Designing Playspaces for the Emerging Society of Car Owners in Post-War Council Housing in Britain
Designing Playspaces for the Emerging Society of Car Owners in Post-War Council Housing in Britain

Summary/Abstract: In 1959, Pilkington Bros Ltd., which was led by Messrs. Jellicoe, Ballantyne and Coleridge, along with their assistant J. Colwill, introduced “Motopia”: an influential plan for a city of 30,000 people, which was set at an actual site near Staines.1 Its main design parameters were shaped around the motor car. The unprecedented growth of car ownership during that period had created demands related to traffic, road systems and highways, and the safe coexistence of pedestrians and cars had become an issue of major importance. The Pilkington Bros proposal placed residents’ cars at the roof-top level on a continuous grid of multi-story buildings, which completely separated them from the pedestrians on the ground floor. The ground floor would be utilized for parks, churches, playgrounds, and other public areas. Motopia, for many, was the realization of the necessity for a new urban development in 1950s Britain, in which the car was increasingly dictating how people lived. (Fig. 1) Concepts like Motopia proliferated at that time, given that between 1950 and 1960, the number of licensed motor vehicles in Britain doubled, with many experts trying to project the future growth of that number.2 By 1959, the number of private cars in the country was an estimated 3,750,000 for a population of 49,800,000.3 Within the broader context of affluence, the “motor car revolution” rendered the car of equal importance to the betterment of the home, and both had to be considered when adjusting the housing typology. Car ownership was explicitly shaping the urban fabric, from the scale of the home to the scale of the city, that by 1963, an official report titled Traffic in Towns explicitly proposed the rebuilding of cities for the automobile.

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