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

Rather than house-builder loans or hire-purchase schemes, house-buyers in the UK have depended on a mortgage industry characterised by the competition of banks, pension funds, mortgage corporations, insurance companies, and building societies. This proliferation of lenders followed the deregulation of housing finance expressed most obviously in the UK’s 1986 Building Societies Act. With deregulation, banks and specialist mortgage lenders advanced into a market once dominated by building societies, mutualised financial institutions promoting homeownership amongst the members who own them. In the late 1970s, the societies held a 96% share of the UK lending market. By 1987, after deregulation, this declined to 66% (Industrial Systems Research, 2013, p. 28). Still, legislation the societies had pressed for meant they gained access to wholesale money to finance lending and, with deregulation, they diversified beyond mortgage operations into personal banking, credit cards, investment, and estate agency (realtor) services.

When societies like Abbey National (the first in 1989) or Halifax (the largest in 1997) demutualised they became PLCs, public limited companies listed on the stock market. The Halifax Building Society’s (HBS) demutualisation ‘created 7 million individual [instant] shareholders who between them received £18.4bn of shares’ (Martin and Turner, 2000, p. 229) and replaced HBS’s members as its owners. Demutualisation also supported the aspirations of more borrowers and at peak in 2006 – two years before the financial crisis that halved UK property sales and cut house prices by around 15% (Beckett, 2014, p. 2) – there were 1.3 million property sales in England and Wales (in 2020 there were 652,000) (ONS, 2021).

Neither the contemporary mortgage industry nor its mutualised antecedent are this article’s focus. But they are an important context for exploration of a simple materialist contention, that the social relations, productive forces, and mental conceptions of the UK’s once dominant mutual mortgage industry crystallised in material forms which have outlasted it. I consider mutuality and its material cultural expressions in terms of a dispositif (Agamben, 2009) apparent, in one guise, in the form of a building in Halifax, West Yorkshire: the former HBS headquarters at Trinity Road (‘the Halifax’ or ‘the building’). Recognising the materialities which, in this case, supported a mutual society’s operation represents the article’s general contribution and pertains to the building’s mechanisation of HBS’s paper-based production process or workflow.

A more specific contribution, or recognition, concerns the extent to which prescribed limits to the mutual societies’ lending materialised in the building. Deregulation began in the 1970s and intensified through neoliberal interventions in the 1980s, extending access to homeownership (Stephens, 2007). Mutuality, however, had assumed a limited number of lenders protected by regulatory privileges, and a limited supply of mortgages financed by a limited stock of real assets: members’ savings. These assumptions crystallised in the headquarters delivered to HBS in 1974, a time when deregulation was already pulling financial power away from institutions like HBS – still the UK’s biggest mutual in 1975 – and towns like Halifax. The building is a bronzed, Yorkstone-clad monument to a financial power that left Halifax as global credit systems subsumed national markets for financial services. Here, as in airlines and energy, deregulation is meant for intensifying competition before ‘massive mergers and corporate diversifications’ (Harvey, 1990, p. 158).

At the Halifax, I recognise how ‘the production, durability and consequences of spatial forms (such as built environments)’ coexist with ‘the forces that have caused their inevitable dissolution’ (Braun, 2006, p. 208). The building, then, still stands despite political-economic (and regulatory) processes undermining its congruence within landscapes of capital and credit; the material forces of the South Pennine hills negotiated at the building since its construction; and a series of further, contradictory pressures concerning energy consumption, democratic office design and the social relations of an expanding mortgage-handling business.

My dad, Peter G Tillotson, worked on the Halifax’s site for the main contractor, Join Laing Construction, until 1971 and my awareness of the building – Banham’s (1974) ‘Godzilla’ – began in childhood journeys through Halifax. The article is the product of research in the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) library and personal correspondence and interviews with an architect, Richard Saxon. Richard was employed by Building Design Partnership (BDP) – architects and engineers at the Trinity Road site – and led the integration of the building’s automated system for storing and retrieving mortgage files. I next outline contexts of mutuality and HBS’s requirements as a paper-reading and paper-storing bureaucracy. A review of literature on spaces of architecture, bunkering, and biopolitics follows, before two further sections address technologies and spaces essential to HBS’s operations as a mutual society but which are superfluous to the Halifax as a banking brand of the Lloyds Group PLC.

Contexts of mutuality

Unlike shareholder-owned banks (PLCs), building societies are mutual organisations. The status of these mutual societies – and their mutuality itself – connotes distinctive social relations: societies concentrate their members’ money savings and idle money capital, amassing, and pushing surpluses into circulation as interest bearing capital (Harvey, 2006, p. 274) to finance the borrowing of other society members who go into deficit to acquire housing. Borrowers pay back interest on loans at a higher rate than that paid to savers and the society itself, without shareholders, does not need to make a profit. The sociality of workers’ surplus redistribution is therefore central to mutual lending.¹

Still, relationships with debt are ‘performative’ and transform subjectivities within the broader financialisation of everyday life (Samec, 2018). Building society lending monetises working-class relationships, subjugating them to interest bearing capital’s formal domination, and turning savers into money capitalists. But savers are also arguably empowered as economic actors within class struggle (Harvey, 2006, p. 263) and my focus is on the money–power of HBS’s members and its embodiment in Trinity Road’s distinctive dispositif (Agamben, 2009). To clarify this point, savers’ deposits were an ‘existing quantity of values’ (Harvey, 2006, p. 279) put into circulation as capital. Accordingly, the building secured a huge stock of mortgage paper in an underground, bunkerised deed store. The paper, as a tangible form of money (Harvey, 1990, p. 107), represented debt, the sociality of the financial institution, and guaranteed the redistribution of savers’ surpluses and interest payments. Building, bunker, and paper, therefore, embodied mutuality’s welfare (i.e. housing) redistributions in a material form contingent upon a mutual society’s power and privilege.

Besides fire, flood, and plane crashes, the mortgage paper was also secured against the money–power associated with the banks which entered the UK mortgage market through deregulation. Although banks do borrow from depositors, flows of fictitious values – commercial borrowing and inter-bank lending – generate their capital. So their home loans are not backed by real assets and bank lending ‘[leverages] claims to the future, to becoming over being. Debt [has underwritten a] speculative investment in oneself and … an individualised form of welfare’ (Allon and Redden, 2012, p. 386). In contrast, because the building societies redistributed the surpluses of savers integrated into circuits of production as workers, mutuality corresponds to an economy more ‘just’ and ‘real’ to the extent that its ‘[foundations are] in actual human labor [sic] … and exchange serves human necessity rather than the making of money as an end in itself’ (Maurer, 2008, p. 66).

The building still embodies just such mental conceptions of mutuality even as it now accommodates a financial institution significantly different from its original occupant, HBS’s mortgage business. Two decades after the building’s completion, HBS demutualised, becoming Halifax PLC, a provider of current accounts, credit cards, and estate agent services – higher margin products added to the mortgage lending business. In 2001 Halifax PLC merged with Bank of Scotland to form the banking and insurance company HBOS. After the 2007–2008 ‘crash’, Lloyds TSB agreed to buy HBOS (September 2008). But HBOS lost access to the wholesale funding it gained by demutualising and its credit rating dropped. As ‘panic spread, retail and corporate customers withdrew £30 billion’ (Tooze, 2018, p. 190), but HBOS did not fail. £13bn was pumped into a new Lloyds TSB-HBOS – the taxpayer’s stake was 43.4% – and the result was the Lloyds Banking Group PLC, formed in 2009 to service global capital from the City of London. Lloyds retains the Trinity Road building as a ‘head office’ although financial services have largely left northern English towns like Halifax for the nearby cities of Leeds and Manchester.

Contemporary financial services support a mortgage industry markedly different from that dominated by mutuals in the 1960s and 1970s, when there were fewer mortgages and lenders and retail savings financed home loans within ‘a cartel of fixed and low savings and mortgage rates’ (Martin and Turner, 2000, p. 224). Deregulation supported a sharp rise in mortgage lending in the 1980s; by the early 2010s, UK mortgage debt was four times higher (as a percentage of household income) than forty years before, although ‘debt stocks’ are not ‘mortgage flows’ as first-time buyers know full well (Meen, 2011, p. 264). Nonetheless, in the late 1960s HBS anticipated outgrowing its existing headquarters by 1973 and started to plan for ‘a future that would take it into the 1980s and an estimated two million mortgages’ (Parker, 1975, p. 40). This volume of mortgage paper would make specific requirements of a new building.

The Society’s confidence seemed well founded given limits on mortgage lending. Between 1973 and 1979 ‘three regulatory privileges … prevented commercial banks from entering the mainstream mortgage market’: firstly, bank lending was constrained by the supplementary special deposit scheme (or ‘corset’), limiting its profitability; secondly, building societies could pay interest to savers below the basic tax rate; and, thirdly, they paid corporation tax at a rate lower than banks. So building societies took, on average, an 83% annual share of the market between 1973 and 1979 – 96% in 1977 and 1978 – while the banks took annually 5% (Stephens, 1993, pp. 161–162). Further, ‘a Joint Advisory Committee made up of industry and government representatives decided how much mortgage lending should be allowed, [and this] benefited relatively well-off “insiders” at the expense of those excluded’ (Scanlon and Whitehead, 2011, p. 279).

Conditions soon changed: in 1980, council tenants gained ‘a statutory right to buy their dwellings, which brought almost a million additional households, mainly lower income, into the mortgage market’ (Scanlon and Whitehead, 2011, p. 279). Demand for owner-occupied housing grew in the 1980s, notwithstanding the 1980–1982 recession and rising inequality. Fiscal policy tightened through spending cuts and tax and interest rate rises; Thatcherite monetarism (1979–1984) sought price stabilisation, drove up unemployment, and undermined consumer spending. These conditions did not preclude a property boom later in the decade: GDP rose after 1982, employment grew between 1986 and 1990 (Boléat, 1994, p. 254), and, particularly after the 1983 budget, households took advantage of ‘partially tax-exempt mortgage borrowing [which induced] greater activity in the housing market … [and put] upward pressure on house prices’ (Ball, 1994, p. 686). The middle classes benefited, and even if wages in the UK have fallen since the 1970s, lenders have emerged to promote indebtedness (Harvey, 2011, p. 17).

The Conservatives ‘revivified the capitalist ideal of a homeownership society, through … enabling legislation in respect of housing finance’ (Rossi, 2013, p. 1069), not least with the cut-price sale of council housing. Capital surplus was deposited in the built environment, particularly housing (Harvey, 1985), and UK mortgage approvals peaked at an all-time high – 151,000 – in May 1988 (Trading Economics, n.d.). By then, new mortgage lending amounted to £31.9bn, whereas, in 1980, the Conservative government recently installed, the figure had been £7.3bn (Martin and Turner, 2000, p. 225).² The housing boom was produced in the broader political-economic realm: ‘surplus capital is extracted from other sectors of the economy but … this is [also] politically facilitated’ (Aalbers and Christophers, 2014, p. 379). Mortgage lending institutions are reproduced within political-economic, regulatory and cultural contexts and the mutuals’ former dominance could not have endured neoliberal Thatcherite interventions.

However, deregulation began before 1979 and, initially, privileged the power of (relatively few) mutuals to preside over a limited increase in the volume of UK mortgages. By the time of the Halifax’s construction Conservative and Labour governments had begun to encourage homeownership. In the decades after 1945, with labour still organised and well-paid, housing policy shifted from prioritising local authority construction towards the expansion of owner-occupancy through tax relief.³ Harold Wilson’s Labour government was elected on a February 1974 manifesto promising to increase local authority house building subsidies and ‘a steady supply of mortgage funds at reasonable rates of interest to those wishing to buy their own homes’ (Craig, 1975). But not only the state governed. In the 1970s, the mutuals exerted direct influence over housing: building societies’ practices reproduced the structure of the social formation (Boddy, 1976) and through discriminatory ‘redlining’ (Williams, 1978, Leyshon and Thrift, 1994) they withheld services from already disadvantaged communities, a point emphasised in my discussions with Richard Saxon (17.6.21). Further, mutual lending has supported gentrification: Butler and Lees (2006) note that where working class tenants were evicted by developer capital in London, the refurbished properties became attractive to middle class buyers borrowing from mutuals (Butler and Lees, 2006).

Given these conditions, HBS’s directors anticipated its expansion well before the property boom and, in the 1960s, began to ‘rethink HBS’s huge storage needs for deeds and files’ (Saxon p.c). At this time, HBS’s headquarters were in a former branch of the high street retailer Woolworths on Commercial Street, where mortgage paper was stored and called up to a clerical office for reference during daily mortgage-handling operations. The Society’s conception of its own business, and the productive forces and social relations it entailed, all revolved around this stock and flow of paper, a ‘material form that acted back’ (Dittmer, 2016, p. 96) as the Society outgrew its headquarters and considered its future accommodation.

The new building delivered to the Society in 1974 projected HBS’s wealth, financial power, and self-confidence (Figure 1): HBS was Halifax’s ‘pre-eminent employer and carried the town’s name across the country. It was a source of great pride that Halifax could be home to a building society handling nearly a quarter of all the country’s mortgages’ (Saxon p.c.). With deregulation unforeseen, the building embodied quantitative and qualitative assumptions about the scale and permanence of everyday operations: the securely stored records of potentially two million mortgages (Parker, 1975) would need to be quickly accessible to clerical staff as the Society’s workflow grew.

Figure 1. A view from Commerial Street, Halifax.

The building emphasises the geographical contexts of mutuality and a mortgage industry dispersed amongst provincial towns.

The Society’s location in Halifax means that its building has little commercial value. Nobody else would want to be there at this scale. [HBS] never considered moving to London, or even Leeds, where their building might have had investment value. The building could therefore be totally bespoke and be paid for as a piece of plant. (Saxon p.c.)

In 1970s prices, the building cost £6.4m, its filing system a further £2.35m (Parker, 1975, p. 42), perhaps a total of £100 million today. Given the scale of HBS’s business, this only amounted to ‘3½ days’ cash flow’ (Saxon p.c.), but the building was not imagined as a commercial asset: bespoke, and as plant, this technology of mutuality accommodated and realised HBS’s specific production processes.⁴

If this underlines the dominance of mutuality and HBS in the early 1970s, then it also emphasises contingency. The rationale to mechanise mutuality, particularly in Halifax, was fleeting. ‘After the traumas of 1973 [OPEC oil price increases and recessions], the pressure for financial deregulation gathered pace … and had engulfed all of the world’s financial centres by 1986’ (Harvey, 1990, p. 161). New forms of telecommunication and computerisation supported a single world market for money and credit and ‘boundaries between distinctive functions like banking, … financial services, housing finance, [and] consumer credit [became] increasingly porous’ (p. 161). Drawn into new global markets, their products and services diversifying, mortgage operations like the one housed by the Trinity Road building had to negotiate the rapidly transforming geographical, technological and regulatory contexts of finance. To this extent, the building’s ‘displacement’ (Guggenheim, 2014) occurred through its changing relationships to society, its users, and architects.

The building’s footprint is much smaller than, say, a Sports Direct or Amazon warehouse elsewhere in post-industrial Britain but, lacking BDP’s concern for an urban centre’s ‘viability’ (Pearson et al., 1976, p. 13), they are built outside town centres. In the middle of its town, the Halifax is an irregular diamond fitting around existing buildings, a ‘four-storey piece of business mechanisation’ (Parker, 1975, p. 42) comprising vertical, volumetric, and horizontal sections corresponding to circulations of paper, people, heat, and air. The materialities supporting mutuality’s working practices have not been considered in relevant literatures: geography, my own discipline, has addressed mutuality’s changing financial and regulatory contexts (Martin and Turner, 2000) and the effects of building society branch closures (Marshall et al., 2000, French et al., 2008, Leyshon et al., 2008). But production processes and their material cultures are more obscure. So while there are other manifestations of mutuality’s materiality (e.g. housing geographies), I will develop a perspective on the dispositif embodied by the Halifax derived from geographical engagements with buildings, discussing ‘material forms as well as the ideas, passions and interests with which these forms become associated’ (Barry 2013, p. 428).

Buildings, biopolitics, and socio-spatial relations of mutuality

The Halifax embodies a dispositif of mutuality, a spatial form centring on the building, the business practices it mechanised, and forces and processes with, potentially, capacities to disrupt the building’s intended uses and operations. Before I detail this dispositif in later sections, I wish to outline how histories and socio-spatial relations might crystallise in architectural forms by engaging with research (often in geographies of architecture) revealing how entanglements of humans, technologies, and materials constitute buildings. After this brief survey, I turn to the Halifax’s material form, not least the sub-basement, which embodies mutuality’s ‘biofinancial’ (French and Kneale, 2012) capacities and savers’ money–power.

Geographies of architecture have located specific buildings in political and economic contexts and read them for signs of the cultural and personal experiences of their human designers and owners (Domosh, 1989). But accounts of buildings as sites of meaning (Cosgrove, 1982) have been replaced with considerations of their performative and affective dimensions (Lees, 2001), how they are lived-in (Kraftl, 2009), or are themselves living things. Actor network theory approaches refute buildings’ constancy and solidity to recognise them as outcomes of intersecting technological, ideational, and (non)human processes (Yaneva, 2009, Strebel, 2011). My account of the Halifax is informed by the related notion of the ‘building event’ (Jacobs, 2006, Rose et al., 2010) which positions ‘the social and the technical/material, the macro and the micro, on the same explanatory plane’ (Lees and Baxter, 2011, p. 110). Nonetheless, conversations with an architect are central to this article, and I recognise the autonomy of architects (Imrie and Street, 2014) as practitioners who foster affect for particular purposes (Kraftl and Adey, 2008) and pursue social ends though ‘critical human intentionality and politicized practice’ (Lorne, 2017, p. 271).

Non-essentialist approaches may align with a historical geographical materialism (Braun, 2006, Harvey, 2006), which cautions against the tendency of assemblage approaches, for instance, to emphasise things above the processes which crystallise in amalgams of material and form. As Mitchell (2016) notes:

Solid geographies, fixed spaces, objects, are (properly) understood to be condensations of relations and histories that have to be understood both as ongoing, fluctuating social process and reifications of those processes. What matters are the internal relations that shape structures. (p. 4)

The techno-social, economic, and material intersect at the Halifax, as do architectural practices and ‘a multiplicity of nonrepresentational forces and practices and processes’ (Latham and McCormack, 2004, p. 705) unfolding through time. On this view, the building is a negotiation of processes and forces: groundwater and deregulation, for example, represent respectively a flow and a process that have challenged the building’s apparent ‘given-ness’ (Jacobs, 2006).

Architecturally, the Halifax is not a brutalist building. Still, brutalism offers a few cues, the Halifax’s postmodern ‘jokiness’ emerging besides its ‘late modernism’ (Saxon 17.6.21). Indeed, this ‘third sector’⁵ (Saxon 17.6.21) building selectively invokes a brutalist ethic: the monumentality and memorability of an image and a clear exhibition of structure (Mould, 2017, p. 708). On these points, the Halifax is identifiable through its association, as image or concept, with monumental things, the oil rigs and aircraft carriers invoked by the building’s ‘flying floor’ (Saxon p.c.). Any ‘scale shock’ (Saxon p.c.) is tempered by Halifax’s earlier structures (see next section). The building’s materials indicate BDP’s changing practice: the firm stopped using exposed concrete by 1970 (Saxon p.c.) – the famous Preston bus station opened in October 1969 – and at Trinity Road stonework, rather than shuttered or precast concrete, is ‘vividly present’ (Mould, 2017, p. 706). The Yorkstone cladding references masons’ fine craft skills, belying its industrialised construction and emphasising its congruence with its location.⁶ Beneath the cladding, concrete towers support the building’s steel frame. Air-conditioning plant is accommodated in trusses underneath the flying deck, leaving room for executive-floor gardens on top of the building.⁷ ‘Visual critics’ (Pearson et al., 1976) dismissed an abstract quality – the building’s ugliness – in spite of any appeal to ‘totality, and … overtones of human association’ (Banham, 1955). This further brutalist cue applies to the Halifax as a building that displays none of the homogeneity which conceals most corporate buildings’ affective capacities (Mould, 2017).

But besides architecture, how did the building organise mutuality in Halifax around a specific dispositif? This is evident with the Halifax’s sub-basement, a bunkerised mortgage paper repository which, in several ways, embodies the money–power of HBS’s savers and, further, a biopolitics of mutuality. Firstly, mortgage lenders accrue governance functions concerning housing: through legislation and tax breaks, the state’s design of society extends into the design of the housing that lenders (may) help us buy (Rawes, 2017, p. 82). Secondly, mortgages themselves are biopolitical. As homeownership increased during the 1970s and then the 1980s boom, life – or a certain form of it – became increasingly the subject of mortgage debt. This occurred before neoliberal financialisation – which itself intermeshes with biopolitics (French and Kneale, 2012) – through mutual lending’s expansion. So while neoliberalism’s macroeconomic and institutional transformations required ‘a parallel biopolitical process that mobilised mortgage contracts to integrate the social reproduction of the workforce into speculative global real-estate practices’ (García-Lamarca and Kaika, 2016, p. 314, Kaika and Ruggiero, 2016), HBS had already recognised related dynamics when it ordered its new HQ. Indeed, the sub-basement speaks of a biofinancial regime founded on the bunkering of mortgage paper, in a steadily increasing volume, to secure material inscriptions of property relations and life’s increasing indebtedness. Mutuality’s redistributive biofinancial regime, in contrast to the later deregulated variant, made a specific requirement of the sub-basement: to secure the actually-existing values and monetised (saver-borrower) relationships represented by a finite stock of title deeds.

Therefore, the third expression of mutuality’s biopolitics and money–power are material relations between a stock of mortgage paper (two million mortgages) and the technologies preserving and making it readable. This concerns bunkering: the sub-basement is a concretised cavern with capacities similar to the underground refuges of civil defence (Berger Ziauddin, 2017) and nuclear war planning (Klinke, 2015) logistics. This bunker, however, did not secure life within so much as (indebted) life outside. Explaining the need for the building in Halifax, Saxon (p.c.) notes that correspondence files ‘[have] been converted to digital methods, [but] there is no substitute for a title deed. It’s like a gold brick.’ So as life increasingly entered debt’s service, and as institutions promoted indebtedness, spaces were needed to guarantee the security of (more) deeds, property ownership, and exchange. Urban design regularly supports biopolitical processes (Kraftl, 2012), and connections between urban processes and ‘economic imperatives’ (Lorne, 2017, p. 272) are themselves biopolitical. In Halifax, then, mutuality’s dispositif supported a limited increase in mortgage lending within a process characterised by mutuality’s redistributions rather than outright welfare privatisation.

Any rationale for the building to centralise mortgage paper in Halifax is now gone. HBS’s anticipated two million mortgage future was exceeded – by 2019, there were 11 million outstanding UK mortgages (UK Finance, 2019, p. 11) – though only as mutuals lost predominance and were acquired by banks. The sub-basement is now emptied of mortgage paper and Lloyds Group brands – including Halifax – take only a 13.1% market share. But we can learn much about mutuality and the contingency of current mortgage lending by recognising the Trinity Road building’s status within mutuality’s dispositif; and how this embodied connections between discourses (home-owning ideals), institutions, and laws (the mutuals’ regulatory privilege), and the Halifax’s means and mode of production (mortgage paper’s storage and mobilisation) (see Agamben, 2009). These relations denote a ‘historical materiality’ (Dittmer, 2016) of mutuality, largely oriented by the possibility of a building society’s autarky.

Of Halifax. Alien to Halifax

The building is only one of the monumental architectural features that suggest historical shifts in capital accumulation. The critic Ian Nairn (1975) argued Halifax needed a twentieth-century monument equivalent to the town’s Georgian Piece Hall (1779). The Piece Hall, now home to shops and restaurants, suggests a confidence in the future of woollen cloth production which, with hindsight aplenty, was perhaps as misguided as any placed in mutuality’s long-term prospects. Soon after the Piece Hall’s construction, woollen production was centralised in a factory system circumventing domestic artisanal production. The weavers who delivered cloth for sale at the Piece Hall became waged workers and, by the 1840s, the construction of the enormous Dean Clough carpet mills began. Dean Clough still dominates a stretch of the A629 road between Halifax and Keighley but, with most carpets imported to the UK since the 1970s, it houses cafes, bars, and shops. At Dean Clough and the Piece Hall coffee rules.

So big buildings which outlast the forces of their creation are features of Halifax and the Trinity Road building’s scale was not unprecedented in a town where ‘[huge] mills mix with small domestic and commercial structures, unified by the stone they are built of and the valley they sit in’ (Saxon p.c.). Still, the building constructed on the 50,000 square foot site by 1974 was startling and criticism citing the deleterious effects on Halifax’s heritage followed. BDP felt this confused ‘visual judgements with antipathy … towards some of the aspects of contemporary society embodied in the building: [a] large organisation [and] financial power mechanisation’ (Pearson et al., 1976, p. 11). But the building’s ‘unusualness and rootedness’ combined, nonetheless, to embed HBS within the town (Saxon 17.6.21).

This is an initial contradiction: the building is both of and alien to Halifax. If it was ‘unusual to find the headquarters of one of the nation’s most important financial institutions in a West Yorkshire town’ (Pearson et al., 1976, p. 11) then it was all ‘properly Halifax’ (Banham, 1974). The Yorkstone cladding and ‘bronze anodised aluminium and bronze-tinted double glazing’ (Parker, 1975, p. 42), ‘[considered] … local character’ (Yorkshire Architect, 1972, p. 525):

The flush grey glazing picks up the colours of the local slated roofs, and sandstone is an ever-present local material, given civic dignity by [Charles] Barry’s town hall. Nor is it anywhere near the biggest building in many views across the city, since there are many industrial structures bigger, though much less unconventional in their bulk. (Banham, 1974)

HBS and BDP recognised the Halifax’s monumental concept as consistent with Halifax’s prior townscape and the ‘Society’s prestige [which] ensured that the project went forward’ (Saxon p.c.).

BDP’s project leader was William (Bill) Pearson, who ‘produced several buildings with horizontal emphasis and overhanging top layers’ (Saxon p.c.), including the Bank of England offices on King Street, Leeds, which is grade II-listed like the Halifax. In the late 1960s

architectural culture was interested in fantasies of big objects in incongruent settings. An aircraft carrier sailing through the countryside was one image. The new North Sea oil rigs were similar scale shocks. The brooding Boston City Hall (USA) was much admired when new. So the building is deeply grounded in time and space. (Saxon p.c.)

The Halifax disrupted the ‘local architectural expectation … that buildings should stand broad and solid on the ground, and get smaller at the top’ (Banham, 1974). It uses the ‘strong shape-making’ language of a late modernism and a self-conscious expressiveness realised in a ‘huge horizontality, flying form and detachment from the locality’ (Saxon 17.6.21). Indeed, in Commercial Street, the location of the Society’s former headquarters, and which runs along the east side of its successor, the ‘tapering perspective of stolid, mostly Victorian classical’ was now interrupted by a ‘great grey horizontal slab  …  60 feet up!’ (Banham, 1974).

Form, function and materials came together in the new building. At third-floor level the flying floor contained the general office and the clerical staff’s core mortgage-handling operations. Management’s offices were on the fourth floor. The ‘shape of the town flows under [the building]’ and, well above the ground inside the general office, these 500 people were always ‘in touch with the horizon’ (Saxon 17.6.21). The sloping site provided a three-level basement for servicing, parking for 60 cars, and document storage. How the building, the Society’s machines, and social relations together express a materiality of mutuality is the basis of the next section.

A dispositif of mutuality

Functionalism understands buildings as forms determined by their intended use and would reduce the Halifax to a series of properties. In contrast, I am more concerned with ‘capacities’ (Dittmer, 2014, p. 387), interrelations, and contingency. The building is not simply an expression of what is immaterial but a crystallisation of mental conceptions of the world, social relations, modes of production, and relations to nature. Accordingly, the physical design of production processes corresponds to the concrete forms of actual labour processes (Harvey, 2006, p. 99–100) and relations and processes crystallising as the building fulfilled mutuality’s ‘strategic functions’ (Agamben, 2009).

BDP’s June 1968 design brief followed interviews with HBS executives and visits to corporate office buildings in the UK and Europe. It made three main recommendations. First, the general office would be planned according to office landscape or Bürolandschaft principles for flexibility and to accommodate a ‘reasonable foreseeable [business] expansion’ (Brook and Halsall, 1975, p. 3), the anticipated future of two million mortgages. Secondly, the building would be completely air-conditioned because of its ‘inherent heat surplus due to the plan depth, large underground area and high level of automation’ (Pearson et al., 1976, p. 13). This reflected the scale of the business operations newly mechanised at Trinity Road and a requirement for mortgage-handling operations to be contained on one floor. Accordingly (and third), an ‘automatic retrieval system … used for the storage of deeds and correspondence files’ would be installed: Roneo Vickers’ ‘Conserv-a-trieve,’ marketed for its convenience and effective utilisation of space (Yorkshire Architect, 1972, p. 523). This preserved a production process organised by mortgage paper’s specific materiality. ‘An anonymous office block could have taken the [Conserv-a-trieve] too, but not in a basement like this, secure from major threats’ (Saxon p.c.). This networked dispositif – deed store, automated filing, and air-conditioned, fluorescent-lit open plan office – ‘strongly influenced the final form of the design’ (Yorkshire Architect, 1972, p. 523).

How did these systems combine to support the Society’s operations, embody savers’ money–power and mutuality’s strategic functions? I will begin underground, in the sub-basement, where technological capacities secured mortgage paper against catastrophe. Securities were ‘housed, with uncompromising northern caution, safely in a hole in the ground’ (Parker, 1975, p. 40). Therein, concrete, gases, strong-room doors, alarms, vapour, and waterproof membranes combined to protect mortgage paper within the bunker and lived experiences of homeownership and property relations outside. The sub-basement is 29 feet (8.8m) in height, a million cubic feet in volume, and designed to be ‘occupied by the Conserv-a-trieve machines and their ancillary systems’ (Halsall, 1972, p. 351). Above, the sub-basement is enclosed by a 610mm ‘deck,’ another concrete slab ‘designed for a loading of 76.6kN/m² to support debris in the event of the collapse of the superstructure’ (Brook and Halsall, 1975, p. 5). Consonant with the terrors of ‘urbicide’ (Klinke, 2015), the risks identified included flooding, fire, and a plane crash onto the superstructure (Saxon p.c.). In this sense a broader ‘all-encompassing environmental terror that threatened society’s vital systems’ and which drove the state’s bunkering was reproduced by HBS and BDP whose response assumed the Society’s self-reliance (Duffield, 2011, p. 763).

In work on nuclear bunkers, Berger Ziauddin (2017) notes that shelter doors represent an ‘intense center,’ ‘where the interior forces of rationality, technocratic faith, and engineered survival were disjoined from the exterior forces of chaos, death, and annihilation’ (p. 678). A similar autarkic relation is embodied at the Halifax. In the event of fire, alarm bells would sound, carbon dioxide would flood the sub-basement, and strong-room doors would secure the deeds. Protection against flood depended upon the structure’s tanking with polyisobutylene rubber, a creation of the German BASF/IG Farben in the 1930s, subsequently developed as butyl rubber by Standard Oil (later Exxon) after the Japanese invasion of Malaya (1941) ended natural rubber exports.

A hydrocarbon-lined bunker and its mortgages might sum up the political-economic contexts of the deindustrialising world in the 1970s. When the polyisobutylene was ordered in the late 1960s, the ‘oil-fuelled expansion of industrial production … [had] allowed industrial workforces to enjoy increasing prosperity and improving social welfare’ (Mitchell, 2013, p. 256). Securing an increasing volume of mortgages under Trinity Road with polyisobutylene seems to embody a mutualised conception of borrowing and redistributions of workers’ surpluses. This prefigured shifts in the 1970s, through which people – whose welfare became privatised (Kaika 2017) – were increasingly put to work as borrowers as capital failed to make profits from productive labour. Equally, polyisobutylene exemplifies a ‘soothing survival mode of agrilogistics’ that oversees life, the ‘soft boundaries of [fossilised] plants and animal cells’ (Morton, 2017, p. 47) turning into the smooth boundaries of oil-based plastics and rubbers. This is significant: in realising the urban underground’s potential for concealment (Graham, 2004, p. 18) the sub-basement bore ‘material testimony to the anxiety of [its] creators’ (Bennett 2011, p. 157) and an urban politics of fear (Graham, 2016). Besides this, the ‘prosaic physical constraints’ (Bennett, 2011, p. 164) of building underground were significant and, as the permeability of a (building) society-nature boundary was revealed, ‘productive forces’ (Harvey, 2006. pp. 107–111) became apparent.

In 1970, 15,000yd³ of earth and 63,000yd³ of rock were blasted and excavated before the construction of the sub-basement’s concrete structure: a 533mm double-reinforced floor slab and 610mm retaining walls, ‘designed to resist a head of water of 6.1m’ (Brook and Halsall, 1975, p. 5), transmit core wall and column loads to the surrounding rock. Vertical columns are reinforced concrete, gridded according to site geometry and the Conserv-a-trieve storage units’ configuration (Halsall, 1972, p. 352). But the South Pennines are damp – there is perhaps 35% more rainfall annually in Halifax than London – and rising groundwater was a significant concern given the presence of the old Ramsden’s brewery wells on the site. During construction groundwater was allowed to rise to find natural drainage in rock fissures and on 17 April 1971 the contractor was told to stop pumping from and cap off groundwater pressure relief pipes in the basement slab. Two days later,

the resident engineer reported the appearance of hair cracks in one of the columns, and by the 24 May it became apparent that the sub-basement floor had begun to lift because of groundwater pressure below. Levels were immediately taken, and it was seen the sub-basement floor had developed a 180 mm camber, taking the central core and deck with it. (Brook and Halsall, 1975, p. 10)

Water ‘was [then] allowed to enter the basement, the first priority no longer being to keep it dry, but to prevent it floating’ (Brook and Halsall, 1975, p. 10).

Three solutions were proposed: firstly, to load the basement with more concrete. But an expanding mortgage business needed space to maximise a material stock of paper. Secondly, the sub-basement floor might be anchored to the underlying rock. But this would puncture the waterproof lining. Thirdly, groundwater levels could be controlled with permanent pumping. This would cost around £35,000, far less than additional excavations and materials, and five pumping stations were constructed in the sub-basement, sealed off from storage areas. But uplift pressure caused existing rock anchors to snap during the pumps’ installation. They had to be replaced but only by piercing the waterproofing after all. The sub-basement and its mortgage paper came into increasing contact with the damp world beyond, and pumping became an essential, daily practice without which the building’s protections would seep out (Deville et al., 2014). Pumps, anchors and punctured waterproofing therefore embody productive forces deployed within the negotiation of a damp, rocky nature to support HBS’s paper-based production process, and its expansion into a likely future of two million mortgages. They therefore embodied pre-deregulation assumptions about the permanence and scale of the Society’s workflow and mortgage market share, and are crystallisations of mental conceptions of mutuality.

The new building’s opening altered social relations at HBS. The number of storage operatives employed in the Woolworths building were no longer required. Indeed, the ‘brown-coated storage room staff were ageing out, the job having poor appeal to recruits’ (Saxon p.c.). At the Woolworths building their labour had mixed with deeds and dust, and when a file was lost they stayed at work for as long as it took to find. But automation and terminal digit filing reduced errors and evenly distributed files throughout the store with fewer bulges or gaps. So although HBS created jobs for the storage staff in the new building, the Conserv-a-trieve and BDP’s technological optimism compromised the Society’s paternalism (Saxon 17.6.21).

In this sense, technology, and the physical design of a production process, objectified further mental conceptions pertaining to mutuality. BDP argued the Society’s effectiveness depended on the Conserv-a-trieve, ‘the largest automatic filing system in the world, and [also] hundreds of smaller pieces of equipment [which would] save human drudgery, [and] ensure accurate and quick service’ (Pearson et al., 1976, p. 13). The Conserv-a-trieve retrieved and conveyed documents from the sub-basement to the general office, 28 meters above. The Conserv-a-trieve machines surround

an operating room suspended at mezzanine level in the centre of the volume. Requests for deeds or files are relayed electronically from the third floor office to the appropriate machine by a simple computer which also memorises the location of all deeds and files out of store. The 52 machines [in two separate systems], each basically a mobile column running between banks of tall racking, extract [the] required containers and carry them, via conveyors, to consoles around the operating room. Here deeds or files are picked out of or returned to the system. They travel between sub-basement and the third floor using a further cassette conveyor. (Halsall, 1972, p. 351)

Files were delivered to the general office in 12–25 minutes, at quickest 6½ (Parker, 1975, pp. 41–42), and the Conserv-a-trieve could handle 4,700 references per hour (Halsall, 1972, p. 351). Its main user was the Society’s securities department, HBS’s largest, and the Conserv-a-trieve’s third-floor terminal was positioned to service this department directly (Yorkshire Architect, 1972, p. 523).

The Conserv-a-trieve was a production system to support the growth of a paper workflow, reorganising a labour process corresponding to mutuality’s scale and dominance. The substantial capital investment in the Conserv-a-trieve would intensify flows of mortgage paper about the building, increasing the mortgage-handling business’s efficiency beyond mutual societies’ ‘social average’ (Harvey, 2006, p. 120). But, crucially, the Conserv-a-trieve preserved the Society’s paper-based production. Despite the advantages ‘sophisticated data communications such as microfilm or [CCTV]’ might bring to a mortgage-handling business, they ‘were apparently never seriously considered’ (Parker, 1975, p. 41) at HBS.⁸ (Photocopying deeds was also deemed unacceptable.) Paper was as paramount in the new building as it had been in the old. But as Richard describes,‘[no] image of [a title deed] is worth anything and possession of the deed is all’ (Saxon p.c.), a suggestion as relevant to Trinity Road as to the homeownership regime it supported.

The Conserv-a-trieve did not create mass clerical redundancies in Trinity Road – mortgage paper needs readers and HBS’s renown in Halifax derived in part from it being a major local employer – but its effects were felt by the men in brown and in the new building’s general office. This followed from a specific mental conception of mutuality, concerning its continuing mortgage market predominance, and which (besides the Conserv-a-trieve) materialises on the third floor and the general office’s horizontal plane: ‘One large floor covering the entire site footprint of 55,000 square feet could contain the entire mortgage-handling process, with other functions above and below it. (Saxon p.c.). But in concentrating the mortgage business in this way there were unintended consequences.

The ‘paper workflow envisaged in 1968 needed that huge office floor to work. A stack of smaller floors would have been less flexible’ (Saxon p.c.). But the new building ‘separated the clerical and managerial staffs who had mixed informally in the Woolies [Woolworths] building (Saxon p.c.).’ Whereas the Society’s clerical staff – like my uncle, Michael Tillotson, who worked in other HBS offices – were local people recruited from school, ‘the management were university men’ (Saxon p.c.). Managerial offices in the Woolies building had been situated in the corners of a main office floor; clerical staff were used to managers circulating and moving between each other’s offices and they had ‘mixed in a feudal but friendly way’ (Saxon p.c.). In the new building, with managers’ offices and rooftop gardens above them, when clerical staff saw managers moving through the third-floor open plan accommodation they might justifiably expect that trouble, or inconvenience, was brewing (Saxon 17.6.21).

A hierarchical reinscription of social relations in a workplace is not surprising: reorganising productive forces permits the class relations of capitalism to penetrate specific labour processes (Harvey, 2006, p. 107). Still, this represents a contradiction given BDP’s embrace of a democratic office design to support HBS’s flexible expansion. BDP would ‘try the German concept of Bürolandschaft … established by the Quickborner [management consultancy] team in Hamburg’ (Saxon p.c.), and which BDP had observed on a German ‘study trip’ (Elwall, 2012, p. 98). Rather than ‘strict linear planning and hierarchical, school-like layouts, Bürolandschaft favoured  …  more random, organic and democratic floorplans that would encourage interaction and communication’ (Walsh, 2015, p. 45). Bürolandschaft cut against an architectural determinism reproducing office hierarchies with fixed walls; it offered ‘a more complex, dynamic, and organic model alternative to the conventional American orthogonal office grid’ (Gattara, 2016, p. 70). But in Halifax, on Richard’s view, the separation of the managerial and clerical staff – if not Bürolandschaft itself – ‘turned out to be an error’ (Saxon p.c.).

The Conserv-a-trieve and the building’s other electrical systems used substantial quantities of electrical energy. They included (unusually) air-conditioning, and the general office’s fluorescent lighting – essential to the clerical staff’s work – from which heat was captured. Additionally given the building’s plan depth and underground volume, BDP expected a heat surplus sufficient for the heating only to be turned on after a winter closure. Richard describes the building’s ‘celebration’ of high energy use during the design phase (1968–1970), a period when BDP anticipated nuclear energy becoming too abundant to meter (Saxon 17.6.21), a technological optimism which would later manifest in terms of hopes for ‘multifuel total energy generation’ (Pearson et al., 1976, p. 11) in time for the building’s first refit in the mid-1990s.

Despite this hopefulness, the building became a focal point for mental conceptions challenging BDP’s optimism, driven particularly by emergent environmentalist discourses and the building’s ‘ecological critics’ (Pearson et al., 1976). During construction, the Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972) report, known to BDP’s architects, warned of resource depletion and pollution driven by industrial and population growth. By 1976, BDP was required to defend the Halifax’s fluorescent lighting, and the air-conditioning criticised as a ‘wasteful luxury’ (Pearson et al., 1976, p. 11). So BDP began to advocate an ‘Integrated Environmental Design’ (IED) concept, consolidating the building’s fabric and technologies as a system supporting a comfortable working environment. Further, BDP argued IED did ‘not imply use of high technology, and certainly not high energy use’ (p. 11); and advocated technological improvements to prolong the use of non-renewables and support a transfer to renewables without compromising working conditions. They described, for example, the capacity of a further concept – ‘total building design’ – to cut energy use through a ‘thermal balance concept’ (p. 13).

The point I wish to draw is that the forces beyond buildings variously act upon and remake them. Competing imaginaries challenge their given-ness (Jacobs, 2006) and in the Halifax’s case I have shown how energy consumption, office design, visual criticism, groundwater, and mortgage paper (etc) speak of the social relations, productive forces and mental conceptions a building may organise. But these forces change and so do buildings’ uses. To this extent, any ideal or mental conception of mutuality could only map onto the building fleetingly: as a material form and a negotiation of forces, the Halifax could not constrain the uses that might be made of it.

Conclusion

No deterministic ‘spirit’ of mutuality is evident at Trinity Road. But like any urban infrastructure, office design expresses a ‘transhuman material culture bristling with intentionality’ (Amin and Thrift, 2007, pp. 153–154). The building speaks of the conditions of its conception, before 1968, if not (so much) the world into which it was delivered by BDP and the contractors. When construction began, the world was steeped in excess capital and labour’s power was entrenched; the building’s materials and technologies engendered its capacities to organise life around debt and express the money–power of building society members through redistributions of their surpluses. But the building’s completion in 1974 followed recession and a property market crash. Labour controls intensified, wages fell and revanchist capital restructured; Halifax itself finally lost Dean Clough’s carpet manufacturing jobs in the early 1980s. By then new conceptions animated mortgage lending, not least outright welfare privatisation. So mutual lending’s sociality, based around labour’s empowerment with respect to capital and state (i.e. tax-exempt mortgage borrowing), lost traction after the mid-1970s.

As noted above, the mortgage market’s deregulation engendered the building’s ‘displacement’ (Guggenheim, 2014): if the building remains a material cultural expression of a mid-1960s imaginary, its relationships to the town, to the workers and business it accommodates, and to its creators have changed. Since deregulation the building has become ‘partially obsolete’ (Saxon 17.6.21) but like any urban form it persists through transformations. The building does not simply embody anachronism or a break with mutuality: its situation is within a historically developing townscape (Guggenheim, 2014, pp. 427–428) and changing landscapes of credit and, although mutuality offered the building its workflow to mechanise, this could not prescribe its future uses.

My discussion has built on existing accounts of mutuality but, further, points to the materialities which embodied assumptions about finance and a redistributive form of welfare (particularly when mutual lending complemented local authority housing construction). But mutuality is only one form of finance and the historical materialities of others can be considered in further research. Whereas Trinity Road’s dispositif of mutuality spoke of savers’ money–power and a specific biofinancial regime it necessarily invoked limits to lending, indebtedness and financial institutions’ profits. Researchers now recognise huge expansions of credit and indebtedness as organised, for example, by FinTech businesses whose telecommunications, digital and data infrastructures increasingly disburse debt amongst millions of new financial products users (Langley and Leyshon, 2022). Materiality does not itself generate limits to lending but moves towards limitless credit systems, particularly virtual ones, suggest that everyday life’s intensifying financialisation can be recognised by a critical appreciation of formations like mutuality. Understanding materiality, in other words, may help invigorate contemporary considerations of financial ethics (Beckett, 2014).

Setting these questions aside, I have shown how the building organises expressions of optimism and fear, transformation and continuity, and a drive to preserve the interests of capital while empowering workers as savers. Accordingly, uncovering mutuality’s dispositif supports a certain hopefulness informed by the idea that financial institutions could again foster sociality, solidarity and collective claims to welfare in the present rather than only individualistic claims to the future.

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.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

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.

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).