The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Joe Kerr
emerging as the necessary price for fighting total war. As the contemporary
phrase had it, this had become “the people’s war.”
“AND NOW—WIN THE PEACE”
As the 1945 Labour election slogan quoted in the heading succinctly
phrased it, the end of war was merely the prelude to a new struggle, set in a
hypothetical peacetime future. But how does one monumentalize the future?
Certainly not with crowing triumphalism. Beneficial memorials, ones
that served more purpose than did inert sculpture, had been widely proposed
after 1919, and they now increasingly seemed the correct expression
of the emergent Welfare State. For instance, one project launched as a national
war memorial in 1946 was the National Land Fund. But the idealism
that at least temporarily inspired the reconstruction drive was better symbolized
by something more substantial and monumental: anticipated victory
against the new social enemies became memorialized in the great
building programs of the Welfare State.
In a very real sense, the houses, hospitals, and schools that came to
dominate the landscape of London were monuments to a yet unrealized, hypothetical,
and utopian future, comprising the expeditionary force for a
great new campaign. Aneurin Bevan, opening a new London housing estate
in 1948 spoke of such buildings as if they were the anticipatory fragments
of an equitable society of the future: “I felicitate the new tenants of these
charming new flats. I hope they will have a long and happy life, produce
many bouncing babies, and find full employment. I hope that in the years
that lie ahead they will find a sense of pride in being associated with such a
great municipal activity.” 18 Rather than trumpeting military victory over
external enemies, the city and its architecture became the peaceful monument
for peacetime battles.
THERE ARE ONLY INDIVIDUALS
The traditional public monument lost its power to represent a public consensus
about national events at the very time of a genuine national consensus
about the political and social shape of the future. 19 As long as this
consensus held, so then the architecture that represented it could continue
to serve as the visible testimony to the sacrifice of war, and the triumph of
peace. However, by the late 1970s the politics of Keynesian economics and
welfarism, and the modernist cultural creed with which they were so intimately
linked, were under sustained attack from a resurgent conservatism,
whose triumph came with the election of the Thatcher government in 1979.