Berthold Lubetkin
Reporting on the designation of Peterlee New Town on 25 March 1948, The Times newspaper wrote:
‘The newest of the new towns is in many respects a project of greater importance than the new towns in the London area. Not only is Peterlee to be built forthwith because of its importance to the mining industry, but it also presents an opportunity of revitalising the whole social life of its area…
The opportunity thus created demands both vision and an open mind, and the development corporation is to be congratulated on its choice of Mr Lubetkin as architect-planner. He is one of Britain’s most distinguished architects, and his recent work at Finsbury has proved his capacity to cooperate well with local authorities. Emphasis should be laid on the fact that he is a designer rather than a town planner in the narrow sense. Too much emphasis has perhaps been given lately to the sociological and statistical aspects of town planning at the expense of the visual. Mr Lubetkin can be relied upon to plan in three dimensions from the beginning.’
Lubetkin had in fact been approach by Lewis Silkin early in 1947 with the offer to become architect planner at one of several of the first-generation new towns in the Greater London area. He rejected each offer, cautious of the Reith Report’s advocacy of a ‘mixed community’, which he felt would look artificial and transplanted. Silkin then approached Lubetkin again in the autumn of that year with a new proposal. In contrast to task of rehousing the overspill population of the nation’s capital city, badly damaged in the Blitz, the task at Peterlee was to create a ‘world capital for miners.
Trained in Moscow and Paris, Lubetkin moved to Britain in 1930, where he established a reputation as the leading light in establishing the Modern Movement (also known as the International Style) on these shores. His appointment in January 1948 was a clear statement of intent, bringing added prestige to the project. It also represented a significant departure from the town envisaged by C W Clark.
Lubetkin’s plan for the town centre is unapologetically urban in character and dynamic in design. The buildings encompass a bus station, linear shopping/department store, indoor sports complex, skating rink and swimming pools, a cinema and conference centre, clubs and restaurants, shops with rear service access, a civic centre group, and residential apartment blocks. It is the latter which proved to be the centre of controversy, leading to the fallacy that Lubetkin planned to build a ‘city in the sky’. The facts don’t bear this out. The high-density apartment blocks in the town centre were to accommodate 2,000 residents, a small fraction of the new town’s target population of 30,000 people. His designs for the residential areas of Peterlee were limited to two-, three-, and four-story buildings, consistent with the later building programme.
Facilities for the Recreation Area and Sports Complex at Oakerside ‘peninsular’ were to include rugby, football, cricket, hockey, tennis, athletics track, squash club, youth hostel, outward bound centre, and a rock-climbing club on the cliffs of the ravine. Paths to the east led down into the Dene, where a Zoo was also proposed.
Designed as an experimental test bed for the residential areas of the New Town, the only physical trace of Lubetkin’s Master Plan is the road layout found at Thorntree Gill. Given the timescales involved, it is possible that the roads were already being laid in Thorntree Gill when Lubetkin resigned as Architect Planner in March 1950.
In retrospect, Lubetkin’s Master Plan appears to have been doomed from the outset, ending with his resignation in March 1950. On 1 February 1949, MPs raised the question in the Houses of Parliament as to why a detailed survey of the site had not been undertaken prior to the designation of Peterlee. The issue here was the risk of subsidence in a coal mining area. Prior to the Draft Designation Order being issued in October 1947, the Ministry of Fuel & Power had given the National Coal Board assurances that the proposed new town development would not interfere with coal extraction in the area. Consequently, the NCB offered no representation at the local public inquiry in January 1948. When discussions with representatives from the regional office of the NCB began, Lubetkin was shocked to discover their true position on the matter, which to his mind ran contrary to the official remit of the Development Corporation and the type of town he had agreed to design. As discussions with the NCB progressed, Lubetkin sought to reach a solution by proposing that the building programme above ground be synchronised with mining operations below, thus minimizing the need to sterilize coal reserves vital to post war reconstruction. Lubetkin was himself desperate to avoid the need to sterilize coal reserves as this would effectively be robbing the town’s intended residents of their livelihood.
Note that Lubetkin’s designs for terrace houses at Thorntree Gill include a gently sloping roof hidden behind rectangular facades on three sides. The visual impact achieved here bears resemblance with the ‘flat roof’ designs of the houses in the South West Area of Peterlee, developed almost a decade later by Frank Dixon and Victor Pasmore.
It’s possible however that in choosing the form of a cube as the basic building unit in South West I, Pasmore and Dixon did so without with prior knowledge of, or direct access to Lubetkin’s earlier designs. The Peterlee Development Corporation Archives, now in the collection of The Story at Mount Oswald, contains no documents relating to Lubetkin’s designs for the Hundred Houses. Many of these documents, which are reproduced in John Allen’s architectural biography (Berthold Lubetkin: Architecture and the tradition of the new) came from either the man himself, or from Peter Yates, a member of Lubetkin’s design team, who retained the original drawings.