While Britain after the Second World War was a country in ruins, it was also a country buoyed by visions of the future. Street furniture played a key role in how such visions were realized, and many in the design community optimistically believed that better lampposts, benches and parking meters would help create a better Britain - one that was more beautiful, civilised, modern and tasteful than the country before the war. However, while many people agreed that good street furniture was important, few could agree on what constituted good design or who should be responsible. As a consequence, street furniture emerged as a particularly divisive topic in post-war Britain, drawing strong feelings across Britain’s social, political and cultural spectrum.

One particularly loud voice within this debate was The Architectural Review (AR), which perceived street furniture as the acid test of good town design. Through its series Townscape, the AR developed a highly aestheticized, utopian expression of postwar urban planning, in which Britain was re-imagined through modernist idioms and picturesque references. By contrast, the magazine’s 1955 Outrage campaign depicted the dystopian – or rather, subtopian – reality. Yet while ‘Townscape’ represented Britain as the AR wished it to be, Outrage represented the magazine’s resistance against the prevailing social order, in which the true townscape was under threat from anonymous amenity committees in local government, whose lack of design awareness was allowing landscapes to be ruined by miles of cable and wiring, ugly lampposts and pylons, inappropriately designed benches, as well as a host of other overpowering alien elements. For the AR, ‘the treatment of the fringe is often symptomatic of what is happening at the core’, and poor quality street furniture reflected a broader malaise within British society. But the struggle raises certain questions, among them: what does the AR’s engagement with the street furniture debate tell us about the utopian spirit in post-war British design culture?

This paper will address that question by examining how the AR fought to realize its utopian visions and shame those responsible for the subtopian reality. Using drawings, photographs, essays and letters, it will explore how different understandings of what the street needed - and didn't need - reflected a power struggle between the avant-garde, design philistines and the increasingly vocal ‘untrained masses’ in post-war Britain.

(This paper is the third part of a panel titled 'Convictions, conflicts and compromises: debates about ‘good’ design and the future of Britain 1939-77' put together by Dr Harriet Atkinson, Dr Jessica Kelly and Dr Eleanor Herring).