‘The Esher Report’: Architect-Planner Lionel Brett, 4th Viscount Esher, and the Architectural Culture of Conservation in Post-War Britain, 1964-71
Yanqi Huang
‘The Esher Report’ is the iconic nickname of the architect-planner Lord Esher’s York: A Study in Conservation given by the York Civic Trust, one of its prime local supporters.[1] It was one of the four government implication studies on the recent planning legislations in the conservation of historic towns, commissioned in 1966 jointly by Richard Crossman’s Ministry of Housing and Local Government (MoHLG, 1951-70) and the relevant local Councils. The four pilot studies (on Bath, Chester, Chichester and York), officially known as the ‘Studies in Historic Towns’, were initiated in response to perceptions of planning distress in redevelopment schemes of historic town centres across the country. Led by Crossman’s diligent junior minister, Lord Kennet, and advised by a purpose-built Preservation Policy Group at the MoHLG, the ‘Studies’ were ambitious in their conception. The intention – with each of the four towns’ varied and complex conditions (both physical and political) – was to bring together different tendencies of thought in conservation to inform future legislation. [2]
Nonetheless, after its successful publication in 1969, the Esher Report has long been a missing chapter in the architectural historiography. It was primarily due to the Report’s unfortunate fate at the end of the 1960s, when the majority of its recommendations were rejected by the stubborn York City Council, with the promised Government aid revoked amid bureaucratic changes. Therefore, the Esher Report has been read and omitted as a story of ‘disappointment and failure’, but as this history unfolds, it shall be a charming one. [3] First, Esher, whose life mobilised between architecture and a prescribed public life, was inherently an alluring topic: as put by Otto Saumarez Smith, Esher’s dual identity made him ‘one of the central cogs in the prosopographical machine of post-war architectural culture’. [4] Second, the story of the Esher Report is not wholly characterised by the ‘heroism’ of the 1960s conservation movement – as chronicled by Alan Powers in Twentieth-Century Architecture (2004) – but multiple protagonists’ resilient belief in conservation as public service, which was later translated into Esher’s nuanced method for York and the local amenity societies’ collective desire to regenerate their walled city. [5]
This dissertation approaches the story with a biographical lens. Through the personal history of Esher – evidenced by his architectural criticism and multiple written memories – and his local and national intellectual network, this study aims to situate the intellectual processes of the Esher Report from 1964 to 1971 (marked by the beginning and end his personal involvement in York) within the architectural culture of modernism and conservation in post-war Britain, and to expose the intricate relationship between architecture and public service, modernism and conservation, local and national politics. Meanwhile, it draws from a strong base in archival and oral histories, in excavating numerous overlooked collections at the Borthwick Institute, City of York Council, John Rylands Library, Royal College of Art, York Civic Archive and York Civic Trust, and mining unmapped personal tales from the former oral history interviews with three protagonists of this story, conducted by John Gold in 2003.
Endnotes
[1] Chris Brayne and Vivian Brooks, ed., Esher’s York (York: Yorkshire Evening Press, 1969). Lord Esher was born as Lionel Brett in Watlington Park. During his long tenure as an architect-writer, he had signed different names, including Lionel Brett, for architectural criticism and personal accounts; Viscount Esher, for public works before 1963; Lord Esher, for public works after 1963 and works as the Rector of the Royal College of Art (1971-78); and, finally, Lionel Esher for his history A Broken Wave: The Rebuilding of England, 1940-1980 (London: Allen Lane, 1981), as a combination of his architectural and public role. While the footnotes respect his different signatures, the main body of this excerpt of the long dissertation will hereinafter refer to him as ‘Esher’.
[2] Harry Teggin, interviewed by John R. Gold, 21 Lansdowne Crescent, Glasgow, 21 May 2003.
[3] For other tales alike, see Timothy Brittain-Catlin, Bleak Houses: Disappointment and Failure in Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).
[4] Otto Saumarez Smith, Boom Cities: Architect-Planners and the Politics of Radical Urban Renewal in 1960s Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 125.
[5] Alan Powers, ‘The Heroic Period of Conservation,’ Twentieth-Century Architecture, no. 7 (2004): 8-18. It shall be noted: while aspects of the planning history of twentieth-century York (especially in relation to the Inner Ring Road plan) is discussed in this dissertation at times, a comprehensive study of this subject is well beyond the scope of this essay. Only materials in direct relation to the Esher report will be examined and hereinafter cited. Albeit a worthwhile study, no attempt has been made to chronicle the planning history of York further to Bill Fawcett, ‘A Plan for the City of York (1948),’ York Historian 30 (2013): 25-42.
Figure Credits
Figure 1. Lord Esher at the Opening Ceremony of Bregate Housing, with June Hargreaves, Senior Planning Officer, York City Engineer’s Department (right to Esher, in shades) and John Shannon, Chairman, York Civic Trust (left to Hargreaves, in glasses), 1981. Photographed by David Foster. Courtesy of David Fraser and the York Civic Trust. Bregate Housing was the first phase of the Walmgate Rehabilitation project (1978-83) led by the York Housing Association following the Esher Report. It was designed by the York University Design Unit, a subsidiary of the Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies, York, one of the key local supporters of the research and implementation of the Esher Report.
Figure 2. Cover matter, York: A Study in Conservation, 1969. Photographed from a copy of the original (London: HMSO, 1968).
Figure 3. Cover matter, Esher’s York, 1969. Photographed from a copy of the original (York: Yorkshire Evening Press, 1969) held at the University College London Library, London. Figure 4. Lord Esher and Harry Teggin (centre) at the Platform Party after the Public Presentation of the Esher Report at Tempest Anderson Hall, with, from left to right, Honor Jackson (left) and John Shannon (right), 1969. Photographed from a copy of Yorkshire Evening Press (6 Mar 1969) held at the York Explore Archives, York. Harry Teggin, Partner at Esher’s architectural practice Brett & Pollen (1959-71), managed the production of the Esher Report.