Bringing modernism to the masses in 20th-century Britain

The second world war was won in the cafés of central Europe – the intellectual milieu that produced Edward Teller, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, and before them Albert Einstein. But even though America was an alluring destination, many of the 1930s escapees from Nazism ended up in Britain. There were scientists in their number, too, but Owen Hatherley concentrates on the newcomers’ effect on how post-war Britain looked. He examines their role in photography and film; in the design of printed books; in art, especially public art; and in architecture and town planning.

Perry Anderson’s 1968 essay ‘Components of the National Character’ was dismissive of the impact of the diaspora. In his view, the central Europeans who settled here were drawn by the country’s parochialism and provinciality. Anyone who had anything more radical to offer went elsewhere, and it was only those who were in tune with reactionary Britain who flourished. By this argument, the contribution of the migrants to the national character was at best nugatory, at worst negative.

Most popular

Ross Clark

The electric car honeymoon is over

Owen Matthews

Putin has pushed Trump too far

Jonathan Miller

Is France still a democracy?

Hatherley’s book is essentially an extended response, and part rebuke, to Anderson. In terms of academia, Anderson may have been correct – Karl Popper, for example, with his rejection of systemisation in favour of pragmatism, gave a continental seal of approval to a way of thinking that was innately conservative. But Hatherley’s argument is that, as well as the bourgeois Austrians of the academy (which Popper, for all his early enthusiasm for the Austrian Social Democrats, unquestionably was), Britain offered artistic refugees from ‘Red Vienna’ – and elsewhere – a home.

In architecture, for example, Bernard Lubetkin and Ernö Goldfinger brought modernism to the masses.