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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 October 2015
This article examines the transfer of Swedish concepts of urban modernity to British cities after 1945. It shows how an affinity between design and architecture elites facilitated the transfer of key concepts that were mediated in cities. Moreover, it argues that the often contested transfer of Swedish modern architecture and design to northern English cities initially meshed with municipal ambitions to improve working-class housing and culture. Thereafter the influence of Swedish modern was continued in altered form by the preponderance of Swedish prefabrication techniques in the construction of new poured concrete and high-rise estates during the 1960s. These aspirations to improve the urban environment with Scandinavian examples of good living often magnified the difficulties of modernising the industrial conurbations of the north.
1 Owen Hatherley, ‘How Sweden's innovative housing programme fell foul of privatisation’, The Guardian, 16 June 2013.
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8 Eva Rudberg, ‘Building the Utopia of the Everyday’, in Mattsson and Wallenstein, Swedish Modernism, 152. Rudberg's earlier comprehensive assessment of the Stockholm exhibition and modern architecture is also instructive: Rudberg, Eva, The Stockholm Exhibition 1930: Modernism's Breakthrough in Swedish Architecture (Stockholm: Stockholmia, 1999)Google Scholar. A detailed analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of the 1930 exhibition can also be found in Åren, Uno, Creagh, Lucy, Creagh, Mary, Kåberg, Helena and Lane, Barbara Miller, eds., Modern Swedish Design: Three Founding Texts (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008)Google Scholar. Further insights on the artists, architects and designers who shaped Swedish functionalism can be found in Widenheim, Cecilia, Utopia and Reality: Modernity in Sweden 1900–1960 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.
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13 Bloom, Nicholaus Dagen, Merchant of Illusion: James Rouse, America's Salesman of the Businessman's Utopia (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004)Google Scholar, 129–30. In 1977 David Popenoe's seminal comparison of Levittown and Vȁllingby confirmed these affinities, although with more explicit admiration of the benefits Swedish planning models bestowed on urban dwellers, who in Vȁllingby enjoyed natural beauty and generous access to public space that ‘far exceeded’ equivalent provision in the American suburb. Popenoe, David, The Suburban Environment: Sweden and the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977)Google Scholar, cited in Lane, Barbara Miller, Housing and Dwelling: Perspectives on Modern Domestic Architecture (London: Routledge, 2006), 374Google Scholar.
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25 It is important to note that whilst these ideas continued to have purchase in provincial British cities during the 1950s, this was not the case in Sweden, where planners and architects had by this time largely relinquished 1930s inspired modernism. I am grateful to Catharina Nolin, Associate Professor and Director of Studies at Stockholm University's Department of Culture and Aesthetics, for this insight.
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29 These developments were also the legacy of the 1951 Festival of Britain travelling exhibition, which visited various industrial conurbations, including Tyneside. On Merseyside, Festival of Britain projects included an exhibition of ‘model flats’ that were ‘hopeful representations of life tomorrow for ordinary people’. Connekin, Becky, ‘ The autobiography of a nation’: the 1951 Festival of Britain (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003), 166Google Scholar.
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31 Laing Art Gallery Committee Minutes, 22 May 1947, TWAS, MD/NC/129/6, 65.
32 Laing Art Gallery Committee Minutes, 10 June 1949, p. 109, TWAS, MD/NC/129/6.
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34 This feature had first come to attention with the publication in 1928 of Henry Mess's pioneering social survey of the area. Mess, Henry, Industrial Tyneside. A Social Survey (London: Ernest Benn Ltd., 1928)Google Scholar.
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36 Laura Falender, ‘Concepts of Hygiene and in the Conception and Construction of post-war housing in Oslo’, paper presented at ‘The Urban History Group, Annual Conference: The Living and Liveable City: Health, Lifestyle and Sustainability’, held at St Catherine's College, Oxford, Mar. 2012.
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42 Boyes, ‘North East New Towns’, 85. His plans were vetoed by the NCB's mining manager who exercised their right to obstruct any construction that might impede the extraction of coal on the site, particularly blocks of flats. At a time of acute national need for coal such arguments found government favour and delayed the start of building in Peterlee until 1950, Boyes, ‘North East New Towns’, 37.
43 Lubetkin cited in Parsons, ‘Communism in the Professions’, 470.
44 Minutes of the 53rd Meeting of the Peterlee Development Corporation, 31 Oct. 1949, Peterlee Development Corporation, DCRO, NT/Pe 1/1/1–9.
45 Minutes of the 53rd Meeting of the Peterlee Development Corporation, 31 Oct. 1949, Peterlee Development Corporation, DCRO, NT/Pe 1/1/1–9.
46 Fraser and Kerr, Architecture and the ‘Special Relationship’, 486.
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48 Hollow, ‘Governmentality’, 127.
49 Social Development Committee of the Peterlee Development Corporation, Minutes of the 76th Meeting of the Peterlee Development Corporation, 6 Oct. 1950, Peterlee Development Corporation, DCRO, NT/Pe 1/1/1–9.
50 Social Development Committee of the Peterlee Development Corporation, Minutes of the 76th Meeting of the Peterlee Development Corporation, 6 Oct. 1950, Peterlee Development Corporation, DCRO, NT/Pe 1/1/1–9.
51 John Griffiths, ‘T. Dan Smith: a case for the defence’, paper presented at the ‘Urban History Group Annual Conference’, University of Leicester, July 2013.
52 Also because the influence of socialist architects such as Lubetkin was very much diminished. Fraser and Kerr, Architecture and the ‘Special Relationship’, 28.
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54 Local opposition to housing cooperatives was relatively ephemeral. Within the national Social Democratic Party controversy over recommendations for housing cooperatives surfaced, briefly, in 1919–20, in the context of discussions of continuing parliamentary collaboration with Liberals. After 1945, the presence of HSB as a major provider of social housing in the Swedish context was largely celebrated, prior to recent critical appraisal of the ‘Swedish model’ of welfare and housing. For a full discussion of Swedish housing policy during the twentieth century see Strömberg, Thord, ‘The politicization of the Housing Market: the Social Democrats and the Housing Question’, in Misgeld, Klaus, Molin, Karl and Åmark, Klas, eds., Creating Social Democracy. A Century of the Social Democratic Labor Party in Sweden (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.
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56 Mattsson, ‘Designing the reasonable consumer’, 81.
57 Ibid.
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66 Glendinning and Muthesius, Towerblock.
67 http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/local-news/well-it-seemed-a-good-idea-at-the-time-1037385 (last visited 1 May 2014).
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71 Tyne Tees Television, T. Dan Smith and the Government Regional Plan (1966) Film ID: 18119, North East Film Archive NEFA; Tyne Tees Television, Dan Smith, Regional Development Council (1965), NEFA, Film ID: 17291.
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75 I acknowledge Bill Lancaster for this insight.
76 Boyes, ‘North East New Towns’, 8.
77 BBC, Are the New Towns the Slums of Tomorrow (1964). In this documentary Dr. Robin Best argued that the spatial arrangements in the town were ‘causing unhappiness’ and utilised selected interviews with residents to support his claim. NEFA, Film ID: 17291. The spatial determinism of contemporary criticism was later reinforced in work such as Coleman's, AlisonUtopia on Trial. Vision and Reality in Planned Housing (London: Hilary Shipman, 1985Google Scholar), which attributed the social malaise of British council housing estates directly to their spatial arrangement.
78 Griffiths, ‘T. Dan Smith’; Minutes of the 250th Meeting of the Development Corporation, 4 Jan. 1962, DCRO NT/AP/7/1/34.
79 Griffiths, ‘T. Dan Smith’.
80 Minutes of the 262nd Meeting of the Development Corporation, 8 Feb. 1963, DCRO NT/AP/7/1/34.
81 Significantly the Corporation's appetite for the prefabricated system was lukewarm, despite the advantages it bestowed compared to ‘traditional methods’. This echoes Charles Jenks’ assertion that the British were generally less willing to adopt prefabricated and industrial building techniques than were their European counterparts. Charles Jencks, Modern Movements, 77.
82 Minutes of the Peterlee Development Corporation, 5 Mar. 1964, DCRO NT/AP/7/1/34.
83 Philipson, Garry, Aycliffe and Peterlee New Towns 1946–1988 Swords into Ploughshares and Farewell to Squalor (Cambridge: Publications for Companies, 1988)Google Scholar, 183–4.
84 Crudens, Crudens build with Skarne (1967), Film ID: 19268, North East Film Archive (NEFA).
85 BBC, Anniversary Peterlee (1976), Film ID: 8136, North East Film Archive (NEFA).
86 Minutes of the 314th Meeting of the Peterlee Development Corporation, 2 Nov. 1967, DCRO NT/AP/7/1/34.
87 Philipson, Aycliffe and Peterlee, 183–4.
88 T. Dan Smith was charged with corruption in 1970 and 1973, serving six years in prison from 1974.
89 Emblematic of this was the Anglo-Swedish architect Ralph Erskine's redevelopment of Byker in Newcastle during the 1970s.
