In 1942, with Britain needing to help not only the military strength but also the mental moral of the nation as it pushed through World War II, the War Office appointed designer Abram Games to create a series of posters that presented to soldiers and population what the future nation they were fighting for could be. His “Your Britain. Fight for It Now” posters centred the transformational power of architecture to both symbolise and enable a new society, one more equitable, healthy, prosperous, and glorious.




In his posters, new visions for the state – a health centre, housing, and a school – boldly stood in front of representations of the pre-war landscape, a construction of glowing ambition out of a dingy, failed past. These powerful images were not only symbolic of a possible restart, they spoke to Games’ socialist idealism and touched key concerns of a population who were struggling in archaic Victorian ruins – 10% of children in industrial areas had rickets and in London alone the war had made 1.4 million people homeless.

The buildings he used were all from the late 1930s: Finsbury Health Centre by Berthold Lubetkin and Tecton, Kensal House by Maxwell Fry, and Impington Village College by Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry all came just as the war developed, but Grames posters promised that the story they represented could not only continue, but (to borrow a modern political word) be turbocharged in a post-war society.

A new book by photographer Robert Clayton, Provision - Architecture of the Post War Consensus, is a celebration not only many of the buildings that emerged over the decades that followed, but through them summons the hope, ambition, and intent for an improved and fairer world such architecture represented. The buildings he records are photographed with a similar manner to Grames’ posters: standing proud, majestic in sunlight, blue skies overhead, and from a perspectival vantage to best present their radical modern geometry.




In an opening text, Clayton remarks that he “makes no apologies for portraying [these buildings] in heroic compositions, in the best possible light, with reverence.” He adds that to do so is his “act of rebellion” at a time we look back through four decades of neoliberal selloffs, value squeezing, and austerity and such socialist ambition and equality seems like ambition from another country.

Provision - Architecture of the Post War Consensus is a dense book, and the 162 buildings within are equally as dense, though photographed with a crisp lightness. Where it has become the trodden path to photograph post-war architecture with film noir shadows, dystopian aura, or masculine heft, Clayton brings clarity, optimism, and levity. Many of the buildings are photographed at extreme vertical angles, capturing something of a wide-eyed child looking up to their future, the mannerism of Soviet Constructivism, or Paul Strand’s 1921 City Symphony, Manhatta.

The verticality of Balfron Tower is celebrated in Clayton’s crop, extracting it from the compressed city pushing closer and closer. Where the Barbican’s towers are part of a compact urban fabric in the flesh, photographed here one disappears with perspective into the blue sky. Croydon is often lambasted, but here Richard Seifert’s No.1 Croydon – the 50p building – is redolent of its period.




Clayton knows that architecture is more than the simple form or one-liner outline that some modern architects and designers may have you believe, and he acknowledges the complexity of dense and complicated post-war buildings through not trying to encapsulate their totality. Images here are only extracts, fragments and details, corners and junctions, that speak to the human and public relational experience with architecture more than the architect’s or historian’s reading – taken from street level, head thrust back to capture full height, cropped details from turning a corner, and moments when form overlaps as the passerby passes by.

The book features a number of short texts by exemplary voices on the post-war landscape, and countless more short quotations dotted throughout the text from writers, architects, and thinkers from the past eight decades. In her Preface, the Director of the Twentieth Century Society, Catherine Croft, mentions how such modernist buildings are often photographed “to emphasise their gritty monumentality, the strong shadows cast by craggy concrete profiles in slanting light” but that Clayton determinedly takes a different approach. Where estates and architectures of the period are often now a shorthand to inner-city grime, or used as lazy locations in feature films to indicate deprivation or working class despair, Clayton’s images are more akin to Abram Games’ posters. They contain, as Croft says, “Pure geometry, perfect symmetry, crisp lines, blue skies, awe-inspiring angles.”



Other texts consider the places and ideas in Clayton’s images. Architectural writer Owen Hatherley writes about how post-war modern architecture is now treated in a similar vein to how rotten Victorian architecture was in the 40s, as shown in Games’ posters. “And like Victorian architecture in the sixties, this stuff is in constant danger from developers,” he says, adding that so much has already “been smashed up by the wrecking ball”.

Indeed, many buildings in Clayton’s book now do not exist, the photographer not only managing to get to the places in time (and on a suitably sunny day!) to capture them in the singular style, but with the deep knowledge of the period, its architecture, and current-day threats needed to know about and get to such sites before they were lost forever.

There is clear sincerity and passion in these images, qualities present in Clayton’s previous projects, most notably Estate in which the photographer returned to his childhood landscape of Lion Farm Estate in the West Midlands to document and recapture the architecture and community. Lion Farm is not an especially remarkable estate, and it does not make the ‘best-of’ archive in Provision, but it was extremely special because it was a good home for Clayton and many more besides. Clayton speaks to this in his Introduction:

“The welfare state was in full swing for my parents’ generation and our working-class community – times were materially tough but housing, health, and educational security had become a given. My school, Elbury Mount Junior, was a classic example of the height of late fifties modernity: a utopia for us Gen X kids with big glass windows, huge playing fields, a mini farm, and big kitchens cooking great (with some exceptions!) school dinners on site.”


Architecture is more than material and form. It is the essence of if as a container for community, its capacity for social good, and its political intent that interests Clayton. And while in Provision, unlike Estates, he photographs no people, instead focusing solely on the aesthetic and appearance of places, it is through his eye, angles, and connection that he presents these buildings more as exemplars of their political and social environment than as sculptural form.




In his essay, Hatherley brings up the possibilities of how such architectures can be repurposed, and discusses how in many instances Clayton’s images acknowledge changes that have taken place since construction – pointing at Balfron Tower and Park Hill as places that might aesthetically read as successfully renovated and loved buildings, but to do so were privatised and decanted of their original communities.

In another essay – acting as a coda at the end of the publication – writer and academic Barnabas Calder points out that these buildings represent another time, one of “superabundant fossil fuel consumption” and constructed of carbon-intensive energy and steel. He thinks around the implications for celebrating architectural optimism in such an iconic way as Clayton does, considering that the world we are in now faces new challenges.




Calder states that Clayton’s photographs should act as “a call for planners, heritage organisations, and architects to ensure the retrofitting of this period’s architecture is conducted with integrity and sympathy. He adds, however, that the beauty present in such images as these is a danger – stating that we should admire such heritage, but “must stop emulating it in today’s construction”. The architecture we need, Calder explains, is rooted in a circular economy and low-carbon processes, and “will look profoundly unlike the buildings Clayton catalogues”.

Quoted fragments dot the book, featuring thoughts from a rolodex of post-war thinkers including Norman Foster, John Grindrod, Anna Minton, Ernő Goldfinger, and Nye Bevan. One of them, from writer and broadcaster Jonathan Meades, perhaps speaks to the ideas present not only in Robert Clayton’s images, but also the issues raised in the texts – and indeed the hope within Abram Games’ posters – when saying on TV: “I remember it as if it was yesterday, but it didn’t look like yesterday, it looked like tomorrow.”

All which leads us to wonder what does today’s tomorrow will look like.