[0:00:00]

Costello: Right I’m in the home of Mr Albert Clarke who used to be the city architect for Bristol and actually worked for the city not only during the war but afterwards in the role of deputy architect at one stage and then the city architect himself. When did you retire?

Clarke: I retired in 1974 when the old city and county of Bristol, after 600 odd years was disappearing and was being succeeded by the new county of Avon.

Costello: So that was in 1974 but when did you become an architect and why, what was the story behind you going into that profession?

Clarke: I became an architect from a background of family farming in Worcestershire and North Gloucestershire by being articled to a practice of architects with a very large expanded clientele based in Clevedon in Cheltenham and doing works all over the country, literally from Plymouth to Manchester and from Manchester to Southampton, to Ipswich, to Birmingham and lots of other places, mostly with large department stores.

Costello: So where in a sense in the days that you were training, who were the famous architects at that time?

Clarke: We’re going right back into the end of the Lutyens period and people like that and Edmund Morf and other architects who were designing churches at that time and then becoming very well known.

Costello: Is that where your training came from in a sense, picking up from that style of architecture or were there other influences as well in the training that you got in Cheltenham?

Clarke: The training went on not only in the office but in the College of Art as it was in those days in Cheltenham and the College of Technology. It was nine years roughly from the start of my architectural interests up to the time I became fully qualified as a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects. I was also following up the qualifications for the Royal Town Planning Institute at the same time.

Costello: Was that a different profession in those days, planning as opposed to architecture?

Clarke: No no, not so much. They were very allied, more so then than they are now if my information is right. But the architecture rather than the planning drew my interest to a far greater extent. I felt I needed to satisfy myself in building buildings and things for the community use – schools and everything else connected with the community as distinct from planning which might come about and might not and takes a very long time anyway. But of course I have been involved with planning in Bristol since the war, starting some of its work in fact at the end of the war period.

Costello: So when you were training then and going more toward the architecture rather than the planning, was that interest in school and public building, was that a rarity amongst architects or was there a lot of work doing that sort of construction when you were doing your articles? Was this a new idea coming on?

Clarke: There was a lot of work going on before the war and in the mid-‘30s in relation to housing and school building and things like that. And again I was fortunate in that working from the base in Derby I was involved in school projects again spreading from Torquay in the South nearly to Edinburgh. I had a great interest in the development of the schools system in those days which I followed up of course at the end of the war period when I was the Deputy City Architect for Bristol.

Costello: So in that pre-war period, if it came to school design, how would you describe what the characteristics of a 1930s school was? What was the thinking behind actually designing them? Because they were quite different from the old Victorian ones with their high rise if you like, squat sites.

Clarke: Yes, very different. They were more spread out, based on a comparatively small classroom size really, as far as numbers are concerned and with plenty of place space and a gymnasia and activities of that sort provided for which were never provide for before of course. We were planning schools to deal with the expected increase of school populations in these various areas.

Costello: Did the design of the architecture change regionally or was there more of a national design?

Clarke: No, there was more of a national design in the approach in those days. There were also competitions being set forth; one or two by the newspapers just before the war. For example I remember on I think was by the News Chronicle which had a national attraction. The practice I was then working with, we entered that competition but unfortunately we didn’t win it. It brought all manner of new ideas for school design and that was one of the interests which appealed to me immensely.

Costello: Could you describe what some of those new ideas were that either came out of these competitions or that you saw other people doing or even yourself doing in the ‘30s?

Clarke: It isn’t easy to describe it in words. In fact I find it very difficult to describe it in words.

Costello: You’re a visual man.

Clarke: Well yes, I suppose so. The acquisition of the appropriate sites and locations was one of the interests of course, taking post-war, immediately post-war Bristol as an example, there was the new estates being developed, the need for the schools, if possible at the same time on suitable sites naturally had to be given immediate attention. So the layout for many of the new estates after the war were, included schools, shops, churches and other facilities, even swimming barns and so on which were subsequently developed of course.

Costello: So what, did you work at all in Bristol in the pre-war period?

Clarke: Yes, I did work in Bristol. My first visit to Bristol, I was very young and inexperienced architectural assistant, was to visit construction going ahead in Wine Street, High Street and Mary le Port Street which was the Jones and Company Store in those days. It was a very large project really and took many years to build and of course was subsequently burnt out in the main blitz of Bristol. That was the first time I had any building contact with any part of Bristol. When I came to Bristol to do a job in an office I joined the education department with the education architect because it began my schools approaches. That was way back before the war of course and before there was a city architects department. As I joined it, the city architects was being formed at the end of 1938, and the small group of us who specialised on schools joined that as one of the founding group, in fact I suppose we were the main group founding it at that time. Others came from the valuers and the engineers departments.

Costello: So each of these departments would have had their own architects, is that how it worked in those days? Who took the responsibility for building things?

Clarke: Well they had technicians, they weren’t necessarily architects. I think we’re the only architects with any RIBA qualification or anything, the few of us in the education section.

[10.00]

Costello: Can you think of any of the schools that you were involved in actually planning, doing the architectural draw-ups for and implementing in that 1938-39 period?

Clarke: No, because the department, as I said, was founded in 1938, late 1938 and of course the war period was coming along. I was not very happy in the situation in Bristol at the time and finished up by moving to Oxford, to Oxford city where I was specifically engaged to deal with a new college of art for the city of Oxford. That, of course, never materialised because the war came along a year later, or less than a year later. I found myself involved then in ARP work and things of that sort.

Costello: Was that in Oxford that you were…

Clarke: That was in Oxford, yes.

Costello: But were you, I mean you did have a role as I sort of know it actually in Bristol in the war itself because you came back to work in Bristol.

Clarke: I came back, yes I was directed back to Bristol in fact because in Oxford, having volunteered for a number of special units in the army and other organisations, I was eventually accepted by the Royal Navy, called up by the Royal Navy, just a few days before one of the main air attacks on Bristol took place. The result was the Ministry of Labour, having spoken to the Royal Navy representatives; I was in excess of Royal Navy requirements officially and asked if I would report to Bristol to the ARP organisation because there had been air raids on Bristol. The last raid on Filton, I think, was on the 25th of September in 1940 and I was in Bristol on the 1st of October from Oxford. I found myself attached to the ARP organisation, the controller being the then city engineer, HAM Webb. I was attached also to the architects section where Nelson Meredith, the then City Architect was also involved. So I found myself dealing with dangerous structures as a result of the various raids. The main Bristol raid, of course, in November 1940 took place just a month or so after I came back into Bristol and I saw the whole of the damage of that, I saw Castle Street and Wine Street and places like that on fire and had to look to the damage in housing and houses with lists prepared each morning by the warden system. The result of that was I travelled the city a great deal each day to deal with dangerous structures which would include houses which were unfit for human habitation because they were likely to fall down or something like that. That led to very heart-rendering scenes when I had to tell people, including old people who’d lived in the same house pretty well all their lives that within two hours I was arranging for them to be transported to temporary accommodation, the house which they’d occupied was no longer safe to stay in.

Costello: was that your understanding of what the job was going to be when you were called to Bristol in October of 1940?

Clarke: Well, I didn’t know quite what to expect because I’d not heard very much about the bombing that had taken place in Bristol. I had heard that there was bombing in the North Bristol area, around the aircraft works and so on in the middle of 1940, I think it was about July but I didn’t expect any massive bombing and I suppose when I came I found what I expected; the result of a few bombs here and there and damaged houses, one or two perhaps completely demolished. Of course it wasn’t until the major raid on the 24th of November I think that really set the city in a terrible state. It was a terrifying period, there’s no doubt about that, lots of people killed. Being sent to decide what to do with some dangerous structures often meant going to the very structures where people had been killed within hours beforehand. So I had the experience of assisting now and again recovering bodies and helping as far as I could.

Costello: Would it also have been your role, in a sense, to act as a safety officer in those sorts of instants, advising wardens about potentially what would be a dangerous building to go into?

Clarke: So far as the very severely damaged buildings which were dangerous, yes it would be. But it didn’t come across very much time absorbing efforts in that way. It was very often very worrying to decide on the future of a building, the famous one being the Dutch House on the corner of High Street and Wine Street round which previously I had helped to build this new building of Jones and Company. There it was falling apart, as is shown in many existing photographs, standing up on just two or three timber posts which themselves had been damaged. It was a medieval type of structure of course and obviously far too damaged to be recovered. Though it wasn’t in my estimation at the time, knowing the importance of it in Bristol history, for me to say pull it down. I referred it to higher authority, took part in the inspection with them with the ARP authority and they had no alternative, it had to be pulled down. It only required movement of a small medieval post or something like that and the thing fell down of course.

Costello: How soon after the blitz on that Sunday night would you have had that conversation? That would have been with Meredith would it? And Webb and people like that?

Clarke: Yes, it would have been with them almost the following day or within a couple of days anyway.

Costello: What was your feeling about the Dutch House? What was their feeling of the group about the Dutch House having to actually be demolished?

Clarke: I think they were very distressed about it and they would have done everything possible to preserve it as a bit of Bristol history. But it was far too much damaged and they collectively had to decide no, it must fall down and that was the end of the Dutch House.

Costello: And when it actually came to people’s houses themselves, what sort of criteria did you apply in your own mind as to whether a house had to be saved or had to be demolished?

Clarke: If it was only stripped of tiles and the windows broken out and things like that, it could be subject to what was called first aid repairs. I would report accordingly and first aid repair operatives would deal with it, even if its only putting a few tiles back on or tarpaulin over the roof or something like that. In many other cases of course, nearly half the structure was damaged, perhaps only just to the front of the house or the back of the house still reasonably habitable. But if the thing wasn’t likely to completely fall down and could be made habitable by keeping the weather out by putting glass in or temporary ceilings, then again repair system but more permanent repairs in a case like that. Beyond that many of them were damaged and couldn’t be economically repaired, they would have to be pulled down to be reconstructed anyway so pull it down.

Costello: Were there other people doing the same sort of job as you doing that?

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Clarke: There may have been just one. I can remember one young architect who was doing something similar to my work but I was in the architect’s department on the ARP side with my tin hat and ARP on it and architect and all the rest of it. I had these lists most days to get around and it might be any part of Bristol from East to West, North to South. It led to some very interesting experiences, some of them very frightening, some of them quite amusing. Some of the conditions I found in Bristol were absolutely appalling from a living point of view, others were quite amusing instances.

Costello: Can you think of any?

Clarke: Yes, I can think of one or two. The old coals in the bath story for example which used to be mentioned frequently but no one ever admitted to seeing it. But I’ve seen it quite numerous times round East Bristol when I was going round with the ARP lists that there was a bathroom badly damaged by coals in it and fuels in it and things like this. No balustrades because the balustrades on the stairs had been torn off and used as firewood, probably up to three or four families living in two rooms doing all the washing and everything else within that small area, the children running around with no shoes and socks on and little torn baggy trousers. And amusing ones, yes. On one occasion, it was in the South Bristol area, I was about to dash upstairs to make sure that the top part of the house was in reasonable condition still, I was shouted at by the occupant ‘be careful up there I’ve got a few chickens’. So when I got upstairs, opening the door of the front bedroom, there were loads of chickens in there; as I say chickens in the bedroom, that’s another one I came across.

Costello: Where would these pockets of poverty have been in your experience as you were going around? And where were the worst areas in Bristol where those conditions still prevailed at the beginning of the war?

Clarke: I suppose some of the worst areas, there were very few back-to-back houses in Bristol but there may have been just one or two in little squares off Redcliffe Hill. Beyond that the terrace housing and the housing developed during the Industrial Revolution period in Easton for example which was connected with the mining in that area originally. Those were very poor living conditions. The same applied down in some of the South Bristol area. But many of the inter-war period developments out West and things like that, they were quite modern houses in those days of course and the living conditions were quite good compared with some other parts, it varied immensely.

Costello: You were saying that you were going around with these lists, could you describe the process of exactly who compiled these lists, where you picked them up from and how you actually got about to look at these houses?

Clarke: As far as I was concerned they were delivered into the office every morning. But they came from the ARP headquarters which HM Webb was the controller and they were developed from the reports of the wardens of the area, particularly where they thought things were dangerous. Only the dangerous ones were picked out for my particular attention so the decision could be made as to whether it could be repaired, temporary repaired, was uninhabitable, had to be pulled down or was already demolished. Some of them, when I got there, there wasn’t anything left except a pile of rubble and sticks and piles of rubbish.

Costello: Did you use your discretion though to look at other houses to make decisions about those? Ones that wouldn’t have necessarily been on the list but which you actually saw in a street that had been hit?

Clarke: Yes, in running right through a street for example. Perhaps a whole street was listed. One would find that from the one end where one or two were demolished completely, others were so badly damaged that they couldn’t be repaired economically, others a bit further away were capable of being lived in with some first aid repairs and right at the end of course there’d be some almost undamaged ones except glass missing in the windows and things of that sort. We could make comments about those that they were okay and remain occupied. ‘Cause there were many homeless people throughout the blitz period.

Costello: Presumably though you wouldn’t have any role in their re-housing, that would have been a different section?

Clarke: That would have been a different section altogether of the ARP organisation. All I could tell the people was that transport would arrive in an hour or two’s time and they could be put into temporary accommodation. I couldn’t tell them where it was or what it consisted of or anything like that. I didn’t even know the people who operated it. All I did was reported back as quickly as I could that there were people to be re-housed.

Costello: And who did you report that back to at the ARP organisation?

Clarke: Well I knew various individuals back them whose names of course escape me. But yes, the ARP headquarters was in the old Broadmead Street and I occasionally visited back there to bring myself up to date and to try and bring them up to date as far as my reports were concerned. I had my sheets of notes and things like that which they found useful I hope.

Costello: Did people, obviously people objected to being moved out, who had the final, was there an appeal system here, if they objected to it and just stayed in their house, were they ever physically taken out?

Clarke: I didn’t’ come across an example of that but I suspect that it did happen. Certainly lots of people were very distressed when they thought that they had to move but it was in most cases that I dealt with quite obvious that it was definite one way or another that there could be no argument about it. I expect in other cases there were arguments and how they were dealt with I never knew.

Costello: The reason I was asking, especially about procedure is that…

Clarke: I think after all, you must remember that this blitzing of Bristol came along very suddenly. It wasn’t entirely anticipated, for some reason or another they forgot that Bristol was a main city on the West side of the country and they thought it was comparatively safe and better to concentrate activities on the East side in London and so on. So it was, I suppose, an element of chaos arose as soon as the main blitz really came to town.

Costello: Because the authorities hadn’t really anticipated a strong bombing campaign and hadn’t prepared themselves for it? From your connections with these people, would you have any idea, in a sense, where they got the idea of the organisation of ARP from in Bristol? Did they take the model from London or did they in a sense construct their own way of working do you think?

Clarke: I think the man in charge of the regional ARP was Sir Hugh Ellis and the Bristol controller was Webb as I’ve said. I think they just developed their own system as well as they could. I was not involved, of course before the war and I was sent almost in the middle of it to deal with the thing so I never really appreciated how it was argued about, organised and thought about beforehand.

Costello: The reason I’m asking, in a sense, is that a lot of this detail is not there in the documents and can only be reconstructed in a sense from how you actually remember it happening in practice. As an officer then in a sense if you like, you were probably, am I right to describe, in the middle in a sense in a lot of this, you were carrying out procedures but at the same time you were the one at the coal face often actually meeting the problem face on. If you were to review it, how chaotic was it or how well organised was it? Were there good bits of organisation? Where were the weaknesses do you think from your experience of it? I’m thinking here about the whole of the Second World War ARP system in Bristol.

Clarke: Under the circumstances of war as it was, I think it was fairly well organised to be quite honest. The ARP organisation was quite efficient, the fire services were efficient so far as they had equipment and men and were able to get there of course but each one of those are stories in themselves of course.

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Health was a very worrying feature. I got involved with a little bit of work for the hospitals at one period. That was before the 1947 health act of course when the NHS took over, after that I didn’t. Incidentally, one of the interesting first things I was asked to do when coming back to Bristol after the initial list of damaged buildings which I’d come from Oxford to deal with was, when I had a look at the unfinished new Council House on College Green in Bristol, they anticipated there might be huge casualties coming from this war which there weren’t of course, not to the extent that was thought of and was it possible to make a hospital of the unfinished Council House building? That was a scheme which I worked on in between doing all the other things I was working save and evenly trying to evolve the system of altering that into a hospital. It never materialised, it was never necessary of course.

Costello: But it was used I think as a British Restaurant.

Clarke: Yes it was used as a British restaurant, and the British restaurant embraced the centre part of the main floor of the Council House. Other parts were used for storage of clothing and things of that sort during the war period. That caused trouble because it got infested with rats amongst other things. But the centre part, the British Restaurant as they became known, Emergency Feeding Centres they were first of all called and there again I was delegated to deal with some of these with the officers of the Ministry of Food. The Ministry of Food had these Emergency Feeding Centre ideas and where could we set them up. So we inspected all sorts of church halls and things like that and the biggest one of the whole lot was the Council House where the present main entrance hall and things like that were the kitchens and the main council chamber and the assembly hall, which was one big one at this time, it hadn’t been divided was then the largest British Restaurant in Britain. With all the toilets and everything that had to be provided alongside to deal with it of course. It was interesting in that context and in my family context it was interesting as well because my wife who’d been teaching in Swindon came down to Bristol and became the first manager of many of these church hall renovations and alterations to form Emergency Feeding Centres because she’d been involved in food and that sort of specialisation in Swindon and she came to Bristol to do that job. For a time she ran, in the open for a while, nearly every one of the British Restaurants in Bristol.

Costello: Was the cooking done on site for these restaurants?

Clarke: Varied. The first ones we did there was a central cooking depot, if I remember right, it was at a place called Temple Cloud in Somerset and there the food was brought up by volunteer drivers and vans and WRVS and other organisations each day to these Emergency Feeding Centres in the city of Bristol. For example there was one in Hotwells on Hope Chapel Hill, there was one in East Street Bedminster at the church hall there, there was one up Lodge Causeway, there was one at Eastville, there was one in what is now part of the East end of the Broadmead area, I think it was in Penn Street, what was called Penn Street in those days. There were new ones built, there was one built on College Green so the Council House could be rehabilitated as a Council House after a while, after the war of course. There was a new one also at Avonmouth built and a canteen on the docks at Avonmouth was another partly linked up thing with the Ministry of Food, and the last one built was on in Belgrave Road where the BBC now operates over that side.

Costello: Was the idea of cooking outside in Temple Cloud a way of if you like distancing a potential bomb from destroying a vital production unit as it were or was that just sheer coincidence?

Clarke: I think that was just sheer coincidence personally because most of these were developed with their own kitchens eventually but it was only the first ones, the church halls which were requisitioned. They were supplied by these portable foods, yes.

Costello: You mention these and the housing and making decisions about those and also the Council House as a feeding centre. Were there any other aspects of architectural work that came within your brief that had to be dealt with, particularly because of the war going on?

Clarke: No, not architecturally. Planning started coming into it. Almost before the war finished they were talks of what was to happen with the central area of Bristol, the whole central area. There was a member of the Town Planning Institute as a member of the City Engineers Department, an oldish member and myself as qualified with the Royal Town Planning Institute. So again they asked me if I would liaise with the City Engineers Department on this and again I found myself thinking very much of H M Webb who’d been the controller during the war. By the beginning of 1945, we were sort of analysing, as far as time would allow, the possibilities of developing various areas of the central part, what would become of Park Street which was badly damaged of course, what would become of the area around Victoria Street and all the brewery areas around there, what would become of the Castle Street area, what would become of Broadmead area and so it went on. Very soon after that the traders in the various areas were obviously involved in this, in preliminary discussions and it emerged that there was some very special treatment of buildings, that it would be impossible to get the retail shopping area which they were asking for built on the old Castle Street area which was the main shopping area before the war. So Victoria Street was looked at and for all these areas I produced various sketches. Eventually a decision was made that it must be based in Broadmead because there was a greater area there available for redevelopment, hence the start of the Broadmead area. Subsequent to all that I got involved more in the detail of Broadmead because it was necessary to get the thing started as redevelopment. The negotiations which we were many of us involved in with all the retailers, the Marks and Spencers, the Woolworths, the various clothing industry, the shoe industry, they were not leading to an immediate building programme coming out. So the council decided that they would start themselves by building both ends of Broadmead. One was on the corner of Union Street and Broadmead and the other was away the other on Easton end on the corner of Old Market Street. Both have now disappeared

[40.00]

They were built and let for retail purposes. That set the ball rolling and immediately when that was on its way we found that Woolworths would come in right alongside the Broadmead/Union Street development. It was then settled where Marks and Spencers should be in relation to others, where Dolcis should go in and all the rest. Then came the question which was the architectural one as to the form of building, the height of the buildings, any limitation there should be. Well some of the retailers didn’t require more than ground floor of course, others required two floors and that’s all, one or two others thought that wasn’t imposing enough. Some very contemporary designs were produced, a great number of them, several of which were built, all within the general limits which were devised with Nelson Meredith. I was by that time his deputy. It was a most intriguing time, it was a most worrying time in many respects too but it got Broadmead started. Then came the question as soon as a few others really started locating themselves as to what should happen on the central crossroads. I suppose one of the only little bits of Broadmead which still exists today which I had some finger in the pie on, because I did all the original drawings and design for it, was the central quadrant on the crossroads, that still exists. But that was done in an effort to get the central part of the thing going, we’d got the two ends started but we didn’t know how to start the centre part. We got retailers like Watches of Switzerland and people like that coming along, anxious to take shops in those days.

Costello: That’s fascinating that narrative. If I went back to the beginning of it, the way you were describing these areas like Victoria, Castle Street area, the Broadmead area, was this how people at the time actually thought of how the city was divided, was that the way they you know, they didn’t think of it as one big area but as lots of little areas that made up a whole?

Clarke: Yes, there was a tendency to think in sort of precinct thoughts rather than anything else. Asked to produce some of the ideas for some of these precincts, for example one on what is now Newfoundland Road area, I produced some schemes there for an education precinct which involved a College of Technology, a College of Engineering and other buildings as well. That’s when the Education Committee and so on came into the picture, of course, together with the, working together with the Planning and Reconstruction Committee which had been formed at the end of the war period which was a very powerful committee. That was a precinct idea and I suppose similar ideas were put forward for the development of the Victoria Street area excepting the fact that most of the old stuff would have to have been destroyed anyway. That didn’t quite materialise by a long way. A lot of it remained until quite recently. The education precinct never materialised, the reconstruction of Park Street of course did materialise and then came the question of should it be reconstructed exactly as it was before or not. Again, after a lot of surveying and analysis of the facades and so on, some were preserved and others were completely reconstructed to match.

Costello: In a sense, who was driving this idea of creating, recreating Bristol after the war. I think here is an architect’s department but you’ve also got a town planning element to it and then you’ve got the council actually running it, have the interests of the traders whose businesses were actually disrupted by the war. In a sense if you like, who was evolving the main ideas behind what Bristol was actually going to look like after the war period?

Clarke: I think it was the chief officers in association with the specialist committee, the Planning and Reconstruction Committee that I have mentioned. All sorts of ideas were pushed forward by all sorts of people with all sorts of interests. These were taken into consideration and a general balance was arrived at. The actual production of ideas was coming back to us as officers.

Costello: So you were given if you sense the outline of what things should achieve and you were then doing the necessary work in order for that to happen. Would that be a correct interpretation?

Clarke: Yes, and sometimes making provision for the future which the changes at the time wouldn’t acknowledge. For example, it may sound strange now but when Broadmead was first opened as a shopping area or to be opened as a shopping area, it was thought by the traders and by the committees and so on that the bus services must run through it and it must be open to car traffic and all the rest of it which of course it was. Some of us visualised that that wasn’t going to last very long, there would be need to get the traffic out of the area, hence the idea of the ring road which actually materialised of course and still exists. Although its had its disadvantages since in that its restricted further developments on the East end of Broadmead. It was interesting because some of the ideas we put forward and other architects put forward, there were outside architects putting forward ideas as well of course and quite rightly so. Some were materialising, for example, some of us as architects would have liked to have seen Castle Street as a shopping area reconstructed but in order to do so you’d have had to build some multi-story shops as it were, in other words, malls as you have in present conditions and like many American cities had. But no one would face up to that at the time, they must all have their own individual shop at ground level and not above. That made Castle Street much too small to redevelop with the areas which the traders said they wanted. The traders formed their own associations quite quickly which was right and proper. They were bringing forward their advice, they were appraised of every move that the City Council intended to make and generally speaking, it was a pretty satisfactory arrangement and it worked pretty well.

Costello: What was the argument for not actually constructing the Castle Park area as it had been, why couldn’t we have gone back to doing shops as in the 1930s as opposed to having a completely new American style of shopping experience?

Clarke: Well, they just wouldn’t accept any new ideas of that nature so what it boiled down to in the last analysis was the site was just not big enough. So what happened, we then produced other ideas for the Castle Street area, again they didn’t materialise very well. The last big one which I personally was involved in was the idea of building a new museum there for the city. That was a massive multi-million project which was reduced time and time again until it became necessary to consider the future of it as a whole, having spent lots of money on it, of course and altered all the television cables and the drains through the area and things like that at a colossal cost. The City Council then decided to abandon the museum scheme and that was one of the great disappointments of my personal career.

Costello: Had you designed the building?

[50.00]

Clarke: With the help of others of course. I built up a team, a very big team of architects, quantity surveyors, technicians, engineers, electrical, heating and ventilating all the other systems needed, acoustics, all them gone into in great detail, and all that costs a lot of money of course. At the time I had the pleasure of going to see many of the new museums in the continent and various areas, as I had previously taken advice to visit Denmark and other countries to see housing and prefabricated housing because we were coming into the area in the late ‘70s no ‘50s, even the mid-50s of building taller and taller blocks in the housing system where we’d built already, places like Lawrence Weston and Henbury and Lockleaze and part of Hartcliffe and Withywood, always two storey houses in the main. Then came the government intention to produce up and down the country lots of multi-storey tall blocks. We eventually built quite a large number of these in Bristol as you can see today. But what we avoided, despite great pressures from various sources, we avoided using large prefabrication systems which were used by other authorities, particularly some London authorities. Of course many of those have proved very unsatisfactory and have been demolished. Not that I personally ever thought that tall blocks every produced good living conditions. I think that it’s a very restricted part of our population that can satisfactorily be accommodated in a ‘50s storey flat, not very many.

Costello: Were you aware of these problems when high rises were saluted as a solution to the housing problem?

Clarke: Yes, and from my personal point of view I certainly didn’t subscribe to the intention to put tall blocks in various parts of Bristol but it became necessary because it was government policy at that time. We were subject to all sorts of influences that way. One of the Lord Mayors reminiscing with me recently reminded me how, after the housing committee had considered and looked at these various multi-storey prefabricated systems on the continent and in other parts of this country it came to the point when I said that I didn’t want them and I didn’t do this and I didn’t do that. But of course the government intentions won the day and there are many examples up and down the country where its quite ridiculous to see a tall 15 storey block on the side of a Welsh mountain.

Costello: Where there’s absolutely plenty of space for… Well actually, one of the interesting things about council housing in Bristol on estates not sort of before the war but after, is the variety and there’s some that is quite particular to Bristol are the little canopies for example above the door. Did you yourself and your team innovate new designs in council housing as part of the construction of new estates?

Clarke: We were designing the basic unit as it were and allowing the construction experts, the big builders, the Laings and Wimpeys and Costains and so on to apply their particular form of construction and any particular details that they particularly liked to our basic design so you get terrific variation really in different forms of construction, from the ordinary brick construction to no-fines concrete and even some prefabricated stuff. Bristol did have erected as part of the temporary housing programme immediately after the war, build some 3000 I think it was, temporary houses. That included the small prefabricated aluminium type house and the steel framed houses up to the concrete slab form of structure. Some of those were not very satisfactory, the structure relied on the retention of the concrete slabs by strips of copper or something like that. Many of the prefabs of course were temporary and have disappeared. Its interesting to note that some of the aluminium prefabs built down in Western-Super-Mare in the old aircraft factory there, still exist and have been bought up by residents. They’re some pleasant little houses still.

Costello: Did your department have any control over the types of materials used for the council houses in the post-war period or was that entirely the building firm’s privilege if you like?

Clarke: No it wasn’t entirely, but if they had a particular type of dwelling for which they’d used London bricks from the London bricks company and were using them all over the country, they wanted to use them here of course. And there’s no reason why they shouldn’t because we use brick also, we use many local bricks of course, including the one from the local yard here at Almondsbury. Others which we accepted that we had to do so only after severe testing was the thing I referred to a moment ago called no-fines concrete where shutters were put up and concrete poured into the body of them to form the wall in concrete which is of large lumps of aggregate and brick and things like that and therefore contains a lot of air spaces. It isn’t solid concrete at all, its no-fines concrete, no fine work in it, no fine aggregate in it. Those, we tested those very severely over some weeks once one or two were erected to see whether they really were waterproof or not and had water pouring on them for weeks on end and that sort of thing, that was an interesting experiment. We didn’t use very many of them but there were some no-fines concrete. Others that were developed by the firms themselves, the units were a good example of that, were what’s called a mansard roof, two stokes on the roof and ordinary concrete slabs in the walls and tiles on the roof. They were quite pleasant and there are still quite a large number of those still existing of course. They weren’t temporary houses, they were permanent houses.

Costello: How would you characterise the difference between a Bristol City Council council house after the war as opposed to one built in the ‘30s in places like the Knowle West. Apart from the materials is one I think that you have been describing so far.

Clarke: Yes, varied and different uses of materials in different areas, much more than it was before the war. Before the war the Knowle West, as you mentioned and Sea Mills and places like that were just brick and that was it and tiles of course on the roofs. Very little rough casting or anything of that sort. So we had a great variety of housing, what with the ones developed by these individual firms and the influence of firms putting their form of construction into our units. Others were built on contact with us from our own complete designs, of course, many of them, thousands of them. We were building up to, just over 2000 a year at one time which is a lot of houses to be built.

Costello: So in fact some of these council houses were entirely your design, including facades and details and others were built by independent, private firms. But when you talked about a unit, could you just describe what a council house unit is so people could understand that as a concept.

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Clarke: Well it would embrace living areas, a living room and a smaller sitting room or something like that, a kitchen area and all the facilities, that would be washing facilities and things of that sort and of course the bedrooms and the toilets and things like that. Once you put those together you’ve got a unit.

Costello: Would that have been laid down specifically how these units related to each other physically in the building or were you more concerned with things for example like minimal space and that sort of thing?

Clarke: That comes to a planning point doesn’t it where you’ve got a relationship of buildings one with another and if you go on forever with them it gets incredibly monotonous and all the rest of it. So we did, we mixed them up to avoid monotony and so on. But there again there were engineering difficulties with some of these things and some of the layouts. But in the main, the groups of houses, the terraces, the four-storey flats perhaps or maisonettes, they were all related one to another with the road systems around and the parking and so on which was being considered by that time of course. There were cases were the engineers that were contracted to do all the road systems and so on, they didn’t necessarily follow on from what would have been the desired standards of the town planner. The town planner, especially the architect town planner, concerned with the little grouping, the social spaces, the preservation of trees and all the rest of it which we did on many of our layouts was partly ruined by the engineers coming along and putting the straight roads through. So you do get some exceptional cases, you get Long Cross in Lawrence Weston which is a good name for it. Certainly it’s a long cross alright. But they’ve had to put traffic controls in that now I see.

Costello: Can you give an example of an estate where that happened, where you designed, if you like, the scenario of how the buildings and roads might look but when they’re actually finished they look different from the conception?

Clarke: Yes, I suppose that parts of the Lawrence Weston development was subject to that sort of feature. It was designed having in mind the lie of the land, the little rises and the existing hedges, a pond or two and the trees and groups of this. We related that to the layout of houses with groups round in relation to these various features but some of those disappeared in the actual construction of the roads and so on. Whilst the grouping of the houses was pretty good in most of those areas, there are one or two cases where it could have been very much better.

Costello: Did that happen at Lockleaze as well?

Clarke: Yes, Lockleaze was one of the examples of that sort of thing, yes.

Costello: So where then did your responsibilities begin and end in the construction of an estate? From what you’ve been saying there I’m sort of intimating that in a way the engineers department seemed to have some discretion to be able to actually fabricate things beyond the original drawings.

Clarke: My first approach to any of the estates which were to be developed, the land having been subject to compulsory purchase of course which we’d gone through beforehand was to walk over the whole area and to start visualising where certain features were, how they could be taken advantage of, the rise of the land or the fall of the land, the stream that went through and so on. Most of the estates show the result of that sort of approach. We’ve just mentioned the Lockleaze, the Southmead, Lawrence Weston, the Hartcliffe area. All those show in their layout the approach that I’ve just mentioned. The Hartcliffe one for example had lots of riverlets running through the area and they were preserved in forms of little green strips coming into the centre of the whole development with the houses grouped around them and things like that. Those were reasonable.

Costello: Where did you get your influences from in order to create a housing estate? For example like Hartcliffe where its organised with the road going through it, the shopping centre, the church and things like that? Was that just from experience or were there other places that you’d seen somewhere perhaps that gave you these insights?

Clarke: It was mainly based on experience and partly having observed what some of the continentals were doing. I particularly like the approach of some of the developments in Denmark, they really are extremely well done. If anything, they absorb too much space in many ways. So it wouldn’t have been entirely applicable in this country but they are very nice. They would have an influence on my approach to it certainly. Other features of post-war development in Bristol for example, which could have been very different. When Broadmead was first thought of as development there, the question arose about dwellings in the area. I would have liked, though my then chief didn’t necessarily agree with me, that it would have been nice to have some dwellings above shops and I still think that would be so. But the powers that be thought against it at the time and it was little use me quoting that Rotterdam was going to be rebuilt like this or something like that which I happened to know. So that was one of the disappointments I think. Undoubtedly over the years it would have made a fantastic difference to the central area of Bristol if there had been some residential properties included within the development. Rotterdam was quite successful from that point of view, although you could criticise it again from other points of view like living in it and things like that. The rowdyism that takes place and so on.

Costello: I’m interested in coming back to Broadmead in a sense, because the whole thing is really quite integral in terms of its layout and its size, except that probably Horsefair corner where you’ve got what is now Bentalls, it used to be Lewis’ with Debenhams next to it. Am I right in thinking in a sense that the concept of what the whole thing looked like with that quadrant was essentially the architect’s department. What you were doing, was if you like, creating segments of it because you had that little Union Street corner that you did a drawing for as well as the quadrant. Was that then so that you hoped other private developers would come in and follow that style?

Clarke: Yes we did and indeed we controlled the heights of buildings throughout Broadmead when these came along. We liked them to be basically a three-storey and up to the same level and the window lines near enough marrying up so they wouldn’t get an up and down effect and one disjointed view against another. But while the site was that shape for example, round what is Debenhams and Bentalls now so it was a question of negotiating with developers to develop those particular sites. The shapes of the buildings came out of our planning as it were, all done by private architects of course. There again some interesting stories attached to some of those areas because there was a plague pit of course excavated over part of what is now Bentalls, was John Lewis’ or Lewis’ rather. When that building was being built it came up as a scheme for the committees, yes it was all fine, it could be approved and it included two storeys of basements below the ground level. I’d said to the architects whom I happened to know because it was Sir Percy Thomas based in Cardiff and I’d met his son. And his son came across and had a chat and I said well you need to be very careful because the Frome is very near it, the partly covered over Frome river is there.

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Anyway they went ahead and they started its construction and eventually a day came when the phone rang. They wanted to talk to me from the architect’s department from the architect’s office, they didn’t think they could construct it quite like they designed it. I said oh why? We’ve got a water table which is far to high and unless we can build a big box and sort of put the building on top of it and sink it down, it’ll float, we can never build it. Can we leave out the second basement? I said well you’ve got no alternative have you? I did warn you about the Frome. And so it had one big basement but it never had the second one and that’s an interesting feature there. There are many interesting features, the same thing applies, I mentioned earlier on the development of the pre-war Jones and Company, now Debenhams round the Dutch House. That is now occupied as you know by the Bank of England. I said to the Bank of England architect, Harris was it, I can’t remember, you’ll need to be very careful about the foundations there because when the foundations were put in when I was a very small boy we had to make various shapes and sizes of them and have these wacking great big steel girders buried in concrete there and it won’t be easy getting those out. They came back to me subsequently and told me they never did get some of them out, they’re still there underneath the Bank of England. So that’s a little personal contact with that area.

Costello: 1930s techniques for you.

Clarke: Yes it was 1930s, yes.

(Recording ends)