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| Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, 1957-1959 by David Kynaston – review | Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, 1957-1959 by David Kynaston – review |
| (2 months later) | |
| On 5 December 1958, Harold Macmillan opened Britain's first stretch of motorway with a prediction. "In the years to come," the prime minister said, "the county and country alike may look at the Preston bypass – a fine thing in itself but a finer thing as a symbol – as a token of what is to follow." | On 5 December 1958, Harold Macmillan opened Britain's first stretch of motorway with a prediction. "In the years to come," the prime minister said, "the county and country alike may look at the Preston bypass – a fine thing in itself but a finer thing as a symbol – as a token of what is to follow." |
| He has David Kynaston to thank for its realisation. For ages, the Preston bypass was not, as it turned out, much on people's lips; certainly, in my 60s childhood we rarely spoke of what a fine and symbolic thing it was. But now it features as an emblematic moment in Modernity Britain, the latest in the historian's acclaimed sequence of books about postwar life, Tales of a New Jerusalem. | He has David Kynaston to thank for its realisation. For ages, the Preston bypass was not, as it turned out, much on people's lips; certainly, in my 60s childhood we rarely spoke of what a fine and symbolic thing it was. But now it features as an emblematic moment in Modernity Britain, the latest in the historian's acclaimed sequence of books about postwar life, Tales of a New Jerusalem. |
| In the years 1957-59, Kynaston again shows, rather than tells, how countless town planners committed to demolishing Britain's physical past and to constructing, with incredible rapidity, what most seem not to have doubted was a glorious improvement. In another prophecy, the chairman of Birmingham's public works committee imagined future citizens saying: "This was Birmingham's finest and most courageous period." | In the years 1957-59, Kynaston again shows, rather than tells, how countless town planners committed to demolishing Britain's physical past and to constructing, with incredible rapidity, what most seem not to have doubted was a glorious improvement. In another prophecy, the chairman of Birmingham's public works committee imagined future citizens saying: "This was Birmingham's finest and most courageous period." |
| For future citizens who have wondered, on the contrary, how planners got permission to construct dual carriageways in bulldozed city centres, or to vandalise Euston station, Modernity Britain describes how the ruthless annihilation of homes and communities was just the most extreme expression of the era's infatuation with newness and mod cons, from flyovers and motorways and shopping centres down to twin tubs, televisions and Ready Brek. "This is only the beginning," said the Birmingham Mail. "Ugly old buildings are being wiped away." | For future citizens who have wondered, on the contrary, how planners got permission to construct dual carriageways in bulldozed city centres, or to vandalise Euston station, Modernity Britain describes how the ruthless annihilation of homes and communities was just the most extreme expression of the era's infatuation with newness and mod cons, from flyovers and motorways and shopping centres down to twin tubs, televisions and Ready Brek. "This is only the beginning," said the Birmingham Mail. "Ugly old buildings are being wiped away." |
| Although, unlike Alan Johnson's new memoir of the same period, this narrative never quite conveys the brutish conditions inside slums designated for clearance, Kynaston is clear about the difficulty of arguing, at that time, against the efficient shunting of old communities into new flats where, even if they had no shops, gardens or friends, the residents would finally have an inside lavatory. A combination, he says, "of the spirit of the age and seemingly inescapable practical necessity was irresistible". | Although, unlike Alan Johnson's new memoir of the same period, this narrative never quite conveys the brutish conditions inside slums designated for clearance, Kynaston is clear about the difficulty of arguing, at that time, against the efficient shunting of old communities into new flats where, even if they had no shops, gardens or friends, the residents would finally have an inside lavatory. A combination, he says, "of the spirit of the age and seemingly inescapable practical necessity was irresistible". |
| For all their modernity, it emerges that, where respect for the working classes was concerned, town planners and architects were barely, if any advance on the patrician Harold Macmillan, who remarked, by way of a public compliment to inhabitants of the north east: "They are rather like fish, the further north you go the better they get." That "they" did not always appreciate the housing estates and town centres designed to improve their lot would not, even when local councillors and campaigners joined in the protests, be allowed to frustrate what Basil Spence called, on behalf of architects, "our native genius". | For all their modernity, it emerges that, where respect for the working classes was concerned, town planners and architects were barely, if any advance on the patrician Harold Macmillan, who remarked, by way of a public compliment to inhabitants of the north east: "They are rather like fish, the further north you go the better they get." That "they" did not always appreciate the housing estates and town centres designed to improve their lot would not, even when local councillors and campaigners joined in the protests, be allowed to frustrate what Basil Spence called, on behalf of architects, "our native genius". |
| "A lot of this is sentimentality," said the chairman of Chesterfield's town planning committee, when almost half its councillors opposed destruction of the marketplace. "I don't like to see the marketplace developed but am I to allow morbid sentimentality to prejudice the future development of the town?" | "A lot of this is sentimentality," said the chairman of Chesterfield's town planning committee, when almost half its councillors opposed destruction of the marketplace. "I don't like to see the marketplace developed but am I to allow morbid sentimentality to prejudice the future development of the town?" |
| Proceeding by way of themed accumulation of detail, Kynaston assembles endless stories such as Macmillan on fish, and this "stormy" Chesterfield council meeting, reported in the Derbyshire Times, to create what sometimes feels like a faultlessly researched big picture and, at others, more like immersion in a great vat of random, undigested trivia. Many a page reads, for better or worse, like a fact miscellany, albeit one assembled by a true artist of the verbal segue and one drolly capable of juxtaposing, in a single paragraph: the birth of Kenton and Shula Archer; Patrick White's distaste for "drab" London; the arrival of personal loans at the Midland; a matinee of My Fair Lady; a diarist's annoyance with a lavatory ("cistern chain not working"); Ted Hughes on the Third Programme; and what must be one of Philip Larkin's least interesting comments ever, on the England cricket team. | Proceeding by way of themed accumulation of detail, Kynaston assembles endless stories such as Macmillan on fish, and this "stormy" Chesterfield council meeting, reported in the Derbyshire Times, to create what sometimes feels like a faultlessly researched big picture and, at others, more like immersion in a great vat of random, undigested trivia. Many a page reads, for better or worse, like a fact miscellany, albeit one assembled by a true artist of the verbal segue and one drolly capable of juxtaposing, in a single paragraph: the birth of Kenton and Shula Archer; Patrick White's distaste for "drab" London; the arrival of personal loans at the Midland; a matinee of My Fair Lady; a diarist's annoyance with a lavatory ("cistern chain not working"); Ted Hughes on the Third Programme; and what must be one of Philip Larkin's least interesting comments ever, on the England cricket team. |
| In his more sustained passages on grammar schools, say, or the Notting Hill race riots, this artful deployment of different voices and sources vividly evokes a time when benighted extremes of snobbery and hate-speech coexisted with increasing working-class confidence, in a culture built on what Kynaston calls "a widespread underlying decency". A "Keep Kentish Town White" byelection candidate, for example, would allow only whites in his pub: "The Negro is on a lower evolutionary plane so far as I can see." He won 479 votes out of 6,500 cast, Kynaston records, and was evicted by his brewery. | In his more sustained passages on grammar schools, say, or the Notting Hill race riots, this artful deployment of different voices and sources vividly evokes a time when benighted extremes of snobbery and hate-speech coexisted with increasing working-class confidence, in a culture built on what Kynaston calls "a widespread underlying decency". A "Keep Kentish Town White" byelection candidate, for example, would allow only whites in his pub: "The Negro is on a lower evolutionary plane so far as I can see." He won 479 votes out of 6,500 cast, Kynaston records, and was evicted by his brewery. |
| Although Kynaston's regular voices naturally come, when they are not luminaries, from literate classes with the resources to entertain themselves, they leave little doubt about the punishing ennui of an era in which intelligent viewers genuinely looked forward to that ultimate antidote to morbid sentimentality, The Black and White Minstrel Show. Lest there be any doubt: the first Carry On film was considered hilarious. If you were born, as I was, during the gestation of the Preston bypass, some of your earliest memories may be of stretches of intense tedium that, along with corporal punishment and secondary moderns, awful television and the pervasive smell of wet wool, helped make the baby-boomers what they are today. | Although Kynaston's regular voices naturally come, when they are not luminaries, from literate classes with the resources to entertain themselves, they leave little doubt about the punishing ennui of an era in which intelligent viewers genuinely looked forward to that ultimate antidote to morbid sentimentality, The Black and White Minstrel Show. Lest there be any doubt: the first Carry On film was considered hilarious. If you were born, as I was, during the gestation of the Preston bypass, some of your earliest memories may be of stretches of intense tedium that, along with corporal punishment and secondary moderns, awful television and the pervasive smell of wet wool, helped make the baby-boomers what they are today. |
| In fact, the dissemination of Kynaston's book could be the most promising way, to date, of reconciling today's jilted generation with the survivors of an age in which Harold Wilson feared, on Any Questions, for the aesthetic consequences when Gilbert and Sullivan went out of copyright. "Sundays were still Sundays," Kynaston notes, condensing vistas of featureless boredom into one, succinct aside. "The Victorian age was still alive, and for children especially it could be an endurance test." | In fact, the dissemination of Kynaston's book could be the most promising way, to date, of reconciling today's jilted generation with the survivors of an age in which Harold Wilson feared, on Any Questions, for the aesthetic consequences when Gilbert and Sullivan went out of copyright. "Sundays were still Sundays," Kynaston notes, condensing vistas of featureless boredom into one, succinct aside. "The Victorian age was still alive, and for children especially it could be an endurance test." |
| For many women, whose domestic drudgery and child-related duties might have merited more of the attention that the author lavishes on sport and forgotten landmarks in light entertainment, the Victorian age was, again, the organising principle, gender-related modernisation not being, as their name suggests, a priority for the Angry Young Men or for the Young Communists or the New Left. The most powerful voices are male and, to a more revelatory degree, fabulously patronising. Macmillan's pomp one expected; less so the haughtiness of modernity's architects, or the arts critics sneering at working-class taste, or Richard Crossman of the Labour front bench, and later editor of the New Statesman, complaining about an "open-necked, swarthy and ugly" audience – on his own side. | For many women, whose domestic drudgery and child-related duties might have merited more of the attention that the author lavishes on sport and forgotten landmarks in light entertainment, the Victorian age was, again, the organising principle, gender-related modernisation not being, as their name suggests, a priority for the Angry Young Men or for the Young Communists or the New Left. The most powerful voices are male and, to a more revelatory degree, fabulously patronising. Macmillan's pomp one expected; less so the haughtiness of modernity's architects, or the arts critics sneering at working-class taste, or Richard Crossman of the Labour front bench, and later editor of the New Statesman, complaining about an "open-necked, swarthy and ugly" audience – on his own side. |
| "Though the centre of Rochdale is rather fine," this champion of the working man wrote on a byelection visit, "the rest of it is the usual ghastly Lancashire town, with its slummy streets running up and down the hills." They would soon be wiped away. | "Though the centre of Rochdale is rather fine," this champion of the working man wrote on a byelection visit, "the rest of it is the usual ghastly Lancashire town, with its slummy streets running up and down the hills." They would soon be wiped away. |
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