Big is beautiful: A crushing case for brutalism — with the people left out

First things first: this is one of the heaviest books I have ever read. Eventually I finished with it resting uncomfortably on my knees, as I perched on the edge of my bed. It reminded me of when I met Jennifer Worth (of Call the Midwife fame) and she showed me her hardback copy of my own substantial tome Austerity Britain — neatly spliced in half to make two separate manageable entities. Reluctantly I can now see her point; but in the case of Elain Harwood’s Space, Hope and Brutalism, the doorstopper’s doorstopper, I doubt if I would have the strength to do the same.

The physical inconvenience of Harwood’s book is doubly unfortunate because there is some evidence that Britain’s often reviled modernist architecture of the quarter-century or so after the war is having a moment, to judge by two straws in the wind this autumn. London’s annual Open House weekend included booking-only tours of Ernö Goldfinger’s increasingly iconic Trellick Tower (on the right soon after leaving Paddington station), all tickets for which were snapped up within minutes; and much the same happened with the National Trust’s Brutal Utopias season, featuring tours of the Southbank Centre, Denys Lasdun’s University of East Anglia (students living in ‘ziggurats’) and the streets-in-the-sky of Sheffield’s Park Hill estate.