This SAHGB - IHR seminar will be a hybrid event, taking place online and in person at the Institute of Historical Research, Pollard N301 (3rd Floor, North Block of Senate House, Malet St, London WC1E 7HU).
This is the story of a prize-winning modernist school and its early demise, and entangled with this is a larger story about the landscape in and around Heathrow airport, about the local versus the global, and about noise and its tolerance (perhaps also about ‘affordance’). The school in question – Woodfield County Secondary Modern – was one of the first secondary modern schools built under the dispensation of the 1944 Education Act, and its architect (Denis Clarke Hall) attempted to combine some of the ideals of continental modernist schools with forms suitable to the idea of a vocational technical education. The seminar offers an analysis of the particular conditions and ideals that shaped the school and how they immediately came into conflict with the school’s environmental conditions, particularly the noise pollution of its site; such was the conflict, in fact, that within fifteen years the school was abandoned and demolished. The seminar asks, how were ordinary local needs like housing and schooling reconciled - or not - with the imperatives of a facility like an international airport with its apparently superordinate claims to make or maintain London’s global status (in the face, for instance, of imperial decline)? How, more specifically, was aircraft noise to be mitigated, how was it even to be measured in its effects? How far was noise ‘annoyance’ a cultural or learnt matter, and what might this mean not only for the skins of buildings but to the forms of life that they contained?
Registration:
Please use the form below and watch for the pop-up message that will appear onscreen after you submit your details. The Zoom link will be shown in this message for those joining remotely. The date of this event is 12th October.
Image:
Woodfield County Secondary Modern School, Cranford (Architect – Denis Clarke Hall, 1954). Photographer – Reginald Hugo de Burgh Galwey.
Courtesy RIBA Drawings and Photographic Collection.
BIO
Mark Crinson is Emeritus Professor of Architectural History at Birkbeck, University of London. He was Vice-President and President of the European Architectural History Network (2016-2020), and he is a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the keynote speaker for the SAHGB’s 2023 Study Tour to Manchester, and recently contributed an episode of the 2023 Architectural History podcast mini-series.
His book Shock City: Image and Architecture in Industrial Manchester (2022) has been shortlisted for the SAHGB’s Alice Davis Hitchcock medallion at the time of this event; an interview can be read on our Features page.
His books include Rebuilding Babel: Modern Architecture and Internationalism (2017), The Architecture of Art History – A Historiography (2019, co-authored with Richard J. Williams), and Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (2003, re-issued 2019). He is currently researching a Leverhulme-funded book, Heathrow’s Genius Loci.
Book A Place:
Calling SAHGB Members!
We have a small-group Autumn Study Day in Surrey bookable through the What’s On calendar, and will publish details in our newsletter, and online, of our 2023 AGM and linked Q+A Event in November. Please register for these if you wish to attend.
Sincere thanks for your support through 2023. Please get in touch if you have any questions.