Several factors contributed to the decline of the modern movement in British architecture. In the first place, it had arrived late, and as J. Mordaunt Crook points out, "England has no building by Le Corbusier. No building by Aalto or Frank Llyod Wright. No building by Mies van der Rohe." Second, modernism found itself associated with visions of an inhumane future and an increasingly intolerable present, and increasingly conservationists opposed it. According to Crook's polemical view of England's recent architectural history,
more than anything, it was the traffic engineering of the 1960s -- Spaghetti Junction, Birmingham, most famously -- which turned a whole generation into conservationsists. By the end of the 1970s, there were about three hundred thousand active members of ocnservation societies in England . . . The past seemed suddenly more attractive than the future. Liverpool was devastated. Birmingham became a wilderness of motorways. T. Dan Smith and John Poulson set out to make Newcastle 'the Basilia of the North.' It turned out more like Stalingrad of the South. Long before the collapse of Ronan Point -- a system-built tower block [appartment house] in Canning Town, Newham -- on 16 May 1968, the worm had turned. Block of high-rise council flats [public housing] were not only inefficient, they were hugely unpopular. The 'Piggeries' at Everton, Easterhouse in Glasgow, East Statfird in London . . . system-building had merely produced systematic slums. Faceless monsters like Possilpark, Glasgow, trapped council tenants in a nightmare world of anonymity, alienation, vandalism and decay. [262-63]
References
J. Mordaunt Crook. The Dilemma of Style: Architectural Ideas from the Picturesque to the Post-Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
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