Space, Hope and Brutalism: English Architecture 1945-1975 by Elain Harwood – a concrete cause celebre

Long dismissed as ‘concrete monstrosities’, the civic buildings of the postwar era are expressions of a benevolent welfare state

There’s a mural at Templewood school in Welwyn Garden City – a low-rise, unadorned structure, typical of the postwar period – which places a wild-haired, though fatherly, woodland figure among children in party hats, clambering over giant oak and sycamore leaves. This modern building, probably mid-ranking on Prince Charles’s hit list of grotesques, saw itself as closer to nature than what had come before, as a place that would unify children, all of them equal in the shadow of the oak tree and the new comprehensive education system.

Aren’t we meant to hate concrete? Hasn’t the architecture of this era been thoroughly discredited? John Grindrod, in 2012’s Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Post-War Britain, observed that all concrete buildings are called “monstrosities” in the same way that political correctness is always said to have “gone mad”. Quite often, like Templewood, the buildings don’t even have to be made of concrete. “Concrete monstrosities” has been shorthand for postwar architecture for decades, and still went mostly unchallenged at the tail end of the last century, when Elain Harwood began writing this comprehensive survey.

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