Modern Metropolis

By 1870 Britain had reached her zenith as a global industrial power. Thereafter rival nations, in particular the US and Germany, began to overtake her. The nation emerged from the First World War victorious but economically weakened, setting in train the processes of deindustrialisation and decolonisation that are still playing out today. The inter-war period witnessed extreme economic turbulence. Post-war recovery generated a great consumer boom during the 1920s, culminating in the Wall Street Crash of 1929 followed by the Great Depression of the early 1930s. These upheavals forced British industry to modernise and the City to shift its focus from international to domestic markets, as New York took over as the world’s leading financial centre. The Bank of England was rebuilt for a fourth time, whilst four of the Big Five commercial banks built new City headquarters. Midland, the largest of them, commissioned the country’s grandest architect Edwin Lutyens to create the most lavish and costly bank building ever erected in the City. Britain also experienced a great social and political transformation during the twentieth century. Both wealth and power were redistributed down through classes and communities, redefining the nature of modern capitalist society with important consequences for hegemonic building. In response to the ever-increasing range of functions performed by the state, power was progressively devolved to local governments. Most powerful of these was the London County Council, predominantly under radical control. Seemingly to challenge conservative national governments, the LCC built County Hall, its imposing neo-Baroque headquarters, on the south bank of the Thames directly opposite the Palace of Westminster. Sustained real wage growth combined with redistributive social policies produced a dramatic levelling of wealth and income distributions that reached a climax in the aftermath of the Second World War. In the spirit of the times, hegemonic building took on a more egalitarian and collectivist character, particularly during the long post-war economic boom. By this time Britain was finally accepting the radical new built forms produced by Modernist architects that had become standard in Europe and the US. The Modernist aesthetic was based on the principles of clear articulation of structure, transparency of interior spaces, use of standardised components and the pre-eminence of proportion over decoration. The ultimate Modernist building, as devised by the German-American architect Mies van der Rohe, was a rectangular steel and glass slab containing tiers of open floors and lacking any surface decoration. During the post-war boom this universal form was used to rebuild London as a modern metropolis. In the public realm the LCC Architects Department led the way in using it for the construction of residential blocks in housing estates and for community buildings such as schools and hospitals, creating a new landscape of collectivist power across London. In the private realm, the Miesian slab became the standard form for a new generation of office buildings, each competing to be the tallest, culminating in the iconic 43-storey NatWest Tower completed in 1981.