![Sample our Urban Studies journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110826/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Urban-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
After the Second World War, artist Peter Laszlo Peri approached the London County Council with the idea of creating sculptural reliefs with a family theme in coloured concrete on two of Lambeth’s new housing estates. The results were three reliefs: ‘Following the Leader (Memorial to the Children Killed in the Blitz)’, 1949, on the Vauxhall Gardens estate and ‘Boys Playing Football’, 1951–52, and ‘Mother with Children Playing’, 1951–52, on the nearby South Lambeth estate. After the war, the reconstruction and improvement of housing were crucial. The London County Council planned for large areas of London to be rebuilt: including an ambitious programme of housing. This paper looks at these artworks within the context of the housing they sit amongst. I read these sculptural reliefs, created between 1949 and 1952, within the LCC’s post-war housing and community policies and as symbols of Lambeth’s renewal. This paper places these reliefs, and their settings, within the wider context of debates surrounding the post-war renewal of London, community participation and placemaking.
GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dr. Sam Johnson-Schlee for his help and guidance in preparing this paper. I would also like to thank Peter Peri for sharing information about his grandfather Peter Laszlo Peri and for permission to use images of his grandfather’s work.
Notes
1 South London Press, Festival sculptor brightens flats, 25 November 1952.
2 C. Wheeler, Sculpture 1850 and 1950. London County Council Exhibition at Holland Park, London, May to September 1957 (London: London County Council, 1957).
3 G. Whiteley, ‘Peri, Peter Laszlo [formerly Ladislas Weisz] (1899–1967), Sculptor and Etcher.’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 23 September 2004. Oxford University Press https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/64507 [accessed October 2019]
4 J. Gold, The Experience of Modernism: Modern Architects and the Future City, 1928–1953 (London: E & F. N. Spon, 1997).
5 D. Pereira, Art for the Common Man (2009).
6 D. Mitchell, ‘Art patronage by the London County Council (LCC), 1948–1965’, Leonardo, 10:3 (summer 1977), 207–12.
7 M. Garlake, New Art, New World: British Art in Postwar Society (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998).
8 Garlake, New Art, New World, 231–32.
9 ‘The Shape of Things to come’, The Listener, 5 March 1942, 297, quoted in Garlake, New Art New World, 238.
10 B. Campkin, Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture (London: I. B. Taurus & Co., 2013), 25. Campkin quotes Keith Gandal’s term, the ‘spectacle of the slum’ from Gandal, K. The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen of the Slum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
11 HM Government, Housing Act, 1930 <https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/20-21/39/enacted> [accessed 22 March 2019] 1.
12 W.E. Jackson, Achievement: A Short History of the London County Council (London: Longmans, Green & Co. Ltd., 1965), 93.
13 J. Forshaw and P. Abercrombie, County of London Plan 1943 (London: MacMillan & Co., 1943).
14 L. Nead, The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain (London: Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, 2017), 250.
15 E.J. Carter and E. Goldfinger, The County of London Plan: Explained by E. J. Carter & Ernö Goldfinger, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945), 24.
16 N. Bullock (1994) ‘Ideals, priorities and harsh realities: reconstruction and the LCC, 1945–51’, Planning Perspectives, 9:1, 87–10, 94.
17 N. Day, ‘The role of the architect in post-war state housing: a case study of the housing work of the London County Council, 1939–1956’, (1988), 168.
18 Forshaw & Abercrombie, County of London Plan, 2.
19 Ibid. 3.
20 Ibid. 9.
21 Day, ‘The role of the architect in post-war state housing’, 169.
22 HM Government, Report of the Design of Dwellings Subcommittee of the Central Housing Advisory Committee Appointed by the Minister of Health and Report of a Study Group of the Ministry of Town and Country Planning on Site Planning and Layout in Relation to Housing, (1944), 58–59.
23 M.P. Collins, ‘The London County Council’s Approach to Town Planning: 1909–1945’, The London Journal, 42:2 (2017), 172–91, DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2017.1305253 [accessed January 2018], 186.
24 Day, ‘The Role of the Architect in Post-war State Housing’, 52–53.
25 Andrew Boyd, quoted in Day, ‘The Role of the Architect in Post-war State Housing’, 27.
26 Jackson, Achievement, 218.
27 Ibid. 223.
28 LCC minutes of proceedings, 1956, 205 (LMA reference 18.6 LCC, available on library open shelves in LMA Information Area).
29 LCC minutes of proceedings, 1954, 576, quoted in LCC minutes of proceedings, 1956, 205 (LMA reference 18.6 LCC, available on library open shelves in LMA Information Area).
30 ‘The Shape of Things to come’, The Listener, 5 March 1942, 297, quoted in Garlake, New Art: New World, 238.
31 Pereira, Art for the Common Man, 19.
32 Garlake, New Art: New World, 19.
33 Ibid. 4.
34 H. Read (1944), Herbert Read, Henry Moore Sculpture and Drawings, London, 1944, p. xxxvi, quoted in Cork & Rosenberg, Architects Choice, Art in Architecture in Great Britain Since 1945.
35 Forshaw & Abercrombie, County of London Plan, 4: under the title ‘Depressed housing areas and obsolescence of the East End’, the authors describes the East End and other industrial areas, ‘where there are large areas of dreary and monotonous streets. The invincible cheerfulness and neighbourliness of the Londoner makes the best of these areas’. Lambeth, both historically and in the 1940s, was an industrial area with its proximity to the Thames, as well as the numerous small factories and works in the area.
36 Forshaw & Abercrombie, County of London Plan. 8.
37 L. Ward, The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps, 1939–1945 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2015) 6.
38 Ibid. key to colours used (removable).
39 The circles on the LCC bomb damage maps indicate V1 and V2 attacks, depending on their size.
40 ARP message form, 27 September 1940, Lambeth Archives, ref: MBL/CD/25/576.
41 ARP message form, 27 September 1940, Lambeth Archives, ref: MBL/CD/25/576.
42 ARP message form, 27 May 1941, Lambeth Archives, ref: MBL/CD/25/1605.
43 https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1430235 [accessed February 2019]
44 South London Press, Festival sculptor brighten flats, 25th November 1952.
45 R. Cork and E. Rosenberg, Architects Choice, Art in Architecture in Great Britain Since 1945 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1992), 11.
46 R. Millicent; This sculpture’s human, Daily Worker, 10 November 1948.
47 LCC bomb damage map no. 89 Kennington; Walworth shows Laud Street, the site of Darley House, and the surrounding area.
48 South London Press, Festival sculptor brighten flats, 25th November 1952.
49 Pereira, Art for the Common Man.
50 Forshaw & Abercrombie County of London Plan, 8: as mentioned earlier in the quote, ‘This decentralisation has been happening in an unplanned way; the boroughs see their population dwindling, as their best elements, especially the young married folk leave the old surroundings, which are not benefitted by this reduction except in strictly limited patches of new tenements. What we now propose is to anticipate this loss, to enhance it by means of a bold reduction and to produce a really satisfactory environment by wholesale rebuilding made possible by war damage’
51 Ministry of Information The Proud City, A Plan for London, A Greenpark Production, in association with the Film Producers Guild Ltd. Written and Directed by Ralph Keene, 1946.
52 Forshaw & Abercrombie County of London Plan, 9: ‘The Plan we submit contemplates the conservation or creation of communities which would be divided into smaller neighbourhood units of between 6,000 and 10,000 persons related to the elementary school and the area it serves. It is the intention of our proposals that children living in these units should not have to cross a main road from home to school. Each unit would need a neighbourhood centre, perhaps focussed around the school’
53 R. Tubbs, Living in Cities (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1942), 47.
54 South London Press, Festival sculptor brighten flats, 25th November 1952.
55 https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1430263 [accessed October 2019]
56 Mitchell, ‘Art Patronage by the London County Council’, 208.
57 The Star, A Sculptor Takes Art to the People, 4 December 1952.
58 Forshaw & Abercrombie, County of London Plan, 29.
59 Jackson, Achievement, 226.
60 G. Clifton, ‘Members and Officers of the LCC, 1889–1965’, in A. Saint (ed.), Politics and the People of London: The London County Council, 1889–1965 (London: The Hambledon Press, 1989), 26.
61 Keene, The Proud City: A Plan for London (Ministry of Information, 1946).
62 Garlake, New Art: New World, 213.
63 C. Jolivette, Landscape, Art and Identity in 1950s Britain (Abingdon: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 16.
64 The LCC installed Neighbourly encounter by Uli Nimptsch on Rotherhithe’s Silwood estate on 8th July 1964.
65 London County Council, A Survey of the Post-war Housing of the LCC, 1945–1949, foreword (London: London County Council, 1949).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Rosamund Lily West
Rosamund Lily West is currently finishing her PhD on London County Council housing and public art, 1943–1965 at Kingston University. She is the Paul Mellon research curator at the Royal Society of Sculptors working on the project ‘Pioneering women at the heart of the Royal Society of Sculptors’, and also works at the Horniman Museum in South London.