ABSTRACT
With these words, the newly knighted Minister of Works sent a cautiously optimistic New Year’s message via the pages of the Architects’ Journal to those who might identify themselves as modern architects. Somewhat surprisingly, they were in need of encouragement. However much hindsight suggests that architectural modernism was on the threshold of its profound influence on urban reconstruction and renewal in the postwar period, there was little indication that this state of affairs was imminent in January 1954 – the starting point for this study. Few in power promised that eventuality and equally few architectural commentators predicted it. Most readers would have noticed that the writer prefaced his comments with the word ‘gradually’ and might well have concluded that they had heard it before. After all, this was the same David Eccles, who positively ‘took a pleasure in exercising his responsibilities [as Minister of Works] for the demolition’ of the Festival of Britain exhibition site on the South Bank;2 primarily because his government regarded it as a monument to the socialist ideology of the previous Labour administration. At a stroke, this action symbolically punctured any lingering traces of postwar political consensus about planning for London, gratuitously removed most traces of an event that brought colour to the grey postwar city, and returned a formerly blitzed area to something resembling its former status. It was an unconvincing basis for fostering hope for the future.
