There’s a nuclear power station in the middle of London.
You know the one.
Prime riverside site. Right there on the Thames. Waterloo Bridge just along the way. Somerset House looking across at it. St Paul’s down river. Big, grey, lowering thing. Acres of concrete.
Except it isn’t a nuclear power station.
It’s the National Theatre.
And the man who called it a nuclear power station was going to be King.
Now that’s quite a review.
Prince Charles, as he then was, said the National Theatre was “a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting”.
Ouch.
Especially because the architect heard about it.
And it hurt.
But here’s where this gets interesting.
Because another man looked at exactly the same building and had exactly the opposite reaction.
John Betjeman.
Sir John Betjeman. Poet Laureate. Defender of old buildings. Lover of churches and railway stations and Victorian London. The man you might reasonably have expected to take one look at that enormous concrete flytower and reach for the smelling salts.
Betjeman looked at it.
And gasped with delight.
So.
Nuclear power station?
Or masterpiece?
Welcome to the National Theatre.
And happy birthday to the man who put it there.
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets Ahead.
Story time. History time.
And today, September 8th, we’re going to meet Sir Denys Lasdun.
Born on this day in 1914.
And, wonderfully for our purposes, born in London.
Not London-ish. Not somewhere in the Home Counties and subsequently sucked into London’s gravitational field.
London.
Number 17 Pembridge Place, Kensington.
There’s our starting point.
A Kensington baby who would grow up to pour some of the most extraordinary concrete London has ever seen.
And I think we’d better get one thing out of the way.
Concrete.
It’s our word for the day.
And what a word.
Because concrete doesn’t originally mean concrete.
The word comes ultimately from the Latin concrescere.
Con – together.
Crescere – to grow.
To grow together.
That’s what concrete means.
Things growing together. Separate bits becoming one solid mass.
And only much later does the word become the name of the building material. Cement, sand, aggregate, water. Mix it up. Pour it. Wait.
And there you have it.
Concrete.
Grown together.
Which, as it happens, isn’t a bad way into Denys Lasdun.
Because he didn’t think a building should just be plonked down somewhere.
He thought about what was around it. What was underneath it. How people would move through it. How the city would flow into it and out of it.
Buildings and people and streets and landscape.
Growing together.
Concrete.
Now, Denys’s father died when he was five. His mother, Julie, was a talented musician and a keen supporter of modern art. And she had an enormous influence on him.
Young Denys went to Rugby.
And while other schoolboys were presumably doing whatever Rugby boys did in the 1920s, Denys Lasdun was reading
luh-kor-boo-ZYAY
Le Corbusier.
As you do.
Le Corbusier’s
vair-zewn ar-shee-tek-TEWR
Vers une architecture.
Towards an Architecture.
And that was it.
Hooked.
He briefly tried the Royal College of Music, thought better of it and went to the Architectural Association.
And there’s a wonderful school report.
Denys Lasdun is twenty-one.
And somebody writes that he is “possibly suffering from a period in which theory looms larger than practice”.
Oh, come on.
That is a teacher’s way of saying:
Lasdun, stop thinking about architecture and get on with some architecture.
Except Lasdun didn’t stop thinking.
He never stopped thinking.
And luh-kor-boo-ZYAY
Le Corbusier never went away.
Lasdun went to Paris. Saw his buildings. Studied them. Absorbed them.
And later
luh-kor-boo-ZYAY Le Corbusier himself saw one of Lasdun’s drawings and wrote on it:
“Bravo! Lasdun!”
Imagine keeping that.
He did.
Then history intervened.
And rather violently.
War.
Lasdun joined the Royal Artillery and then the Royal Engineers.
He built airstrips.
And on June 6th, 1944, Denys Lasdun landed in France.
D-Day.
He went right through the north-west European campaign and came out of the war with an MBE.
And then back to London.
A battered city.
Bomb sites. Housing shortages. Whole neighbourhoods wounded.
And architects looking at all that destruction and thinking:
Right.
What do we build now?
And how do we build differently?
This is the London in which Lasdun comes into his own.
Paddington first.
The Hallfield Estate.
Then Bethnal Green.
And this is important, because Lasdun wasn’t just thinking, Let’s build a bloody great block of flats.
He was asking:
How do people live together?
How do neighbours meet?
How do you make a community in the sky?
At Bethnal Green he came up with his “cluster blocks”.
Keeling House is the great survivor.
Four wings clustered around a central tower.
Not one enormous slab.
Break it up. Make smaller groups. Give people a sense of neighbourhood.
A vertical East End village, if you like.
It’s very Lasdun.
And there it still is.
Bethnal Green.
Grade II* listed now.
London changes its mind about buildings.
It does it all the time.
Sometimes several times before breakfast.
Then St James’s Place, overlooking Green Park.
And here’s another little correction to the cartoon version of Lasdun.
Concrete monster man.
Modernist.
Enemy of old London.
Not a bit of it.
He loved Hawksmoor.
He campaigned to save Hawksmoor’s London churches when some of them were threatened with closure and even demolition.
He had a deep feeling for classical architecture.
And then comes one of my favourite Lasdun buildings.
The Royal College of Physicians.
Regent’s Park.
John Nash territory.
Creamy stucco terraces. Regency London. Very grand. Very composed. Very polite.
And into this comes Denys Lasdun.
The committee asks him whether he’s going to produce a classical building.
No.
But listen to what he says he wants to do.
He wants a building that accords with the Nash terraces without imitating them.
That’s clever.
Don’t fake 1820.
Don’t dress a twentieth-century building up in Regency fancy dress.
Listen to Nash.
Answer Nash.
But answer him in your own voice.
And that is exactly what Lasdun did.
The Royal College of Physicians is startlingly modern.
And somehow it belongs there.
And now we need a quick architectural word detour.
Because sooner or later somebody is going to say:
Brutalism.
Lasdun.
Brutalist.
Brutal architecture.
Except that’s not quite where the word comes from.
There’s a French expression,
bay-TON brew
béton brut.
Raw concrete.
Concrete left exposed. You see the stuff. You see how it was made.
The term New Brutalism begins circulating in architectural circles in the early 1950s. Alison Smithson uses it for a project in Soho in 1953, and the critic Reyner Banham gives the movement its intellectual horsepower a couple of years later.
So Brutalism isn’t called Brutalism because the buildings beat you up and steal your lunch money.
Though some people looking at them may feel that way.
And Lasdun knew all about raw concrete.
Because now we get to the big one.
The National Theatre.
Commissioned in 1963.
Building starts in 1969.
Opens in 1976.
Thirteen years.
So anybody currently having building work done, take heart.
The National Theatre took thirteen years.
And what Lasdun creates on the South Bank is not really one building.
It’s a landscape.
Terraces.
Platforms.
Levels.
Staircases.
Auditoria.
Foyers.
Concrete planes reaching towards the river.
The inside comes outside.
The outside comes inside.
The theatre meets the city.
And the city meets the theatre.
You don’t simply enter Lasdun’s National Theatre.
You climb it.
You cross it.
You look out from it.
You discover London from it.
The Thames becomes part of the architecture.
Somerset House becomes part of the architecture.
Waterloo Bridge becomes part of the architecture.
London itself is scenery.
That’s the trick.
That’s the magic.
And that’s why the nuclear-power-station joke, funny though it is, misses something.
Lasdun wasn’t trying to make something pretty.
He was trying to make a piece of London.
And London duly did what London does.
It argued about it.
Some people hated it.
Some people adored it.
Betjeman gasped with delight.
Prince Charles reached for the nuclear option.
And Lasdun took the criticism hard.
That’s worth knowing.
Because this wasn’t some swaggering architectural bruiser saying, You philistines simply don’t understand my genius.
He was an intensely serious man.
Demanding.
Private.
Prone to self-doubt.
He drove himself harder than he drove the people who worked for him.
He worried.
He revised.
He obsessed over detail.
And criticism wounded him.
He was wounded in another way when people started altering the National Theatre.
In the 1990s there were plans for substantial changes, including losing one of the riverside terraces.
Lasdun fought.
There was a protest meeting in the House of Lords.
The terrace survived.
Other alterations didn’t please him.
He felt his building had been mutilated.
And there’s an irony here.
Because the supposed enemy of historic buildings now had to become the conservationist fighting to save his own historic building.
Welcome to London.
Stay around long enough and eventually they’ll list you.
And they did.
Lasdun lived long enough to see the wheel turn.
His buildings were listed.
Modernism came back into fashion.
Young architects sought him out.
The man whose concrete had been cursed and mocked became the grand old man of British modern architecture.
By the 1990s he was something extraordinary.
A living link with the heroic age of pre-war British modernism.
And the young loved him.
His door was open to them.
He went to exhibitions and symposia.
He was still looking.
Still thinking.
Still interested.
Still refusing to retire.
And I think that’s where we’ll leave him.
Not in an architectural history book.
Not even in Kensington, where he began.
Let’s put him back where most Londoners know him.
South Bank.
Stand on Waterloo Bridge.
Look towards the South Bank.
There it is.
That great grey composition beside the river.
Terraces.
Platforms.
Shadows.
Concrete.
A building that changes every few yards as you walk past it.
A building London has spent half a century arguing with.
Which may be the greatest compliment London can pay a building.
Because indifference is fatal.
Nobody is indifferent to the National Theatre.
A future king looked at it and saw a nuclear power station.
John Betjeman looked at it and gasped with delight.
Denys Lasdun looked at it and saw something else.
Theatre and city.
Building and river.
People and place.
All of it coming together.
And there’s our word again.
Concrete.
From concrescere.
To grow together.
Happy birthday, Sir Denys.
Your building did.
See you tomorrow, London Walkers.