(Above, Harold Wilson by an unknown photographer). Coming forward in time to the 1960s the ‘modernist’ movement dominated the scene. This was the decade when everything was going to become different typified by plastic household objects, mass car ownership, central heating, motorways, diesel trains, washing machines, ‘cubist’ building plans and prefabrication, these much influenced by the ideas of Corbusier (apparently a pseudonym with the 1950s trend of having, in public, just one name), 1887-1965. It was a time when science (men in white coats in laboratories – witness early soap powder adverts) were going to solve the world’s problems and lead the way to a brave new world, and leave behind the grubby old one. I like to think that despite growing-up in the early 1960s in a rural backwater that I sensed some of this, it being crystallised in the form of a friend’s new-build bungalow in Downham Market which had picture windows, an open-plan layout with a square footage probably five-times greater than the cottage in which I lived. My mother always wished she could live in a bungalow – but she never did. The age of the ‘white heat of technology’ (Harold Wilson) was going to transform living conditions and life in general – hop on board and don’t look back.
In fact time has shown that the 1960s was probably the most destructive peacetime decade of the century, although many ascribe the 1980s to that status, and justly so. How could we have imagined that the seas and oceans could absorb all human waste and rubbish, ejected through outflow pipes, with no harm caused? How could we have imagined that huge anticipated population increases could be accommodated in tower block after tower block, ‘castles in the sky’ and how could we have imagined that ‘modern’ farming techniques of prairie-like fields, insecticides and herbicides would not ‘kill-off’ the countryside?
(I’ll get onto housing next time).