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

Winston Churchill led the Conservatives into a drubbing. The 1945 result was arguably a judgment not so much on Churchill himself as on the party he led, and many voters were surprised to find that Churchill had been ousted by the result.⁵ Nonetheless, the near-religious fervour with which Clement Atlee’s Labour government proposed to turn postwar Britain into the New Jerusalem of the party’s dreams, with public welfare at the core of its vision, left no room for doubt as to the seismic shift that the election represented. Even when Churchill and the Conservatives regained power in 1951, they did not feel it wise or practicable to set about dismantling much of the welfare infrastructure that they found in place. To this day, it is a brave UK government (and many would say a foolish one) that proposes widespread changes to a sixty-five-year-old National Health Service still lovingly seen as one of the nation’s greatest assets.

The question of housing was also very much on the mind of the incoming government. Because so much of the prewar housing stock had been damaged or destroyed by years of bombing, there was an unprecedented opportunity to realise some of the architectural visions of the prewar period. Many architects, influenced by the clean lines of modernism and the work that Le Corbusier and his followers were doing in France, sought to turn rows of slum terraces into gleaming white streets in the sky, where high-rise tower blocks were joined by walkways and strategically placed communal spaces encouraged people to mix and mingle. There would still be houses on the ground, of course—row upon row of them, built out as far as the government-protected greenbelt area around each city centre would permit and, where possible, clustered in the “new towns” that applied Ebenezer Howard’s early twentieth-century vision of the garden city to new conurbations outside of London. In all cases, though, the benevolent hand of the state would replace the grasping one of the private landlord, giving people homes in which they could live healthy, communal lives. As Lynsey Hanley noted in her study of the housing estate and its residents, “the enlightened self-interest that characterised the building of workers’ villages … was swelled and amplified by two world wars into a central, life-changing pillar of the new Welfare State.