A Yorkstone Godzilla. A materiality of mutuality at the Halifax Building Society, 1968–1974

ABSTRACT

How does a monumental building – the former headquarters of the Halifax Building Society – in a northern English town embody a material expression of the mutualised mortgage industry dominant in the UK at the time of its conception and construction? How does this building correspond to a specific dispositif of mutuality? I consider questions such as these through documentary research, an interview, and correspondence with an architect who worked on the project (1968–1974). The building’s current use as a global banking group’s ‘head office’ is significantly different from that which supported mutuality in the 1970s, and I consider the building’s architectural and technological forms to understand how it organised a material cultural expression of the mutual building society’s power, and of its members’ money–power, through the mechanisation of an intensifying mortgage-handling business and the bunkering of a gradually increasing stock of mortgage paper.

KEYWORDS:

• Mutuality
• materiality
• mortgages
• bunkers
• architecture

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Richard Saxon for his time, discussions and correspondence; to Andrew Melling and Matt Wilde for comments on drafts; and to the supportive reviewers and editors of Journal of Cultural Economy. discussions with Peter G Tillotson on the contractor’s work have been invaluable – thank you.

Disclosure statement

The author declares no potential conflicts of interest or benefit with respect to the research and authorship of this article, including family members' connections to the building and the organisations discussed in this article.

Notes

1 On ‘sociality’ in different financial contexts see Maurer (2008).

2 10.2 million owner–occupiers in England and Wales in 1981 rose to 13.4 million a decade later (Jeffries, 2021, p. 13).

3 51% of English and Welsh households were owner-occupied in 1971; 58% were in 1981 (ONS, 2015).

4 BDP took mainly public sector contracts in the 1960s and was drawn to clients who built for their own occupation. Unlike most structures built with developer capital to accommodate financial services clients, bespoke ‘one-offs’ like the Halifax (and e.g. Bloomberg London) are depreciating expenses, not assets (Saxon 17.6.21).

5 Here, Richard emphasises the Halifax’s status as neither a public nor strictly private building given its purpose to house the member-owned mutual.

6 ‘A gang of Sikh masons did the excellent work’ (Saxon p.c.), likely the technically self-employed ‘lump’ labour of a subcontractor who provides only labour and not material, equipment or workers’ entitlements. Tax was not paid on the lump; workers forfeit protections for seemingly high wages. Abolishing the lump was one motivation for the 1972 UK building workers’ strike (Goulding, 1975).

7 The towers ‘are poured concrete but cladding them was logical as well as appropriate to the place [because] BDP had stopped using exposed concrete given its poor weathering qualities.’ Preston Bus Station is precast concrete, ‘detailed to weather well’ (Saxon p.c.).

8 Nonetheless, HBS adopted sophisticated technologies, computerising administrative and investor records in the 1960s – alongside the Halifax, connected by bridge-link, is the Society’s computer building, finished in 1967 – and installing ATMs after 1978 (Hollow, 2017, pp. 220–221).

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Matthew Tillotson

Matthew Tillotson is Lecturer in Human Geography at Queen Mary, University of London. He completed a PhD at King's College London and has previously taught geography at Sheffield, Leicester and Southampton universities. As a political and historical geographer his research interests have centred on the technical practices of boundary surveying, histories of colonial territory processes and geopolitics.