From 19-26 June our office in central London will be hosting A Reconstruction on Paper, an exhibition of paintings and drawings on the reconstruction of London after World War II. It is a joint exhibition between the Create Streets Foundation and the art dealership, McEwing-Sexton-Smedley Fine Art. It will also feature additional work by Minty Sainsbury.
Our chair, Nicholas Boys Smith, writes in the exhibition’s foreword:
The architect and town planner Sir Patrick Abercrombie’s 1944 Greater London Plan followed the spirit of Le Corbusier’s dirigiste revolution in planning theory and put it into practice. The men in Westminster, Whitehall and County Hall were mesmerised. Here surely was the future, all neatly printed and bound in one report. London would be decentralised and sliced through to help the traffic. Five enormous ringways would encircle the city, linked by dozens of radials. Mile upon mile of the ‘drab and dreary’ buildings in between would be cleaned away with half a million people compulsorily removed to new ‘satellite towns’ or newly zoned residential estates. As always, the poor would have the least choice. Forty per cent of the, heavily bombed, East End population were to be transported. Monuments and a few historic villages, such as Kensington, would be allowed to remain in aspic. Everything else would have to go. How this could have been achieved without catastrophic urban destruction is impossible to comprehend. The blitz would have been a mere irritant in comparison.
Full catalogue and booking available here