Introduction

The ardour with which Modern architects promoted their ideals of the Modern city can scarcely match the vehemence with which the public, and public authorities, opposed them. In Britain, for a brief period after the Second World War, however, Modern architects thought they might have won the battle. Britain had survived the war by a strategy of long-term planning, essentially the planning of civilian life: ‘Years of chaos and mismanagement . . . end on the beaches of Dunkirk. Months of careful planning . . . lead to D-Day’.1 The election of a Labour government in 1945 seemed to cement the historic relationship between Modernism and the Left in Britain. The County of London Plan by Forshaw and Abercrombie in 1943 is as much a monument to Modernism as the Royal Festival Hall by Leslie Martin in 1951. Disillusion that the public would embrace Modernism was swift, but the consequence of war-time planning was that many of the central beliefs of Modernism came to dominate urban planning: the rigorous separation of functions (which, unfortunately, killed many industries) and the provision of low-cost housing (unfortunately, generally low quality, too).