Chapter Seven
Cymru am Byth - Wales Forever
The 1960's through to the 90's

 

London beginnings

My family’s exile began in London, where I waited for them to arrive from South Africa. After a week in the great city, we travelled to Cardiff, South Wales. We settled there in peaceful quiet for more than a quarter-century, a wonderfully extended period for restoring the children’s stability and senses of belonging. Wales was good for us, to us: we found a comfortable home, excellent schooling, work that satisfied and extended my wife and I respectively. We made lasting friends. As the saying goes, we put down roots.

We grew to understand something of the people, their beautiful, intimate country, their long history of subjection to English hegemony and, in the coal mining valleys, their sustained struggle against early industrial-capitalist exploitation. The Welsh National Opera Company, located in Cardiff, was glorious, as was the venerable legacy of the Welsh language and its literature and poetry - from the thirteenth century Mabinogion onward. Regrettably, that captivating language, similar in its Celtic origins to the Breton of Brittany across the English Channel, eluded me, but not the children.

There is still, forty years after our first gentle, extra-ordinally benign spring days there, much of us that lingers in the Wales of which we became inordinately fond; not least its relative freedom from the dispiriting, snobbish class consciousness of bourgeois England. Only Welsh rugby has failed since the memorable 1960s and 70s, when it certainly was “Cymru am byth, Wales forever.” All else remains in our hearts and thoughts as warm memories. Those - the warm memories - embrace the ready manner in which we were accepted by people who soon became lasting friends; they include our relief when we realised that here policemen were ever polite, helpful to middle class folk such as us and, most important for me, they highlight the charming, the disarming ways in which the students who I encounterd in my university work took to me - after prolonged teasing about my odd 'Seth Afr'kan' accent.

Before touching on those settled years, a passing mention of my productive months tramping London. In addition to the challenging design tasks that were assigned to me at work - in the internationally renowned architectural office of Ove Arup Associates - my time was devoted to the too, too many special attractions of the city: searching out and studying its magnificent architectural past and, at that boom-filled time, its growing body of enviable new buildings. And, as if those were not sufficient, there were the rich pickings of quite outstanding daily concerts, recitals, exhibitions, lectures and like attractions; each of which would, in Johannesburg, have assuaged one’s cultural and intellectual hunger for months.

With helpful architectural guide-books lodged in a back pocket and the inescapable London A to Z clutched in my hands, I negotiated what were to me previously unknown parts of the city in search of Gothic, Tudor, Georgian, Edwardian and other so-called ‘period’ gems. I visited familiar settings, attempting, for instance, to trace Christopher Wrens’s far-reaching baroque plans for the city (1666) had they been implemented. I focussed in painstaking detail on selected favourites from a previous stay in London - buildings such as the Henry VII Chapel, Westminster (1503), Inigo Jones’ Banqueting Hall, Whitehall (1619), Burlington and Kent’s Palladian Villa at Chiswick (1725), Brunel’s Paddington Station (1852), Denys Lasdun’s cluster block in Bethnal Green (1958). On tiring of this hunt for a comprehensive historical coverage, I simply walked the streets. That was particularly engrossing: relishing the divers feelings of the collection of villages that is said to be London, watching the crowds rushing through their busy hours, indulging trite tourist events like the showy changing of the guards at the royal palace,

“They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace,
Christopher Robin went down with Alice. They’re
changing guard at Buckingham Palace.”

I attentively avoided contact with the anti-apartheid movement; save, of course, meeting exiled friends and acquaintances at parties, often braaivleis evenings in this damp northern climate. Then, on a particularly lonesome Sunday afternoon stroll, I encountered a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) gathering on the streets at the entry to Westminster Hall. The scene was lively, the songs from a tiny choir were compelling, the speakers, Mary Kaldor and Edward Thompson among them, were rivetting. Their central topic, the imminent nuclear threat to humanity, was of pressing interest. I was gripped, ready to be drawn into immediate membership. I was also at home, with people, young and elderly, who cared deeply, knowledgeably, intelligently about the world about them. They offered me congenial company, searching seminars - now referred to as ‘workshops’ - loads of reading material and generous invitations to their homes where we might talk and I might learn.

In the weeks that followed that drizzly Sunday, I talked and read incessantly, coming gradually to understand something of the nuclear menace from East and West, primarily the USSR and the USA. I struggled with the many technical terms, and often graphic, everyday terminology used by my new colleagues. The disturbing acronym MAD, for instance, meant Mutually Assured Destruction - surely a case for profound concern. The miseries of apartheid were subsumed in this wider, this incalculable danger; one in which the proponents and their apologists boasted that they could destroy the other fifteen to twenty-five times over and take neighbouring peoples with them.

The terminology of nuclear ‘diplomacy’ was sickening, “collateral damage” and “overkill” and “pre-emptive deterrence”; the weapons and systems for “delivering” them were horrific. Above all, the huge profits accruing from producing this sophisticated weaponry fattened the already swollen coffers of corporate capital, state owned or otherwise. This was, unquestionably, grounds for dissent, for addressing and analysing the reassuring balm that governments on either side of the Iron Curtain were promulgating. The dissembling propaganda I had previously been subjected to had been suspiciously soothing, bland; now I realised that yet another massive package of lies was being directed to those ‘on the outside’ by their mendacious leaders. The old game of misleading the public was on.

The division in popular views on the international scramble for ever more destructive, murderous nuclear gadgets - insofar as one can discount the distorted information on which members of the public were able to express views - followed political party lines. Those in support were, in the main, Conservatives, Tories; the opposition, those urging “unilateral disarmament” were, largely, supporters of the Labour Party. As in my earlier trip to Britain, I was attracted to Labour; in particular, to the left groupings that sought to uphold Clause Four - the defining, potentially socialist declaration in the Party’s constitution. This held the promise of a sustainable political position in exile; one that was firmly anti-apartheid and anti-nuclear.

When, in mid-1963, the family travelled westward in our tiny Mini Minor, across Offa’s Dyke into Wales, I carried two membership cards, one CND and the other Labour. The former still remains with me, the latter was allowed to lapse when, under the purportedly reforming leadership of Neil Kinnock and then, more energetically, under Tony Blair, the New Labour Party sought to capture, and succeeded in winning, large sections of the Tory vote - by usurping conservative policies. As I write, in 2006, New Labour has, in effect, long been not-so-new-Tory. It is as dedicated in its opposition to the intended socialism of Clause Four as it is cosily settled in its patently Tory, neo-liberal, ‘globalising,’ aggressive, post-colonial imperialism.

 

Friends indeed

Here I met two quite outstanding people, colleagues in the University of Wales who, in their markedly different ways, changed my intellectual life, who challenged and helped consolidate my previously wobbly architectural and socio-political thinking. They were Professor Dewi Prys Thomas, Head of the Welsh School of Architecture, and Howard Harris, a then recent graduate with whom I carried out a number of research studies, jointly published technical and other reports, and with whom I developed a friendship, a comradeship that has, to date, lasted almost forty years.

Dewi, an ardent Welsh Nationalist, welcomed our family to Wales, became god-father to our children and an avuncular confidant to Beate and I. He encouraged her in her television career at BBC Wales and made space for me to teach as I thought best. When I questioned him on this, he argued that he had chosen me for the post of lecturer in his department after carefully examining my curriculum vitae, testimonials, references and my conduct in interview. I was now to substantiate, confirm that selection via my work with the students. He was a quite, undemonstrative scholar, ever at informed ease in his two specialities, History of Architecture and Design. I learnt much from Dewi’s tutorials; sessions in which - a sure mark of a caring teacher - he constantly highlighted the stronger aspects of weak designs in order to convey, to inspire confidence in their authors. As I recall, he was never a carping critic, ever a heartening, reassuring educationist. He directed me to much of what I know about architectural history and design. With many of his students and a large compliment of his staff, I loved him; truly an Edwardian gentleman, a man for all seasons.

Dewi was a socialist with distinct social democratic leanings, a common standpoint among Welsh Nationalists of his First World War generation. He respected, often concurred with my views. In my later years as the occupant of a personal chair, he shielded me from severely antagonistic opposition from our fellow professors and, unsurprisingly, the Principal of our College, a publicly announced advocate of militant Thatcherist university policies. Little of that elevated professorial flatulence accommodated his, and my, supposedly dated, ‘old-fashioned’ views on matters relating to academic freedom, to established, tolerant university policies and procedures.

Dewi, the gentle dissenter, was ever-loyal to members of his department, on occasion, one thought, to a fault. It was about halfway through my stay in the department, that I learnt of his sustained defence of my right to hold and express dissenting academic views. That, in the reactionary ambience of British universities during the 1980s until my retirement in the late-1990s, was a remarkably enduring expression of loyalty, one for which I am lastingly grateful.

Turning now to Howard Harris, a young research assistant who joined one of my sponsored projects in 1973. He came as a psychology graduate from Keele University immediately to impress my colleagues on the project with his intelligent ability, his knowledge in cognate disciplines, his capacity for rapidly assimilating new and recondite paradigms, concepts, methods of inquiry. Within weeks of his arrival, his initiative and enthusiasm enabled him to become creatively familiar with our proposals, to comment on them incisively and to suggest considerable improvements to them. Howard became pretty well indispensable to us.

As he and I worked ever more closely, we exchanged thoughts on matters ranging from the project to the often perplexing social and political milieux in which we found ourselves. We soon became close acquaintances, habitual companions who shared many values. We sparked ideas off each other, we urged one another openly to explore fresh concepts, to appreciate each others’ respective academic disciplines. Together we came to savour the complexities of our research studies, and, above all, to do so with the infectious humour which we, especially he, brought to those sessions. Colleagues in neighbouring offices frequently asked whether we were working or merely joking together. Of course, we were doing both.

Over the years Howard and I came substantially to agree on most socio-political, public matters, on appropriate approaches to research methodology, on the social and personal values that affected us most urgently. We were and remain committed research workers, enduring friends and concerned critics of the status quo, of routinely accepted authority.

In this, as in all our academic and related activities, Howard and I referred constantly to the work of our mutual love, William Morris.

His socialism - a version which we termed 'socialist humanism' - guided and informed most, if not all that we thought and acted on. Morris, the humane revolutionary, reached confidently, with profoundly innovative understanding, into craft and art, into poetry and novel writing, into architecture and design, into book-printing and stained glass manufacturing, into social history and political activism and much, much else. His ideas pervaded our joint writings: most of our published material - at minimum some three dozen academic papers - rests heavily on the insightful inspiration which our studies of Morris afforded us. That happily acknowledged debt is clearly recorded in the writings and was stressed in the seperate teaching activities we undertook. As might be gleaned from what I have written and am yet to write in these memoirs, Morris remains my always present, beloved mentor. On that, I am, and remain, indelibly influenced by the magisterial scholarship of the social historian cum political commentator Edward Thompson's William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (Merlin Press, 1977).

During those approximately fifteen years of Howard's and my day-to-day collaboration, we took part in university-related campaigns of attempted resistance to ruthless neo-liberal incursions: for instance, official efforts to enforce interchangeable blocks of ‘modulized’ courses; to ‘rationalising’ departments and/or faculties, usually by decreasing, debasing teaching in the humanities; to ‘deploying’ stratified staff salaries as tools of control; to ‘empowering’ administrative at the expense of academic practices and policies ... in short, to reducing previously autonomous tertiary education to a conglomeration of marketable sub-entities. We opposed the then vaunted ‘commodification’ of university life, the concerted, government-led attack on teaching, learning and research. The language was/is as cumbersome, as ugly, as offensive as the proposed intentions and means for realising them.

We were also involved in CND and Labour Party work: in, for example, CND’s non-violent, passive campaign of direct action that was aimed at blocking the entrances to the Royal Ordinance Factory on the outskirts of Cardiff. There, in a quintessentially suburban setting, nuclear warheads were brought from military installations throughout Wales for periodic maintenance. We were trained in mutual and individual techniques of passive resistance by a decidedly ecumenical group - among others, folk from local sections of the women’s movement, seasoned anti-apartheid and left-Labour activists, and volunteers from the Quakers, who were frequently part of similar acts of dissension.

These non-aggressive, peaceful procedure were used whenever necessary by members of CND Wales; expressly by the women who marched across South Wales, through south-west England, to Greenham Common, near Newbury, Berkshire. They camped roughly, very roughly, for months outside the adjacent US airbase to block the entry of US-made Cruise Missiles. These anonymous, mysterious weapons were, the British public was ‘informed,’ to be stationed there for use against the USSR, and, as some argued later, to intimidate supporters of the increasingly powerful peace movements across Europe.

As Chairperson of CND Wales at the time, my attention was repeatedly drawn to events at Greenham; events that led to the makeshift women’s camp becoming a worldwide anti-nuclear, anti-war symbol. A contingent of the very first marchers from South-West Wales, women who had helped initiate the project, stopped overnight at our house in Cardiff en route to Greenham. During our excited discussions, they said that shortly after my recent series of CND addresses in their area, they had met, debated and decided on this form of protest - a welcome outcome of my months of travel, organising work and public speaking across the country. Activity in the Labour Party, as in Anti-apartheid Wales, was inevitably curtailed in this pressing rush; excepting, that is, for one’s habitual references in public addresses to the then persistent Israeli-South African collaboration on nuclear as well as so-called ‘conventional’ weaponry.

My role in the Cardiff Labour Party, particularly during the period in which I served on what was known as the City Party Committee, was quiet, though not wholly pacific. Surprisingly so: this was, after all, a time in which Thatcherist slashes in welfare expenditure were at their most biting. Notwithstanding forceful disagreement from an handful of dissenters, members of the committee deliberated turgidly, grandiloquently, in ever more rotund phrases. We, discussed ‘upgrading’ the long decaying docklands, ‘renewing’ the harbour by ‘creating’ an huge, ‘world-class’ marina, ‘re-locating’ - not, bless us, moving - the city administrative offices from the centre. This was my most intimate exposure to what was later to become an epidemic, inflated official rhetoric; a device readily resorted to by publicity ‘consultants,’ politicians and their bureaucratic side-kicks - not least in post-1994 South Africa.

More explicitly, and honestly, our committee members opted to displace the poor, the often black inhabitants of the docks area to make way for private, profitable investment in, principally, speculative office or modish residential premises. The members united in pursuit of a soundly Thatcherist goal. But I will spare the heavy criticism, they also decided to provide a series of handsome swimming pools - better described as 'aquatic playgrounds' - in many of the less affluent parts of the city, a necessary and popular measure. It was a representative, fork-tongued local Labour Party committee earnestly at work. We acceded to public pressure for visible, relatively inexpensive items while, simultaneously, preparing to shift indigent people from their affordable homes in the docklands. The underlying purpose being solidly Tory: encouraging, if not inciting highly profitable private capital into the city - not quite, one imagines, a priority for the Party’s founding members. All that was needed to secure the process of entrenching Tory policies was the reformist ideology and action of New Labour. They were soon to come.

 

University relations - a drawn out interlude

Among the miriad recollections of my three decades spent in the University of Wales, Cardiff, one seems to drift repeatedly to consciousness - my odd, strange academic relationship with the Vice-Chancellor of that college.

We were different, no doubt about that. Like a cultivated, quietly matured, port-gorged Stilton and a chunk of kitchen cheddar, Augustus Smithfield-Thackeray and I. He - most seemed readily to refer to him as Smithers - had been prepared as a lad by personal tutors for Winchester, Balliol and one of those phi-beta-alpha places at Yale ... possibly Harvard, certainly top-drawer. Done to an expensive academic turn as a chemical engineer - sounds positively plebeian that - he’d been let loose on US industry where, one of my inquisitively-minded colleagues swore, he worked diligently on developing Napalm in the shadowy Dow laboratories. You know, the sticky stuff that adheres and burns to one’s marrow.

Returning to the tired, vaguely whitish shores of old England, Smithers entered the tatty halls of British provincial academia and soon took the post of Principal at our smallish college in Cardiff, South Wales. Small but puffed-up with distinctively Welsh pride, heol. We were one of the geographically scattered tertiary institutions that, jointly, formed the University of Wales. That was second only in size to the University of London. Proud? Of course, we had initially been funded by the half-pennies of Welsh colliers, quarry-workers and hill-farmers. A people’s university, conceived, born and reared in the Principality. That changed abruptly; the new, post-World War II, unremittingly technocratic Tory and Labour regimes sought rapidly to transform us into a clutch of drearily repetitive techno-bureaucrats. Words like that came strangely to us, I believe the telling phrase is, trippingly off the tongue. Trip as we may, new appointments apart, very much apart, we remained the shabby ‘dons’ we had been.

Augustus was, entirely unsurprisingly and un-apologetically high Tory, high church, a high-flier, high-minded scientist; his vision firmly set on glistening, technologically intermeshed futures. Always on the move, improving this, amending that, including the departments in which we toiled. My architectural colleagues and I escaped much of this zeal; he seemed bewildered by our vaunted, but shallow, claims to being a scientific - definitely an in-word - and an artistic discipline. Art, I think, terrified him; especially in the thick, wordy buckets-full we added to confuse him. He said he was, had been since boyhood, an architect manque - creative, a ceaseless searcher for perfect form. We smiled in coy empathy, our charismatic Head of Department giving the cue.

My initial relationship with Smithers was ambivalent. No, puzzlingly schizophrenic. Immediately before he arrived in Cardiff, I had been appointed to a Personal Chair, the supposedly logical outcome of having been a Reader in the University. Likeable, venerable terms those: in the Middle Ages, Readers, apparently, read the texts of their discipline, Professors merely professed to having done so. My hesitant advance up this quaint ladder came as a consequence of studying sociology as well as architecture. I struggled to meld two scientifically outre disciplines in a heavily conventional academic ethos; I strove to carry out research in their seemingly overlapping areas of operation. That, for Smithers, was innovative, new, novel - he often emphasised his views by repeating them.

I was “pushing back the frontiers of knowledge”, he said. A good thing! But I was also a lefty, a political exile from South Africa - “from one of the colonies, not quite like us you know” - who, since arriving in Britain, had become involved in the then powerful Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. A left-wing, Jewish, probably Marxist background? Not necessarily a good thing. Ought to be watched: educated “abroad” - Rosebank Junior School, Parktown High School for Boys, Jo’burg, University of the Witwatersrand? That guttural, half-swallowed accent. Well ... Put up with it; may help fatten, add a whiff of imported glamour to the Institution’s over-burdened Welsh CV.

So, it was an uncertain balance for years, often jeopardised by monthly Senate meetings. That was an intriguing body, the central, most highly-placed academic committee in the Institution. Over my cheerful times in the College, I had been encouraged by my exceptionally empathetic, Welsh-speaking Head of Department, Dewi Prys-Thomas, to proceed successively from Senior Lecturer to Reader, from a personal chair to, eventually, the award of an emeritus professorship. He, Dewi, was becomingly quirky: on learning, for instance, that I had decided to read for a Doctorate, he attempted gently to dissuade me, “Gentlemen,” he confided, “do not proceed beyond a Masters degree - foreigners, especially continentals do, but that’s insufficient reason for us.” Nonetheless, in the event, he enthusiastically supported my efforts to study for a PhD in the Department of Sociology and, with benign patience, indulged the reluctant leadership which flowed, that oozed in laggardly fashion from me during my enforced spells as Dean of our faculty. That became expressly evident through my obligatory years as a member of the university Senate.

This highly influential, powerful body comprised the most senior academics of the Institute. They were a self-evidently select group; one whose members had, I soon realised, diligently honed their barely concealed lusts for power, their petty-minded, self-serving efforts to control, to direct rather than encourage the junior members of staff and students … and much more. For me, they were, to put no gloss on the indelicate matter, thoroughly reprehensible - reactionary, ruthlessly ambitious, coarsely condescending to their supposed inferiors. They came to epitomise the venal counterpart of that appealing depiction ‘a community of scholars.’

My rare appearances at Senate’s regular meetings were pockmarked by its members’ explicit disdain for what, earlier, I had, probably innocently, taken to be scholarly discourse. Naive, naive, naive. A duly respected inner circle of venerated leaders in action? In invariably self-seeking action; now, especially where university benefactors were concerned, distorted by excessive, Uriah Heep-like obsequious humility; now, on intra-mural matters, pompous, snobbish, scornful. Leadership?

That disappointment was relieved, by-passed by my growing commitment to the CND, then, mid-1970s, the most significant organisation of the many whose supporters sought to oppose the politico-military scramble to nuclear war. The urgent pressures of this overwhelming task pushed me, willy-nilly, onto the leading committees of CND Wales and, later, the national executive of British CND. In both instances, while views differed widely, while debates were frequently heated - as befitted the profound ideological and related divergences among the participants - we found common ground for our shared, our overriding goals.

Meanwhile, then as now, the leaders and led of a world that had - seemingly resolutely - turned from grass-roots, searching democratic participation, continued their power games; their crass, exploitative, vaunted devotion to individualistic competition, their now globalised exploitation.

As Dean of the Architectural and Town Planning Faculty, I was frequently thrown into the Principal’s presence. A mild, mutually tolerant accommodation had developed between us. Indeed, colleagues asked whether I might be joining the Tories, a knighthood could well be on the cards! The japes grew ever more bold, even suggesting that a doffed cap greeting to Mrs Smithfield-Thackeray might be indicative of “something interesting”. Absolutely not. While retaining my disagreements, I had grown to hold her husband in considerable regard; if for nothing else, and there was much more, his patent integrity. Ours became an increasingly mature social encounter. We avoided what might be construed as threatening to that by then placid condition. It was via our restraint, our reticence - our circumspect, perhaps hypocritical willingness not to speak of all we thought - that we nurtured our capacities for courteous respect, thoughtful forbearance, for intellectual trust.

That, though, was before the denouement, before the cosy bubble burst, pricked by the ever-thorny official perceptions of CND. We were, of course, Soviet agents, intellectuals - seeking with fulsome dedication to serving the interests of foreign powers, to undermining resistance to the great bogey, COMMUNISM. Why, I could have sworn that, on drawing up for petrol en route to CND meetings, I scrambled to find pounds sterling among the traitorous roubles falling visibly from my pockets?

On one such journey - to the distant corners of south-east Wales - we had, apparently, fired our audiences with principled opposition to the then proposed stationing of USA Cruise Missiles at Greenham Common, Newbury, south of Oxford. They decided to march cross-country, to set up rough camps at the air-base, to block entry to and exit from that by then thoroughly-advertised target. The march was an huge success, drawing, as it did, mass support as it passed through the populated areas of South Wales and the West of England. The stop in and protest meetings held at the Welsh Office in Cardiff were particularly newsworthy, as was the fact that many marchers stayed over-night at our house. My wife and I were depicted as subversives, les eminences grise. We were in the news.

Smithers, I gathered, was unimpressed. He had visited my research offices to be struck by the peace slogans and CND posters with which the research students and assistants had decorated the walls. Further, on questioning them, he learnt that they had spent, were presently spending, a great deal of time and energy on CND activities; none of which, he emphasised, was directly relevant to their carefully specified programmes of study. He left an angry, somewhat anguished note on my desk, requiring me to make an early appointment with him.

The meeting was arranged via his secretary, I slunk across the campus gardens to his office feeling as guilty, as neglectful as a selfish schoolboy. A trust unmindfully betrayed, thoughtlessly, casually put aside. That of which we had not spoken kicked up into our faces. All that I, and surely he, had come to believe to be jaunty, buoyant, debonaire lay nonchalantly smashed. At his invitation, I sat, mumbled a crude, probably inaudible apology, stared silently into his eyes. What I saw there was as abashed, as apologetic, as miserably withdrawn as I was feeling. We parted, the subject unbroached.

 

Pre-occupations of research

During those years, Howard and I conducted and/or supervised the socially-orientated research of the department. This dealt with what we referred to as socio-spatial analyses in local authority welfare buildings. Principally, these comprised the institutional accommodation specifically provided under legislation that identified “people in need of care and attention.” They included residential Homes for elderly people, Homes for Spina Bifida sufferers and other disabled young folk. We also committed ourselves to analogous research in, for instance, open-plan schools and, separately, similarly planned office premises. Later, as funding for welfare was cut by successive Conservative governments and Homes were being ‘privatised,’ we turned to analyses of recent architectural history and contemporary design theory.

Our research procedures in these projects ran counter to the prevailing, the overwhelmingly positivistic ‘methodology’ then, as now, favoured by influential, powerful members of the British and other dominant research establishments. We preferred qualitative social studies rather than quantitative social science: for example, participant observation, unstructured or semi-structured interviews, content analysis of free-association essays, as against the rigorously structured questionnaires and attitude scales, an undue reliance on the impersonal ‘laws’ of statistical analysis and the similarly pre-ordained procedures that characterised authoritatively approved social inquiry. We sought research verisimilitude, not formal, usually numerically-orientated accuracy.

As our polemical writings stressed, we attempted to grasp, to understand the meanings which people attributed to architectural phenomena, not to order, to control them. We carried out ‘soft,’ definitely not ‘hard’ investigations. We held that understanding might best - ie, in imaginative, flexible, innovative manners - inform building designers rather than recourse to supposedly positive, abstract formulae, prescriptions or rules of design. In the choice between, on the one hand, designers seeking to act on the basis of understanding socio-spatial events and, on the other, formulaic control by designers, as well as building managers, we stood by the former. This, once more, placed me in a sceptical, a questioning, dissenting camp, yet again on the outside looking in.

Of far, far more socially relevant significance, Howard’s and my approach enabled us - hesitantly at the outset - to identify a repeatedly neglected factor in design theory and practice. That centred on the issue of social power, the matter of who, of which individuals, and/or groups determine the nature or character of socio-spatial relations in given contexts. Who holds power, who exercises control? And, concomitantly, how, in what ways do those who are controlled, those relegated to powerlessness, respond? What is the nature of their opposition, their resistance? On publicly posing these crucial questions, we became confirmed dissenters in the world of socially-related architectural scholarship. At best, we were depicted as tender-minded utopians, “nice guys but totally unrealistic” is a description that remains with me. At worst, and increasingly, we were depicted as crypto-leftist agitators; in the days of habitual Cold War labelling, we were dismissed as frustrated, armchair revolutionaries.

One’s scepticism stretched to doubting that our research findings warranted this intense opposition. What was so shocking about highlighting the suspicion that dominated the working lives of office staff? What was objectionable about examining the continuous, the focussed managerial surveillance that marked the trumpeted ‘freedom’ of open-plan offices? What was so ominous about portraying them as classroom-like spatial arrangements in which mature members of staff were/are habitually treated as recalcitrant school children? Why were we being unduly provocative, potential agents of work-place insurrection, when we reported the freely expressed views of office workers; views that our unobtrusive research procedures solicited so readily?

What, vis-a-vis local authority Homes for aged people, was so perilous by our publication of the divisive, frequently uncaring behaviour of staff attendants? Why did we so startle our scientific, open-minded colleagues by revealing that, day upon dreary day, elderly residents spent their waking hours in the often fiercely contending factions that characterised the sitting-room groupings in the Homes? How did we offend our critics by indicating that, week upon week, young relatives called on otherwise unvisited residents so shortly after the latter’s old-age pensions were handed to them? What was so portentous for the sociologists, social psychologists and architects to whom, at conferences, we reported our studies in residential Homes for children, most of whom were young offenders? Why, as a case in point, were they so angry in expressing their upset that we had, as one commented, “ruthlessly zeroed in” on the ways in which the staff denied space to the inmates by summary appropriation? Why were ”nice guys” like us being unleashed to set upon colleagues at cool scientific conferences?

Can it be that in our putatively a-political academic niche, we were drawing undesired attention to coarse reality, to the ever-present exercise of privileged social power? Better, surely, to let all that be, to leave social power to those who wield it. Can it be that, from the secluded towers of academe, we were querying the also trumpeted ‘neutrality’ of our professional design and scientific colleagues? The end of British capitalism was, it seems, being hurried on by our inappropriate, embarrassing research conclusions - a consumation devoutly to be wished.

 

More extra-mural emphases

It was in the 1970s, through the 80s and into the 90s that corporate and government neo-liberalism reached its 20th century apogee in Britain. During these two and more decades the British people - especially the abused ‘lower orders’ - experienced trenchant welfare cuts. Public, social housing was central to this sustained Tory or Tory-like attack. The situation was horrifying: as, ten years into Mrs Thatcher’s government, 1988, a Salvation Army report of its survey of London’s homeless people showed,

Drawing on earlier surveys - like that carried out by the National Assistant Board in 1965 - the report suggested that similar conditions existed in other British cities - Cardiff being one. Despite the efforts made since the end of World War II, there was a serious, and poignant, shortage of houses in the public as well as the private sector - particularly the rented stock available to indigent families. That this was to occur had been anticipated by the Milner Holland committee in the comprehensive report it released, also in1965. Britain’s stock of privately rented houses was diminishing rapidly and would not stabilise until “a balance was struck between the conflicting needs of the landlord and the tenant.” Even if that took place, there would still be shamefully many families unable to afford market rents. The public sector had necessarily to step in, marginally aided by government-funded but privately managed Housing Associations. Successive, Conservative and Labour administrations sought electoral support by undertaking, in see-saw fashion, to exceed the numbers of homes that their opponents promised to provide. And, indeed, housing output did increase. Details of these events may be found in Bill Risebero’s Fantastic Form: Architecture and Planning Today (1992)

Then the economic crisis that had begun in the early 1970s began to bite. Confronting a continuing fall in the rate of profit, the Labour government of the time intensified its support for finance capital and, concomitantly, its increasing withdrawal from welfare provisions such as public housing. News of welfare cutbacks came, it seemed, daily. From 1979, they continued under the militantly monetarist Thatcher and her like-minded ministers. We became familiar with the language of Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman which, translated, meant SLASH, SLASH, SLASH. By 1984 the registered number of unemployed was more than three million, some half of whom were building workers. Such new housing as was built was largely private. Public housing programmes were, in the main, suspended or abandoned; the existing welfare stock suffered from ever-worsening disrepair.

Resistance was inevitable, not least from tenants; an increasingly vociferous, primarily working class population whose members tended to look to the wider, national political struggles that had started in the late 1960s. Not unexpectedly many tenants associations allied themselves with trades unions. But they also attracted support from others, among which there were architectural and town planning students. As in my case, they urged members of academic staff to support and/or join them. This occurred in most of the main, industrial cities of Britain - Liverpool, Sheffield, Glasgow and many others, including less populous centres such as Cardiff.

In the main, the objectors consisted of working-class tenant groups who united around the adverse, and diverse, consequences of government policies that were affecting them immediately. In the most publicised instance, the Covent Garden protest, this included middle-class home owners whose property values were under threat, and cultural pressure groups whose influential members sought to prevent the destruction of historic buildings and their local settings.

Our liaison in Cardiff was an energetic Labour councillor and fellow academic, Bob Dumbleton. He spearheaded a public campaign of protest that centred on the historic docks, the adjoining industrial and the surrounding, predominantly working-class residential areas. He posed direct, design-related questions to our student activists; questions that focussed on the neglected, dilapidated physical conditions of the entire dockside. The students, in their turn, brought these and their own, also pertinent, questions to the School of Architecture. There, together with invited protestors and students from universities in other affected centres, they sought to confront these matters; mainly via guest lecturers, in their seminar discussions and, centrally, in the design studios. Notwithstanding the indifference of many, most, of its staff members, the School stepped into the world of deprivation and resistance which now sat expectantly on the students’ drawing boards.

Activities of this nature featured in Schools of Architecture and among young practitioners across Britain. In time, that led to a loose association, the New Architecture Movement (NAM), initially intended to co-ordinate protests of the type which were so urgently engaging us. Soon, however, we, its members, considered it necessary to bring a more formally organised, a more directly targeted body into being. This became pressingly evident from the wide-ranging discussions and specific resolutions adopted at NAM’s newly instituted annual conferences. The resolutions included a request that elected members participate in the affairs of the Architects Registration Council of the United Kingdom (ARCUK), a statutory body charged with keeping a register of architects and regulating their professional affairs.

A group of us was nominated to offer ourselves as NAM candidates for annual election by the electorate; namely, all registered architects. Each year, a party of some nine or ten of us found ourselves on the Council, where we came to constitute a stable, regular caucus of radicals. I recall serving for a decade or slightly more. We argued, and occasionally won majority support for matters such as humane, contemporary interpretations of offences against minor ARCUK regulations; a refusal, in the apartheid era, to register South African architects; and an easing of the stringent entry requirements for foreign architects living in Britain who had applied for registration. The latter affected a growing tally of refugees from repressive, authoritarian states that had expelled them. We were, to a NAM man and woman, grateful for these opportunities to help relax the often rigid, half-century old regulations.

 

Academic travels

Service as an academic on ARCUK led to my appointment by the Council to an accreditation board whose members periodically visited schools of architecture throughout Britain. We remained in each institution for three days studying course syllabi, design portfolios, examination papers, students’ scripts and consulting closely with students, staff and local practitioners. One thus became familiar with a range of pedagogic practices.

This provided an useful basis for the visits - in some instances, extended periods of teaching - which I was to make to schools outside Britain; principally in New Zealand, Australia, India and North America. All, bar my mid-West stops to lecture and teach at in the United States and New Delhi, India, were instructive. The US exceptions seemed locked in ignorance and/or indifference: students and a majority of staff members appeared to be unaware of, unaffected by the poverty, the degraded physical settings in their own neighbourhoods and, not least, in neighbouring Mexico. When I introduced a course dealing with Hassan Fathy’s splendid book, Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt (1969, Chicago University Press!) there was bewilderment, disbelief - what had ‘the poor’ to do with the mightily affluent USA?

The School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi provided an obverse, a distorted mirror image. Patently well-heeled, indeed an often flamboyantly well-off staff were vocal in their disdain, in their undisguised contempt for the many thousands of indigent families living out their entire lives on streets and sidewalks close to the campus. In areas of the richest and possibly the poorest nation on earth, architecture remained entrenched as a privilege of the privileged.

The situations in Australian and New Zealand schools differed markedly from this shaming smugness. Much the same circumstances as those in Britain prevailed at the universities I visited there - two in Sydney and in Melbourne. Focussed educational attention was paid to the staffs’ and the students’ indigent fellow citizens, particularly to the makeshift, shoddy housing habitually occupied by native Aborigine peoples. But, my New Zealand experiences, at the University schools of architecture in Wellington and in Auckland, were the most telling. Lecturers in each devoted considerable energy and erudition to the physical environs of the poor, expressly to the frequently unenviable plight of urbanised Maori families. An old friend, Tony Ward, of the Auckland school was, and surely is still outstanding in this respect. He conducted inspiring lecture courses in conjunction with under- and post-graduate research and implementation studies in urban planning, housing and job provision in blighted areas close to his home university. A beacon of dedicated scholarship.

The school at Wellington was exemplary for a similar and an additional reason. The latter centred on its enlightened approach to democratic, participant architectural education. As at the singularly open school in Hull, northern England, the student body was deeply involved in a range of crucially relevant matters: from staff appointments to course content; from co-operation between different years of study to independent, self-critical student assessment of academic work; from organised library-based programmes of study to a firm focus on social issues that might be amenable to architectural intervention.

I was immensely impressed; not only by these and allied matters, but by the quite obvious success of this exercise in inwardly disciplined self-regulation. Far from the exclamations of alarm that so many academics evince on hearing of this - the place will surely descend into chaos - as I learnt over a long spell there, the school was filled with cheerful, ever-receptive, searchingly innovative young people. A contemporary community of scholars? Certainly a worthy, an educational lesson.

Shortly after returning to The Welsh School of Architecture, the editors of the student magazine asked members of staff to summarise their views on architectural education. I began by citing Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal:

Then I outlined two visions: the first an ideal, a dream of what might be; the second a sketch of what is,

There are, for me, obvious analogies with MacNeice’s generous advocacy, the ideals that underpin the first image and the urging of the African National Congress’ Freedom Charter of the mid-1950s - “the doors of learning and culture shall be opened.” This, an immediately pressing issue in South African architectural education, is the focus of what follows.

I touch first on another troublesome aspect of architectural pedagogy; one that has long prevailed and continues to flourish. Among critics of the second image, this is somewhat dismissively depicted as “the star system”. It is a frame of reference - confidently, glibly presented as “learning from excellence” - in which architectural students are regularly, if not constantly, required to attend on “star” designers, on well-known exemplars, on, to resort to the modish term, “precedent”.

That notion is associated with an appealing myth to which practitioners, like teaching staff, tend to subscribe: their comforting belief that architects lead “the building team”. Since about the end of World War II, the professional standing of architects has shifted decisively; especially of those who work in urban centres. Where formerly - a hangover from gentlemanly Victorian custom - practitioners were regarded, or regarded themselves, as team leaders, they are now members inter pares. Or, as those commissioned by corporate agglomerates testify bitterly, as less than equals. The aura of primacy is no longer apposite.

That fable is nurtured in the role-image presented to students; one that centres on membership of an occupational elite, of being favoured neophytes who aspire to genius. Not surprisingly, many view themselves as creatively exceptional participants in an otherwise prosaic construction industry. This indulgence is consistent with that other illusion: the disabling mystique of architectural stardom - each student an incipient Le Corbusier, Aldo Rossi, Rem Koolhaas. Their actual, their latent abilities are bypassed, undermined or frustrated in debilitating strivings for purportedly unique artistic superiority. That is not lessened by a rapid turnover of heroes as successions of stars are made obsolete by ever newly anointed idols.

A fetish-like homage continues to be paid, and repaid, to formalistic concerns, often to the detriment of building function and/or social purpose. This is not unrelated to an enduring, preoccupation with “architecture as art”. As Peter Buchanan, past editor of the Architectural Review, noted “the emphasis on unshackled and uncritical creativity has led much student design far from the ... disciplines of architecture and into the realms of bad art”. Attendance on other design essentials - principally the social, technological, economic - is tenuous in relation to that ever-beckoning talisman, “great art”.

Yet, looking about one, the products of this overblown emphasis are seldom re-assuring. Art is conspicuously absent from much of our architectural environs; particularly in our urban settings. And unsurprisingly, here as elsewhere in recently colonial Africa, the white-dominated nature of those surroundings remains embedded. As Professor Chabani Manganyi, a non-architect, wrote some twenty years back, this inhibits “a healthy and aesthetic response to architecture ... [it] stands as a barrier between my humanity and that of my white countrymen”.

The dual images I have outlined are intended to highlight such matters. Image One portrays an evenly distributed web of power, shared among members of a community of scholars. Academics as well as students are to be enabled, reciprocally. Like the doors of culture, those of learning shall be opened, genuinely. The second image depicts an asymmetric distribution; one in which control of knowledge lies with an hierarchy of teaching staff who, in southern Africa, have been and are overwhelmingly white, male and educated in the very paradigms they promote.

Knowledge empowers, provides a basis for social control, for - in the case of those with restricted power resources - gaining control of their affairs, including, crucially, their built surroundings. Courses that do not help design students to acquire, to exercise such control are incapacitating rather than enabling. In South Africa, such educational programmes entrench rather than challenge established privilege - whether based on class, gender or race.

To the ever practical, the tough-minded, my first image is idealistic stargazing - “it won’t work, it’s impractical.” In terms of their cramped, their constrained interpretations, that must carry considerable force. But, to borrow Bertrand Russell’s challenging phrase, there is “nothing so practical as a good theory”, or, as he also noted, “an humane vision”. Unlike the thoughtfully, the determinedly innovative departments of architecture in which I have been fortunate to work abroad, in southern Africa that remains untested. When it is, supposedly hard-headed ‘realists’ might well be surprised.

 

‘Hard’ and ‘soft’ social inquiry

Mention is made in this chapter of what is customarily described as positivistic social research and a contrary approach in social studies, interpretative inquiry. Each of these, I suggest, calls for a brief, preferably a non-technical digression.

To my knowledge, the term positivism is derived from the ‘positive philosophy’ of the noted French sociologist Auguste Comte (1798-1857). He postulated three successive phases in human intellectual history - theology, metaphysics and sociology. The earlier two were, he argued, concerned with first and final causes. The third, emphasising the criteria of economy and simplicity, centres on “efficient causes for invariant laws,” the basic, unalterable laws of social existence, the law-like regularities among observable social phenomena. This stress on fixed causality - and, consequently, on the predictability of human affairs - led him to an idealised ‘scientific’ method for social inquiries that would, Comte posited, point to a rational form of social life. Knowledge of the laws of society would, he implied, set the limits of possible reform, and also allow governments to deploy social scientific data to reformist ends.

In more formal terms, he held that positivism is a scientifically-orientated form of empiricism in the specific sense that its adherents seek to describe the co-existence and succession of identifiable phenomena. It is, in the eminent sociologist Talcott Parsons’ words, “the view that positive science constitutes man’s [sic] sole possible cognitive relation to external reality.” It is, Parsons added, a system in which one is obliged to assume that human action can be adequately characterised without regard to people’s, to the human agents’ own standpoints. It is abstract. Accordingly, positivistic theory and practice in social inquiries involves taking ‘natural,’ pre-eminently physical scientific accounts - rather than, for instance, historical or literary accounts - as primary, as the focus of st
udy. Advocates of social positivism, take the physical sciences as their exemplar, their ideal.

Critics of positivistic inquiry argue that Comte’s view of piecemeal reform is limiting; a view which Karl Popper’s philosophical thoughts on scientific inquiry may be considered to lend support. They, the critics, contend that a confident emancipatory social theory, and its associated practices, must necessarily be alert to potentialities that lie beyond observable phenomena; potentialities that are not limited to external reality. Such reflexive, self-reflecting, and interpretative research is not obediently tied to law-like theorising and practices. Such critics - especially, but not solely, members and/or followers of the Frankfurt School, the Institute of Social Research established in Frankfurt,1923 - call for an open-ended, continuously self-critical approach. It is an approach that could avoid the paralysis of, among other concrete examples, the firmly positivistic emphasis which is embedded in Stalinist dialectical materialism.

Their, the critics’ approach - widely known as ‘critical theory’ - is conveniently summarised in the editor, Tom Bottomore’s A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (1983). In a lengthy entry devoted to the Frankfurt School, its adherents are described as seeking,

Even in this stark, abbreviated outline, their challenging, distinctly non-positivistic stance bypasses the myth of ‘value-free’ science; indeed, it roots research enterprises in committed, above all, in critical examinations of social phenomena. Throughout our work, Howard Harris and I were inexorably drawn to this perspective and, in parallel, to the qualitative methods that I alluded to earlier in this text. For those who wish critically to investigate our perhaps unfamiliar standpoint, I recommend Qualitative Methodology: Firsthand Involvement with the Social World, edited by William J Filstead (1970). The citation printed on the opening page illustrates the thrust of his and his co-authors’ contributions to the book,

“Respect the nature of the empirical world and organize
a methodological stance to reflect that respect.”

The general, theoretically inclined, comments in Filstead’s volume arise directly from the authors’ research reports. They are not abstract, separate excursions into ‘high theory.’ Happily, that also applies to another, similarly illuminating volume, Symbolic Interaction: a Reader in Social Psychology (1967) edited by Jerome G Manis and Bernard N Meltzer. This carries an eminently readable explanatory introduction, a range of readily accessible methodological articles and a welcome series of critical appraisals. It is a self-aware exercise in self-critical social studies.