The Red and the Black

It’s always a delight to learn about unexpected connections between places and people, which you would struggle to make credible if you were writing fiction. I found out about one recently: between a small urban village in the Black Country, known for coal-mining and steel-making, and a Viennese socialist intellectual, a member of the Vienna Circle of philosophers.

The place is Bilston, now part of the city of Wolverhampton, but in the 1940s an independent municipal borough. The mining and steel-making is all gone, and the economy has never fully recovered, but the fabric of the town centre largely survives. It has attractive streets, with many characterful buildings. In one of them is housed the Bilston Craft Gallery, where I saw an exhibition about this unexpected connection: Bilston’s Happy Housing.

The intellectual was the sociologist and political economist Otto Neurath, who in Red Vienna in the 1920s and 30s worked on the development of modern housing and city planning. In 1932, with the architect Josef Frank and others, he created the Werkbundsiedlung, a model housing development. He also invented a graphical method of displaying statistics, such as those on slum housing, public health and new housing types, in pictorial form. He called it Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education).

He arrived in England as a refugee in 1940, and set up his Isotype Institute in Oxford. In 1945 Bilston’s Town Clerk wrote to Neurath and invited him to become Bilston’s Consultant for Human Happiness. How did this unlikely-sounding event happen? It’s not fully explained, but those were heady days, when the dream of new scientifically-based housing, which could transform the lives of the working-class, was evidently circulating not only in Frankfurt and Paris but in an obscure little Black Country town as well.

Neurath died suddenly later in 1945, but he had already instigated the development of a new municipal housing development in Bilston which became the Stowlawn Estate. Seven organically-shaped greens were surrounded by a variety of two-storey houses and maisonettes. The site plan looked rather like a cluster of seven pebbles.

After Neurath’s death, the estate was designed by others including the architect Charles Reilly, eminent neo-classicistturned-modernist, and another Viennese émigré, the architect Ella Briggs. The architecture was not astonishing, but it had a distinctly exotic flavour of European modernism imported into the Black Country. Sadly, several of the greens have subsequently been built on, and the double-glazing practitioners have removed a lot of the original character of the houses.

We are now rather more pragmatic about the role of good housing in people’s lives. We think that good housing is important, but we don’t see socialist politics, radical architecture, and public health, wellbeing and happiness combined together into an ambitious social programme, least of all by a small local authority. Walking through Stowlawn, I get a romantic scent of a time, not so long ago, when this future was considered possible.

I thought of the parallel with another central European exile, the architect Walter Segal who, a generation later, was invited by the London borough of Lewisham to work with residents on their council house waiting list. Segal showed them how to design and build their own timber-framed houses, on sloping sites which Lewisham had rejected for house-building: they became, like Stowlawn, unfamiliar and exotic places.

I remember Ken Atkins, the chairman of the Lewisham Self Build Housing Association, testifying how the experience of designing and building his house had transformed his life: with Segal he had achieved something he had not thought himself capable of, and this had changed him entirely. Housing had certainly made him happy. Immigration is a divisive subject, but immigrants like Neurath and Segal have enriched British life, and are rightly celebrated.