Brook, Richard

Dodge, Martin

English

Abstract In this paper we wish to explore how the threat of nuclear war in the 1950s and ‘60s affected planning at a range of geographic scales. Discussion is focused on the role of survivable infrastructure design and planning in the face of atomic weapons in the 1950s. National and international telecommunications networks were built during this time as a direct response to global political conditions. The rise of atomic power and computational technologies required new facilities that were often dispersed and situated variously for secrecy and locally available expertise/experience. The zoning of land and organisation of facilities and the planning towns is not conventionally viewed as informed by processes of the ‘warfare state’ (Edgerton, 2005), but we want to ask; What were the patterns of the built environment, economic structures and aesthetics / cultures of Cold War urbanism in Britain? As Boyd and Linehan (2013) state in the introduction to their recent book Ordnance: War + Architecture &amp; Space, we needed to be alert to ‘escalation in the intersections between the fabric of the landscape and the technologies of war and the extrusion and mutation of war from the battlefield into everyday life’. We seek papers drawing on a range of different evidential bases, archival research, personal histories and lived experiences and theoretical ideas to understand the spatiality of technological development, primarily focused upon city scales and architectural resultants

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The University of Manchester ResearchCold war urbanism - the challenge of survivable cityinfrastructureDocument VersionAccepted author manuscriptLink to publication record in Manchester Research ExplorerCitation for published version (APA):Dodge, M., & Brook, R. (2015). Cold war urbanism - the challenge of survivable city infrastructure. In InternationalConference of Historical Geographers 2015 (pp. 1-32)Published in:International Conference of Historical Geographers 2015Citing this paperPlease note that where the full-text provided on Manchester Research Explorer is the Author Accepted Manuscriptor Proof version this may differ from the final Published version. 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Jun. 2022International Conference of Historical Geographers 2015 5-10 July 2015, at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) in London, UK  Cold war urbanism - the challenge of survivable city infrastructure  Department of Geography, University of Manchester m.dodge@manchester.ac.uk Richard Brook, Manchester School of Architecture  r.brook@manchester.ac.uk Abstract In this paper we wish to explore how the threat of nuclear war in the 1950s and ‘60s affected planning at a range of geographic scales. Discussion is focused on the role of survivable infrastructure design and planning in the face of atomic weapons in the 1950s. National and international telecommunications networks were built during this time as a direct response to global political conditions. The rise of atomic power and computational technologies required new facilities that were often dispersed and situated variously for secrecy and locally available expertise/experience. The zoning of land and organisation of facilities and the planning towns is not conventionally viewed as informed by processes of the ‘warfare state’ (Edgerton, 2005), but we want to ask; What were the patterns of the built environment, economic structures and aesthetics / cultures of Cold War urbanism in Britain? As Boyd and Linehan (2013) state in the introduction to their recent book Ordnance: War + Architecture & Space, we needed to be alert to ‘escalation in the intersections between the fabric of the landscape and the technologies of war and the extrusion and mutation of war from the battlefield into everyday life’. We seek papers drawing on a range of different evidential bases, archival research, personal histories and lived experiences and theoretical ideas to understand the spatiality of technological development, primarily focused upon city scales and architectural resultants.     Cold War Urbanism The Challenge of Survivable City InfrastructureMartin Dodge Geography | University of ManchesterRichard Brook Manchester School of Architecture International Conference of Historical Geographers 9 July 2015Cold WarContext• Post-war, atomic age Britain, but deep austerity and imperial decline• 1949 shock of speed of Soviet atom bomb development• ‘Civil defence was about the preservation of Government (the State) and not about protecting the general populous’• Essential national infrastructure• Urban planning, architecture / design, structural engineering, the techno-scientific bureaucracies • Speaking here, we might speculate on the role of geographers and the RGS…..• What do we mean by urbanism? Summation of the forces shaping urban space and how people experience city life• Yet as Henri Lefebvre notes: Urbanism . . . masks a situation. It conceals operations. It blocks a view of the horizon, a path to urban knowledge and practice. It accompanies the decline of the spontaneous city and the historical urban core. It implies the intervention of power more than that of understanding. Its only coherence, its only logic, is that of the state – the void. The state can only separate, disperse, hollow out vast voids, the squares and avenues built in its own image – an image of force and restraintLefebvre, H. (2003 [1970]) The Urban Revolution, trans. R. Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 160–1Cold War Urbanism Definitions• Urbanism in the 1950s and 60s as a military project• The city the primary site of war • Urban population and aerial bombing, the WWII blitz experiences, showed how vulnerable civilians were• City centre target of single atom bomb (Hiroshima)• Metropolitan wide megaton devastation of the thermonuclear weapon by late 1950s• Nuclear war is about deterrence, which in turn is about planning for a survivable nation• Cold war urbanism – imagining, designing, planning and building for the bomb and its aftermath Cold War Urbanism DefinitionsSpatio-architectural autopsy of dead city Cold War Urbanism A research agenda• Telling the technical histories• Uncovering the logics, document discourse and plans; explaining the agenda of developments• Mapping the spatial networks and operational space of physical infrastructure• (In)visibility | hidden in plain sight• Proposed, unrealised and unbuilt, e.g. shelters• Co-opting civil infrastructural into service for strategic and military usage• Industrial systems brought into being to produce strategic weapons• Exploring and exposing the atomic imperative across many other registers: economic, legal, cultural, education, personal The imperative of survivable communication• Why did they build deep bunkers for telephone exchanges under several British city centres in 1950s?• Hugely expensive, at a time of austerity• Reference frame was WW2 blitz and recovery• The inertia of installed infrastructure. Vital national networks physically converged on vulnerable city centresScheme 526 | AnchorScheme 2147 | KingswayBT Archives TCB 417/E19882; E19982Scheme 567 construction a lot of effort expendedBT Archives TCB 417/E20315BT Archives TCB 417/E21572BT Archives TCB 417 /E24044TNA, CAB 21/3999Official secrecy Hiding what?• Cloak of classified space• Default of the State• Hides waste and incompetence• Klaus Fuchs and the Cambridge Spies – Soviets knew it all…(In)visibility Hidden in plain sightSaving peopleThe Shelter QuestionMr Chuter Ede [Home Secretary] making a statement on civil defence to House of Commons “…It will not be possible to provide shelter on any significant scale without making heavy calls on labour and materials much needed for other purposes..”[Source: “Local surveys the first stage in air-raid shelter plans”, Guardian, 10 November 1950]Source: TNA | CAB 129/44Warfare versus Welfare  Warfare versus WelfareThe City Engineer in Manchester diligently conducted a survey …… and then little or nothing seemed to happen regarding sheltersCorporate SpaceThe shelter questionCIS Tower | City Engineers LibraryCorporate SpaceThe shelter questionCIS Tower | City Engineers LibraryA viable shelter? or a tomb when the 118m tower above collapses..Public informationPropaganda and social spaceCold War construction Civil engineering and architectural aesthetics• Aesthetics were engineering and camouflage driven• Blast tests called to question the reality of man-made structures surviving detonationCold War construction Civil engineering and architectural aesthetics• BT Tower• Kelvedon HatchSituating the military-industrial complex • Economic drivers of Cold War urbanism evident in strategic projects that required specialised facilities for research, testing and industrial production• Computer cluster in Manchester• There is a need to understand spatial position, flow of material and architectural forms | Was it planned, or opportunistic on the part of technology manufacturers? • The role of the computation and the computer in relation to military objectives and civil applications – industry too was hidden in plain sight Planning for the ‘End of the World’ Dispersing the city• How far did ‘doomsday’ scenarios and metrics of nuclear destruction come to influence strategic planning of cities?• Was planning philosophy and modern land-use practice driven by dystopian avoidance?• Expolis, suburan sprawl and multi-lane expressways, car-based consumerism, edge development, economic dispersal, lower residential densities  Image references:• Slide 1: Diagrammatic map of the effects of nuclear blasts on Greater Manchester from ‘Emergency Planning and Nuclear War in Greater Manchester’, booklet published by MUND Manchester University Staff Nuclear Disarmament Group and Greater Manchester Council, circa. 1983.  • Slide 2: Photograph of the Trinity atomic test, 16 July 1945. Source: http://www.atomicarchive.com/Photos/Trinity/image7.shtml• Slide 3: Promotional illustration for 2015 exhibition Churchill’s Scientists at the Science Museum in London. Source: http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/Plan_your_visit/exhibitions/churchills-scientists.aspx• Slide 4: View of the mushroom cloud above Hiroshima after the atomic bomb on 6 August 1945. Photograph taken by crew of the Enola Gay. Source: http://www.atomicarchive.com/Photos/Hiroshima/image1.shtml• Slide 6: Hiroshima bomb survey map and damage photographs from The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, Report 92, May 1947. Source: Cook N B, 2013, https://archive.org/details/TheEffectsOfTheAtomicBombOnHiroshima• Slide 8: View of racks of telecommunications equipment being installed in the top half of the main Apparatus Tunnel 8 of the Guardian underground telephone exchange in Manchester, April 1958. Source: tunnel engineer Patrick Gough, courtesy of George Coney.• Slide 9: Left, safeguarding maps showing the approximate extents of the 1950s era underground telephone exchanges built in central Birmingham (Scheme 526, Anchor) and in central London (Scheme 2147, Kingsway). Source: BT Archives, ref. POST 122/1049.• Right, map of ‘Coaxial Cable Systems in Great Britain 1946’, edited and annotated by author. Source: Keith Ward,  2006, “A short history of telecommunications transmission in the UK”, The Journal of The Communications Network, 5(1).• Slide 10: Photographs documenting tunnel construction for the Guardian underground telephone exchange (Scheme 567) in Manchester, January and February 1955. Source: BT Archive, ref. TCB 417/E19882; E19982.• Slide 11: Photograph documenting tunnel construction for the Guardian underground telephone exchange (Scheme 567) in Manchester, 1955. Source: BT Archive, ref. TCB 417/E20315.• Slide 12: View along the main apparatus tunnel prior to equipment installation in the Guardian underground telephone exchange (Scheme 567) in Manchester, 1956. Source: BT Archive, ref. TCB 417/E21572.• Slide 13: View of backup electrical generation equipment installed the Guardian underground telephone exchange (Scheme 567) in Manchester, 1959. Source: BT Archive, ref. TCB 417/E24044.• Slide 14: Newspaper clipping included in Cabinet files discussing the secrecy of the construction of the Post Office tunnels. Source: National Archives, CAB21/3999.• Slide 15: Map ‘Backbone & Standby Radio Links’ from GPO briefing paper to the Cabinet, July 1956. Source National Archives, CAB 134/1207. • Photograph of the Heaton Park microwave tower. Source: BT Archive, ref. TCB 417/E33223. • Slide 16: Page from ‘ Advising the Householder on Protection Against Nuclear Attack’, Civil Defence Handbook No. 10, 1963.• Slide 17: Extract from Cabinet briefing paper ‘Civil Defence Preparation’, 18 January 1951. Source: National Archives, ref. CAB 129/44.• Slide 18: Extract from survey list ‘Public basement shelters in steel framed & reinforced concrete buildings’, 1951. Source: Manchester City Archives, ref. miscellaneous Wood Street material Box 7 2012/33• Slide 19: Architectural section of the CIS tower building, Manchester, 1958. Source: author scan from City Engineers microcard, ref. 3925/_/6, Courtesy of Manchester City Archives.• Slide 20: Extract from architectural section of the CIS tower building showing the location of basement shelter. Source: author scan from City Engineers microcard, ref. 3925/_/6, Courtesy of Manchester City Archives.• Slide 21: Left, ‘Duck and Cover’ cartoon by US civil defense. Source: Cook N B, 2013, Air Raids Handbook, p. 346, http://archive.org/details/AirRaids• Right, author edited extractfrom British civil defence poster, ‘If you think it’s hopeless, you’re wrong’, cartoon by Leslie Illingworth, 1957. Source: National Archives, ref. INF 2/122.• Slide 22: Photograph sequence, ‘47 kt Greenhouse Easy, Entwetok Atoll, 1951. Brick house, 3 psi peak overpressure’, Source: Cook N B, 2013, Air Raids Handbook, p. 296, http://archive.org/details/AirRaids• Chart ‘Nonseismic Reinforced-concrete Building’ taken from Wayne Davis L, et al, 1966?, Prediction of Urban Casualties and the Medical Load from a High-Yield Nuclear Burst, (Dikewood Corporation, DC-FR-1060). Source: Cook N B, 2013, Air Raids Handbook, p. 249, http://archive.org/details/AirRaids• Slide 23: Left, photograph of BT Tower in London, date not know. Source: unrecorded online source. • Right, photograph of the innocuous surface building masking the entrance to the Kelvedon Hatch underground military bunker, 2007. Source: Genesisman26, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvedon_Hatch_Secret_Nuclear_Bunker • Slide 24: Photograph of the entrance gatehouse to the Ferranti factory in Wythenshawe Manchester, 1955. Source: author scan from original in the Cruikshank and Seward archive, courtesy of Fairhurst Design Group.• Slide 25: ‘Chart 4 - Schematic diagram of the relocation of dispersed workers and evacuated persons and plants’, from a 1969 Soviet book, Civil Defense(‘Grazhdanskaya Oborona’), translated by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL-tr-2306, April 1971). Source: Cook N B, 2014, War Plan UK, p. 248, https://archive.org/details/WarPlanUK

Cold war urbanism - the challenge of survivable city infrastructure

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Cold war urbanism - the challenge of survivable city infrastructure

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