ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the personal reflections of renowned community architect Rod Hackney. He was born in Liverpool, shortly after the height of the Blitz, in 1942. Britain was still in the grip of the post-war housing programme, and building was booming. The Labour government's programme was tackled like a military operation, even using wartime machinery, the Ministry of Supply, converted its output from munitions to the housing materials. Amongst the new styles was that of the Modern Movement, which had begun with the German Bauhaus architects in the twenties and blossomed in the Europe before the war. The only way to build new homes on a massive scale was by the unrestrained use of the standardized, mass-produced materials advocated by the Modernists. The visits to 'model' estates were followed by the visits to so-called successful new towns-which had earned British architects highly respected reputations abroad.
