25.Google Scholar

80 Bradford Chamber of Commerce Annual Report, 1953–54 (Bradford, 1954), 33Google Scholar; Bradford Chamber of Commerce Annual Report, 1954–55 (Bradford, 1955), 25Google Scholar; and Bradford Chamber of Commerce Annual Report, 1958–59 (Bradford, 1959), 17–18Google Scholar; “Changes on Change,” Bradford Chamber of Commerce Monthly Journal, December 1967.

81 “Rebirth of a City.”

82 “Industrial Development in Bradford,” Bradford Chamber of Commerce Monthly Journal, September 1967.

83 Richardson, Geography of Bradford, 146; “Bradford (Economic Prospects),” Hansard, 8 March 1972, 1613.

84 Bradford Telegraph and Argus, 9 January 1969; Hansard, 8 March 1972, 1613.

85 Braine, John, The Two of Us (London, 1984), 1.Google Scholar

86 See Larkham, “Rebuilding the Industrial Town,” 408, for comments.

87 Pendlebury, “‘Alas Smith and Burns’”; Gordon Cherry, Birmingham; Baird, Patrick, The Birmingham Bull Ring (Stroud, 2004)Google Scholar.

88 Esher, A Broken Wave, chap. 5.