OTD in early British television: 15 February 1939
John Wyver writes: Looking through the schedules of 1938-39 there is little sense that television was strongly ‘war-minded’. The newsreels would have relayed the worsening situation in Europe but there appears to have only a minimal concern for preparing viewers for the coming conflagration.
One exception is an intriguing presentation on the evening of Wednesday 15 February 1939, billed simply as A.R.P. This half-hour discussion with Alderman Harold Riley and architect Berthold Lubetkin was ‘a demonstration of the Finsbury A.R.P. Plan for structural defence’, illustrated with drawings, film extracts and a model of a deep shelter.
As a far-sighted London borough, aware of the potential dangers for civilians of aerial bombardment, Finsbury had commissioned for its Air-Raids Protection strategy a scheme for heavily protected underground shelters.
A component in a larger program of social building and regeneration, these were designed by the Tecton architectural group, of which Lubetkin was a key member. Crucial assistance was provided by engineer Ove Arup, with whom Lubetkin had collaborated on the famed ‘Penguin Pool’ at London Zoo.
The proposals had been part of a small exhibition in January and in March were published by the Architectural Press in a book titled Planned A.R.P. with illustrations by Gordon Cullen, who was collaborating with Tecton at the time and was later to be an influential architect and urbanist.
An example of of these quirky, cartoonish drawings gives a sense of their modernist but reassuring qualities, and is suggestive of an almost alluring underground world:
Brett Holman’s 2008 blog post offers a detailed description:
There were to be 15 of these [shelters] spaced around Finsbury borough. In peacetime they would serve as car parks (for which there was also a growing demand as middle-class car ownership rates started to climb). In wartime, they could hold 7600 people (a second design could hold 12300) spaced out along a ramp spiralling downwards around a service core…
The shelter plan has two spacious entrances for orderly ingress and egress, air locks so that ARP workers could enter and leave without letting poison gas into the shelter, gas decontamination areas for both men and women, air filtration systems, food stores, water supplies, first aid areas.
Holman points out the seeming lack of beds, since nighttime use of the shelters was not anticipated. Experience of the coming Blitz would demonstrate how wrong this vision was. And he notes, recognising the benefit of hindsight, that
The other shortcoming is the emphasis on gas protection — which wasn’t needed, as it turned out — and the relative neglect of the danger from high explosive bombs.
Robin Woolven in his thesis Civil Defence in London 1935-1945, which is available online, provides further details:
The shelters were to be located to enable all citizens to reach their shelter in about seven minutes following the sounding of the air raid warning. This seemed to many to be the complete answer to air raid protection and demands for similar schemes were made in many Boroughs. But large bomb-proof shelters were at variance with the Government’s stated policy of dispersal into small blast-proof shelters.
Many Councils, particularly St Pancras and Lambeth, were bombarded with similar proposals by groups with professionally sounding titles who were backed by the Communist Party or the local Trades Council. Boroughs invariably agreed to take no further action on such proposals pending the investigation of the Finsbury Scheme.
Despite widespread publicity of the Finsbury plan, of which the television broadcast was an element, the Home Office rejected the Finsbury plan, favouring instead ideas of spreading out the population to minimise damage and loss of life. Tecton’s vision was never realised.
Intriguingly, though, Woolven provides a significant footnote:
Councillor Riley and his Town Clerk Mr E Arnold James eventually adopted a novel, and ultimately declared illegal, method to fund one of the original shelters. In February 1939 Riley had leased, at a rent of £50 p.a., a recently (slum) cleared plot in Busaco Street to a firm called ‘Shop Investments Ltd.’.
The firm was to build one of Arup’s deep shelters which would then be rented to the Council at a 3/4d rate for the next 38 years. Excavation of the Busaco Street site started but work was halted on the outbreak of war on the operation of the ‘war clause’ in the contract. With only minimal progress made, the project was abandoned and the site later used as a dump by the Council.
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