Chapter five moves out of the city to the countryside. Planners in Britain had long insisted that the concepts of town and country should be keep apart, but this division was recast by the threat and experience of air war, when urban and rural areas were redefined as evacuation and reception areas, respectively. Plans for ‘New Towns’ and industrial dispersal brought civilian and military planning imperatives together, while anxieties about threats to rural landscapes connected modern war to broader concerns about industrialisation and urbanisation. Sensitive to this, architects and planners debated how wartime camouflage techniques might be used in peacetime to limit the impact of industrial dispersal on rural scenes. The severe economic difficulties of post-war Britain, and the uncertainty over the possibility of any meaningful passive defence from nuclear weapons, meant that ambitious Cold War dispersal policies largely failed to take root. The chapter finishes with a case study of debates about the location of electricity stations which demonstrates the limits of these planning visions.

This section highlights the connections between the development of airpower and the work of planners and architects in mid-twentieth century Britain. Both military thinkers and town planners were drawing images of the future and making projections about the shape of the world to come, and these visions transformed contemporary perceptions of cities, as the danger of bombing was drawn ever closer to reality and civilian urban spaces were militarised. Airpower created a permanent threat, and the decision to target cities meant that the boundaries between peacetime and wartime became increasingly blurred. The key questions addressed in this book and the range of source materials used stress the importance of a study in this field that is focused on Britain.

The third chapter discusses the Second World War and, in particular, the Blitz period, when the dangers of living in urban spaces and the central areas of cities in modern war were realised and air raids became part of everyday life. This chapter moves away from the social histories of urban populations under fire to focus on the transformation of the materiality of cities and their infrastructure networks. In order to do this, it considers how different elements of the built environment were refigured by bombing in both a strategically important provincial city and the capital. In London, the networks of subterranean pipes and tunnels were transformed into an urban architecture of survival and civil defence that extended underground, while on the streets above a new ‘architecture of destruction’ came into view. A case study of the strategic port town of Southampton demonstrates how the city’s infrastructure networks were affected by bombing. The final section considers how networked infrastructure during the war fed into policy makers’ visions of nationalisation in reconstruction.

The fourth chapter discusses the period immediately after 1945, when the government and intelligence planners began to look towards the next war. The city had been redefined by bombing, and after 1945 defence planners continued the process of mapping and evaluating urban areas according to their vulnerability to air raids. The chapter examines intelligence and civil defence planning documents and debates which drew imagined attacks onto maps of British cities. Cities were divided into ‘Bull’s-Eye Areas’ and ‘cushion areas’, and an arithmetic of destruction was produced that presented air war as a series of calculations. This chapter examines the relationship between military ideas about urban containment, zoning and dispersal, and their civilian iterations in urban planning techniques and theories. In both instances, density was read as vulnerability, and a case study of the development of ‘fire zoning’ demonstrates how new urban geographies of war drew on civilian architectural expertise to create a vision of cities as targets that was central to the development of the Cold War.

Chapter two begins in 1935, when the ARP Committee was transformed into a full department within the Home Office, and continues to the bombings of 1940. It details the various ways in which government planners and architects explained preparations for air raids as an increasingly normalised and permanent part of town planning and economic development. This chapter argues that the government’s approach to air raid precautions and their relation to planning reflects a narrowing of the gap between peace and war and signals the attempt to construct a condition of permanent stand-by for air raids. The argument is supported by analysis of government debates about the strategically vital electricity industry, before focusing on the architectural debates about the vulnerability of cities in their contemporary form of densely packed terraced houses and narrow streets. Architectural interventions in the debate about the threat from bombing reflected the reclassification of air raids as a concern for civilian planners and contributed to civil defence debates about how to prepare for war while trying not to induce it. These debates exposed the ambiguity and uncertainty created by the permanent and unpredictable threat of airpower.

The first chapter covers the period from the end of the First World War until 1935, when the Air Raid Precautions Sub-Committee became a department in the Home Office. It draws together military, literary, planning and architectural visions of urban areas to highlight how dystopian versions of the future and responses to contemporary urban problems influenced the development of air power theories. It demonstrates that there was a widespread assumption that cities would be the primary targets in air war, and highlights the way airpower theorists’ arguments drew on perceptions of urban populations as weak and vulnerable. Science fiction and cultural anxieties about the future and cities were concentrated around the threat of bombing, and architects and planners were recasting their task as planning for survival in an anticipated era of air war. The three sections of this chapter connect the speculations and extrapolations of airpower theory to the debates in urbanism about the problems of the cities, and highlight the influence of aviation and the aerial view on speculations about the future shape of society and the possibility of urban annihilation from the air.

The conclusion argues that the destruction from the air in the Second World War was the product of a longer history of airpower and urbanism, in which the perceived vulnerability of cities and their inhabitants played an important role in normalising the deliberate bombing of civilians and eroding the distinction between combatant and non-combatant in modern war. The chapter provides a brief overview of the book’s main arguments and stresses the continuities of thinking across peacetime and wartime. The last section examines how an urban history of airpower and war can help develop Cold War critiques of militarisation and cast light on the rationalities of the seemingly permanent war of the twenty-first century, as new architectures of survival are ever more firmly embedded in a contemporary urbanism of terrorism, surveillance and security.

Cambridge can show to a remarkable extent the continuity of the architecture of England from later Saxon times to the present day. We could never expect the buildings of a single town to be quite comprehensive, but possibly no other English centre is so completely equipped: Oxford, which is more representative in some respects, notably for Norman work, has no outstanding example of either Saxon or Early Gothic; and Cambridge is also more representative because Oxford has stone buildings only; but brick was an important building material in England from the beginning of the sixteenth century onwards, and in some centres—Cambridge being one of them—it was in use from the later part of the fifteenth century. The very limitations of its constructive and decorative possibilities gave the brick building a value of its own.

STYLES IN ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE

There is no more common form of question put to the historian of architecture than ‘How are we to know that a building belongs to a particular style or period?’ We must begin with construction, as in any consideration of architectural styles we cannot ignore the limitations of particular materials; and what we call a ‘style’ was something which was made by a gradual process, controlled, more or less strictly, by local methods of handling materials. The vertical projecting strips, for example, that we often find in Saxon towers, may have had a remote origin far removed from England, but the constructive method of building these strips in Saxon walls is peculiarly native; and we could find similar explanations for many distinctive forms in other countries.

This book may enable the architecturally-minded visitor to Cambridge—who has more leisure than can be afforded in a brief inspection—to realise the value of the Town and University for illustrating the sequence of styles in English architecture; for which purpose, the series of thirty-one Plates and Descriptions of subjects from Cambridge has been augmented by an Introduction dealing with England as a whole. In this, again, subjects from Cambridge have been used for the most part, though no excuse should be required for the frequent reference to Ely Cathedral; and only by its inclusion with Cambridge can Gothic architecture, as a whole, be adequately explained.

The examples have been selected as typical of the more important aspects of architectural style, without consideration of the inclusion of all the Colleges; the only explanation that need be offered for the omission of Magdalene and Sidney Sussex. A more solid objection might be maintained to the omission of one of the timber-framed domestic buildings in the Town; but these buildings show rather a phase of construction than of style, belonging to a type which was widely prevalent and unvarying in essentials.

There have been so many books on Cambridge that I may, perhaps, be excused for not mentioning any of them except Willis and Clark's great work, and the late J. W. Clark's A Concise Guide to the Town and University of Cambridge, now in its eleventh edition; to these, and to the former in particular, I have been much indebted.