Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

H. L. Malchow is Walter S. Dickson Professor of English and American History at Tufts University.

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SPECIAL RELATIONS

Stanford University Press

Contents

Preface: Trafalgar Square, 19/20 July 1969........................................................xiIntroduction......................................................................................1The Issues, 1 Cross-Traffic.......................................................................8PART I. MAYFAIR MODERN............................................................................191. London, USA?...................................................................................272. The Embassy and the Crowd......................................................................483. US/Us: The Left's Special Relationship.........................................................64PART II. THE COUNTERCULTURE.......................................................................954. From the Albert Hall to a British Counterculture...............................................995. California Dreamin'............................................................................1186. Venues of Liberation...........................................................................138PART III. FREEDOM.................................................................................1577. Anglo-American Black Liberation................................................................1618. Riding the Second Wave: The American Face of Women's Liberation in Britain.....................1949. Coming Out and Coming Together: Anglo-American Gay Liberation..................................216PART IV. POSTMODERN, ANTIMODERN...................................................................24710. Dystopias.....................................................................................24911. British "Heritage" and the Transatlantic Marketplace..........................................26312. Mecklenburgh Square...........................................................................287Postscript: To the Bicentennial/Jubilee...........................................................303Concluding Remarks................................................................................307Notes.............................................................................................313Index.............................................................................................355

Chapter One

The long decade from the late fifties to the early seventies saw significant changes to parts of the cityscape in inner London. If well short of wholesale reconstruction, there was a visible "modernization" of some key areas as not only bomb sites but also streets of surviving Victorian and Georgian buildings were swept away for new traffic schemes, office building slabs, and the odd high-rise tower. Though there were areas where the changes were dramatic—London Wall near Moorgate in the City, the London County Council's own Elephant and Castle redevelopment south of the River, along Victoria Street in Westminster or north of the Euston Road—the result was by and large a scattered and episodic modernism, and the visual "destruction of the familiar" was not nearly as extensive or as shocking in the sprawling immensity of London as in some provincial city centers gutted for parking garages and shopping precincts. While there was some resistance to many of these projects as they went up—from preservationists, those whom the schemes displaced, and those who resented the lack of local consultation—developers rarely had much difficulty in winning over council officials and Whitehall with their modern aesthetic and its promise of economic regeneration.

Thrusting modernism—its scale, the anonymity of its design, and, especially, its verticality—had long been popularly associated with American culture. Among those who opposed such changes, a rhetoric of invasion and resistance could draw upon a more general unease over American commercial and military supremacy and the loss of national autonomy in the post-Suez era. Such connections were ideologically weighted—on the right, among the suburban middleclass for whom the nostalgic idea, massaged by Betjeman and Larkin, of "village London" versus an American-styled urban modernism had one set of meanings, and on the left where commercial development meant speculative build-it-quick American-style capitalism and the destruction of local working-class communities.

Reaction to modernism and the international style as un-English and threatening national decadence and decline can be commonly found in the interwar period. The influential architect Sir Reginald Blomfield associated it with Continental, often German, émigrés—that is, with authoritarianism and ideologies at odds with "English pragmatism" and traditional values. There was a shift, however, in the popular reading of "foreign" modernism the decade or so following the Second World War, when the best-available association was with the cultural and commercial exporting prowess of the United States rather than the Continental avant-garde, just as, Serge Guilbaut has argued, in the art world the postwar rise of an American abstract expressionist avant-garde "succeeded in shifting the cultural center of the West from Paris to New York." As Britain struggled to reconstruct, "the expansive image of America" not only offered expanded possibilities of urban pleasure, design, and convenience but also, to a different audience, focused "the fears of a social and cultural order that felt itself under siege."

Responses to modernism in the fifties and sixties cannot, however, be seen simply in the terms of a straight-forward dialectic between the defensive domestic and the invasive foreign. One unexplored aspect, for instance, of the intertwining of popular cultures and the reciprocity of their causes and effects is the connection between the nostalgic expectations of ever more frequent American visitors and the marked turn in domestic taste in early seventies Britain toward a nativist subjectivity that on some level was constructed as riposte to the modern American world, but on another was complicit with it (and the American media) in constructing an antimodern reading of "real" British culture. Whatever role a mutually reinforcing, growing synchronicity of Anglo-American imagination and longing might play in the shifting of attitudes, any such process developed over some time and at a pace set by a host of cultural factors well beyond the physical spread of a modernist architectural aesthetic. One must be cautious of projecting backward what later came to seem a popular consensus against the arrogance, uniformity, and alienating scale of much modernist reconstruction of key sites. Moreover, background and social class are probably critically important factors in responses of different parts of the London population to the world about them (the architecture and the tourists) as it changed.

In contrast to the public discourse of the arts and architecture professionals and of the protest and preservationist pressure groups, it is difficult to recover popular, in-the-street reactions of inner-London people going about their daily lives. However unappealing some of these prominent, badly aging urban designs might have later seemed, often from mismanagement and neglected upkeep, one can imagine a variety of reactions at the time, from dislike at the loss of the familiar, through casual indifference, to enthusiasm for at least the conveniences modernism often brought in the form of new shops, cinemas, and supermarkets. There was, in fact, at the level of popular experience, a quite complex interaction over time with these sites. We should also remember that buildings do not go up overnight. Their emergence was a process—often a lengthier process in London than in the States where shopping malls and office blocks seemed to mushroom. In Britain there were planning permissions to be gained, a variety of fora for debate and challenge, and the sometimes impeding nature of British labor relations. Locals might live for some time with the destructive clearance of familiar sites, the blockage of roads and pavements, the hoardings-enclosed spaces like oversized postwar bombsites, then years of construction as fifties and sixties modern grew above the Georgian roof line.

POSTWAR CONSTRUCTION, THE PROMISE OF MODERNISM, AND THE URBAN AESTHETIC

Although the "international style" often favored by fashionable British architects and builders in the decade or so from the mid-fifties was derived directly and self-consciously from the prewar European avant-garde modernism of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, or Walter Gropius, its visible aesthetic would often have been read by many beyond the academic and architectural community as a characteristically American import. This is so not only because the skyscraper revolution happened first there and the world had long looked to Chicago or New York for the most dramatic realizations of large-scale, grid-patterned, skyscraper-canyoned urban modernism. The American association also derived powerfully and more generally from the twentieth century's fascination with metropolitan America itself as symbolically "modern." And thanks to the war and to the magnetism of American money and academic opportunity, often the European originators themselves were now American residents who, though belonging "to the whole world," as Herbert Read said of Walter Gropius, were more specifically citizens of Massachusetts, Illinois, or California. It was also a style that was associated with the commercially driven boom in London's speculative building sector following the lifting of postwar controls by the Tory governments of the 1950s, with, that is, helter-skelter building regimes more familiar to American capitalism than to the urban planning traditions central to much of European modernism.

Through the fifties and into the early sixties there was little government control—at either the local or national level—over the commercial-modern schemes favored by many property developers. As Harold Macmillan, then Minister for Housing and Local Government, said when he introduced the Town and County Planning Bill in December of 1952, "The people whom the Government must help are those who do things: the developers, the people who create wealth." The following year building licenses (introduced during the war to ration building resources) were abandoned, and controls on the construction of office blocks lapsed at both the national and local level. Speculative building, already given a boost by the abandonment of the "development charge," was further encouraged by the fact that local authorities' plans were sharply inhibited by strict controls on their ability to borrow and, after 1959, by their obligation to pay full market value (rather than "use value") for any land they might wish to acquire for public development. While its own schemes faltered, the London County Council approved millions of square feet of privately developed new office space.

A modern style—if not the "Modern Movement"—had modestly come to commercial London in the twenties and early thirties, for instance in the "jazz modern" of the Daily Telegraph Building in Fleet Street (1928) or in the odd, chunky, "almost New York" look of the riverfront of the Shell-Mex House (1931). The first significant piece of academic modernism was, appropriately, introduced by that emblem of contemporary American commercial practice, a progressive advertising agency (Crawford's), which hired Frederick Etchells to design an office building, influenced by Mies van der Rohe, in Holborn in 1930. For the most part, however, these remained relatively idiosyncratic intrusions into the Victorian and Edwardian fabric of the city, isolated buildings that usually did not offer to subvert culturally important locations and, like the moderne growths of bypass strip development beyond the heart of the capital, were not particularly challenging to a local sense of ownership and belonging.

Though the war and its destruction seemed to offer the opportunity for a wholesale re-envisioning of the capital, London—pockmarked rather than razed to the ground—had in fact not been badly damaged in its traditional core. While there were plans for significant reconstruction in the City, where 9 million square feet of office space had been destroyed, elsewhere the prospect of radical redesign, planned by public authorities, faded rapidly. Housing beyond inner London was the great need, and the postwar Labour government concentrated on this rather than redeveloping the city center. In the late fifties and sixties, belated but massive projects of high-rise council-flat development rose, usually on the periphery. These were perhaps not characterized as peculiarly American (though public housing projects in the United States were in fact sometimes referenced as models). The rapidly proliferating public and private "slab-on-a-podium" office building projects of central London, however, were associated with American modern—inspired as they often were by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill's Lever House in New York—and inevitably raised the issue of the "Manhattanization" of the capital's skyline.

By the time taste and the economy changed in the early seventies, this had hardly happened; the footprint left by large vertical or horizontal glass and concrete boxes was strategically limited rather than defining. And as tastes changed, the aesthetic "failure" of the largest redevelopments—the sterility of Victoria Street, the destruction of Notting Hill Gate, the scatter of undistinguished large government office-blocks like the three immense slabs in Marsham Street (1963–71), or the commercial rebuilding of Paternoster Square to the north of St. Paul's Cathedral (1961–67)—became visible confirmation for many of a threat halted if not averted. Some sites, such as London Wall or the Westway motorway flyover, were frozen in time as uncompleted reminders. These highly visible points of deformation became useful as an architectural cautionary just as American political leadership of the "Free World" ran into a dead-end in Southeast Asia and American technological modernism at home collapsed into social malaise and self-doubt.

THE HILTON HOTEL AND THE THREAT OF MANHATTANIZATION

[S]eated in the grill-room of the London Hilton, [Morris Zapp] sank his teeth luxuriously into the first respectable-looking steak he had had since arriving in England.

The Hilton was a damned expensive hotel, but Morris reckoned that he owed himself some indulgence after three weeks in Rummidge and in any case he was making sure that he got full value out of his occupation of the warm, sound-proofed and sleekly-furnished room on the sixteenth floor.

If any single modernist intrusion commanded an iconic status in popular discussion of what appeared to be American-driven change in London in the sixties, it was the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane, proposed in 1957 and finally completed in a somewhat reduced form in 1963 after an extended process of public inquiry and debate, appeals, and redesigns. It was not the first tower in London—before the war there had been the London Transport building in Broadway and the Senate House in Bloomsbury. But these were relatively earth-bound in comparison with the Hilton, the first structure in the city to rise above the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral. On the eastern edge of Hyde Park, it both visually intruded into residential Mayfair and ruined, it was claimed, the rus-in-urbe illusion that the park provided—being when completed the only building clearly visible above the tree-line. Moreover, its top floors offered its patrons—wealthy American businessmen and tourists—a vulgar view, it was said, into the private gardens of Buckingham Palace.

The Hilton was commonly regarded as a harbinger of a vertical revolution, and sparked considerable apprehensive discussion. J. M. Richards, an influential modernist and architectural critic for The Times, warned in 1958 (in the American journal Architectural Review) that, though more high buildings in London were "bound to come" and in a way expressed the city's "vitality," "even a few buildings" of great height around Hyde Park would "seriously disturb" the illusion of "rurality" that such spaces provided—an "awful warning of what to avoid is offered by Central Park in New York." Richards was not opposed to high buildings in London per se—he approved the plans for the Millbank tower as a kind of "vertical punctuation mark" needed "to stop the long, dull horizontal line ... seen from Westminster Bridge"—and thought they would commonly not be as tall as "skyscrapers on the American scale," but worried about their quality (slabs, not airy glass towers), the traffic congestion they would cause, and their diminishing of historic buildings. If built in numbers, though "unspectacular ... by American standards," they would be "foreign to London tradition" and as mere monuments to individual profit, of little "civic significance."

By the end of the sixties there were, Pevsner counted, seven buildings taller than St. Paul's—and work had begun on another, the National Westminster Bank in the City, which would be taller than any of them. In his influential guide to the architecture of Westminster and the City, first published by Penguin Press in 1957 and in two further editions in 1962 and 1973, Pevsner, the doyen of architectural critics of the time, was like Richards, characteristically of two minds. He was famously an early advocate of good modernism and deplored the persistence of conventional neo-Georgian as "hopelessly out of touch." The prospect, however, of an Americanized cityscape led him to warn in 1962 (when the Hilton tower was nearing completion) that planning authorities "had to be careful" of creating an American jungle, though he then believed that "so far nothing is lost yet" and much could be gained by the "judicious siting" of future towers. A decade later, however, he was in a despair tinged with nostalgia (an ethos that grew rapidly as the seventies evolved) about the drastic alteration to the skyline, "wholly to the detriment of London ... the greatest and the saddest change."

These skyscrapers are not as high as those of America and they rarely come in clusters. So the result is not dramatic; it does not remind one of New York or Chicago but of some medium-sized city of the Middle West.

Ironically, Pevsner suggested, London was getting a modernism that was more "American" than cosmopolitan New York—the thin, scattered and unimaginative cookie-cutter modernism of the provincial United States. Similarly, his final judgment on the Hilton tower was that it was second rate even by Hilton's standards. Elsewhere, in Istanbul ("outstanding") and Berlin ("clean and sleek"), they had built good, interesting hotels, but not in London: "It is all a great pity."

Second only, perhaps, to the Coca Cola trademark, the Hilton Hotel chain became a charged motif of spreading American influence and presence abroad and, specifically in the left's critique, of a commercially driven cultural imperialism in the early Cold War era. It represented by the early sixties—to both Americans and Europeans—an example of vigorous, opportunity-grabbing, aggressive American enterprise that was—like the red-and-white Coke ads flashed in bright lights above Piccadilly Circus—highly visible. The only way one could avoid seeing the Hilton tower in West London, the quip ran, was actually to stay in the hotel itself. The Hilton chain had a further meaning. While Coke represented the export of a product that offered to conquer popular taste, the Hilton represented the export of Americans themselves, the tourists in their thousands, the longed-for bringers of American dollars to some, to others a rude invasion.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from SPECIAL RELATIONSby H. L. Malchow Copyright © 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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