Chukyo University Institute of Economics
Discussion Paper Series
March 2023

No. 2206
Architectural modernism and the housing question:
the case of England in the 1930s

Tatsuya TsubakiArchitectural modernism and the housing question: the case of England in the 1930s

Tatsuya Tsubaki*

School of Economics, Chukyo University, Nagoya, Japan

Abstract
During the 1930s, the question of popular housing provision became a matter of considerable
public discussion. The decade also coincided with the slow introduction of architecturalmodernism into England. This article explores some of the ideas about a new form of

housing development put forward by its advocates, particularly in relation to the idea offlats as homes, and looks at their achievements in the 1930s. These modern architects werefirm in the view that improving people’s housing conditions was an important task of the day
which called for an application of their skills and expertise in the service of society. Theirpreferred solution of providing blocks of modern flats with a range of social facilities foundfavour with sections of the voluntary housing movement. The official slum clearance campaign
seemingly gave added relevance to the ideas of modernists. But in terms of actual building,their achievements were limited to a few isolated examples.
Keywords: architectural modernism; housing; town planning; modern flats; England; London*E-mail: ttsubaki@mecl.chukyo-u.ac.jp

Introduction
The 1930s represent an important period in the development of housing policy in Britain. During thedecade the question of popular housing provision became a matter of considerable public discussion:
how to provide the majority of working-class people with decent houses and better living conditions.
One of the major themes in the housing debate was the issue of desirable dwelling types and there
was a heated controversy over the relative merits of flats and houses. Thus ‘The battle of flats versus
cottages is now raging in housing quarters’, wrote B.S. Townroe in 1936.1 The Prince of Wales lent
his voice to the slum clearance campaign. The Times reported the prince’s keen interest in ‘its
solution by means of blocks of flats’, being himself ‘acquainted with schemes both at home andabroad where that method has been adopted’.2 George Orwell was advocating flats as an answer tothe problems of rehousing.3
The flat or apartment has been a comparative rarity in the history of English housing. The generalconsensus was that flats were alien to the English (if not British) way of life. Yet there were anumber of factors which helped them come to the fore in the 1930s. A shift in government housing
policy towards slum clearance and central redevelopment questioned the wisdom of providing
cottages with gardens on suburban housing estates. This type of housing development – houses built
to a low density, in informal and picturesque layout, surrounded by greenery – was identified withthe garden city principles and represented mainstream thinking on housing and town planning of theday, both in public schemes and houses built by private enterprise.4 More importantly, however, the1930s coincided with the slow introduction into England of modern architecture. An active minority,
mainly of architects, took up its cause and made their views in public in writing, through exhibitions
and by their buildings. They contributed to the housing debate by criticising the existing form of
residential development and called for solutions on modern lines.
Based mainly on contemporary sources from the period under review, this article will explore
some of the ideas about a new form of housing development put forward by its advocates,
particularly in relation to the idea of modern flats as homes, and look at their achievements in the
1930s. Most of these proponents of modern flats identified themselves with modern architecture as it
developed in the interwar years in several other European countries. Accordingly, the first section of
the article will give a brief account of important developments which took place in modernist
thinking on housing on the continent in the 1920s.

1Architectural modernism and housing in Europe
In the 1920s, Germany was one of the countries where the new ideas of modern architects were mostwidely applied in public housing. In common with several other European countries, Germany was
suffering from a severe shortage of dwellings due to the cessation of building during the First World
War. The increases in marriages and the influx of refugees from eastern Europe exacerbated thesituation. The country also had a legacy of high-density tenement blocks from the nineteenth century
to overcome. The housing programme, therefore, aimed at producing the maximum amount ofadditional accommodation by developing new estates within reasonable distance of city centres at
rents affordable by the working-class people. And this had to be done under stringent budgets.
Research into economy and efficiency in building was carried out, and in several cities, notably
Berlin and Frankfurt, standardisation and prefabrication were utilised to good effect to produce oneof the first large-scale modern housing estates under the direction of modern architects.
Modern architects’ contribution to the solution of the housing problem was based on two claims.
As Sigfried Giedion, a Swiss historian of modern architecture and a fellow traveller, put it in 1927,
these were ‘the change from handicraft methods of construction to industrialization, and thepremonition of a new way of life’.5 Walter Gropius (1883-1969), calling for ‘an architecture
adapted to our world of machines, radios and fast motor cars’, assumed that modern technology andnew materials could be usefully applied to housing, combining ‘the greatest possible standardization
with the greatest possible variation of form…to fulfill varying requirements of those to be housed’.6
Moreover, the machine would act as a liberating force in the lives of ordinary people. Again,
Gropius argued:
Modern man, who wears modern not historical dress, also requires a modern dwellingwhich is in harmony with himself and with the times in which he lives, and is equippedwith all the modern objects in daily use…The machine, which creates standard types, is aneffective means of liberating the individual from the physical labour through mechanicalaids – steam and electricity – and giving him mass produced products cheaper and better
than those made by hands.7
Thus, with modern technology harnessed to social purpose, architecture sought to create a new wayof life appropriate to the machine age.
Bruno Taut (1880-1938) was an architect involved in several of the housing estates built in Berlin.
In his book published in 1924, he discussed the new types of interior planning, using ergonomicallyefficient plans and labour-saving equipment which would free the housewife from household

2drudgery.8 Research into dwelling plans pointed the way to a clear separation of two groups ofrooms, one for living and eating and the other for sleeping. An open and spacious living-dining room
was to be the hub of a family’s activity, to which was adjoined a small kitchen, replacing the
traditional kitchen-living room. 9 Social housing in Frankfurt was a model of efficiency andeconomy in design. Under a radical City Architect, Ernst May (1888-1970), the city developed
standardised dwelling plans with built-in furniture, folding beds and the famous ‘Frankfurter Küche’,a functional kitchen unit with modern equipment so fitted to facilitate activities taking place inside
the kitchen. The latter was designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897-2000), an Austrianarchitect, who was a member of May’s team at Frankfurt. Of course, consideration of economy wasa major factor in these design innovations and dwellings had to be kept minimum in size.
Nonetheless, with these compact and efficient dwellings in planned residential communities
containing churches, schools, shops and other communal facilities and provided with transport into
the city centre, May positively sought to create a new way of living for his residents.10
In matters of layout of blocks, there was also a significant advance. The old tenement tradition
was denounced. Securing fresh air, sunlight and greenery became the pre-requisite. Dwellings were
to be no more than two rooms deep, running the width of the block with all the rooms having
windows. Likewise, research and experimentation into the layout of blocks saw the gradualevolution towards more open and spacious planning. The traditional planning followed the
peripheral model, in which each block enclosing a courtyard continuously lined the main street.
These peripheral blocks could be opened up at the corners or along the sides, letting in a greater
amount of air and sun and avoiding some dark corner rooms. This eventually led to the opening upof both ends of blocks. Instead of having buildings on four sides of a block, a series of straight rows
now ran along the streets or in preferred directions. The favoured orientation of these blocks was tobe north-south giving maximum exposure to sunlight. Moreover, to protect the dwellings from noise
and traffic of the streets and to give them greater privacy, a radically new layout emerged. A parallel
row of blocks, identical in length, was arranged at a standard distance and planned at right angles tothe street. It was first introduced by Otto Haesler (1880-1962) in 1924 for one of his housing
schemes and became widely adopted in the schemes built by radical architects.11 A historian ofGerman architecture of this period has written:
Despite its novel and often bizarre appearance, the new architecture thus gained acceptancein public housing and other municipal architecture in Germany with extraordinary ease…it
was increasingly sponsored by public officials of nearly every persuasion who approved of3radical architects’ economical building methods and high standards of comfort andconvenience.12
Similar developments were taking place in other European countries. In Holland, J.J.P. Oud(1890-1963), in his work on low-cost housing, designed two-storey terrace houses which weregeometric in shape and white-washed with a horizontal band of windows. 13 Le Corbusier(1887-1965), in his Citrohan (a pun on the mass-produced Citroën car) projects, established his
design concept for a standardised, mass-produced dwelling. In its essence, it consisted of arectangular box with a completely glazed front wall, containing a double-height living room in thefront half of the box and the remaining accommodation stacked on two levels at the back.14 He
followed this up with a scheme of ‘Freehold Maisonettes’ which were blocks of double-height flats
rising up to eleven storeys. Of these maisonettes, Le Corbusier wrote:
A communal service provides for all necessities and provides the solution to the servant
question (which is only just beginning and is an inevitable social fact). Modern
architecture, applied to so important an enterprise, replaces human labour by the machinesand by good organization; constant hot water, central-heating, refrigerators, vacuum
cleaners, pure water, etc…Each maisonette has its own gymnasium and sports room, buton the roof there is a communal hall for sports and a 300 yard track…There is the great
covered court, on the roof of the underground garage, for tenants. Trees and flowers allaround the court, and all along the street in the gardens; in each hanging garden flowers
and creepers.15
Having devised his ideal dwelling type, Le Corbusier went on to work out his town planningscheme ‘Contemporary City of Three Million Inhabitants’. Two types of residential block were
contemplated: a continuous block with set-backs of six double storeys, advancing and receding amid
the lush surroundings of a park; and a rectangular block of five double storeys, enclosing a vast open
space. In both cases, his prototypical maisonettes, double-height and each with its own garden
terrace, became the unit dwelling. On the ground floor of these housing blocks were to be placed
shops, restaurants and laundry.16
A noteworthy early realisation of these new design concepts could be seen in a small experimental
housing development constructed in Stuttgart between 1925 and 1927. Weissenhofsiedlung wassponsored by the Deutscher Werkbund, a German organisation of architects, craftsmen andindustrialists founded in 1907 to improve industrial design and promote standardisation in building.
Overseen by Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), who was also one of the pioneers of modern

4architecture, leading modernists of the day, among them Gropius, Taut, Oud and Le Corbusier,contributed their designs to the project. An exhibition took place of the resulting development in
1927 in an effort to disseminate the idea of modern housing to the public. Though the majority of thebuildings at Weissenhofsiedlung were single family houses and terrace houses, Mies’ own design fora block of flats, geometric in form with rational interior planning and displaying horizontal bands ofwindows, offered the most striking image of the new architecture that could be applied to mass
housing.17
Thus, the proponents of the new architecture brought to bear its new principles and new methods
upon the solution of popular housing provision and achieved some success, most notably inGermany. Outside the few isolated examples of high flats, the preferred type of dwelling in the
1920s was a straight row blocks of flats, three to five storeys high, containing units of minimum size
but with efficient up-to-date amenities.

The foundation of Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne
On the strength of these developments, an international organisation of modern architecture(Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne – CIAM) was founded in 1928 to disseminate theprinciples of modern architecture.18 Several of Europe’s leading modern architects took part. The
declaration from its first meeting in La Sarraz, Switzerland, called for architecture to be put ‘back in
its true sphere which is economic, sociological and altogether at the service of humanity’. It also
touched upon town planning, albeit in very general terms:
Town planning is the design of different settings for the development of material,
emotional and spiritual life in all its manifestations, individual and collective, and it
includes both town and country.19
The CIAM resolved henceforth to work towards solving the town planning problem of modern
society through the medium of architecture.
The housing question dominated the early meetings. The second congress in Frankfurt (1929)
discussed the problems of small, efficient dwellings for low-income families. May argued
convincingly for the mass provision of small dwellings to be let at affordable rents as the way out of
the housing shortage. Some advanced the filtering-up theory of providing larger units for thewell-off sections so that the dwellings they vacated could be turned over to the poor. They pointed
out the increasing cost per unit of small dwellings and the possibility of negative psychologicaleffects of overly small units on the tenants. For Gropius, it was a fundamental responsibility of the5society to provide dwellings for its members. He referred to the contemporary tendency towards
smaller household sizes and defended the provision of smaller dwellings as answering a genuine
need.20 The next congress in Brussels (1930) took up the subject of rational housing development.
The discussion turned on the relative merits of using low, medium and high blocks of flats. It was
Gropius who presented his study of the relationship between plot ratios and building heights. On agiven plot developed with parallel rows of flats, allowing for the equal angle of sunlight, hedemonstrated that the habitable space increased with the number of storeys. Since high blocks would
be placed at a distance to allow for the same amount of daylight to penetrate the lower floors, they
were seen as having space-liberating potential. Thus, Gropius argued that by building high flats,
Instead of the ground floor window looking on to blank walls, or into cramped and sunlesscourtyards, they command a clear view of the sky over the broad expanses of grass andtrees which separate the blocks and serve as playgrounds for the children.21
The fourth congress in 1933 discussed the problems of the modern city and produced a set of
propositions on modern town planning called the Athens Charter. The charter decried the suburb(describing it as ‘the symbol for waste’, ‘a kind of scum churning against the walls of the city’ and‘an urbanistic folly’) and set its face against garden cities which were seen as ‘an illusory paradise,an irrational solution’. The principle of functional zoning was upheld and the four principal
functions of town planning were spelt out: housing, work, recreation and traffic. On housing, highflats were the favoured solution and the charter went on to describe its requirements:
If it is to be filled with fresh air and sunshine inside, it must also extend outside by various
community facilities. So that dwellings can be more easily supplied with common services
dealing conveniently with the supply of food, education, medical attention, and theenjoyment of leisure, it will be necessary to group them in “habitation units” of adequate
size.22
Through these early CIAM meetings, the idea of high flats placed in a park-like setting, equippedwith communal facilities in place, came to be endorsed by leading modern architects of the day as adesirable form of housing development. The significance of modernist thinking on housing, as
outlined above, lay in the fact that it influenced the emerging core of modern architects in Englandand set the tone of the debate on housing types in the 1930s. The first collective statement formodern architecture would come from those who rallied around a group representing the British
wing of the CIAM.

6

The Modern Architectural Research Group and the early English modernists
The Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS)23 was set up in early 1933, at the invitation of
Sigfried Giedion, the international secretary of the CIAM, to act as ‘the nucleus of a British group ofarchitects, engineers and town planners, whose work will be officially associated with the research
programmes of the International Congresses’. 24 The character and aims of the MARS were
described by the Architects’ Journal in 1934:
The Group is made up of modern architects and allied technicians who have been willingto profit by those experiments in form and function which were worked out almost
simultaneously in many countries during the last quarter of a century and which haveproduced a modern style both rational in character and international in distribution, andassume some of the architect’s social responsibilities. The Group has been formed
primarily for research, which, within the terms of the task the members have setthemselves, includes not only technical investigations into purely architectural matterssuch as planning and structure, but also includes rather deep probings into the whole
structure of society.25
Because of its vague commitment to an architecture in the service of society, its obsession withresearch and personal differences, the MARS was not too successful in functioning as a collective
and as a group could not put across a coherent message on housing, but as its membership (itnumbered 71 in 1938) shows, the group included most of the figures who represented a force callingfor a change in the existing form of housing development.26 In their capacity as MARS members or
as individuals they put forward images of modern housing. Wells Coates acted as chairman, with
Maxwell Fry as vice-chairman and F.R.S. Yorke as secretary. Its membership numbered those inarchitectural professions as well as writers, critics and other lay members who were sympathetic tothe cause of the new architecture. These included the Connell, Ward and Lucas partnership,
Frederick Gibberd, Berthold Lubetkin, Joseph Emberton, John Gloag (all architects), Ove Arup (astructural engineer), Thomas Sharp (a town planner), P. Morton Shand (an architectural critic), H de
Cronin Hastings (editor of the Architectural Review), John Summerson (an architectural historian),
Geoffrey Boumphrey (an engineer and writer) and Charles de Peyer (a wealthy client of Connell andWard).27

Wells Coates
Wells Coates (1895-1958)28 laid the theoretical basis for the need to have modern housing. He was a7

Canadian, born in Japan, with a doctorate in engineering. He did some interior designing, planningand furnishing shops, showrooms and redecorating houses and flats, before coming to architecture.
At the most general level, Wells Coates would argue for progressive architecture in the service ofsociety, an idealist strain shared among MARS members:
What is the essential intention of the art of architecture? Reduced to its simplest elements,
architecture is the art of providing ordered shelter for a multitude of human activities. In
this sense it has always been the most direct expression of the culture of an age, the least
personal, the most objective, art…
In the transitional society of today, there is no communal desire to achieve order andsignificance in the arrangement and aspect of life…Communal amenity is rarely
considered. And there are always practitioners in architecture who will irresponsibly
provide what men ignorantly and wrongly and anti-socially desire for their own personal
ends…architecture has to serve the purposes of the people as well as the purposes ofbeauty. Thus will it ‘serve life’…we are not so much concerned with the formal problemsof ‘style’ as with an architectural solution of the social and economic problems of thetoday…As creative architects we are concerned with a Future which must be planned
rather than a Past which must be patched up, at all costs.29
Wells Coates was particularly interested in the changing nature of architecture in relation to themodern society he saw emerging. For him a modern dwelling was a function of two factors: theinvention of new materials and the demands of modern living. On the one hand, he used thetechnological argument, claiming that new materials and new building methods justified a new typeof dwelling. The mechanical devices such as ‘heating, lighting, ventilating, refrigerating and sanitary
processes, and the machines for vertical circulation’ were to be integral part of its construction as
were ‘furniture designed into the house as part of architecture’.30 He took to designing radio sets,
electric fires and a range of furniture which was simple and economical. Wells Coates also
experimented with prefabrication and the standardisation of units which could be arranged in all
manner of ways and allowed the maximum interchangeability. And he also stressed,
The paramount importance of building in largeish units, as the building of small detachedhouses will very quickly be discarded, when it is shown how economical and comfortable
and convenient other methods may be.31
The main justification for a modern dwelling came from the change in people’s mode of living.
‘Our society is above all determined to be free’,32 wrote Wells Coates. He thought the home in the8traditional sense of the word as a permanent place no longer applied. People moved after work, forholidays, even across frontiers, leaving the old home and family, all of which made for ‘a new,exciting freedom’. This new freedom and the bustle of modern life outside the home made ‘the real
comfort, quiet and convenience required in our dwellings’ an essential purpose of the design. He
noted the trend towards smaller family units and an increase in households requiring separate
dwellings. The shortage of adequate accommodation for hundreds and thousands of people and theservant problem of the upper classes were bringing the homes of the different classes more into thesame category. All this pointed to smaller dwellings planned compactly and economically, withmodern conveniences.33 Wells Coates was particularly critical of the bric-à-brac and the generalclutter characterising the conventional interior of a home, which he said, created ‘a museum-type
intimacy’. People were rarely aware that ‘a room exists for the man, not man for the room’.34 Since
people were moving around more and dwellings becoming less permanent, he believed that built-in
furniture should be provided wherever possible:
Very soon it will be considered quite as fantastic to move accompanied by wardrobes,
tables and beds, as it would seem today to remove the bath or the heating system, including
all pipes.35
The form of housing development that he envisaged pointed to blocks of flats containing modern
efficient dwellings coupled with a range of communal and recreational facilities. As Wells Coates
expanded on it:
Every dwelling has got to have the best lighting, heating and cooking devices, and someform of heating for the general warmth…the day of the detached house, with obvious
exceptions, is rapidly drawing to a close…the next step in the design of dwelling units
must be the block or group of dwellings with every centralised service which the sharingof costs makes economically possible: the provision of large open spaces for social,athletic and other community interests within a stone`s throw of one’s dwelling –swimming baths, nursery schools, children’s playgrounds, parks and walks – all as an
essential element in the main design of the community life… The main community blocks
would be four or five stories high, and so placed as to give the principal living and sleeping
rooms the best aspect – light, sun and air…36
The application of these ideas in actual building found partial and somewhat extreme expression
in the Lawn Road Flats (1934) in Hampstead, London, built for the Isokon Company.37 The
building was four storeys high, built in reinforced concrete and consisted mainly of ‘minimum’9

service flats approached by access galleries cantilevered out of the building. Each unit was provided
with built-in furniture and a well-equipped kitchenette. Such services as heating, hot water, cleaning,
bed making and collection of refuse were included. There was a communal kitchen on the groundfloor from which meals could be ordered (later replaced by a residents’ club-cum-restaurant).38 As
J.M. Richards, a prominent architectural critic, later remarked, Wells Coates planned the building forthe new type of man who wanted to ‘live light’, unencumbered by possessions. And the building wasa success in practice, and became a meeting ground for the architects and other refugees fleeing Nazi
Germany.39

F.R.S. YorkeIn the same year as the Lawn Road Flats were completed, F.R.S. Yorke (1906-1962), a founder
member of the MARS, brought out a book called The Modern House. It consisted of an essay on theorigin and development of new domestic architecture, followed by illustrations of modern house(commonly featuring flat roofs, whitewashed surfaces with expansive glazing) from all over theworld. In line with the thinking of the MARS, the new style was explained in terms of the needs andmeans of the modern society:
Twentieth century architecture is dictated by new methods of construction and newmaterials, and by unprecedented practical requirements, a new outlook on life, a new senseof space and time.40
He was aware of the fact ‘the individual architect-designed house’ was a luxury or might beundesirable in ‘an age of big population’ and maintained that the small house had become amass-production problem.41 The importance for the modern architect of designing a villa, he argued,
lay in the fact that it afforded an opportunity for experimenting in new materials and new methods
and examining what modern architecture could do to help solve the problems of housing.42 In fact, anotable feature of the book was that it was prefaced by an introductory plea for flats. A reformed
type of flats and controlled land development was the solution to the housing problem. He wascareful to distinguish modern flats from the traditional high density tenements lacking light, air andopen space:
Modern construction permits higher building, and higher building means economy in land.
When a building rises to ten or twelve stories the saving is considerable, and the land thatis freed becomes park-land between the building units.43
And dwellings grouped in modern flat blocks would make arrangements such as heating, laundry,10

hot water supply common to all residents and thus lead to economy in planning. The way thisdevelopment of flats would look was implied by the illustrations which was a scheme of ten-storey
flats by Gropius (‘planned in narrow blocks, single flat thickness, spaced apart so that daylight may
penetrate to every room’), a diagram showing the evolution of layout resulting in the Zeilenbau plan(‘rational orientation and economical layout and structure’) and a project for a residential quarter(‘planned as a self-contained group with communal dining room, kindergarten, school, club, central
kitchen and sports stadium’).44
In 1937, Yorke produced the book The Modern Flat, in collaboration with a fellow MARS
member, Frederick Gibberd (1908-1984). The book was primarily one of plans and pictures. Some
50 examples of modern flats from Europe including England and America were illustrated. The
accompanying text went over the same argument for flats as in the previous book. Only this time theauthors were more intent on exposing the ills of existing towns as grey, dull and dirty places, withhaphazard developments producing a jumble of industrial, commercial and residential buildings. Inturn, the shortcomings of resulting suburban developments were pointed out, with multiplication ofsmall houses along the roads and eating into the countryside, the disfiguring of the landscape, andthe long journey incurred to and from work, with its great waste of land and increased outlay on
services. They claimed:
We are making this book because we believe that we shall want to live in a tall building ina park, with common amenities, air and view; and that the problem of housing cannot be
solved by the provision of millions of little cottages scattered over the face of the country,
whether in the garden city manner, or as speculatively built stragglers.45
Aesthetic judgement sometimes got the upper hand. It was invariably the interminable row of little
houses that caused squalor in towns, as factory buildings in most cases had ‘its peculiar aesthetic
quality and scale’. In place of this squalor,
A few tall buildings rising up to the light and air, spaced well apart, properly served with
communications, would keep the dwellings away from through traffic roads, and theirnoise and danger, and would house all the people whose individual villa-homes now makecongested areas that stretch for miles. Open spaces for walking and recreation, with cafésand places of entertainment between the blocks would bring the open country right into thetown.46
Striking aerial photographs accompanied the text that showed a maze of roads and a jumble ofbuildings in town, untidy rows of semi-detached houses in a suburb, small houses straggling along a11

trunk road into the country and an example of speculative development encroaching on the
countryside. To these were juxtaposed an artist’s impression of a project by Walter Gropius and E.
Maxwell Fry47 at St Leonard’s Hill, Windsor, showing free-standing flats in a park-like setting. The
project was for 110 flats with restaurant, lounge and ballroom. Only one acre out of the 33-acre sitewould be built upon and the remaining 32 acres of parkland would remain untouched, its view
available to everybody. The actual examples of modern flats illustrated in the book, the authors
argued, were to be units in a large-scale urban development, ‘designed not as a means of crowding
more and more people into a given area, but as a means of releasing more ground space for parks,
roads and gardens’. This would only be possible ‘when public authorities take over and clear large
areas in existing towns, or develop new areas’.48

E. Maxwell Fry
E. Maxwell Fry (1899-1987), another founder member of the MARS, reviewing Yorke’s The
Modern House reiterated the point about the need to have collective dwellings to serve the people:
The small house, fulfilling a deep want that certain happily placed section of thecommunity have money to gratify, provides the architect with the means of putting into
practice ideas which have their final application in the service of the wider community –when the community is prepared to receive them.49
His sustained interest in the social aspects of architecture is clear from the statement he made later in
his own book, Fine Building, as the nation prepared itself to take on the task of post-war
reconstruction following the Second World War:The housing of those sections of the public which we as architects are unable to cater for
as individuals is unquestionably the biggest job before us.50
Prior to the war, he was writing of architects’ vital contribution to the solution of the slums. He
saw the problem as three-headed: rent, construction and land. Since rents had to be kept within themeans of the tenant, the solution needed to be found in terms of construction and land. On
construction he complained about the practice of dressing up flats ‘in the blind faith that only
decency is Georgian’, and proposed instead ‘the standardisation of units, a standardisation fromwithin outwards’, as the way to economy. The design of the flats, containing as they do small unitsof nearly similar size, was particularly susceptible to a process of fine standardisation and functional
planning. This would result in ‘minimum’ bathrooms and ‘minimum’ kitchens, the layout of whichshould be studied from the housewife’s point of view. The labour cost of construction would be cut

12

by factory production of components.51 Moreover, in his eyes, existing flats in England had been‘built like little houses disconnected from the ground’ which left a lot to be desired in their planning.
Maxwell Fry admitted that in terms of size of rooms these flats provided a generous minimum, but
he also pointed out their shortcomings, such as the lack of balconies for babies and children,common use of gallery access to flats, the lack of hot water provision to sinks, generally vertical andsmall windows, insufficient utilisation of ground floor space and the irregular disposition of theblocks.52 Individual rights in property clearly stood in the way of land acquisition for the purpose of
housing, forcing the existing slum clearance schemes to be piecemeal and wasteful. Maxwell Fry’s
answer was to ‘plan over areas sufficiently wide to offer the services of a planned community’ as ‘aconstructive step in the building up of a new, better and more economically managed urban
community’, presumably with the help of wider town planning powers.53

Berthold Lubetkin
Berthold Lubetkin (1901-1990) was another important figure in the MARS group. He was a Russianémigré and had spent several years in Paris before settling down in England in 1930. He was
influenced by architectural developments in Paris during the 1920s, especially the work of Le
Corbusier. He also kept in touch with the architectural debates taking place within the Soviet Union
and was imbued with a strong sense of social responsibility and political commitment in bringing
architecture to serve the people. When he wrote, in a survey of Soviet architectural thinking, ofSoviet architects’ ambition as being ‘not simply to build architecturally, but to build
socialistically’,54 it no doubt reflected his own sentiments. Lubetkin formed the firm Tecton with anumber of Architectural Association (the oldest independent school of architecture in Englandfounded in 1847 as an alternative to the traditional training of architects by apprenticeship) graduates
and together they designed, among other things, the High point Flats in Highgate, London.55
Though their rentals put them in the middle-class housing category, these flats, particularly High
Point I (completed in 1935), with its interesting plan and some formal qualities, were a valuable
contribution to modern architecture and ‘certainly the finest block of flats built in the country’ in the
1930s.56
In 1935, unhappy with ‘the apolitical nature of the MARS and the failure of that group to clarify
its purpose and determine its actions’,57 Lubetkin and a minority broke off to form the Architects’and Technicians’ Organisation (ATO).58 Some members of the building industry also took part in the
new body. One of the aims of the ATO was to work for the adoption of a rational progressive policy13

on housing and town planning, to secure the rehousing of the millions of families under the bestmodern conditions. The ATO also allied itself with the Association of Architects, Surveyors andTechnical Assistants (AASTA), a white-collar union for salaried architects, and concentrated on the
defence of official architects (architects in the employ of local authorities and public bodies) against
the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) which catered in the main for qualified architects inprivate practice, the status to which many of the MARS members belonged.59
In 1936, the ATO Housing Committee organized an exhibition on working-class housing. The
accompanying pamphlet60 was an indictment of the housing policy of the Conservative-dominatedNational Government. Drawing on contemporary social surveys and medical research, it wasdemonstrated that even the rents of subsidised council housing was often beyond the means of thetenants and that bad housing conditions induced chronic ill health, malnutrition and high mortality.
The committee calculated that the official slum clearance lagged far behind the actual need for new
dwellings. The ATO called strongly for positive intervention by the government in the provision of
housing, making it a national service. The remedies suggested included higher taxation andcontrolled rents. In the actual provision of new dwellings, the ATO insisted that central areas be built
according to modern standards of health, comfort and convenience, and gave an idea of the kind of
housing development it envisaged:
Large balconies can and should be provided for all blocks of flats, where young children
can sleep and play in plenty of sun and fresh air. Planted roof terraces should be provided
over the whole area of the building.
The various blocks in any housing scheme should be so laid out that every flat receive
direct sunlight for several hours every day and that all rooms receive enough air for
efficient ventilation. Too often blocks of flats are built with narrow internal courts wherethese principles are ignored.
In refuse disposal, a system has been evolved in which refuse is evacuated through thebowl in the sink, and is destroyed in an incinerator in the basement…
There seems no reason now why every block of flats should not have an efficient central
heating system, whereby each room can be efficiently heated at considerable saving in costover the system of individual heating units.
Centralised laundries, crèches, nursery schools, playgrounds, etc., should all be provided inlarge housing schemes, as they were in Vienna, and as they are now provided in all new
housing estates in Soviet Russia.61

14

At around the time of the setting up of the ATO, articles and reports featuring flats started toappear in the organ of the AASTA, Keystone, 62 reflecting the close relationship of the twoorganisations. The general tone was objective rather than partisan, but with an emphasis on making
out a fair case for flats. An article on housing standards, in effect, argued the advantages of flatsplanned in social units with shared services and amenities.63 In another issue, the planning of private,
old-type mansion flats for the middle classes was juxtaposed to a review of The Modern Flats byYorke and Gibberd.64 Inspired by examples of modern housing projects carried out on the continentand by the work of public institutions like the Miners’ Welfare Committee which designed and built
pithead baths and other social facilities,65 the AASTA also championed the cause of those salaried
architects who sought to apply their skills in remedying the social ills of bad housing and poor living
conditions. It saw government involvement in popular housing provision as an important step in the
direction of extending the social services which would offer greater scope for ‘official architecture’(a term used to describe the architectural work of local authorities and other public bodies) inproviding schools, hospitals, health centres as well as housing.66 One AASTA member called forarchitectural departments of local authorities to be expanded so that ‘full advantage could be takenof large-scale methods of production, of prefabrication, mass production and standardisation, ofmodern systems of heating, refuse disposal, etc.’.67

Thomas Sharp
Thomas Sharp (1901-1978),68 a town planner by profession, was also drawn into the circle of the
MARS,69 by his sustained criticism of low-density housing development, characteristic of garden
cities and suburbs, and by his espousal of the beauty and order of compactly-built towns. Hispolemic was set out in two books, Town and Countryside (1932) and English Panorama (1936). Partof the latter, describing the historical development of the English town and forming the basis of thebook, had, in fact, appeared earlier as a series of articles in the Architectural Review (which becamea major mouthpiece for modern architecture in the 1930s). Sharp’s main thesis was that the distinct
qualities of the town and the countryside had to be re-established:
only through the preservation of towns as towns can the countryside be saved; and only
through the limitation of rurality to the country can the town be preserved.70
Increasingly through the interwar years, the destruction of the countryside by uncontrolled
development became a matter of concern.71 Sharp saw it as a creation of the ‘semi-suburbia’ or the‘universal suburbia’ at the expense of both the town and the countryside:15

From dreary towns the broad, mechanical, noisy main roads run out between ribbons of
tawdry houses, disorderly refreshment shacks and vile, untidy garages…Over great areas
there is no longer any country bordering the main roads: there is only a negative
semi-suburbia.72
Sharp recalled a fine tradition of English town building in the eighteenth century, which expressed
itself in a series of related streets and domestic squares in harmonious association with the unity andconformity of Georgian buildings. He argued that their form and beauty reflected the cooperationand collective way of life. Moreover, this town building took an individual line within a democratic
tradition without any autocratic control from above, growing out of the lives and customs of thepeople. This tradition of architectural unity and civic design, however, had been debased in theprocess of industrialisation, producing ‘vast inescapable deserts of arid brick’ in towns, while thefirst signs of suburbanisation became evident in the building of detached villas for the middle classes
set in landscaped gardens. This ‘open development’, as Sharp described it, gained greater
significance because of the Romantic Revival which emphasised the informal, natural andpicturesque setting in the layout of towns. The straight road was taboo. Country villas and vernacularcottages facing onto wriggling and tortuous streets became the ideal. This was a complete antithesisof the traditional town, which had been built in close formation, with buildings fronting onto formal
streets and squares. Of course, at first these picturesque suburbs were the privilege of the wealthy
and the powerful, though model industrial villages at Bournville and Port Sunlight towards the endof the nineteenth century showed how the principles could be applied in favour of ordinary workmen.
The sorry state of the existing town was fuelling people’s desire to escape from it, and the generalrevulsion against it, he said, led to its ultimate destruction. Sharp saw Ebenezer Howard’s Garden
City as the culmination of the Romantic ideal of ‘open development’, obliterating the traditional
concept of the town, and as such, vehemently reacted against it:[Howard] had no interest in the town as a thing of beauty, a work of art, an expression ofman’s dignity and civilization…The town reformer showed his true intention at the very
beginning of his work: he was out to destroy it.73
Howard’s idea of the third alternative, ‘Town-Country’, having the characteristics and advantages ofboth town and country, was unacceptable to Sharp, who called it a hermaphrodite. To Sharp, it wasessentially back to the land, nature-worship romanticism:
In Town-Country the country must prevail. In Garden City (which was, of course, thesame thing) the emphasis must all be on the garden. So all the houses were country

16cottages set singly or in pairs along curving countrified roads diversified with hedges, trees
and shrubs, herbaceous borders and green swards. Informality and romance was the
key-note. In fact when all was said and done Town-Country arrived as but a popular
edition of Bournemouth and the rest of the resorts of the Victorian upper-middle classes.74
Within a few years of the publication of Howard’s ideas, the first garden city was set up, and the first
Town Planning Act of 1909, instead of reviving ‘Civic Design’, as Sharp would have liked,
consolidated the garden city principle, which was, in effect, that of ‘open development’ –semi-detached houses, or at most four houses in a block with gardens, built to a density of twelve peracre, and set well back from the street behind deep building lines. The damaging effect of this typeof development on the town and consequently upon the countryside was clear to Sharp:
Hundreds of thousands of houses have been built to this standard, and scores of thousands
more to an enforced density that is still lower – ten, eight, six, four, or even two to the acre.
The result is already obvious. The new suburbs and town extensions sprawl out in a sloppy
diffuseness all over the countryside.75
His plea was for a return to the compact town:
We must return to Architecture. Let us again have streets of houses grouped closely
together, clear in their symbolism of social order, pure, strong and independent in theirmaterial beauty. Let us again build TOWNS.76
Thus, indiscriminate housing developments on garden city lines had to be checked. The way
forward was in bringing back true urbanity and civic expression to the existing towns. Flats would
play an important role in Sharp’s idea of urban housing. He called the blocks of neo-Georgian flats
erected by the London County Council ‘noble essays in the true and native style of English urban
architecture’.77 Later, in English Panorama, he went on to say that a considerable part of the
population of the future town would be housed in great new blocks of flats:
The present ‘blighted’ districts of our great cities, those vast areas of mean cottage streets,
will, indeed, be largely occupied by groups of flats and their open spaces and publicgardens…78
The accompanying illustrations, including projects of modern flats, indicated Sharp’s receptivenessto modernist ideas in housing, while his whole polemic against the garden city principles helped
reinforce and articulate the arguments for modern flats.

17

Actual achievements in working-class housing
How these ideas and principles outlined above could be applied to working-class housing wasdemonstrated in a number of actual buildings and housing projects produced by the MARS members.
Maxwell Fry designed two housing schemes, both in collaboration with Elizabeth Denby(1894-1965), a renowned housing reformer and sociologist, who also became a MARS member. The
first of these, Sassoon House in Peckham, London, was completed in 1934 and was managed by ahousing trust. It contained twenty flats in a block built in reinforced concrete, the external walls of
which were painted in yellow, grey and cinnamon. Each flat had a cantilevered balcony, large
enough to accommodate two small beds for sleeping out in summer, and a well-fitted kitchen
providing cheap hot water to the sink and bath. Other provisions included pram sheds, clothes drying
rails in the paved yard and refuse chutes. A considerable degree of standardisation went into thedesign and construction of these flats. The use of standard metal windows and standardised kitchen
units resulted in speed of erection and reduced building costs.79 Kent House, built in 1935 for a
London housing association, was designed by the Connell, Ward and Lucas partnership. Two blocksof flats, of four and five storeys, were of reinforced concrete frame construction, and externally thecolour schemes – wall in pink, blue for the back of the staircase, the balconies bright red – gave thebuildings a cheerful appearance. A total of sixteen flats were arranged two flats per floor, thus
eliminating the need for lengthy access galleries. Inside, the bathrooms and the kitchen were
logically placed near the bedrooms and the living room. Again, cantilevered balconies were provided,
which would take a table and chairs. Other amenities included pram sheds and clothes lines on the
ground floor and a roof-top playground.80
These two schemes illustrated the possibility of a fruitful alliance between housing reformers andmodern architects, in their cause to improve and modernise working-class housing. Kent House,
commissioned by the Northern Group of St Pancras House Improvement Society, in fact, grew outof the collaboration between the MARS and the New Homes for Old Group at the annual Building
Trades Exhibition in 1934.81 The New Home for Old Group was founded in 1931 by a committee ofLondon voluntary housing societies. Its main aim was to draw public attention to the problems ofslums and overcrowding and the urgent need for more and better low-rented housing. To this end,
the Group periodically organised exhibitions in the 1930s, to disseminate the knowledge of methods
to be utilised in rehousing and raising housing standards. The Group may have taken to advocatingflats more from pragmatic considerations of the constraints of rehousing conditions in central
London, but its displays of dwelling plans did show ideas and suggestions in common with the18thinking of modern architects. Thus, the full-size model of a three-bedroomed flat at the 1932
exhibition was designed ‘to provide as large a living room as possible, containing a dining alcove’,with the kitchen being planned ‘on the American and Continental method to take up the minimum
space in the flat, and to save all unnecessary steps for the housewife’.82 In 1933, the New Statesman
and Nation, a leading leftwing liberal journal, organised a number of housing study visits for its
readers. The visits included housing schemes carried out by member societies of the New Homes for
the Old Group and these elicited some favourable comments on the method of rehousing in flatsfrom the participants. 83 The 1934 exhibition again displayed a plan of three-bedroomed flat,
extolling the advantages of a well-designed balcony, as an extension of the living room, withadequate built-in flower boxes, where the family could sit out in the sun and possibly eat, or where
the baby might sleep under the mother’s eye, while she worked. The Group called for amenities suchas allotments, club-rooms, meeting halls and playgrounds, and insisted that these facilities for ‘ahappy home life and a successful community life’ be incorporated in new housing schemes. The
Group stated:
Vigorous agitation is still needed to ensure that the flats are to be built in urban areas andto become homes that the people can come to love.84
In 1936, the Cement Marketing Company held a project competition for a design of 200
working-men’s flats in five-storey blocks, to be built on a 4-acre site in reinforced concrete. It
offered an opportunity for modern architects to demonstrate their ideas in large-scale building
projects. The winning scheme by Lubetkin and Tecton showed four rows of straight blocks running
north-south, disposed at equal distance over the site (following the Zeilenbau layout made famous by
Gropius), with a communal laundry placed in a separate building. Each pair of flats was to beapproached by an internal staircase and had generous-sized balconies. Open space between theblocks was landscaped and provided with tennis courts, and it was indicated in the plan that the roofsof the blocks might be utilised as additional garden space.85 The other entries by MARS members(Connell, Ward and Lucas partnership, Sergei Chermayeff) also displayed similar groupings ofblocks, in contrast to some other entries employing forms of traditional courtyard layout, andprovided a great measure of communal facilities.86
Kensal House, in Kensington, London, ‘the latest and by far the most important contribution to
the development of working-class housing in London’,87 was completed in 1937. The scheme wascarried out by the Gas Light and Coke Company as a practical demonstration of how gas could be
economically used as a fuel in slum clearance schemes under the Housing Acts. It was built to19

Maxwell Fry’s design, who participated as executant architect in a committee of architects incollaboration with Denby. The scheme consisted, in the main, of two parallel, five-storey blocks ofdifferent length on the north-south axis and was built on a former gas work site in reinforced
concrete. The access to dwellings was by covered stair cases leading to a pair of flats on every floor.
Each of the 68 flats had a semi-recessed balcony with a built-in flower box, a standardised,well-fitted kitchen equipped with a gas cooker and a gas heater supplying hot water to the sink, bathand washing copper. The gas-coke stove was provided in the living room mainly for heating
purposes. This was an attempt to establish the living room and working kitchen plan (in the mannerof the Frankfurter Küche) in modern flats, instead of the kitchen-living room commonly provided in
more traditional working-class tenement flats. The scheme was planned as a social unit, catering forcommunal needs of the tenants. It provided adult and juvenile club-rooms, allotments and a nurseryschool ingeniously built around the curve of the circular pit of a demolished gas holder. The pit wasfilled up and made into a children’s playground.88 Denby called Kensal House ‘the first “urban
village” to be built in Britain’.89 For Maxwell Fry, the scheme was an illustration of what he had
been arguing for, namely, the synthesis of technical and social approaches to housing:Unless technical advance is made to contribute directly to increasing the total of humanhappiness, it is largely wasted.90
The orientation of the blocks ensured maximum sunlight to each flat. The internal staircase access
was preferred to the outside galleries which ‘[were] un-private, draughty, barrack-like, and loved by
nobody’. A type plan of the flats was devised and repeated throughout, taking advantage ofstandardisation and mass production of fittings. The bedrooms were made small, in order tomaximise the area of the living room. Together with a ‘longish’ galley-like functional kitchen and abalcony, large enough to have a meal on, the architect provided a layout that would facilitate andencourage a new way of life among the tenants.91 In its architectural language and social intent,
Kensal House represented a significant achievement of modernist thinking on housing.

Concluding comments
This article has looked at some of the ideas put forward by the proponents of a new type of housingdevelopment in England during the 1930s. The ideas came mainly from architects who identified
themselves with the development of modern architecture in the interwar period and were informedby modernist thinking on housing. There were differences in their approach. A somewhat vague
social utopianism of Wells Coates contrasted with a strong reformist strain found in Maxwell Fry’s

20essentially functional and logical method or a more politically committed, collectivist solution
espoused by Lubetkin and the ATO. Nevertheless, underlying their varied utterance was a firm belief
that improvements in people’s housing and hence the transformation of their living environment wasan important social task of the day and that this gave architecture a pivotal role to play. Accordingly,
these modern architects attempted to offer their skills and expertise in the service of society and, inparticular, to the question of working-class housing provision. They came up with a set of fairly
coherent ideas and design concepts: a self-contained residential development of modern flats,
equipped with up-to-date amenities and set amid open spaces, complete with a range of communal
facilities. The ideas found favour with certain sections of the voluntary housing movement. Then
there were those who were critical of the sprawling suburbs and the ribbon development of houses
along trunk roads. Some of them became modernists’ allies, as in the case of Thomas Sharp, while
his criticism of housing developments on garden city lines was taken up by modern architects andreinforced their arguments for flats. There were some other hopeful signs. By the middle of the
1930s, the students of schools of architecture, such as at Leeds, Liverpool and at the Architectural
Association were starting to produce modern building designs.92 The government’s slum clearance
campaign and the resulting redevelopment of central parts of towns seemingly gave added relevanceto the views of modernists. In terms of actual building, however, their achievements were limited toa few isolated examples of purpose-built modern flats.

21

Notes and references

1

B.S. Townroe, Britain Rebuilding: The Slums and Overcrowding Campaigns (London: Frederick

Muller, 1936), 119. Townroe was a member of the Housing Committee of the London County Council(LCC) and a respected writer on housing.
2

The Times, 7 July 1933. See also The Times, 18 May 1933.

3

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962, originally published1937),61.
4

See, e.g. William Ashworth, The Genesis of Modern British Town Planning: A Study in Economic andSocial History of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954);
Anthony Sutcliffe (ed.), Multi-Storey Living: The British Working Class Experience (London: Croom
Helm, 1974); Mark Swenarton, Homes Fit for Heroes: The Politics and Architecture of Early State
Housing in Britain (London: Heinemann, 1981); M.J. Daunton, House and Home in the Victorian City:
Working-Class Housing 1850-1914 (London: Edward Arnold, 1983); John Burnett, A Social History of
Housing 1815-1985 (Second Edition, London: Methuen, London, 1986); Alison Ravetz (with Richard
Turkington), The Place of Home: English domestic environments, 1914-2000 (London: E & FN Spon,
1995); Mark Clapson, Invincible green suburbs, brave new towns: Social change and urban dispersal inpostwar England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Peter Shapely, The politics ofhousing: Power, consumers and urban culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Chris
Allen, Housing Market Renewal and Social Class (London: Routledge, 2008); Stefan Muthesius andMiles Glendinning, Towers for the Welfare State: An Architectural History of British Multi-storey
Housing 1945-1970 (Edinburgh: Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies, 2017); Michael Tichelar, The
Failure of Land Reform in Twentieth-Century England: The Triumph of Private Property (London:
Routledge, 2019).
5

Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (5th Edition Revisedand Enlarged, Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976), 598.
6

Walter Gropius, ‘The Theory and Organization of Bauhaus’ (originally published in German, Munich

1923), in Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, Ise Gropius (eds), Bauhaus 1919-1928 (New York: Museum ofModern Art, 1938), 27-8.
7

Walter Gropius, ‘Dessau Bauhaus – principles of Bauhaus production’ (originally published in German,

Dessau 1926), in Frank Whitford, Bauhaus (London: Thames & Hudson, 1984), 206.
8

Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945 (Cambridge Massachusetts:

Harvard University Press, 1985), 65-6.
9Ronald Wiedenhoeft, Berlin’s Housing Revolution: German Reform in the 1920s (Ann Arbor

Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1985), chapter 4.
10Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945, 91-103. See also John Robert Mullin, ‘City

22

Planning in Frankfurt, Germany, 1923-1932: A Study in Practical Utopianism’, Journal of Urban History
14, No.1 (November 1977), 3-28.
11

Wiedenhoeft, Berlin’s Housing Revolution, 119-20. See also Kenneth Frampton, ‘The evolution of

housing concepts 1870-1970’, Lotus (Milan) 10 (1970-1), 24-33.
12Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945, 124.

13

William J.R. Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900 (Second Edition, Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1987),

168-70. See also J.J.P. Oud (London: Architectural Association, n.d. but c. 1979).
14‘Citrohan 1 and 2’, in Le Corbusier: Architect of the Century (London: Arts Council of Great Britain,

1987), 208-10.
15

Le Corbusier, Towards A New Architecture (London: Butterworth Architecture, 1989, first published

1927, originally published in French, Paris 1923), 247-9.
16

Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow (Third Edition, London: Architectural Press, 1971, first published

1929, originally published in French under the title Urbanisme, Paris 1924), chapters 11, 13.
17Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945, 119-22; Curtis, Modern Architecture, 131,

166, 175-7.
18

On the history of CIAM, see Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960(Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002).
19

Quoted in, Curtis, Modern Architecture, 171.

20

Wiedenhoeft, Berlin’s Housing Revolution, 43-7.

21

Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1965,

first published, London 1935), 101-2.
22

Le Corbusier, The Athens Charter (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973, originally published in

French, Paris 1943), 59-60, 65, 95-6, 102.
23

On the MARS and the English modern architectural scene in the 1930s, see, e.g. E. Maxwell Fry,‘English Architecture from the Thirties’, in Trevor Dannatt (ed.), Architects’ Yearbook: 8 (London: Elek
Books, 1957), 53-6; John Summerson, ‘Introduction’, in Trevor Dannatt, Modern Architecture in Britain(London: Batsford, 1959), 11-8; Anthony Jackson, The Politics of Architecture: A history of modern
architecture in Britain (London: Architectural Press, 1970), 22-77; Leslie Martin, ‘notes on a developing
architecture’, Architectural Review 164, no.977 (July 1978), 12-6; J.M. Richards, ‘Style was a dirty word:
Rationalism and discipline’ and Edward Carter, ‘Politics and architecture: The observer looks back’,Architectural Review 166, no.993 (November 1979), 301, 324-5; John R. Gold, The Experience ofModernism: Modern architects and the future city, 1928-1953 (London: E & FN Spon, 1997), 78-156;
Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination form Virginia Woolf
to John Piper (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010), 38-63,74-5,133-4.
24

F.R.S. Yorke, ‘Modern Architecture’ (Letters to the Editor), The Times, 25 April 1933. See also ‘The

23

MARS Group’, Architects’ Journal, 3 May 1933, 580.
25

‘The New Homes for Old Exhibit: The MARS Contribution’, Architects’ Journal, 20 September 1934,

425.
26

Louise Campbell, ‘The MARS Group, 1933-1939’, Royal Institute of British Architects Transactions 4,

no.2 (1984-5), 69-79. For example, Campbell, after tracing MARS members’ contributions in presenting
the image of modern housing, notes that ‘The architects…seem to have been ultimately unable tosubstitute a collective for an individual and competitive approach to work…Save for the Group working
on the plan for London, MARS became principally a social and discussion group by the end of thedecade’ (ibid., 78). The Architects’ Journal, reviewing the first MARS exhibit on housing, saw theabsence of any design for buildings as ‘the most notable and encouraging symptom of the right approachthat characterizes this exhibition of architects’ work’ (‘The New Homes for Old Exhibit: The MARS
Contribution’, 426). In fact, as a group the MARS seems inhibited from the straight-forward expressionof its stylistic preferences. The 1938 exhibition catalogue, though aided by photographs and illustrations,
could only call for ‘an architecture founded upon actuality, upon the pattern of our daily life’ in terms of
housing (MARS Group, New Architecture: An exhibition of the Elements of Modern Architecture(London: MARS Group, 1938), 10). A critic visiting the exhibition complained: ‘It was impossible to finda straight photograph of a building clearly displayed with some explanation of its function and planning’(‘The MARS Exhibition’, Architectural Association Journal 53, no.612 (February 1938), 388). For
membership of the MARS, see list in MARS Group, New Architecture, 23.
27

Campbell, ‘The MARS Group, 1933-1939’, 70.

28See, e.g. Sherban Cantacuzino, Wells Coates; A Monograph (London: Gordon Fraser, 1978); Obituaryin The Times, 20 June 1958; J.M. Richards, ‘Wells Coates 1895-1958’, Architectural Review 124, no.743(December 1958), 357-360.
29

Wells Coates’s statement, in Herbert Read (ed.), Unit 1: The Modern Movement in Architecture,

Painting and Sculpture (London: Cassell, 1934), 108 [italics in original].
30

Wells Coates, ‘Material for Architecture’, Architects’ Journal, 4 November 1931, 588-9.

31

Quoted in, Cantacuzino, Wells Coates, 52.

32

Wells Coates, ‘Furniture Today – Furniture Tomorrow: Leaves from a Meta-Technical Notebook’,

Architectural Review 79, no.428 (July 1932): 32.
33‘Modern Dwellings for Modern Needs. A Discussion between Geoffrey Boumphrey and Wells Coates’,

The Listener, 24 May 1933, 819-22.
34

Wells Coates, ‘Notes on Dwellings for Tomorrow’, in Ascot Gas Water Heaters Ltd, Flats: Municipal

and Private Enterprise (London: Ascot Gas Water Heaters Ltd, 1938), 52.
35

Wells Coates, ‘Furniture Today – Furniture Tomorrow’, 34.

36‘Modern Dwellings for Modern Needs’, 821.

24

37

See Jack Pritchard, View from a Long Chair: The memoirs of Jack Pritchard (London: Routledge &Kegan Paul, 1984), 78-97; Obituary in Independent, 5 May 1992. Isokon was a company initially set up
by Jack Pritchard, an ‘entrepreneur’, and his wife with Wells Coates, to finance the building of Lawn
Road Flats. With his experience in furniture sales and interest in modernism, Pritchard believed in ‘theapplication of modern functional design to houses, flats, furniture and fittings’. In the 1930s, Isokon
commissioned furniture from renowned modern designers, among them Marcel Breuer. One of the firstpeople to stay in the Lawn Road was Philip Sargant Florence, an acquaintance of Pritchard and an
economist with wide interests including planning at the University of Birmingham, who tried to get a
block of Isokon flats built in Birmingham in 1935. See Louise Campbell, ‘The good new days’,
Architectural Review 162, no.967 (September 1977), 183.
38

‘Flats in Hampstead Designed by Wells Coates’, Architects’ Journal, 20 September 1934, 409-412;

Cantacuzino, Wells Coates, 62.
39

Richards, ‘Wells Coates’, 359.

40

E.R.S. Yorke, The Modern House (London: Architectural Press, 1934), 28-9.

41

Ibid., 26.

42

Ibid., 5.

43

Ibid., 3.

44

Ibid., 1-3.

45

F.R.S. Yorke and Frederick Gibberd, The Modern Flat (London: Architectural Press, 1937), 16.

46

Ibid.

47

Gropius after fleeing Nazi Germany settled briefly in England, where he went into a partnership with

Maxwell Fry. See Jackson, The Politics of Architecture, 58-9.
48

Yorke and Gibberd, The Modern Flat, 18.

49

E. Maxwell Fry, ‘The small house of today’, Architectural Review 76 (July 1934), 20.

50

E. Maxwell Fry, Fine Buildings (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), 7.

51

E, Maxwell Fry, ‘The Architect’s Problem’, Architects’ Journal, 22 June 1933. 844-6.

52

E. Maxwell Fry, ‘London Housing: An Itinerant Survey of Typical Schemes’, Architects’ Journal, 17

May 1934. 713-5.
53

Ibid.

54

Berthold Lubetkin, ‘Architectural Thought since the Revolution’, Architectural Review 71 (May 1932),

201.
55

Howard M. Robertson, ‘“High Point”, Highgate Architects: Lubetkin & Tecton’, Architect andBuilding News, 10 January 1936, 49-53.
56

F.R.S. Yorke and Colin Penn, A Key to Modern Architecture (London and Glasgow: Blackie and Son,

1939), 48.

25

57

Peter Coe and Malcolm Reading, Lubetkin and Tecton: Architectural and Social Commitment(London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1981), 53.
58

Ibid., chapter ‘Lubetkin and the ATO – social commitment and political action’, 44-67.

59

Jackson, Politics of Architecture, 76.

60

Architects’ and Technicians’ Organisation, An Exhibition on Working Class Housing (London:[Architects’ and Technicians’ Organisation], 1936).
61

Ibid., 29.

62See, e.g. C. Bertram Parkes, ‘Rehousing in Tenements or Cottages?’ and ‘Rehousing in Flats or

Tenements Some Further Remarks’, Keystone 11, no.5 (October 1935); ‘Can Flats Solve the Housing
Problem?’, Keystone 11, no.6 (December 1935); H.E.F., ‘“Highpoint”, Highgate’, Keystone 12, no.4
(August 1936).
63‘Housing Standards Equipment, Room, Dwelling, Group of Blocks, Residential District Town, etc.’,

Keystone, New Series, 1, no.3 (June 1937), 11-4.
64

W.E. Masters, ‘Flats’ and Colin Penn, ‘The Modern Flats’, Keystone, New Series, 2, no.3 (June 1938),

9-17.
65

See Charlotte Benton, ‘Miner improvements: The architects to the Miners’ Welfare Committee’,Architectural Review 166, no.993 (November 1979), 305-8.
66

The outlook of the architectural profession was undergoing some change in the depression of the 1930s.

The number of architectural commissions dwindled leading to fewer openings in private practice, while
there was an increase in the employment of architects by local authorities and other public bodies which
helped to raise the profile of their architectural work. See, e.g. John Summerson, ‘Bread & Butter andArchitecture’, Horizon 6, no.34 (October 1942), 233-43.
67‘Architecture as a Social Service’, Keystone, New Series, 1, no.2 (April 1937), 16.

68

See Kathy Stanfield, ‘Thomas Sharp 1901-1978’, in Gordon E. Cherry (ed.) Pioneer in British

Planning (London: Architectural Press, 1981), 150-76.
69

He was not an initial member of the MARS, but his name appears on the list in 1938.

70

Thomas Sharp, Town and Countryside: Some Aspects of Urban and Rural Development (London:

Oxford University Press, 1932), 11.
71See, e.g. Clough Williams-Ellis (ed.), Britain and the Beast (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1938).

72

Sharp, Town and Countryside, 4.

73

Ibid., 140.

74

Thomas Sharp, English Panorama (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1938), 80.

75

Sharp, Town and Countryside, 149.

76

Ibid., 164 [italics in original].

77

Ibid.

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78

Sharp, English Panorama, 106.

79

‘R.E. Sassoon House: Working Class Flats in St Mary’s Road, Peckham, designed by Adams,

Thompson and Fry in collaboration with Miss Denby’, Architects’ Journal, 29 November 1934, 824-5;
The Times, 14 November 1934 and 17 November 1934.
80‘Kent House Ferdinand Street, St Pancras, NW. Designed by Connell, Ward and Lucas’, Architects

Journal, 19 December 1935, 909-13. See also Dennis Sharp and Sally Rendel, Connell Ward and Lucas:
Modern movement architects in England 1929-1939 (London: Frances Lincoln, 2008), 154-9.
81

Campbell, ‘The MARS Group 1933-1939’, 72; Elizabeth Darling, Re-forming Britain: Narratives ofmodernity before reconstruction (London: Routledge, 2007), chapter 4.
82‘“New Homes for Old” Exhibition’, Architects’ Journal, 14 September 1932, 328.

83

See the issues of New Statesman and Nation, 18 March 1933, 25 March 1933, 1 April 1933 and 8

April 1933.
84‘New Homes for Old Catalogue of the Housing Exhibition’, in The Building Trades Exhibition 1934:

Official Catalogue (London: [Building Trades Exhibition], 1934), 401.
85

‘Cement Marketing Company’s Competition for Working-men’s Flats’, Architects’ Journal, 21 March

1935, 437-51.
86‘Competition for Working-men’s flats: The Commended Designs’, Architects’ Journal, 28 March

1935, 482-5; Sharp and Rendel, Connell Ward and Lucas, 160-1.
87‘Kensal House Ladbroke Grove’, Architect and Building News, 26 March 1937, 381-4. See also

Stirling Everard, The History of The Gas light and Coke Company 1812-1949 (London: Ernest Benn,
1949), 352.
88

‘Kensal House’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 3rd Series, 44, no.10, 20 March

1937, 500-5.
89

Elizabeth Denby, ‘Kensal House, An Urban Village’, in Ascot Gas Light and Water Ltd, Flats, 61.

90

E. Maxwell Fry, ‘Kensal House’, in Ascot Gas Light and Water Ltd, Flats, 56.

91

Ibid., 56-60.

92

Jackson, Politics of Architecture, 59.

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