Marina Lewycka: The Lubetkin Legacy

Stacey took over the chair of the Tenants Association vacated by Mrs Cracey, and helped to mount a lively campaign against the proposed fourteen-storey building in the garden, insisting, as Lubetkin would have done, that it should fit harmoniously with its environment and should provide affordable homes for low-income families. When Len’s ground-floor flat became available, she helped me arrange for Margaret and Jenny to get the tenancy, aided by the fact that Margaret was now in a wheelchair. So as one chapter closed, a new chapter opened in the life of Lubetkin’s Mad Yurt.

From time to time the old mood would come over me, and I would launch into a morose soliloquy on canine and human mortality, the wanton destruction of urban trees, the housing crisis, the unravelling of the post-war consensus, George Clooney’s love life and other evils and inequities of our time.

Stacey would watch me with a small smile. ‘I’m sure you’re right, Bertie,’ she would say.

This book came from hours spent walking around London, discovering among the acres of new building sites bristling with cranes the remnants of a different, older London, different not just in architecture but also in the human values embedded in those buildings. These included some by Berthold Lubetkin, which exemplified not just bold experimentation with new materials, notably concrete, but an exceptional eye for grace and beauty, as well as a commitment to building a London fit for the needs of its ordinary residents.

I had many guides and interpreters on these walks, whose insights have found their way into these pages, so first of all a big thank you to those who helped me with the basic history and geography. Thanks especially to Donald Sassoon with his comments on the text, and to Joseph Rykwert, who knows a thing or two about modernist architecture. I have learned so much from their generously imparted knowledge, and any mistakes are purely my own. Thanks to Susannah Hamilton for telling me more than I thought I would ever want to know about International Insurance, to Baiju Shah from Sheffield University for checking the Kenya sections, to Glenda Pattenden for her detailed maps of Ally Pally, to Sarah White for first taking me there and for helping me through a personal challenge which almost derailed the book, and to my daughter Sonia for telling me which bits were boring, as only one’s children can.

I would also like to thank my agent, Bill Hamilton, and the great team at A. M. Heath, for keeping me on course, and Juliet Annan, my editor at Fig Tree, without whom this book would have been a third longer and much duller. Thank you to Jon Gray for another inspired book jacket. And thank you to Shân Morley Jones for meticulous attention to the proofs, and for claiming, even after the seventh reading, that the book still made her laugh.