English Journeys: National and Cultural Identity in 1930s and 19 ...

For a few decades, there was a sense that society could be transformed for the better on the strength of the living conditions of its people.”⁶ Unfortunately, with materials scarce in the austere postwar economic climate, and with high numbers of people facing the prospect of waiting for years to move into a council home, it became clear almost at once that compromises would have to be made by a government whose members found that the bill for establishing a welfare state (which had to be met at the same time repayment commenced on the country’s mountainous war debt) left them with little room for manoeuvre. Whilst the architecture component of the 1951 Festival of Britain, based around a new estate at Lansbury in East London, afforded the public the chance to see the vision realised through facilities, shops, and good public transport serving the well-built homes of the community, the dream was not being realised quickly enough or on a sufficient scale to satisfy everybody.

Once the Conservative Party was back in office, the new minister for housing, Harold Macmillan, pressed on with his campaign pledge to have 300,000 new homes built each year: a figure that was met in each year of the 1950s, it must be said, although this was largely achieved by building more tower blocks than houses. The straitened macroeconomic realities of the nation’s life in the 1950s, however, meant that cheaper building techniques were adopted. The houses and flats of the new estates went up quickly, but the community facilities that had been promised lagged behind, if they ever arrived at all. Those who moved to new towns and estates after the war frequently complained of feeling isolated, cut off from a social network of friends and family, and of finding that the architecture itself, which housed people in identical “boxes,” did not make social engagement easy. Furthermore, the brave visions of the planners often came unstuck when their new buildings were actually inhabited. Successive postwar governments, ever anxious that the private housing sector should increase production in order to take some pressure off the State created within twenty years a climate in which private home ownership became the measure of one’s success. For those tenants housed in estates or tower blocks often unsuitable for their needs and lacking