history
arq (2018), 22.2, 115–126. ©Cambridge University Press 2018
doi: 10.1017/S135913551800043X
This article examines images of childhood in 1950s Britain and
their resonance with architectural modes of representation
alongside changes in conceptions of childhood.
Architecture, cinema, and images
of childhood in 1950s Britain
Liat Savin Ben Shoshan
In 1956, Independent Group member Eduardo
Paolozzi, close friend and collaborator of Alison and
Peter Smithson, starred in the film Together, directed
by Lorenza Mazzetti, who had met him while a
student at the Slade School of Fine Art. Strikingly,
the imagery and setting of the film shares much in
common with the images used by the Smithsons in
their work, particularly those by Nigel Henderson,
of children playing in the East End. Together is a
52-minute film screened in 1956, as part of Free
Cinema programme. East London, with its narrow
streets, riversides, docks, and multiple bomb
sites, as well as the manner in which this location
was shot, expressed the sense of disharmony –
even chaos; a scenery patched together out of
the remnants of prewar daily routines; a mix of
dwellings, cranes, industry, and children running
among the ruins. Looking more closely at Free
Cinema’s use of image and at the postwar concern
with childhood allows us to better understand
how and why children figured in the Smithsons’
work and how they came to inspire a new creative
consciousness in New Brutalism more generally.
In the immediate aftermath of the war,
British architects were involved in planning new
neighbourhoods for displaced citizens. The majority
of reconstruction projects adopted premodernist
aesthetics and urban ideals. The destruction of
large urban areas, the vast emptiness of rubble
fields and the homogeneity of sparsely located
housing constructions, contributed to an acute
sense of alienation, disorientation, lack of identity,
and anonymity among their inhabitants. Alison
and Peter Smithson, who were enthusiastic
modernists, were also critical of the alienation
and disintegration that would be caused, they
believed, by the homogeneous construction and
1
zoning practices of modernism. At the same
time, they also questioned modernism’s modes of
representation. Through their involvement with the
Independent Group (1952–6), which included artists
such as Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson, and
writers and critics such as Reyner Banham, they
challenged prevailing approaches to culture, and
expanded modes of architectural representation
history   arq . vol 22 . no 2 . 2018 115
and its images.2 The Smithsons defined the
aesthetics of the ‘ordinary’, or the ‘as found’, as the
basis of New Brutalism, proposing that daily spaces
and found objects carried memory and identity that
was found in them, and that modern housing had
to relate to the everyday identity in order to create a
3
sense of belonging among residents.
They noticed that these aspects were more
visible in the working-class neighbourhoods
of London. Although parts of them had been
devastated by the war, these neighbourhoods still
had intact sections that were lively and active. They
attracted artists such as Paolozzi and Henderson,
as well as filmmakers, and architects to spend
time and sometimes to live there, as they were
relatively cheap. The images created by these
new visitors and residents and the discourse the
Smithsons advocated, based on the images of these
city fragments, highlighted the liveliness and
significance of the marginal to modern life. The
Smithsons stressed the need to rebuild the city not
from scratch, but by interweaving the old with the
new to create the infrastructure for a network of
connectivity in the city. They used photographs
by Henderson of children at play. Some show free
play and the breaking of boundaries. Other images,
which were not used by the Smithsons but were
surely seen by them, also show urban loneliness,
dislocation, and spatial fragmentation. The
postwar city, an urban realm filled with debris and
cavities in which children wander, has emotional
dimensions that are optimally articulated through
the everyday experience of a child in the city.
At the same time, with their first screening in
1956, a group of young British filmmakers led by film
director Lindsay Anderson, was also interested in
similar everyday themes. The group called their newly
established movement ‘Free Cinema’ and explored
the daily routines of working-class neighbourhoods;
children playing in the streets, overstuffed shop
windows, festive rituals, and popular leisure habits
of youth, presenting an uncommon view of everyday
life in postwar London, which attempted to express
vitality rather than hardships. Their representation
of the everyday was experimental and open,
history   arq . vol 22 . no 2 . 2018 115
116 arq . vol 22 . no 2 . 2018    history
rather than didactic and predetermined, as it was
in contemporary conventional and institutional
documentaries. Children and youth were the focus
of four of the eleven films included in the three
Free Cinema programmes. Rundown or utterly
destroyed urban spaces were reanimated through
the movement and the voices of children. Moreover,
the urban spaces in Free Cinema films were filmed
from a subjective point of view, capturing a space in
which visual images of places, often shot in motion,
accentuate emotional and psychological aspects in an
almost childlike manner.
Conceptions of childhood were transformed in
the postwar years by major international changes in
political and rights discourses, such as the Rights of
the Child Act (1946, 1959). They were also transformed
by attachment theory and developmental
4
psychology, which influenced approaches to
5
education and parenting. Childhood was seen, on
the one hand, as a period separate from adulthood,
in which freedom and free exploration had to be
allowed and provided for, as part of a process of
6
learning to become a future democratic citizen. On
the other hand, the child was seen, in light of the
7
same psychoanalytic theories and contemporary
sociological research on ‘juvenile delinquency’, as
self-centred, wild and destructive; an image both
alluring and intimidating that was also supported by
popular culture.
This complex image of childhood in the postwar
era, further explored later on, provides the
backdrop for a discussion of images created in the
1950s, in the architectural representations of the
Smithsons, and in films made by the Free Cinema
movement. While cinema reflected this image,
the Smithsons’ work with it fed into their design.
In a period when architects were involved in the
design of new schools and new neighbourhoods,
following the Schools Act (1944) and the New Towns
Act (1946), progressive theories influenced the
design of child related facilities like playgrounds,
schools, hospitals, as well as housing. Moreover,
as architectural historian Roy Kozlovsky, who has
studied British welfare state children’s architecture
notes, the child embodied a new spirit in the
postwar architectural world:
Key to this narrative is the choice to represent
reconstruction with the orphaned child, as if to
suggest that the new postwar order will not rely on
reviving the symbolic authority of the Father, but will
be self-initiated and driven by the subject’s internal
8
emotional resources and potentiality for growth.
Images in both architecture and cinema portrayed
children in working-class neighbourhoods as
representing a new spirit of creativity and openness,
as well as being marginal figures, incoherent, and
capable of destruction. This complex figure, I argue,
formed the basis of ‘as found’ and of New Brutalism.
Free Cinema: everyday life and British documentary
In the immediate postwar years, British
documentary films continued their prewar
promotion of government reconstruction projects,
as the war created entirely new opportunities for
Savin & Shoshan   Architecture, cinema, and images of childhood in 1950s Britain
the genre. Films from this period established the
terms of the debate on reconstruction at a time
when the government wanted to tell people not
only how it was fighting the war, but also how it
hoped to set about the task of reconstruction once
9
the war had been won.
The leaders of the British documentary film
movement John Grierson and Paul Rotha regarded
education and social reform as central to the work
10
of the documentary film movement. Before,
during, and after the war documentary films were
used to reinforce government action on key issues
such as slum clearance, health and unemployment,
and reconstruction of housing.
11
A well-known example is Housing Problems
(dir. Edgar Anstey and Arthur Elton, 1935), which
demonstrated the strengths of the medium as a
means of gaining the support of traditionally non-
theatre going audiences for the modernisation
12
of the city. The film captured the hardships of
the tenement dwellers through interviews in
which they shared their personal experiences, and
proposed slum clearance and modern housing
projects as the healthy, spacious, and progressive
solution. In Britain, the documentary film
movement created in 1930 by Grierson as the Film
Unit of the Empire Marketing Board regarded itself
as mediating everyday realities to the public, and
regarded education and social reform as essential to
the documentary film work. In 1933, the unit was
13
transferred to General Post Office (GPO).
At the same time, however, a different approach to
representing reality appeared in the documentaries
made by Humphrey Jennings. One of the initiators
14
of the Mass Observation Movement, Jennings joined
the GPO Film Unit under Grierson in 1934 and
made his significant documentaries at the height
of the war. His films were markedly different from
the social realist documentaries of the GPO and the
Ministry of Information. They were designed to show
the beauty and poetics of British everyday life, largely
15
through long shots. In 1954, Lindsay Anderson
described Jennings as ‘the only real poet in British
16
cinema’ and was at the centre of a loosely formed
group of young filmmakers who sought to continue
the documentary poetics of Jennings.
Free Cinema filmmakers were not the first to
document everyday life, and neither were the ‘social
realists’; in fact documenting the everyday was the
beginning of filmmaking. The Lumière brothers’
late nineteenth-century short films were made with
a cinematograph standing in a street, recording
the movements of the metropolis – people,
automobiles, trains, etc. As cinema technology
developed and cinema became more sophisticated,
filming took place inside studios rather than in the
streets, and location shots were limited mainly to
17
avant-garde films, newsreels, and documentaries.
In 1956, the National Film Theatre in London
screened a programme of three short films: Oh
Dreamland (dir. Lindsay Anderson, 1953), Momma
Don’t Allow (dir. Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz,
1956), and Together (dir. Lorenza Mazzetti, 1956),
and gave the series the programmatic name Free

Cinema. ‘Implicit in our attitude’, the filmmakers
wrote in the programme, ‘is a belief in freedom
18
and in the significance of the everyday’. The
films shared a definite focus on everyday life, and
portrayed the reality of big cities. For the event, the
artists phrased their short manifesto as follows:
As filmmakers we believe that no film can be too
personal.
The image speaks.
Sound amplifies and comments.
Size is irrelevant. Perfection is not an aim.
19
An attitude means a style.
By the term ‘Free Cinema’, they meant that the
films were essentially independent, free from
serving the sponsor’s purposes (as in traditional
British documentary), free of the demands of the
box office (as in entertainment films), and free to
choose their means of expression for their ideas
20
on the everyday, at times idiosyncratically. The
Free Cinema films were non-didactic, aesthetic
rather than informative; they appealed to
emotion rather than to reason. Their aesthetic
was impressionist, following feeling more than
logic or narrative. Richardson, Reisz, and Anderson
all wrote in Sequence, a film journal with clear
editorial emphasis, that a poetic cinema was called
for in Britain, which would provide a national
expression – a poetry of reality and of the common
person. This would not only be a reportage, which
purpose was to show the hardships of poverty,
to educate and convince of the improvements
achieved by reconstruction projects, but would also
be poetic, inventing a form of artistic expression
that emerged out of the local, the people, and the
21
history of the place.
The figures of Free Cinema seemed to be caught
in-between; perplexed. Whether children, youth,
history   arq . vol 22 . no 2 . 2018 117
or grown-ups in a prolonged adolescence, it
seemed as if the figures were somehow not ready
to become part of the world. All three films of
the first screening had themes that related to, or
presented, children and youth. In the earliest one,
Dreamland (1952), children, adults, and families go
to an amusement park in the outskirts of London.
Anderson, the director, wanted to show the people’s
fascination, amusement, and bewilderment with
the awkward, the cruel, and bizarre. Momma Don’t
Allow (1956) captured the emerging ‘youth culture’,
a term unheard of before the 1950s. The spatial,
architectural, and urban construction of the third
film Together (1956) and its portrayal of children
and childlike adults is particularly relevant to the
work and images created by the Smithsons and the
Independent Group.
Together: fragments of childhood and spatial alienation
in the postwar city
At fifity-two minutes Together was longer than other
Free Cinema films. Nor was it a documentary, but
was based on a story by Denis Horne. Nevertheless,
it was considered part of the Free Cinema
programme because of its raw feel and its long
shots that showed the streets and people of the East
22
End. The protagonists – two brothers who work
at the docks and are deaf and mute – are played by
non-professional actors. They are strange; they are
like children, awkward in their walking, incoherent
in their communication, and almost primitive.
Their deafness and blindness may be seen as a
1 Playing in the rubble,
Together (dir.
Lorenza Mazzetti,
1956).
Architecture, cinema, and images of childhood in 1950s Britain    Savin & Shoshan
118 arq . vol 22 . no 2 . 2018    history
metaphor for the early language of a child, which
adults are unable to understand.
The film is poetic and surreal. Though shot on
location, it transcends the particular place and
time to speak of the postwar experience from
the viewpoint of a foreigner. Filmmaker Lorenza
Mazzetti, an Italian who had lost her family in the
war, and lived in London to study art, confessed that
through the film and its protagonists she expressed
her own emotions as a foreigner, further alienated
23
by living in a city devastated by war.
The space, architecture, and techniques of
this film reflect these sensibilities. The brothers,
who share a room in a modest family house, exist
within their own private world of communication,
like young children. Their social environment
does not include them, and they are often left
to their own devices; ignored. Thus, they are
unable to partake in the typical adult pleasures
of communication and intimate love, and have
only each other to communicate with. Their
connection is harmonious and affectionate, but
they are closed off from the rest of the world.
Despite their estrangement, the brothers do
attempt to become part of their surroundings,
albeit with little success. Their desperate need
to reach out to the world repeatedly results in
misunderstandings and confusion.
The setting – the London docks, a bombed-
out area with heavy industry – is filmed from
low angles, emphasising the irregularity of its
proportions in relation to the city. Several shots
portray spaces of different daily rituals that take
place in the neighbourhood, which have remained
intact after the war. Some shots are taken from
above, from a distance, creating an estrangement
Savin & Shoshan   Architecture, cinema, and images of childhood in 1950s Britain
effect. In many shots, very different activities take
place side by side, showing the lack of borders
between areas of use: residential buildings, industry
and children’s play spaces, and the emptiness and
lack of defined boundaries of other spaces. The scale
and proportion seem awkward and disharmonious,
as the height of the street is disproportionate to its
width. In several street scenes the tall and opaque
concrete walls of buildings and narrow streets
dwarf the human figures.
As with the interior scenes in the film, exterior
shots convey disharmony, dissonance, and
disjunction. The street shots emphasise the brothers’
awkwardness. Walking together and communicating
in sign language, clearly they have their own separate
world. As they walk side by side, the children chase
them and then draw caricature figures of the
brothers in chalk on the ground. To these children,
and to some adults who stare at them, the brothers
appear to be some kind of alien creatures.
More generally, the film’s surreal atmosphere
is evident in the visual portrayal of children. They
wander throughout the film in a landscape strewn
with bomb craters. They are left on their own to
spend their time in open fields of debris [1]. Playing
in this harsh space, the children’s behaviour is also
harsh – wild, even cruel. The soundtrack includes
sounds of the jeering children, mixed with the
chanting of a children’s choir between the scenes.
Their singing is employed in a manner similar to
that of the children’s singing and playing in the
streets of Edinburgh in The Singing Street (Townsend,
Mclsaac, and Ritchie, 1952), a film also included in
the Free Cinema programme [2]. The chanting of
these children is far from innocent or sweet – it is
uncanny. The children are filmed from particularly

2 Cut-off figures, 3 Children, Together
Together (dir. (dir. Mazzetti,
Mazzetti, 1956). 1956).
low angles and sometimes extra-close close-ups are
used; some frames are fragmented – the head is
cut off from the body or only the legs are shown
– fragments of people among the fragments of a
town [3].
Often, the film breaks with viewing conventions,
such as the extreme close-ups, and some shots are
badly lit on purpose. Thus, ordinary spaces are
seen in new dimensions, providing a stark view
of reality that is not easy for the viewer to absorb.
The everyday is transgressed, almost to the point of
surrealism.
It is no coincidence that Mazzetti cast two non-
actors as the brothers – artists with whom she
became acquainted as a Slade student [4]. The tall
and skinny brother was played by painter Michael
Andrews, and the fat and stubby brother was played
by Paolozzi, whose own life paralleled that of his
character: roaming the streets of East London,
where he lived at the time, collecting found objects,
which he transformed into art. The enclosed,
separate world of the deaf-mute brothers and their
private language is shared, to an extent, by the
artists who portray them. Mazzetti’s idea, based
on her own experience, was that although part of
society, the artist also has an external perspective
on it, articulated by the creation of objects, images,
and object-images. These are often not literal, nor
expressed through words, but turn to the senses,
memory flashes, visual images, and sounds.
Together does just that – it is almost devoid
of words. It experiments with various modes of
history   arq . vol 22 . no 2 . 2018 119
visualisation and with the breaking of spatial
conformities of sight and of sound. Thus, it captures
the postwar experience vividly, as one in which
language must be reinvented. Communication
is severed in the fragmented postwar city where
the people, both the brothers, and the ‘normal’
children, are marginal figures [5]. However, at the
same time it stages a reality that is more open to
interpretation. Children run around, left alone to
play in the rubble, but also to reinvent play. The
city itself is filled with ‘blank spaces’ yet is open to
the creation of new places and experiences. This
chaotic and violent reality calls for the creation
of physical, emotional, and ethical orders that
would interweave with old ones. Architecture
and urbanism are called upon to reconstitute a
sustainable network of human communication.
‘As found’, street photography, and New Brutalism
The everyday and its visual and material cultures
were also significant to the Smithsons, in their
24
articulation of the ‘as found’. For them, it
represented authenticity and crudeness of an
object, a building, or a neighbourhood. The
architect was the finder and collector of everyday
objects that carried the identity of a place, and
through it he or she was able to reinterpret and
rebuild the city.
In seeking to improve air, light, hygiene, and
spatial organisation in industrial cities, modernist
architects had been concerned with research into
everyday life and routines throughout the twentieth
century, and as a consequence of the physical and
mental destruction of urban neighbourhoods
caused by the war, urban everyday life was a
theme of social research and artistic exploration
Architecture, cinema, and images of childhood in 1950s Britain    Savin & Shoshan
120 arq . vol 22 . no 2 . 2018    history

in the 1950s. It became part of a broader attempt 4 Brothers, 5 Communicating,

to rebuild a democratic society. Photographs of
everyday life revealed the materials of construction
of everyday neighbourhoods after the war – these
leftovers were traces of human activity. They
were the basis of the term ‘as found’, used by the
Smithsons to describe essential material of a place,
its intrinsic sensibilities and memories, sometimes
existing beyond consciousness:
Together (dir. Together (dir.
Mazzetti, 1956). Mazzetti, 1956).
The ‘as found’ aesthetic was something we thought we
named in the early 1950s when we first knew Nigel
Henderson and saw in his photographs a perceptive
recognition of the actuality around his house in
Bethnal Green: children’s pavement play-graphics;

Savin & Shoshan   Architecture, cinema, and images of childhood in 1950s Britain

repetition of ‘kind’ in doors used as site hoardings;
the items in the detritus on bombed sites, such as the
old boot, heaps of nails, fragments of sack or mesh
25
and so on.
As the Smithsons noted, they thought of the ‘as
found’ after looking at the photographs of East
London neighbourhoods of Nigel Henderson, whom
they had met in the early 1950s in the framework of
the Independent Group. In 1953, in a presentation at
the ninth CIAM congress, the Smithsons used a series
of Henderson’s photographs of the neighbourhood
of Bethnal Green, showing children playing in the
streets. The images were shot from above, or from
a side angle. They were never close enough to show
a child’s face. They did, however, express dynamic
movement, the children’s enjoyment of free play,
and the naturalness of their exploration of the space
around them. The children were on their own, out
on the streets, with whatever they found, without
any visible attention from an adult.
In the 1950s, the Smithsons worked with a variety
of visual images. Part of their critique of prewar
modernism was expressed in their different mode
of architectural representation, with photographs
and other visual images highlighting their ideas
of a rejuvenated urban life. The Smithsons used
photographic images that portrayed everyday
working-class neighbourhoods, with men, women,
children, and families roaming streets lined with
tenement houses, images that derived from streets
as arteries of urban life, and memories of their own
childhood:
Interest in street thoughts is endemic in this
generation of architects. They feel themselves
as almost co-investors (comic but true) of social
anthropology. The interest is not book-bred but
is a remembering of childhood […]. P. S. [Peter
Smithson] even had an accidental walk-on part
in Bicycle Thieves, filming in 1948. It was in the
26
Zeitgeist. We had no Joyce.
As part of their critique of zoning and of what they
saw as the narrowly functional aspects of modernist
planning, the Smithsons aspired to forge a better
connection between the city and its people, to
create new forms, as well as new images of public
housing. As part of this attempt, they reinvigorated
architectural representation through collages that
combined magazine cutouts of popular cultural
figures, and photographs taken in working-class
neighbourhoods, which they incorporated in their
own architectural designs.
Architects, artists, and filmmakers reacted
against modes of production and creation that
prevailed in the postwar years, and their respective
discourses. They challenged them by turning to
what they perceived as more honest, authentic and
sensual aspects, which they believed were more
adequate to postwar reality. They wanted closer
contact with everyday emotions and memories.
They were interested in the material and immaterial
aspects of life in the city – signs of joy and
happiness, as well as of fear, anxiety, and alienation.
The Smithsons made use of photographic images
that expressed the presence of existing contexts:
history   arq . vol 22 . no 2 . 2018 121
traces of everyday that were still socially cohesive
despite having been physically shattered by the war.
Since the early days of the medium,
photographers have been interested in modern
everyday life – in the energy and chance
27
juxtapositions found on the streets. Photographers
who focused on street life, such as Eugène Atget,
Henri-Cartier Bresson, László Moholy-Nagy, and
Berenice Abbott, created highly thought-provoking
images. Although urban or street photography
has been traditionally divided into the poetic, or
artistic, as opposed to the social-documentary,
several photographers have straddled both
definitions. British urban photography developed
in both types, with an emphasis on documentary
and social journalism, which prevailed in the 1930s,
alongside the development of documentary film.
British photographers had photographed working-
class neighbourhoods and families before and
during the war. Humphrey Spender (1910–2005),
was such a photographer, and was commissioned
in 1934 to produce photographs of poor housing
in the East End of London and in 1937 joined the
Mass Observation Movement. After the war and into
the 1950s, some, such as Bill Brandt (1904–1983)
and Bert Hardy (1913–1995), became drawn to the
artistic, showing greater interest in formality,
irregular points of view, and compositions of urban
28
neighbourhoods.
Henderson shared this interest in postwar
working-class neighbourhoods. For him the interest
in everyday life was not a sociological or journalistic
venture, but part of an artistic process. Already
in the 1930s, Henderson had become acquainted
with the works of modern avant-gardists such as
Max Ernst, George Braque, Pablo Picasso and Kurt
Schwitters, and created and presented his own
29
collages. His interest in the urban was however,
primarily as a formal composition, bearing
resemblance to the photographs of Laszlo Moholy-
Nagy, and he was less interested in the social aspects
of the neighbourhoods, or in the individuals who
lived there.
Between 1949 and 1952, Henderson took
numerous photographs of East End street scenes.
Many focused on the view from the window or steps
of his home on Chisenhale Road. Looking down in
bright sunshine on the prosaic drama of children’s
play, Henderson exploited contrasts of light and
dark, movement and stillness, to evoke a sense of
the ‘moment caught’. In terms of its composition,
the picture emphasised flatness rather than three-
dimensionality, as Henderson seemed preoccupied
with the patterns created within the scene rather
30
than with the scene itself.  
The interest in the fragments of liveliness after
the war is evident in Henderson’s photographs.
His images are distant. Some are taken from above.
Figures are often placed at the edges of the frame,
or seen from a distance. The view from above is a
photographic position that connotes detachment
31
– no view better embodies estrangement. It is a
filming position that also features throughout
the film Together and is different from the points
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122 arq . vol 22 . no 2 . 2018    history
of view often used in journalistic photography
and documentary films, which intend to express
objectivity and truth, and a straight forward
relation between the person behind and in front
of the camera. Both Henderson and the Smithsons
it seems were more interested in the movement of
children in play, in children as expressing the idea
of movement, than in children as individuals.
The Smithsons voiced their alternative for
urban reconstruction through the liveliness and
playfulness of the child in the city. The materials
of the Smithsons’ Golden Lane presentation of
1952 were used again at the ninth CIAM conference
in 1953, which focused on the theme of habitat.
There, the Smithsons presented their Urban
Re-identification Grid [6a, b]. The presentation
panels were placed in a grid, the format used in
32
all postwar CIAM meetings. The grid was divided
in two. On the right side was the urban scheme,
as well as sections and plans of the proposed
housing project for Golden Lane. On the left were
photographs shot by Henderson, of children at
play on the street. The pictures were placed in the
grid individually. Together, they formed a series in
movement, like a film sequence, articulating the
liveliness of movement and playfulness in street
life. By creating a ‘film strip’ of the photographs
in their presentation, the Smithsons stressed
the issue of mobility, which was significant to
their architectural ideas. They believed in urban
clusters of connectivity, interactions, and mobility
that would bring back a kind of humaneness to
33
modernist housing.
The Smithsons’ usage of the images was part of
their architectural language, as evident in their
usage of urban photography. The formalism of the
images resonated with the city they envisioned in
their writings and drawings, in which, ironically,
Savin & Shoshan   Architecture, cinema, and images of childhood in 1950s Britain
6a
streets would be different from those seen in the
photographs, and would not be quite so mixed
in their usage, as they believed in the separation
of motorised and pedestrian traffic. Surely, there,
children would be safer. The Smithsons’ interest in
children playing in the streets was overshadowed by
their stronger belief in the car, and in the centrality
of the automobile routes in the city, an essentially
34
modernist idea, which prevailed after the war.
The narrow alleys and streets of East London,
photographed by Nigel Henderson, were not really
safe for children, and it was believed that the places
of play were to be moved away from the street, to a
defined and protected playground or park, separate
from cars, but also from other things that took
place in the streets.
Children, postwar culture, and New Brutalism
The notion of childhood was reframed and
re-emphasised more than ever before in the
postwar era. Children were discussed in a variety
of disciplines, including political human rights,
psychology, education and parenting, the arts,
and architecture. The protection of children was
anchored in the Declaration of the Rights of
35
Children adopted by the United Nations in 1946.
These rights were understood to include not only
the right to shelter and protection, but also the
right to play and unrestrained creativity of children
36
that came to be seen as an exercise in democracy.
The child as inspiring a new creative
consciousness in New Brutalism had its parallels in
art – in the works of Art Brute artists such as Jean
Dubuffet and Independent Group Scottish-Italian
artist Eduardo Paolozzi. These artists continued
the work of their ‘primitivist’ predecessors, seeing
the primitive as an alternative to a modern world
37
that has gone astray, a feeling that received

6 a, b Alison and Peter
Smithson and Nigel
Henderson,
Re-identification
Grid, 1953.
a new emphasis after the Second World War.
Dalibor Vesely has suggested that the notion of the
38
primitive was itself modern. It appeared for the
first time in the sixteenth century, with the battle
of the ancients and the moderns, and continued
through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
with the ‘discovery’ of primitive societies and their
virtues, the notion of the bon sauvage, historicism,
and through to the twentieth century, with the
39
avant-garde movement of ‘primitivism’.
As recently argued by historian Michal Shapira,
the experience of total war from 1939 to 1945
shaped a new understanding of selfhood that
focused on the disjuncture between the ‘war
inside’ and the outward needs of the democratic
self to adapt to society. Central to this was the
psychoanalytically informed understanding
40
of childhood and the mother–child bond.
Psychoanalysis referred to childhood as a
primal, primitive, and separate state of human
development, and Freud referred to children as
41
‘primitive people’. By the 1950s, the psychoanalytic
study of mental dynamics of childhood was well
developed, through the works of Melanie Klein
42
and Anna Freud, which had vast influence on
child psychology, education, parenting, as well as
architecture. Although Klein had discussed the
psychoanalytic focus on the bond between mother
and infant in her earlier writings, it came to the
fore in the 1950s as the British psychologist John
Bowlby made clinical observations on children
43
who were away from their parents in hospitals,
and argued that separation from an attachment
history   arq . vol 22 . no 2 . 2018 123
6b
figure (parent or primary caregiver) led to distress,
depression, and trauma; this was the basis for his
44
attachment theory.
Progressive or ‘child-centred’ education became
the dominant orthodoxy in modern English
primary and secondary schools in the postwar
45
period. In examples such as Education through Art
(1943), Herbert Read argued that childhood was not
a preparatory stage for adulthood, as many modern
educationalists still understood it. Instead, the task
of education was to stimulate children in being
children, not just in ‘making’ them into adults, and
46
what mattered was the raw material of life.
However, children were not viewed only through
the lens of progressive and liberal educational
approaches. Contemporary sociologists, for
instance, focused on children not as individuals but
47
only as part of a social network and the family,
and not only as learners but also as threats, as
researches on juvenile delinquency emerged in
48
the 1950s. Also, popular education and parenting
guides that referred to psychoanalytic descriptions
49
of the child as self-centred and destructive
simplified them into a critical and practical advice
and applied them to older children. Thus, children
were viewed as self-centred, destructive, and
immature, unready to take responsibility; and the
constitution of a democratic society was left to the
50
adult world.
Children populated the cities of postwar films
and became the main protagonists of staged street
scenes. Importantly, in films like De Sica’s Ladri di
51 5
Biciclette (1948) and Miracolo a Milano (1951), and
53
Jean Pierre Melville’s Les enfants terribles (1950) it
was their own point of view that became dominant
as their gaze conveyed a moral message to the
54
world. It was the child’s playful and unrestrained
creativity in dwelling the world that provided
Architecture, cinema, and images of childhood in 1950s Britain    Savin & Shoshan
124 arq . vol 22 . no 2 . 2018    history
a basis for the new concepts in the arts. The
disoriented child, able only to wander around in
the devastated city, came to be metonymic of the
postwar world. The child’s consciousness – raw,
authentic, and unmarred by society – became a
basis for artistic perception that was both modern
and archaic. While the world as revealed through
the eyes of the child reflected extreme devastation,
helplessness, and the fundamental need for
protection, the figure of the child also functioned
as a symbol of hope, as a source for a new world
experience, and thus became a focus of interest
not only in postwar cinema but in other arts and
disciplines.
The child embodied a new spirit in the postwar
architectural world. The critique of modernism in
its attempt to create a democratic society abandoned
the authoritative father figure of prewar modernism,
emblematised by Le Corbusier. Children, it was
widely believed, enabled a closer connection with
subjectivity compared to adults. As Kozlovsky notes,
‘the choice to represent reconstruction with the
orphaned child, as if to suggest that the new postwar
order will not rely on reviving the symbolic authority
of the Father, but will be self-initiated and driven
by the subject’s internal emotional resources’,
was ‘an allegory that at the same time naturalised
the authority and expertise of the technician of
subjectivity, as it appeared most legitimate when it
55
was applied to the child’.
The child as the focus of a welfare care system
appeared in the relational concepts developed by
56
Team X architects. The postwar city, an urban
realm filled with cavities in which children wander
in the midst of debris, was an experience that could
57
not be explained with rationalist thinking.
In the immediate aftermath of the war,
architects who were involved in planning new
neighbourhoods searched for a better connection
and understanding with existing environments
and their architectural analysis was often
accompanied by sociological and anthropological
58
studies. In other cases, architects searched for
subjective experience, blurring boundaries of
the conventional modes of analysis by applying
more subjective, artistic modes of analysis and
presentation. By and large, the Smithsons and
their partners sought to create connectivity,
engagement, and diversity in the urban realm.
Along with others in the younger generation of
the modern movement, particularly Aldo van Eyck,
they called attention to thresholds of urban life –
spaces in-between the private and public domain
such as doorsteps, passages, and streets – arguing
59
they were as significant to a city as its buildings.
These thresholds interested them because they held
the potential for human interactions, which they
saw as critical for the postwar city. In cities of the
1950s, children, particularly from working-class
backgrounds, spent much of their free time outside,
in these urban threshold spaces – near enough to
the home, but also away from it. It appears that
this new image of the architect, as playful and
authentic as a child, with more questions about
Savin & Shoshan   Architecture, cinema, and images of childhood in 1950s Britain
how people should live than all-encompassing
answers, was adopted by the Smithsons. Whether
and how this was expressed in their design of
public housing remains an open question.
Conclusion
Similar to artists, architects, and writers, the
filmmakers of postwar Europe explored working-
class landscapes, children, youth, and other people
and were fascinated by what they saw as their
liveliness and free spiritedness. While conventional
documentaries and newsreels emphasised the
hardships of the working class, showing how
reconstruction and modern technology may bring
remedy, Free Cinema filmmakers did not point to
a solution for the people they filmed, but rather
tried to depict their experience through their
eyes, without judgment. Their films were not a
social project. Their realism was also surrealism,
as they were attracted to strange and marginal
manifestations of the everyday. The films showed
a variety of marginal figures who lived stories
that could open new perspectives on the postwar
world and offer a richer and more complex image
of the everyday. It seems that there was a certain
‘discovery’ of those at the margins of society in the
Free Cinema films.
The point of view in Together not only emphasises
dislocation and disconnection, it is also ironic.
The irony is there already in the title, as the
togetherness of the brothers is a forced one,
disconnected from its surroundings. The urban
and architectural surroundings in the film are
themselves disconnected, not only from the rest of
the city, or other parts not as badly damaged in the
war, but from the liveliness of British working-class
street and night life portrayed in other Free Cinema
films. Yet, Together offers a unique depiction of the
survival of community life after the war, through
the children who continue to sing, taunt, and play,
even in rubble fields, wherever possible, as children
are wont to do.
In the case of architecture, the usage of
Henderson’s somewhat surreal photographs
of Bethnal Green children by the Smithsons in
their presentation at the 1953 CIAM conference
had implications for their architecture. Their
architectural ideas are reflected not only in the
figures and places shown in the images – lively
everyday situations in ‘as found’ surroundings – but
also in the formalism of the images. The highly
particular, local situations documented in the
photographs, when placed inside equal-size boxes
of the Urban Re-Identification Grid, become part of
a rhythmic system that repeats itself, compatible
with the urban mega-systems the Smithsons
suggested, and later realised. Like the filmmakers,
the Smithsons read, used, and created images
of everyday neighbourhoods sensitively, in their
creative process; as ‘technicians of subjectivity’, they
also interpreted contemporary ideas of childhood
through the design of housing for families.
However, where the films revealed alienation and
miscommunication, their own images were imbued
 history   arq . vol 22 . no 2 . 2018 125

with optimism. Paradoxically, the freedom of play
and exploration reflected in the images would
in later years be diminished or limited as streets
and neighbourhoods became less heterogeneous
and more functional through zoning practices
that continued in different variations in Brutalist
60
housing projects. The streets held many surprises
as well as dangers for children, which could not be
part of a predesigned space. Gradually, much the
result of a growing public concern for the safety
of children that was reflected in design and urban
planning, children were directed away from the
streets into designated and protected spaces of play.
Thus, ideas promoting children’s independence and
autonomy in urban space, and the photographic
and cinematic images that inspired architects and
urban designers in the 1950s remain intriguing and
thought provoking more than ever.

Notes Ashgate, 2013), p. 247. (Princeton: Princeton University

1. Throughout the discipline
of architecture, the goals,
values, and aesthetics of the
International Congresses of
Modern Architects (CIAM,
1928–1959) were re-evaluated.
CIAM principles were applied to
the new urban neighbourhoods,
however, and they were built
at low cost and high speed. See
Cornelius Wagenaar, ‘Jaap Bakema
and the Fight for Freedom’, in
Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation
in Postwar Architectural Culture, ed.
by Sarah Goldhagen and Réjean
Legaut (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2000), pp. 261–2.
2. David Robbins, ed., The Independent
Group: Postwar Britain and the
Aesthetics of Plenty (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1990), p. 243.
3. See Reyner Banham, The New
Brutalism Ethics or Aesthetic?
(London: Architectural Press,
1966); Reyner Banham, A Critic
Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham
(Oakland: University of California
Press, 1996).
4. John Bowlby, Maternal Care and
Mental Health (Geneva: WHO, 1952);
Donald W. Winnicott, The Child
and the Family: First Relationship
(London: Tavistock, 1957).
5. Laura Tisdall, ‘Education,
Parenting and Concepts of
Childhood in England, c. 1945
to c. 1979’, Contemporary British
History, 31:1 (2017), 24–46.
6. Roy Kozlovsky, ‘Adventure
Playgrounds and Postwar
Reconstruction’, in Designing
Modern Childhoods: History, Space,
and the Material Culture of Children:
An International Reader, ed. by
Marta Gutman and Ning de
Coninck-Smith (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2008),
pp. 15–16.
7. Melanie Klein, The Psycho-Analysis
of Children (New York: Random
House, 1997) and also Winnicott,
The Child and the Family; Tisdall,
‘Education, Parenting and
Concepts’.
8. Roy Kozlovsky, The Architectures
of Childhood: Children, Modern
Architecture and Reconstruction
in Postwar England (Surrey, UK:
9. Nicholas Bullock, ‘Architecture,
Reconstruction and the British
Documentary Film Movement’,
in Architecture and Cinema, ed.
by Francois Penz and Maureen
Thomas (London: BFI, 1997), pp.
52–61.
10. Ibid., p. 53.
11. Housing Problems, dir. by Edgar
Anstey and Arthur Elton, UK
(1935).
12. Bullock, ‘Architecture,
Reconstruction’, p. 53.
13. John Grierson and Forsyth Hardy,
eds, Grierson on Documentary
(London: Faber and Faber, 1979),
p. 48; Paul Rotha, Documentary
Film: The Use of the Film Medium
to interpret Creatively and in Social
Terms the Life of the People as it Exists
in Reality (London: Faber and
Faber, 1952), p. 25.
14. British everyday life was
photographed in the framework
of Mass Observation (1937–48).
Established by anthropologist
Tom Harrisson, poet and
journalist Charles Madge, and
filmmaker and painter Humphrey
Jennings, Mass Observation
‘attempted to get insights into
the lives and thoughts of British
people, and thus create a better
image of British working classes
than that portrayed in the media
and by politicians’. See Benjamin
Jones, ‘Mass Observation 75 Years
on: The Extraordinary in the
Everyday’, The Guardian, 12 April
2012, <https://www.theguardian.
com/commentisfree/2012/apr/19/
mass-observation-75-years>
[accessed 16 January 2018]. See
also Mass Observation Archive,
<http://www.massobs.org.uk/
about/history-of-mo> [accessed 16
January 2018].
15. Ian Aitken, European Film Theory
and Cinema (Indiana: Indiana
University Press, 2002), p. 151.
16. Lindsay Anderson, ‘Only Connect:
Some Aspects of the Work of
Humphrey Jennings’, in Sight and
Sound Film Quarterly, April to June
1954, pp. 181–6.
17. Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking
on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory
and the City Films of Elvira Notari
Press, 1993); Helmut Weihsmann,
‘The City in Twilight: Charting
the Genre of “City Films”, 1900–
1930’, in Cinema and Architecture:
Meliés, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia,
ed. by François Penz and
Maureen Thomas (London: BFI,
1997), pp. 8–27.
18. Gavin Lambert, ‘Free Cinema
Manifesto’, in Christophe
Dupin, Free Cinema: The Films That
Launched the British New Wave
(Chicago: BFI and Facets, 2007),
p. 9.
19. Ibid., p. 9.
20. Susan Hayward, Cinema Studies:
The Key Concepts (New York:
Routledge, 2006), pp. 162–4.
21. Betsy A. McLane and Jack C. Ellis,
A New History of Documentary Film
(London: Continuum, 2005), pp.
197–8, 202.
22. Dupin, Free Cinema, p. 12.
23. Ibid.
24. Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘The
“As Found” and the “Found”’,
in The Independent Group: Postwar
Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty,
ed. by David Robins (Cambridge,
MA: MIT, 1990), pp. 201–03.
25. Ibid., p. 201.
26. Alison and Peter Smithson,
‘Banham’s Bumper Book
on Brutalism’, in The
Architects’ Journal (28
December 1966), 1590–1.
27. Colin Westerbeck and Joel
Meyerowitz, ‘Bystander’, in The
Art Book 2, no. 1 (1995).
28. Mary Warner Marien,
Photography: A Cultural History
(London: Laurence King, 2006).
29. Nigel Henderson, Photographs
of Bethnal Green, 1949–1952 (East
Midlands Arts and the Craft
Advisory Council, 1978), pp. 3–5.
30. Alice Sanger, Nigel Henderson:
Chisenhale Road, The Nigel
Henderson Estate (Tate
November 2008), <http://www.
tate.org.uk/art/artworks/
henderson-bag-wash-p79305>
[accessed 31 January 2018].
31. Kirk Varnedoe, A Fine Disregard:
What Makes Modern Art Modern?
(New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1989), p. 242.
32. Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse

Architecture, cinema, and images of childhood in 1950s Britain    Savin & Shoshan
126 arq . vol 22 . no 2 . 2018    history
on Urbanism 1928–1960 (Cambridge,
MA: MIT, 2000), p. 180.
33. Alison and Peter Smithson,
Ordinariness and Light, Urban Theories
1952–1960 and Their Application
in a Building Project 1963–1970
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970),
p. 84; Alison and Peter Smithson,
‘Sketches for the building and
growth of the Cluster City 1952’,
in Uppercase 3 (1960); Alison and
Peter Smithson, ‘Cluster City: A
New Shape for the Community’,
Architectural Review, 122 (November
1957), 333–6.
34. See Le Corbusier, The Four Routes
(London: Dobson, 1947).
35. In 1959 the United Nations
General Assembly adopted the
Declaration of the Rights of the
Child, drafted by the League
of Nations in 1924. It marked
the first major international
consensus on the fundamental
principles of children’s rights.
See <https://www.unicef.org/
malaysia/1959-Declaration-of-the-
Rights-of-the-Child.pdf> [accessed
31 January 2018].
36. Kozlovsky, ‘Adventure
Playgrounds and Postwar
Reconstruction’, pp. 15–16.
37. As Diamond notes (1974),
Primitivism gained a new
impetus from anxieties about
technological innovation
but above all from the ‘Age
of Discovery’. See Stanley
Diamond, In Search of the Primitive
(New Brunswick: Transaction
Publishers, 1974), pp. 215–17.
38. Dalibor Vesely, ‘The Primitive as
Modern Problem: Invention and
Crisis’, in Primitive: Original Matters
in Architecture, ed. by Jo Odgers,
Flora Samuel, and Adam Sharr
(New York: Routledge, 2006), pp.
17–31.
39. Ibid.
40. Michal Shapira, The War Inside:
Psychoanalysis, Total War and
the Making of the Democratic Self
in Postwar Britain (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013),
pp. 1–2.
41. Sigmund Freud, ‘On Narcissism:
an Introduction’, The Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud (The Standard Edition), Vol.
Savin & Shoshan   Architecture, cinema, and images of childhood in 1950s Britain
14 (1914; repr. London: Vintage
Classics, 2001), p. 75.  is Aldo van Eyck’s Amsterdam
42. Anna Freud, Introduction to
Psychoanalysis: Lectures for Child
Analysts and Teachers, 1922–1935,
Vol. 1 (Madison, CT: International
Universities Press, 1974); Melanie
Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation and
Other Works 1921–1945, Vol. 1 (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2002).
43. John Bowlby, Child Care and the
Growth of Love (London: Penguin,
1953).
44. John Bowlby and World
Health Organization, Maternal
Care and Mental Health: A
Report Prepared on Behalf of the
World Health Organization as a
Contribution to the United Nations
Programme for the Welfare of
Homeless Children (Geneva: World
Health Organization, 1952);
Inge Bretherton, ‘The Origins
of Attachment Theory: John
Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth’,
Developmental Psychology, 28:5
(1992), 759.
45. Tisdall, ‘Education, Parenting and
Concepts’, pp. 24–46.
46. Herbert Read,
Education Through Art (Oxford:
Pantheon, 1948).
47. Talcott Parsons and Robert Freed
Bales, Family Socialization and
Interaction Process, Vol. 7 (Hove, UK:
Psychology Press, 1956).
48. See, for example, Sheldon and
Eleanor Glueck, Unraveling Juvenile
Delinquency (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1950).
49. As in Klein, Love, Guilt and
Reparation, or in Winnicott, The
Child and the Family.
50. Tisdall, ‘Education, Parenting and
Concepts’, p. 27.
51. Ladri di Biciclette [Bicycle Thieves],
dir. by Vittorio de Sica, Italy (1948).
52. Miracolo a Milano [Miracle in Milan],
dir. by Vittorio de Sica, Italy (1951).
53. Les Enfants Terribles [The Terrible
Children], dir. by Jean-Pierre
Melville, France (1950).
54. Liane Lefaivre, Ingeborg de
Roode and Rudolf Herman Fuchs,
eds, Aldo van Eyck: The Playgrounds
and the City (Rotterdam: NAI, 2002),
p. 137.
55. Kozlovsky, Architectures of
Childhood, p. 247.
56. An example for this thinking
playgrounds and orphanage
(1960–1). See Lefaivre, de Roode
and Fuchs, eds, Aldo van Eyck
Playgrounds, and Francis Strauven,
‘Aldo van Eyck: Shaping the New
Reality from the In-between to the
Aesthetics of Number’, in Study
Centre Mellon Lectures (CA: College
of the Arts, 24 May 2007).
57. Kozlovsky, Architectures of
Childhood, p. 247.
58. An example is the research by
George Candillis and Michel
Ecochard, director of the
Morocco Department of Urban
Planning (1946–52), on the spatial
organisation of the bidonvilles or
workers’ slums in Morocco. See
Jean-Louis Cohen and Monique
Eleb, Casablanca: Colonial Myths and
Architectural Ventures (New York:
Monacelli, 2003), p. 379.
59. Strauven, ‘Aldo van Eyck: Shaping
the New Reality’, pp. 1–20; Aldo
van Eyck, Vincent Ligtelijn and
Frances Strauven, eds, Writings,
Vol. 1: The Child, the City and the
Artist: An Essay on Architecture: The
In-between Realm (Amsterdam: SUN,
2008), pp. 6, 20, 23–4.
60. Stephen Kelly, ‘Sheffield’s Park
Hill: Estate Expectations’, The
Independent, 14 June 2011, <https://
www.independent.co.uk/arts-
entertainment/architecture/
sheffields-park-hill-estate-
expectations-2297385.html>
[accessed 29 January 2018].
Illustration credits
arq gratefully acknowledges:
BFI National Archive, 1–5
Smithson Family Collection, 6
Author’s biography
Liat Savin Ben Shoshan teaches at the
Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design,
Jerusalem. She researches and writes
on the theoretical, sociopolitical,
and methodological interrelations of
architecture with photography and
the moving image.
Author’s address
Liat Savin Ben Shoshan
liatsavin@gmail.com