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PAG E
Adam Page Architectures of survival investigates the relationship
is Lecturer in between air war and urbanism in modern Britain.
History at the
It asks how the development of airpower and the
University of
ARCHITECTURES OF SURVIVAL
Lincoln targeting of cities influenced perceptions of urban
spaces and visions of urban futures. An original and
innovative work of history, this book brings together
a diverse range of source material to highlight
the connections between practices of warfare and
urbanism in the twentieth century.
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
A DA M PAG E
Architectures of survival
Architectures of survival
Air war and urbanism in Britain,
1935–52
Adam Page
The right of Adam Page to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by
him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any
external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guar-
antee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Typeset by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire
Contents
List of figures vi
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
1 In the next war: the future of cities and the future of war 20
2 Planning a ‘militant peace’: air raid precautions for
peace and for war 58
3 Cities under fire: the ‘new blitz reality’ 95
4 Seeing cities through bombsights: urban geographies
of war after 1945 132
5 A ‘peace that is no peace’: reconstruction, defence
and development in town and country 169
Conclusion: war without limits 209
Figures
I would like to thank friends, family and colleagues for the big and
small parts they played in the making of this book. This project
began with research funded by the University of Sheffield, and my
thanks go first of all to Holger Nehring for his guidance as well as
his openness to different approaches and ideas. I am grateful to
Clare Griffiths for a very valuable second opinion and perspective.
My thanks also go to Simon Gunn and Adam Piette, who helped me
to see the thing afresh and gave me new threads to pursue. Simon in
particular was an invaluable supporter, and I am especially grateful
for his encouragement when the way forward was far from clear. I
was fortunate enough to have six months as a fellow at the MECS
Institute for Advanced Study at Leuphana University in Lüneburg,
funded by the German Research Foundation, where I continued to
work on the project. My time there was a refreshing and inspiring
introduction to ideas and people, which allowed me the time and
space to slowly begin reappraising my research. Thanks to everyone
at MECS, and to Anneke and Dawid in particular, for making me
feel at home in northern Germany. More recently, I have been excep-
tionally fortunate to find myself among so many new friends and
colleagues at Lincoln. I am grateful for the work and support of Tom
Dark, MUP, and the anonymous reviewers who provided helpful
criticism and suggestions. I would also like to thank the archives
and archivists who helped me in my research, and those who have
given me permission to quote from the various papers and collec-
tions cited in the book. Some elements of chapters 2 and 3 previously
appeared in the article ‘Planning Permanent Air Raid Precautions:
Architecture, Air War and the Changing Perceptions of British Cities
in the Late 1930s’, Urban History 43:1 (February 2016), 117–134.
The publication of this book has been made possible by a grant
Acknowledgements ix
By the summer of 1941, the old concepts of peace and war had been
surpassed by the realisation of a nightmare and the implementation
of a policy. Airpower had transformed war and created a condition
of permanent vulnerability for cities and civilians. The bombing of
British cities that began in earnest in 1940 was the fulfilment of the
promise of the interwar years. In the pregnant skies of the 1930s,
the technology of airpower and the strategies of air war had fixed
bombers on the horizon, from where war threatened to break at any
moment. In 1938, as conflict moved ever closer, urban historian and
theorist Lewis Mumford described the coming war as an explosion
of the ‘pus-bag of vulgar pretense and power’, which had swelled in
the preceding years. The period before had not been one of ‘peace’,
he wrote, but was ‘equally a state of war: the passive war of war-
propaganda, war-indoctrination, war-rehearsal’. In these conditions,
‘periodic preparation for defense against an attack by air’ represented
‘the materialization of a skilfully evoked nightmare’. It was through
these rehearsals, carried out extensively in literature before they were
in practice, that ‘the dweller in Megalopolis dies, by anticipation, a
thousand deaths’. It was by the imagination of, and then planning for,
2 Introduction
the disaster that air raids would bring that the fear of bombing was
‘fixed into routine’ before 1939.2
Mumford, foreshadowing Richards’s remarks in 1941, argued that
war and the fear of war had infiltrated peacetime to such an extent
that the notion of a distinct temporal period of conflict was outdated.
Old ideas of peace and war had been displaced by new technologies,
but also by the theories of war which developed in dialogue with the
new weapons. With cities placed permanently under bombsights, the
notion of ‘wartime’ was being refigured along with the urban spaces
that were simultaneously recast as target zones.3 As new methods
and technologies of war were trained on cities and civilians, both
built environments and their inhabitants were placed on the front
lines of future conflicts and cities were made into targets.
In the mid-twentieth century, planning for defence and develop-
ment became increasingly entangled, as air raids were added to
the catalogue of potential threats to urban life. Bombers cast their
shadows over streets and buildings, as perceptions of urban space
were reframed by a permanent and unpredictable threat from above.
The development of modern cities occurred beneath these shadows,
and the planners who attempted to sketch the future of societies often
did so in anticipation of mass urban destruction. The mapping of
imagined destruction onto images of urban centres created a doubled
view of the future cities as sites of development and destruction. The
exhortations for ‘friendly bombs’ to enact slum clearance and enable
urban redevelopment were part of a culture of anxiety about social
decline and material decay in cities, in which airpower was simulta-
neously a symbol of a new technological modernity and the defining
image of a future of permanent danger and vulnerability.
air, it was not until the Blitz began in September 1940 that the fears
of aerial bombing were realised in British cities. It was then that the
aerial war against urban centres became a reality for the British gov-
ernment and a part of the everyday lives of people across the country.
The impact of the Second World War (and the bombing war in
particular) on British society remains a key topic in modern history.
Social and cultural histories of Britain at war have reconfigured
notions of ‘the people’s war’ and the ‘home front’ to develop a more
nuanced picture of the experience of war in Britain.14 The distinct
social and cultural impact of air war has been subject to new histories
that move on from the classic accounts, such as those by Angus Calder
and Tom Harrisson.15 Richard Overy, Susan Grayzel and Dietmar
Süss in particular have drawn together a broad range of social, cul-
tural and political sources to deepen the understanding of how people
responded to the threat from the air in Britain and Germany.16 These
histories have shown how air raids against cities and their civilian
inhabitants were understood and incorporated into everyday life.
Architectures of Survival builds on these books and engages with the
idea of ‘war as a social condition’ that is central to Süss’s analysis.17
It does this, however, by focusing on government and architectural
planning for the future of cities from the top down. This approach
highlights the processes by which cities were transformed into targets
in plans before they were in practice, rather than analysing how
people lived and societies functioned under fire.
This history of visions of the future of cities analyses the ways in
which the bombing of cities and civilians became embedded into
British governmental thought and, to an extent, architectural and
planning cultures – cultures which are necessarily concerned with
picturing the shape of the world to come. The nature of air war, that
bombs could fall at any moment, meant that altered perceptions of
cities under the shadow of bombers were projected indefinitely into
the future. The new methods of war had created a permanent threat
from the skies, but one which could not be predicted. As cities became
designated as the primary targets for bombs, it followed that planning
for the future of cities was a crucial question for national security and
national survival.
The periodisation of this study, which extends before and after the
Second World War, reflects the idea that airpower and the designation
of cities as targets fundamentally challenged notions of peacetime
and wartime. The book is designed to contribute to the understanding
Introduction 5
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