Modern British architecture

Modernism reached Britain later than it reached Germany, France or the Netherlands, and it never became the national style. Modern British architecture is best understood as a series of arguments with a public that mostly wanted something else, and the buildings that came out of it are more interesting for that resistance rather than less.

The 1930s: a handful of white houses

The first modern buildings in Britain were built largely by émigrés and for a small clientele. Flat roofs, white render, horizontal windows and open plans. The vocabulary was imported whole. The quantity was tiny: a few dozen houses, a small number of flats, a zoo enclosure or two, and the seaside pavilions where the style found its most popular expression.

Post-war reconstruction

The scale changes completely after 1945. Bomb damage, a housing shortage and a new welfare state produced the largest public building programme in British history: new towns, schools built from prefabricated systems, and estates that replaced terraced streets with slabs and towers. Much of it was well intentioned and badly executed, and the reaction against it shaped everything that followed.

The best of it has aged better than its reputation. The Royal Festival Hall, the early Span estates and the more careful county council schools are good buildings by any measure.

Brutalism and the argument about concrete

Brutalism in Britain is more specific than the popular use of the word suggests: an ethic of showing what a building is made of and how it is put together, executed largely in board-marked concrete. The National Theatre, the Barbican and the Park Hill estate in Sheffield are the canonical examples, and public opinion on all three has moved from hostility towards affection over fifty years.

High-tech and after

From the late 1970s a distinctly British strand emerged that put the structure and the services on the outside and treated the building as an assembled machine. It became the country's most successful architectural export. What followed has no single label: contextual brick, conservation-led reuse, and a planning system in which almost every significant project involves a historic building.

That last point is the connection to everything else on this site. Modern British architecture now operates mostly around existing fabric, and buildings like Gainsborough Old Hall or the structures listed under historical buildings are not a separate subject from contemporary practice. They are its principal constraint and its principal opportunity.

Questions about modern British architecture