Lost London, page 27
95 Heston customs building and control tower, 1929. The architect was Leslie Austin, who deployed the clean lines of Modernism, which was already proving to be the new cultural clothing of the age of streamlined locomotives, racing cars, ocean liners and aviation.17 ‘Built of brick, rendered smooth with white cement, the buildings, with their cubic shapes and rectilinear façades, presented interesting contrasts of black and white, solid and void. Corners were rounded off or streamlined and the rectilinear window frames were sometimes carried straight around corners.’18 Heston immediately became the model airport.19 The most striking building in the complex was the big 100-foot × 80-foot (30-metre × 24-metre) reinforced concrete hangar. Designed by Austin in conjunction with Harold Murrell, it was the first all-concrete aircraft hangar built in Britain. Its unprecedented size and shape earned it the nickname of ‘the Arch of Ctesiphon’ (after the remains of a third–sixth–century ce Persian monument in present-day Iraq). Its distinctive curved profile extended to ground level on both sides, with a single large roller door, 18 feet (5.5 metres) high, to the front. Inside, there were workshop facilities and a gallery level with office space, accessed from outside. Photographs of the hangar and the central terminal complex were featured in the RIBA’s inaugural Aerodromes Exhibition at the opening of its new headquarters at Portland Place in 1932.
The layout of buildings was deliberately planned to present a striking appearance from the air, in the shape of a gigantic aircraft pointing magnetic north, giving pilots a useful bearing. At the nose of the imaginary aircraft were the central clubhouse buildings, communications facilities and offices, with flower beds in front in the shape of a propeller. The swept-back ‘wings’ were formed by the east and west extensions and the hangars, while the approach road and its adjoining landscaping formed the fuselage. In the summer of 1931 the Air Park added the Heston Verandah, a new pavilion for spectators set in a public enclosure. The grand opening featured an acrobatic display by Captain T. Neville Stack, who had recently performed the record feat of flying to Berlin and back in one day. ‘There will be displays of crazy flying, exhibitions of simultaneous aerobatics, demonstrations by the Autogiro, humorous displays of “Aerial Marksmanship” . . . formation flying, and trial flying lessons . . . Tea and light refreshments will be served. Passenger flights in the latest type Puss Moth aeroplane will be available at 5s. a flight.’20 It was all in the spirit of airmindedness. As the Architects’ Journal later observed, ‘It is in the interest of civil aviation to interest the general public, not only as an additional source of revenue, but also that, by watching aircraft movements, they may come to accept air travel as a normal mode of transport.’21
Spectators were able to get not only unobstructed views of take-offs and landings but also close-up views of parked aircraft on one of Heston’s innovations: the concrete apron and embarkation area in front of the clubhouse. Another innovation at Heston was its airview clock, 16 feet (4.8 metres) in diameter and clearly visible from the air (and illuminated at night) to assist pilots (this was before inexpensive vibration-free aircraft clocks had been devised). Night-time flying was a speciality at Heston. The airfield boundary was clearly marked with amber electric lamps, and Airwork had collaborated with lighthouse engineers to develop a new system of lighting the airfield using an 800,000-candlepower floodlight mounted on the control tower. It made night flights commercially viable for the first time, along with novelty pleasure flights: ‘Sunday Dinner Night Flights’, with dinner in the terminal restaurant followed by a night flight over London, all for thirty shillings (equivalent to about £90 in 2025).
96 Concrete hangar designed by Leslie Austin and Harold Murrell, 1929. When it first opened, Heston could only cater to private, instructional and club flying, together with a certain amount of charter work; but within a year it had acquired the customs and immigration facilities required by the 1919 International Convention of Aerial Navigation. It was promptly renamed as Heston Airport. Regular passenger services started in 1933, with Spartan Air Lines’s twice-daily summer service to Cowes on the Isle of Wight the first scheduled service. The flight, by seven-seater Spartan Cruiser aircraft, took fifty minutes, for a cost of thirty shillings return. In 1934, Heston was adopted by Jersey Air Lines with its fleet of de Havilland Express aircraft. Other early routes included Blackpool, the Channel Islands and France. Heston’s innovative facilities, together with its communications room with a wireless range of 300 miles, meant that traffic grew at an unprecedented rate.
By 1934, the airport was dealing with nearly four thousand flights and over twelve thousand customs clearances per annum, making the introduction of full air traffic control a necessity. In 1935, the Air Ministry stepped in and took over traffic control from Airwork, centralising the control of both Heston and London’s other major airport, Croydon, under one authority. Heston’s passenger traffic continued to double almost annually, and it came a close second to Croydon in the number of flights it handled.22
Meanwhile, Heston had become a focus for London’s social elite, a kind of aeronautical Ascot. Tickets to the annual Garden Party Flying Displays of the Household Brigade Flying Club were reputedly as hard to come by as those for the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. Leading socialites were among the crowds, including HRH the Prince of Wales, who flew to Heston in his own Puss Moth. From the start, Heston had hosted rich private aircraft owners and their friends, who gathered for joyrides, aero racing and aero touring. In 1930 the London Daily Chronicle carried the news of a group of twenty light aircraft that set off on an eleven-day tour of the continent with the likes of ‘Mr Gordon Selfridge, jun.; Mr W.D. MacPherson, a rich young sportsman; Mr Chalmers, the racing motorist, and his wife; Mr Jack Shand, a Worcestershire hunting man; Mr Harold Peake, of Bawtry Hall, Yorkshire; Mr John Turner, of the Stock Exchange; and Mr Robert Perkins, engineer. Lady Bailey hopes to join the party, which will contain half a dozen women.’ Readers were reassured that the party would be accompanied by two aeroplanes carrying spare parts, and another with two expert mechanics on board. There was a ‘flying cash box’ containing a large sum of money in six different currencies, to ensure that none of the amateur flyers would be stranded without the means of securing a good dinner. Also reassuring for some Chronicle readers, perhaps, was that: ‘All the tourists are taking evening clothes with them, and reserves of underwear are to be sent by air liner to Prague.’23
The growth of scheduled passenger services in the mid-1930s gradually overtook private flying from Heston. More importantly, the limitations of the grass fields at both Heston and Croydon were beginning to become apparent: they were simply too small for the take-off and landing of modern monoplanes, such as the DC-3.24 The Air Ministry was acutely aware of the necessity of addressing the issue before all the available open spaces around London were absorbed by the interwar suburban building boom, and in 1937 it purchased Heston Airport with a view to securing it as part of a prospective London airport strategy. Two government committees were set up to investigate,25 and dozens of possible sites within Greater London were considered before Heston was earmarked for major expansion as one of four airports to serve London, along with Croydon and new airfields at Fairlop (in Essex) and Lullingstone (in Kent).26
Meanwhile, as the prospects of another war with Germany began to loom large, activities at Heston took on an altogether different cast as it became the base for clandestine photographic reconnaissance flights over Europe for British intelligence, organised by Australian businessman Sidney Cotton. Then, throughout September 1938, Heston featured on newsreels worldwide as the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, flew from Heston to Nazi Germany three times for talks with Adolf Hitler as Germany was threatening to invade Czechoslovakia. After his third trip, Chamberlain returned to Heston brandishing an agreement that seemed to have removed the imminent threat (but only by allowing Hitler to annex parts of Czechoslovakia). Speaking at Downing Street a short while later he famously claimed that it promised ‘Peace for our time’. A year later, with the Second World War under way, he was left with a reputation for appeasement and political naivety. But, as Michael Law points out, the bulk of the population in London’s suburbs had regarded Chamberlain as a hero for his tireless work to avoid another war. His arrivals at Heston were ‘greeted by thousands of suburban residents who had found hope that their new houses were no longer under the threat of being destroyed by German bombers’.27
With the outbreak of the Second World War, all civil flying was suspended. Heston became the home of wartime photographic reconnaissance and hosted a succession of units, beginning with RAF Spitfires and Hurricanes controlled from Northolt and going on to include a Polish Spitfire squadron, night fighter operations, early radar countermeasures and, later in the war, transient US Army Air Force units that included the USAAF Headquarters Squadron, the 27th Air Transport Group, the 86th Air Transport Squadron, the 325th Ferrying Squadron and the 112th Liaison Squadron. One of the hangars was destroyed by a German parachute mine in 1940, but otherwise Heston was unscathed. With the war over, the plan for four London airports was scrapped: by now Croydon and Heston were both surrounded by urban development, and incapable of handling the expected increase in civil traffic. Heathrow, with the country’s longest runway (that had been built to accommodate Lancaster bombers during the war), was identified as the nucleus for a postwar civil airport, and in 1946 the newly instituted Ministry of Civil Aviation took over the old RAF aerodrome at Heathrow and renamed it London Airport. Heston was used by 701 Squadron, Fleet Air Arm, until 1947, when it was finally closed because its proximity to Heathrow posed an air safety hazard. The old perimeter track was used for motor racing for a short time, before parts of the field were sold off to Heston and Isleworth local authority for social housing. The rest of the site was still owned by the government, and part of it was used in the mid-1960s for the M4 motorway, including the Heston Services complex. The old control tower and adjoining buildings were demolished in 1978, the operation scarcely witnessed, with no public outcry or media coverage. The only survivor was Austin and Murrell’s concrete hangar, eventually listed, in 2009, as a Grade II building by English Heritage (now Historic England). The hangar is currently part of an industrial park, and is occupied by a cash-and-carry firm.
25
Burtonwood House, Hackney
1948–2021
B
urtonwood House was one of the first expressions of the everyday modernism that transformed London’s urban landscapes in the three decades after the Second World War. A Labour government had swept into power in 1945 with a mandate to implement a comprehensive programme of civil transformation and social engineering that included the establishment of a ‘cradle to grave’ welfare state and the selective nationalisation of major industries and utilities. It was nothing less than a secular Reformation. The three pillars of the postwar welfare state were health, housing and education. Burtonwood House was part of Woodberry Down, a London County Council (LCC) project that incorporated innovative elements of all three pillars. It was hailed in the popular press as ‘The Estate of the Future’.1 Burtonwood House itself was an eight-storey block of social housing in an avant-garde design that was intended to signal the arrival of the new political economy.
97 Burtonwood House, 1973. The election of a Labour majority on the LCC in 1934 under the leadership of Herbert Morrison marked a shift away from building ‘cottage’ estates of two-storey social housing on peripheral sites (so-called out-county estates such as Totterdown Fields, Becontree and the Watling Estate) in favour of higher-density housing in more central sites. The policy was announced in terms of the desirability of keeping families and neighbours as close to their original homes and workplaces as possible, but Morrison made little secret of his intention to secure a large, Labour-voting, working-class population within the boundaries of the LCC.2 The preferred format took the form of four- or five-storey blocks of flats (referred to by Labour as ‘Modern Flats’ rather than tenements). One of the first districts targeted by Morrison for a new-style council estate was Hackney, on the northern fringe of the East End, and in 1936 LCC planners identified a site near the newly opened Manor House Underground station at the northern tip of the Metropolitan Borough of Stoke Newington. Most of the land in the area was owned by the Commissioners of the Church of England, landlords to a small but well-off local population living in substantial Victorian villas with large gardens. The LCC proceeded to acquire a 64-acre site from the Commissioners, exercising its powers of compulsory purchase after highly organised local objections to the scheme (including from the borough council) and a public inquiry. ‘£1,000,000 Slum Dwellers’ Paradise’, was the North London Recorder’s headline: ‘Morrison Drives Out Mansion Owners’.3 In July 1938 a scheme for a housing estate on the site was drafted by the LCC’s architect, E.P. Wheeler. It consisted of 1,660 dwellings in blocks varying from two to five storeys, laid out around a giant central horseshoe shape, inspired, like the Quarry Hill estate in Leeds, by Bruno Taut’s Hufeisen Siedlung in Berlin. The outbreak of war put everything on hold, but during the war the site was identified as part of the strategic plan for the County of London, which Lord Reith’s Ministry of Town and Country Planning envisaged as the guiding framework for the housing drive that would be necessary immediately following the war. John Forshaw, the LCC’s chief architect and the plan’s co-author (with Patrick Abercrombie), replaced Wheeler’s scheme with 1,790 dwellings in a mix of two-, three-, five- and eight-storey units, the taller blocks laid out on a north–south axis, following the Zeilenbau approach favoured by Continental Modernists, with alternating bands of green space and service yards between blocks, so that most rooms received the benefit of either morning or afternoon sunlight.4 The emphasis on flats in the County of London Plan was the result of twin pressures: on the one hand, central and municipal treasuries were keen to minimise the cost of reconstruction; on the other, the architectural profession was keen on the high-density, high-rise tenets of Continental Modernism.5
Opened in 1948, but not completed until 1962, Woodberry Down eventually consisted of 2,500 homes in fifty-seven blocks. They were described as ‘luxury flats’ in the LCC’s first press release. The estate was bounded by the New River, which looped around the site and separated it from two large municipal reservoirs to the south. A promenade was planned along the New River and the internal layout of the estate was based on the American planner Clarence Perry’s ‘neighbourhood unit’ concept, with community services and a site for licensed premises integrated into the housing scheme. Woodberry Down’s social infrastructure included a primary school, a public library, a senior centre and a parade of shops. In 1952 the John Scott Health Centre was opened on the southern edge of the estate, on Green Lanes. It was London’s first purpose-built National Health Service clinic and contained separate consulting rooms for six general practitioners, who had access to a unit for minor operations, a sterilising room, a small laboratory and an X-ray department. There were two dentists, and a pharmacist and two nurses staffed ante- and postnatal clinics and a child welfare clinic. There was a day nursery and school clinic next door. Three years later – and ten years before comprehensive secondary schools became national policy – Woodberry Down secondary school opened on a site just north of the East Reservoir. It was one of the earliest co-educational comprehensive schools in the country. The overall significance of Woodberry Down was that it signalled a move away from unadorned housing estates towards a more integrated approach to neighbourhood development. ‘In this sense, Woodberry Down is of national and even international significance as an early example of an integrated social housing scheme.’6 The entire estate was much visited by municipal dignitaries and housing professionals, eager to see the model for the fledgling new society they anticipated as the result of the welfare state.
Burtonwood House was one of the first blocks on the estate to be completed, along with three other eight-storey blocks, Nicholl House, Needwood House and Ashdale House. There was a conscious attempt to give expression to the ideology of Continental Modernism; Forshaw had been particularly impressed by Swedish and Viennese municipal housing of the 1930s. But the postwar shortage of materials posed a major challenge, and the construction of the eight-storey blocks had to be improvised in several ways. In order to proceed with construction as expeditiously as possible, Forshaw decided to experiment with monolithic reinforced concrete. The shortage of building materials also required a great deal of recycling of materials. ‘The formwork for the shuttering consisted of resin-bonded plywood on the exterior and permanent woodwool for the inner faces. The concreting was done in only three vertical sections, a scheme which is unlikely to be attempted today.’7 The crushed remains of concrete air-raid shelters were used for the floor slab, reinforced by recycled steel from Anderson air-raid shelters. The need for economy was so great that the perimeter fencing of the blocks was made from war-surplus stretcher poles. Nevertheless, the result was identifiably Modernist, strikingly tall and different in appearance to the municipal neo-Georgian of prewar LCC blocks. The LCC had often debated the issue of building high but had always rejected the option because of the costs of installing and maintaining lifts. At Burtonwood House, lifts provided access to all but the top three floors, which were reached by enclosed staircases from the uppermost lift lobby.8 This gave Forshaw the opportunity to provide some of the signature elements of interwar Continental Modernism, with breaks and projections in the façade, cantilevered balconies and the deep eaves. All four eight-storey blocks were finished in cream and light blue rendering, a finish described as Tyrolean Roughcast. The living rooms and the majority of the bedrooms faced the forecourt, while the kitchens, bathrooms and remaining bedrooms were arranged along the back of the block, overlooking the courtyard. In all there were seven two-room flats, forty-one three-room flats, twenty-eight four-room flats and four five-room flats.9
