Coventry, Warwickshire

 

1950s dinosaur?

I was struck a couple of weeks ago by an article in Apollo magazine by Otto Saumarez Smith about Coventry’s city centre. Coventry, as many readers will know, was bombed with more than usual Nazi ferocity in November 1940. The post-war rebuilding programme renewed the city centre, the heart of which was an extended shopping precinct carefully aligned with a view of the spire of the old cathedral. The new centre was built in the mid-century modern style, and Saumarez Smith makes a spirited defence not just of its architecture but also of its thoughtful planning and of the works of art (sculptures, murals, and so on) that were placed around the site. The writer laments the fact that Coventry is embarking on a plan to demolish tracts of the city centre and replace them with ‘banal retail’ development.

I have a lot of sympathy for this view, although I know it will not be shared by all my readers. The post-war buildings were not perfect – one problem with the shopping precinct, for example, was the lack of footfall on the upper levels (a familiar issue in precincts and malls), an issue partly addressed by ramps in the Lower Precinct. But the precinct was far better than many later malls, and we are at a time in history when we need to reconsider town centre design. The high-street retail business is changing under the twin pressures of online and out-of-town shopping. And of course now there’s another problem: coronavirus. Suddenly old-fashioned streets and open precincts and squares like those of Coventry (once criticised as ‘windswept’) seem airy and attractive. One thing that improved the city’s 1940s and 1950s buildings – and that still enhances them – is the quality of public art that I’ve already mentioned.

A favourite of mine is a long tile mural, designed by the architect and illustrator Gordon Cullen, which originally lined one of the Lower Precinct’s ramps. The mural illustrates Coventry’s history (and prehistory), from the dinosaurs to the 1950s, featuring trades and professions (ribbon-making, bicycle manufacture), the old cathedral, some of the city’s surviving Georgian houses, and modern buildings including the new cathedral. Sadly the mural was damaged in the 1970s (it lost a lot of the section depicting medieval Coventry) and has been relocated in a less prominent position. But it’s still worth seeking out. Taking a look will reveal something that is more interesting and admirable than the ‘1950s dinosaur’ that Coventry is sometimes said to be.

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There’s more of the mural on the cover a book about Coventry here, and a photograph of a concrete mural by William Mitchell, from one of my earlier posts, is here. Bull Yard, the site of the William Mitchell mural, is, alas, scheduled for demolition.

Westville Road, London

A mural restored

 I’ve posted before about the architectural illustrator and writer Gordon Cullen, whose books Townscape and The Concise Townscape had a big impact on me when I discovered them in the 1970s and have helped to educate probably hundreds of thousands of architects and planners. In the 1950s and 1960s, Cullen was very influential, not just because of the Townscape books but also because his drawings were everywhere – in the architectural press, in advertisements, in books. At the weekend I had the chance to experience another aspect of Cullen’s work, when I went to Greenside School in West London to see the mural he did for the building unveiled after restoration.

Greenside School is itself an interesting building of the early 1950s, designed with great flair by Ernö Goldfinger and opened in 1952. Goldfinger had designed a structural system for schools, with a reinforced concrete frame, that was intended to be rolled out widely, but only Greenside and one other school were built using the system. When the architect wanted a mural for the school’s entrance hall, he turned to Cullen, with whom he’d worked on a number of exhibitions that had been sent to the troops during World War II. Cullen wrote in a notebook a sentence that seemed to mark a starting point and a challenge: 'Mural. To undulate and intrigue. How?' His response to the challenge was brilliant: a series of colourful vignettes on a range of subjects: history (a medieval castle), the sea (an ocean liner), geography (a world map), the solar system (with a sun like a vast egg yolk), railways, and natural history (a composition of leaves and birds). Brightly coloured, simple, but full of interesting detail, they were clearly designed to appeal to young people and to inspire. Entering the foyer is a bit like stepping into a Picture Puffin book, and one can imagine children responding enthusiastically and teachers incorporating the images into lesson plans.

But the mural wasn’t always popular with the staff. I suppose it began to seem old-fashioned, with its images of the de Havilland Comet airliner (the first commercial jet) and the Britannia steam locomotive that was commissioned by the British Railways Board, both of which came into service in 1951. The current staff, however, are enthusiastic, and see the potential of the mural – as an inspiration in lessons, as an uplifting sight when you enter the school, as something to be proud of.

So a group of parents, staff, and school governors got together to ‘rehabilitate, restore, appreciate, protect and celebrate the Gordon Cullen Mural in the context of the Ernö Goldfinger building to the benefit of the whole school community and enrich the Learning Environment’. Or, as a spokesperson said at the unveiling, ‘simply to love it again’. Now the restoration is complete and colours sing once more, illuminated by natural light coming down from Goldfinger’s cunningly concealed clerestory window above. Warm applause as Jacqueline Cullen, the artist’s widow (top photograph), cut the ribbon to mark the mural’s unveiling, confirmed the project’s success, as well as the appreciation and love that people have for this very unusual* work of art.

Appreciation was also I think, typified by the reaction of one young child looking at the mural afterwards with a small group of us. ‘Which part do you like the best”?’ asked one of the adults. ‘Oh, I like the Fried Egg,’ she replied, with emphasis, looking at the image of the solar system. The knowing expression on her face suggested that she was very well aware of the painting’s real subject.

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*Although unusual, the Gordon Cullen mural is part of a bigger picture, which is that quite a number of schools built in post-war Britain had distinguished decorative artwork of various kinds, much of which has now either vanished or is under threat. A research project under the title The Decorated School has led to greater awareness of these works, and one of the fruits of this project is a book, Catherine Burke, Jeremy Howard, and Peter Cunningham (eds), The Decorated School (Black Dog Publishing, 2013). I hope to return to this fascinating book when it reaches the top of my ‘to read’ heap.

The Concise Townscape

THANK YOU (1)
When I was a teenager, bumbling around the local public library, I came across a book called The Concise Townscape, by Gordon Cullen (1914–1994). It caught my eye because of the title: I’d not heard of townscape before but imagined, rightly as it turned out, that it was like landscape, but urban rather than rural. I picked the book up and, somewhat to my surprise, I was captivated.

I’d forgotten about this encounter until a few months ago when I found an old copy of the book in a secondhand bookshop. Opening it, bells began to ring and old connections to be made and it began to dawn on me that this book had been highly influential on the way I look at the world around me. For one thing it was full of things that I still enjoy and find interesting, but which don’t always appear in architectural history books – there’s a double-page spread with illustrations of shops covered with old advertising signs, for example; photographs of seaside fences, steps, lettering, and cobbled street textures; drawings of shelters and different kinds of city square.

Most interesting of all are several groups of pictures (of Oxford, Ipswich, and Westminster) showing the changing view as a person walks along a street, under an archway, through a group of buildings. These sequences, representing what Cullen calls ‘serial vision’, show how the townscape unfolds as one walks, and how new buildings and vistas appear in a series of revelations. In other words that buildings relate to one another and that, when looking at a piece of townscape, it is at least as good to travel as to arrive.

I now realise, of course, that The Concise Townscape is a kind of textbook for urban designers and city planners, and one that must have been very successful. It still seems to be in print, though without the old cover of my secondhand copy, which represents what happens when ‘a victim of prairie planning traces out his public protest, the reminder of a properly concentrated town’. The protest-drawing (which is signed TGC, for Thomas Gordon Cullen) is packed with all kinds of things that I love and that this blog celebrates – a pub, a fish shop, a nonconformist chapel, a church, the hint of some steps leading to a hidden alley. Thank you, Gordon Cullen.