Art: Rebuilding England

In 1941 as in 1666 catastrophe is British architecture’s opportunity.

When congested, slum-ridden London was leveled by the Great Fire, Britain’s greatest architect, Sir Christopher Wren, urged his Government to rebuild it better. But, like many a would-be city planner, Architect Wren ran smack into public apathy. The Wren Plan was dropped and London was rebuilt as slummily as before. Wrote Wren’s son later:

“The Practicability of the whole Scheme . . . was at that time demonstrated, and all material objections fully weighed and answered. The only, as it happened, insurmountable difficulty remaining, was the obstinate averseness of [a] great part of the Citizens to alter the old Properties and to recede from building their Houses again on the old ground and Foundations. . . . By these means the opportunity was lost of making the new City the most magnificent, as well as Commodious for Health and Trade, of any on Earth. . . .”

Today forward-looking Britons see the Nazi bomb damage of World War II as a great opportunity of rebuilding not only London, but all of urban England, according to a sensible plan. And this time it looks as if something were really going to be done about it.

Last spring the British Government’s Ministry of Works & Buildings got a dynamic boss: dour, violent-tempered Sir John Reith, who took over his new job with formidable enthusiasm. “God Almighty help us!” bellowed he in his debut speech, “Is this our civilization? Are we to plan our future cities for future totalitarian wars? Are we to have reversible signs marked ‘Garage’ on one side and ‘Air-Raid Shelter’ on the other? Are we always to have public trenches as well as public lavatories? Somebody has got to answer that question before we plan our cities.”

His main problems are the same as those that confronted Wren: 1) public apathy; 2) finance; 3) land and property laws. The first has been solved gratis by the Luftwaffe; British public opinion is primed for a drastic change. The second has been partly solved by the War Damage Insurance Acts of 1940, which subjected all building property and working assets in Britain to compulsory insurance. Most property owners cannot collect this insurance until after the war. Thus a huge fund, insurance on £6 to £8 billion worth of building property alone, is in the Government’s hand for post-war reconstruction.

As for property laws, the speculators who at first bought up bombed sites for a song (intending to collect handsomely from the planners) have been stopped. The Government decreed that land taken over for post-war reconstruction should be paid for at rates not exceeding its value as of March 1939.

The Reith blueprint for the future England tackles, among other big problems, the permanent elimination of slum areas—particularly by introduction of balanced industrial mixtures into one-industry towns. Thanks to electric power and speedy transportation it will be possible not only to rebuild England’s existing cities on more spacious lines, but to decentralize whole industries. Meanwhile Reith’s Ministry had to prevent the hasty and partial rebuilding of bombed areas until the time when its Master Plan could be put into execution.

Details of the Master Plan will be left largely in the hands of local authorities. By last week 15 municipal bodies of badly blitzed British cities (London, Birmingham, Bristol, Coventry, etc.) had consented to work along the Master Plan’s lines. The Corporation of the City of London considered buying outright all the land on which the center of the city stands: the 673 acres long dubbed “the richest square mile in the world.”

Smaller cities were Reith’s guinea pigs. First to be singled out for experiment was Coventry, whose City Architect Donald Edward Evelyn Gibson has produced a set of plans. Last week some of his sketches (see cuts) arrived in the U.S. To disciples of Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius, Architect Gibson’s classic-revival façades and pseudo-Roman columns looked disappointingly conservative. But he had laid out his future Coventry on spacious, parklike lines, put huge squares and fountains where crowded slums and shopping districts once knotted Coventry’s busy traffic.