Introduction

In geographic terms, this chapter concerns networks – a regional military industrial network attached to the British nuclear programme and a network of buildings in Manchester related to computing and defence. Defence and military research during the war, by both Allied and German scientists, had all but captured the knowledge that would define the global political landscape for the rest of the century and beyond – the nuclear bomb, the rocket and the computer. The first controlled nuclear explosion by the Soviet Union in 1949 and the outbreak of war in Korea in 1950 made the rearmament programme and civil defence central to government activity. Welfare expenditure shrank and defence spending grew, feeding what David Edgerton has termed the ‘Warfare State’.¹ The birth of computing and its government sponsorship was predominantly attached to military aims, in missile trajectory calculations and nuclear fuel production. The relationship between militarism, computing and British architecture is little examined to date. Here, I wish to explore the history and networks that centred much of this industry in the region and the personnel, policy and plans that enabled the architecture that supported it.

Against a background of a continuous state of preparedness for military engagement, but within a period noted for fiscal austerity, I show how military objectives bypassed development norms. I describe how the interplay between central policy and funding, local interpretation and implementation affected construction. The close relation between research, funding and expertise in academic, governmental and industrial–commercial settings is examined to show how people, policy and place acted in the operative networks of the region. Through the histories of acquisitions, procurement and transformation of sites, existing buildings and new construction I argue that these contexts each impacted upon the architectural production – of the world’s first building for the computer at the University of Manchester, a laboratory and missile factory for Ferranti (an electrical engineering firm), an R&D and production facility for International Computers Limited (ICL) and the headquarters for the National Computing Centre (NCC).

British architecture and the state of the nation state

From a much stronger economic base, the United States undertook the majority of Western post-war investment in military technologies. The first significant sponsorships of computing were predominantly attached to military objectives.² In Europe, as France, England and Germany realised that they had fallen behind in an important technological race, crash programmes and rapidly developed policies were deployed to close the gap. Discussing the computer industry, economist Kenneth Flamm acutely captured a relation that is central to the tenet of this chapter: ‘private firms and their commercial technologies [were] closely linked to public investment in computer technology’.³ Each of the buildings discussed in this chapter was funded by the state and the state also supplied the contracts for the services and products housed and manufactured in them.

It is common to view the architecture of the state through particular building types – schools, hospitals, social housing and suchlike – but these private sector enterprises involved significant state intervention as well. Historians typically examine buildings of the welfare state using political binaries, typologies or through the biographies of their architects – often a combination of these three approaches.⁴ The types of schemes in this chapter do not lend themselves readily to an investigation of political bias in the party system; they were realised under different administrations. The economic consensus of Butskellism was seen in both military and modernisation agendas of successive administrations during the post-war period.⁵ The overarching political culture and its underlying value system was a shared territory, between left and right, overshadowed by the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War.⁶ The rearmament programme and the civil defence programme were ‘inseparable’ and technological culture of Britain was underpinned by investment in military contracts.⁷ Policy drove commissions for weaponry, the forced mergers of the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation (IRC) and the institution of new public–private partnerships.⁸ The Ministry of Supply (MoS) became the de facto sponsor of these contracts, but, as David Edgerton notes, there was ‘a powerful, potentially commercially exploitable, overlap between new military and civil technologies, notably in aviation and nuclear power’ and ‘these were also seen as the key civilian technologies of the future, to be used by nationalised electricity providers and airlines’.⁹ The development of buildings for new technologies in Britain was intrinsically tied to the state and the civil implementation of science that had its genesis in defence expenditure.

Reinhold Martin referred to the ‘aesthetic and technological extension’ of the military industrial complex in post-war US architecture as ‘the organizational complex’.¹⁰ Within the ‘organizational complex’ the individuality of the new consumer was defined by a series of choices ‘made within a system that was designed to offer variety by providing interchangeable elements in standardized formats. Architects would call these elements modules’.¹¹ It is this modularity that Martin calls upon as he draws a strand through the post-war, science derived, aesthetics to the birth of the networked paradigm and its affect upon architecture – the cessation of mechanisation to organisation. In the 1940s and 1950s large US corporations in the technology sector, General Motors (GM), IBM and Bell Laboratories, employed architects and designers like Eliel and Eero Saarinen, Eliot Noyes and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to deploy networked logic in the design and assembly of their buildings, visual identities and products. The association between client and architect in the case of GM was so close that it was a collaborative effort between the car manufacturer and architect Eero Saarinen that developed the neoprene gasket for the curtain wall of GM’s Technical Centre in 1953.¹² The comparative opportunities for architecture in Britain did not attract an equivalent level of capital and, amidst the diminished economic and material resources of the immediate post-war period, buildings for new technologies were primarily vessels for the activity contained within. The luxury of expressing commercial identity through built form was restricted by scarcity and modes of procurement in a resource starved, nationalised state.

The post-war British context for development was an inherited bureaucratic structure, itself shaped by conflict, combined with scarce resources and capital. This meant that the drive to advance society and develop new technologies was curtailed and forced to optimise existing situations, particularly in construction. The desire to progress, despite adverse conditions is captured by the idea of ‘defiant modernism’, but this was accompanied in manufacturing towns by a further sense of pride, attached to notions of authenticity.¹³ Traditional engineering skills and the design of bespoke components prevailed, even in perceptibly hi-tech products. In certain sectors, new technologies were perceived as being of inferior quality if they were assembled from parts made elsewhere. Within Ferranti’s computer division in Manchester, a city known for its engineering manufacturing tradition, each component was made on site, just as earlier electrical technologies had been, to maintain a quality standard. It is conceivable that this type of nostalgic pride was a necessary diversion in a society that longed to be modern but was compelled to function amidst Victorian infrastructure.

The re-use of everything in post-war Britain extended to buildings too. Both new construction and existing sites have their own place in this account that will show how high-technology and architecture in Britain missed meeting one another until the late 1960s. The cases studied here reveal architecture’s value in relation to technology, at the birth of the Cold War in the 1950s, during the height of 1960s optimism and at the brink of economic collapse in the 1970s.

Computing and Manchester: network building

Despite burgeoning building control legislation, design bulletins did not exist for weapons production facilities and computer manufacturing centres. Novel technologies demanded unique and specialised approaches. Buildings procured by the MoS were not subject to local planning processes and were comparatively well funded. Invariably, much discussion and planning took place before an architect was appointed and, in this sense, it is the biographies and networks of other individuals that had more influence on the early procurement phases of projects. In Manchester this was exemplified by the presence of a single actor amidst multiple networks over time – Bertram Vivian Bowden.

Bowden was educated at Chesterfield Grammar School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He worked with Ernest Rutherford in the 1930s, with whom he co-authored papers on the properties of gamma radiation.¹⁴ During the war he was posted to Washington DC and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to work on the development of radar. He led a British team in his role as principal scientific advisor to the MoS Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE).¹⁵ On return to the United Kingdom, Bowden joined the Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA).¹⁶ His experience of military technological research in well-funded higher education institutions proved a dramatic influence and shaped his collaborative approach in the future – including his stewardship of technological education in the city. Bowden was 42 and leading the computer sales division at Ferranti when he was appointed as Principal of the Manchester Municipal College of Technology (later University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology – UMIST) in 1953.¹⁷ In 1964–65 Bowden served in Harold Wilson’s Labour government as minister of state at the Department of Education and Science. Here, Bowden, and others, are actors in a narrative that illustrates policy, personnel, finance and technology and their agency, converging upon a fixed location – Manchester.

The development of the computer has its own histories written with various accents – on the mathematics, on the engineering and on the critical theory attached to its evolution.¹⁸ Here it is the networks of personnel, their genesis and their location in Manchester that are most relevant. Bowden worked with Freddie Williams, Tom Kilburn and Peter Hall at the TRE during the Second World War.¹⁹ Williams and his assistant Kilburn were electronic engineers who found themselves rapidly without purpose in August 1945 as hostilities drew to a close.²⁰ They gravitated towards the University of Manchester where Max Newman, a Cambridge mathematician, took a post as Professor of Pure Mathematics in 1945. Williams was appointed by Newman as Chair of Electrical Engineering in November 1946 and Kilburn was ‘on loan’ from the MoS.²¹ By June 1948 the assembled group of mathematicians and electrical engineers achieved a global first in realising Alan Turing’s ‘stored programme’ computing principle in the machine now popularly known as Baby.²² Shortly afterwards Bowden and Hall took positions with Ferranti, also in Manchester.

Atomic warfare was a powerful force shaping the government agenda in the late 1940s.²³ The political elite, in the face of diminishing global power, wanted to restate Britain’s international authority. In the United States the McMahon Act (1946) denied Britain any further collaborative role in the development of the atomic bomb, despite the significant contribution by British scientists in pioneering its research. The Berlin Blockade coincided directly with the successful operation of Baby and, as the Cold War began in earnest, the government prioritised the development of the computational power necessary to calculate atomic bomb implosions. The ‘control and funding’ in the fields of aviation, nuclear power and the related technologies in military and civil contexts fell to the MoS, which became the largest single funder of research in both domains.²⁴ In October 1948 the MoS asked Ferranti to help to build a computer, to designs by Williams, Kilburn and Newman, funded by the Ministry of Defence and given technical support from the TRE. The government paid Ferranti approximately £175,000 over five years to build this machine.²⁵ Bowden was involved in matters of funding with representatives of various government ministries during his time at Ferranti.²⁶ His skills in canvassing were evident as he aimed to secure further research monies for ‘a number of worthwhile research contracts’ that were peripheral to the development of the computer, if the advisory committee to the National Research Development Corporation (NRDC) found it to be ‘in the national interest’.²⁷

Science and technology were not only at the heart of the government’s interests, but were widely embraced by the nation long before the White Heat of Wilson-era politics. In 1951 The Festival of Britain positively heralded the ‘atomic age’; its buildings, exhibits and visual identity all resonated with the buzz and hum, the whizz, click and whirr of modernity at the same time as they disavowed the recent effects of such warfare.²⁸ On the South Bank, as well as the comparatively restrained Festival Hall realised under the direction of Leslie Martin, fantastic temporary structures exploited new construction technologies and explored new architectural possibilities.²⁹ When considered in terms of defiant modernism and the cultural rhetoric of innovation in Britain, it is noteworthy that the Design Group of the Festival rejected modular construction in favour of unique, bespoke contributions that would emulate the themes of the Festival – scientific endeavour and innovation. The gravity defying Skylon, designed by Powell and Moya, and Ralph Tubb’s Dome of Discovery created the embryo of British hi-tech architecture.³⁰

Figure 2.01 The Ferranti Nimrod Digital Computer on show at the Science Museum Festival of Britain Exhibition (1951). Postcard collected by Malcom Shifrin after his having beaten Nimrod at the game of Nim.

Away from the river, at the Science Museum in Kensington, was an Exhibition of Science that largely focused on basic concepts under the banner, ‘Inside the Atom’.³¹ Amidst the exhibits was a simplified version of the Ferranti Mark 1 computer, named Nimrod, which invited visitors to participate in the strategy game of Nim [Figure 2.01]. The aim of the exhibit was exposure – there was no market for the computer, its commercial applications were relatively unknown in 1951. Bowden was appointed as chief salesman of Ferranti’s computer in the same year and continued to champion science and technology, in the interests of the nation, for the rest of his career.³²

Bowden constructed strong narratives to support his broadly socialist agenda. His 1953 book, Faster Than Thought, took its title from the Nimrod brochure and established the historiography that situated Britain at the centre of computer development.³³ His interests in centring new technologies in Manchester specifically were both public spirited and privately endorsed as they would provide foundation for the growth of education and commerce in the city; Bowden understood the connection between the two. The geography of the networks with which Bowden was engaged varied over time. His work with Rutherford at Cambridge associated him with Newman and Patrick Blackett in the 1930s;³⁴ his role at the TRE with Williams and Kilburn took him to Washington and MIT in the 1940s; his local industrial networks in the 1950s connected these earlier encounters, forged his path as an educationalist and ultimately led to his ministerial post in the 1960s. As an actor in this complex networked model, Bowden was not only able to influence histories but also had the capability and inclination to lobby government for support.

Whether the planned objectives for the computer were civil or military, research was mostly situated in universities.³⁵ Newman’s assembled experts at Manchester were one such group. Parallel projects existed at Cambridge (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Computer) and at Birkbeck College, London (Automatic Relay Computer).³⁶ There was some urgency in the development of the computer, a fact reflected in the commitment by the University of Manchester to construct a ‘temporary’ building for the Computing Machine Laboratory. The Laboratory was instituted in 1946, following an award from the Royal Society. Newman received a grant of ‘£3000 a year for five years for salaries, together with the sum of £20,000 to be spent on construction during the same period’.³⁷

The new building, designed by the office of J.W. Beaumont & Sons, was hurriedly erected as soon as it became apparent that Williams’s memory solution was ahead of the substantially resourced research team at Princeton.³⁸ Thus, the world’s first building (1951) designed for the computer was a simple two-storey form of loadbearing brick, sparingly detailed across three structural bays [Figure 2.02]. The urgency was for the development of the technology – the container simply had to be fit for purpose. The TRE and MoS were in full support of the research project, but it was still a struggle to secure the use of steel as a building material for the temporary accommodation.³⁹ Despite being designed as a temporary measure, the building still stands on Coupland Street in the heart of the University of Manchester campus. The eventual permanent home for the computing laboratories was the Electrical Engineering Building (1953) also designed by Beaumont within the ‘Science Centre’, which was planned by Sir Hubert Worthington as part of the 1945 Plan (see Chapter 3) [Figure 2.03].⁴⁰

Compared to the United States, Britain struggled to grasp the commercial possibilities of the computer and, because of this, investment in the design of products, branding and architecture was comparatively slow. At the University of Manchester, tradition, scarcity and a lack of vision combined to create architecture that was unremarkable and even out of date – Mies van der Rohe completed his first building on the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) campus in 1943. The Armour Research Foundation Metals Building (now Minerals and Metals Building) was part of the US war effort and Mies’s first major construction in the United States. Exposed steel structure and curtain wall glazing lent the building an industrial aesthetic and set the tone for the modernist master plan and buildings that were to follow. Mies was latterly conscious of the relationship between his buildings and technology and was popularly cited as having ‘tried to make an architecture for a technological society’.⁴¹ Mies’s IIT campus was well known and widely published in European architectural journals but its influence was not evident in the schemes by the offices of Beaumont, Worthington or Fairhurst for the University of Manchester.⁴²

Figure 2.02 Architect’s drawing of the scheme for a computing laboratory at the University of Manchester, the world’s first building for the computer.

Not all US architecture for new technologies was technologically driven, though. There were contrasts to Mies and Saarinen’s prominent productions. Philip Johnson’s Computer Laboratory (1961) for Brown University was ‘conceived as a porticus – a porch – to emphasize its importance as a technical center … Neo-classical in concept’.⁴³ Nonetheless, this was a distinctively modern building of ‘plate glass’ and ‘precast stone’, albeit with exposed aggregate of red granite chips to ‘harmonize the new center with the 19th Century [sic] which surrounds it’.⁴⁴ However, by 1964 the Architectural Record asked: ‘The Computer Centre: New Building Type?’ in an article on Eliot Noyes’s ‘building for machines’ for Westinghouse near Pittsburgh.⁴⁵ Noyes’s scheme set the typological standard of situating the computer rooms at the centre of the plan and, owing to their size and weight, on the ground floor.

Figure 2.03 Photograph showing the Electrical Engineering (Zochonis) Building (right, J.S. Beaumont, 1953) and the more modern Chemistry Building (left, H.S. Fairhurst & Sons, 1964) on Brunswick Street. Beaumont’s building is more in the spirit of Worthington’s master plan for the ‘Science Centre’. Its clumsy neo-Georgian style was seen as dated by certain stakeholders (see Chapter 3).

Spaces for computers were heavily serviced and situating the computer hall centrally made the environmental control of temperature and humidity more efficient. Most early applications were forms of advanced calculations, often related to payroll and other information that might be commercially sensitive, so the enclosed nature of computer rooms, surrounded by other spaces and often with no natural light, also offered enhanced security. The Westinghouse facility was not the component-led modularity of Saarinen’s work for IBM, it was an extension of Noyes’s complete corporate design package for Westinghouse. The primary aim of the low, serrated form was to advertise Westinghouse; it was part of the company’s branding, enhanced by a sign designed by Noyes, with a logo by Paul Rand. The architects wanted a ‘vigorous exterior, which would be seen and identified by cars passing by on the highway’.⁴⁶

It was IBM who brought technology and marketing together in their European commissions too. Marcel Breuer designed the French IBM headquarters (1957–62) at La Gaude. It took the dynamic form of a double Y-shaped plan and two of its wings were raised on piloti above the sloping site. The precast concrete façade was the first use of the Breuer-Beckhard system, later deployed across the United States.⁴⁷ IBM’s first UK commission went to Farmer & Dark, who designed a building for laboratories and offices (1963) in a rather squat eight-storey tower and adjoining single-storey block set in the kitchen garden of a Georgian mansion outside Winchester.⁴⁸ The façade was a curtain wall with projecting toughened glass fins and described as having a ‘mechanistic elegance’. Here was the explicit association of architecture and technology in the UK. In the slightly crude manner of Johnson at Brown University, the architects also chose to use a local stone, in this case, flint, pressed into the concrete of the gable walls of the lower block to give a ‘rough, masculine and chunky’ appearance. Nevertheless, this was an innovative use of glazing technology and the first explicitly modern building for the computer in the UK. The application of new material technologies and modernity as a reflection of new technology and branded identity was somewhat arrested in Britain and not truly realised until Norman Foster built at Cosham for IBM in 1971.⁴⁹

There were other buildings in the UK for computers in the late-1960s. Fry and Drew designed a computer centre for Rolls-Royce (1967) at their site in Derby.⁵⁰ The largest adopter of early computation in British industry was the National Coal Board who built a great number of computer centres from as early as 1962.⁵¹ Cedric Price also designed a computer centre for the British Transport Docks Board at Southall (1969) that assumed the typological standard set by Noyes and set the main suite centrally in the plan.⁵² The nuclear industry also required computers and their use in civil and military applications was wide and varied. Research and application went hand in hand. The connections between civil and military research were blurred and the outcomes of one could affect the other. It was not only civil and military research that was blurred; the associations between research and commercial application were similarly interconnected. The University of Manchester ran a research reactor at the UKAEA site at Risley, where the National Computing Centre had its first base. The Argus computer, built by Ferranti, came from their research into control computers for guided weapons in the garden suburb of Wythenshawe in the south of Manchester.

The work of Ferranti at Wythenshawe was an intrinsic part of the technological culture focused upon the region. Through this culture, civil and defence applications were interwoven, relationships underpinned by personnel who held military positions during wartime and parliamentary posts in the post-war period. Whilst directed from Whitehall, it was the regional military industrial structures that influenced the focus of nuclear and computing cultures in the north-west of England. The geography of regionally clustered nuclear R&D was a product of war. From as early as 1935, Cabinet discussed the flight range of Luftwaffe bombers and the location of munitions factories.⁵³ Sites in the north-west of England were preferred owing to their distance from mainland Europe. Of 44 Royal Ordnance Factories (ROF), 19 were retained after 1945 for the peace-time production of arms, including the nuclear programme.⁵⁴ For atomic production facilities, ‘a certain separation from centres of population had to be balanced against the accessibility of local labour. Within these constraints it was the proximity of industrial and academic organisations … that led to the selection of North West England as the key location.’⁵⁵

As well as the development of the computer, pioneering nuclear research was undertaken by the UKAEA at Risley near Warrington and an array of defence contracts were awarded to companies in the north-west, most notably sites at Warton and Samlesbury near Preston operated by English Electric (later British Aerospace).⁵⁶ At Wythenshawe, Ferranti, in partnership with the Bristol Aeroplane Company, developed the most successful guided weapon project of the period, Bloodhound, though the factory and laboratories were originally designed for the manufacture of gyroscopes for the control of missiles.⁵⁷ The choice to develop a computer that could make calculations for missiles with the same industry partner and in the same city as the missile guidance system was not an accident.

Wythenshawe is a suburb to the south of Manchester, on the edge of Cheshire and has had several distinct periods of development. It was originally conceived as a Garden Suburb and planned by Barry Parker, who also planned the first Garden City at Letchworth. It was built after 1927 on land that the Corporation purchased from the Tatton Estate.⁵⁸ Its primary political sponsor, Ernest Simon, lauded the first wave of new homes and amenities as a success, but complete development was halted by the outbreak of the Second World War.⁵⁹ During the war parts of the undeveloped suburb were used as airfields, adopting the recently completed airport at Ringway (1938). Following the cessation of hostilities there was a desperate shortage of housing in the city and Wythenshawe was a prime location for the creation of an overspill estate. The Corporation was not sufficiently solvent to build new houses until the 1950s, but they were able to provide incentives for new industries to locate themselves on greenfield sites with good road links and access to both blue- and white-collar workforces [Figure 2.04]. Among the first of the new buildings in the early 1950s was Ferranti’s R&D and production facility for guided weapons research and manufacture, designed by C&S.

Figure 2.04 Municipal advert to encourage businesses to relocate to the growing Wythenshawe area, 1947.

C&S worked for Ferranti prior to the Wythenshawe commission. They designed the extension to the factory at the Hollinwood site in Oldham, opened in 1950.⁶⁰ Hollinwood was acquired by Ferranti in 1895 and was a former ironworks, not necessarily the obvious choice for the electrical industry that might be considered as a cleaner manufacturing process.⁶¹ This adaption and appropriation of existing premises for new technological purposes is typical of how industrial technologies evolved in Britain. Sites were often palimpsests, each layer added only when necessity dictated and new technologies were conceived and built in old premises – a situation repeated when Ferranti computing bought a former foundry in West Gorton for the production of their Argus Computer.⁶² This was not the case at Wythenshawe though. The design and construction of this site, vital to the defence industry and rearmament programme, was bespoke and brand new.

New development at Wythenshawe offered new opportunities for Ferranti. The site, the roads, the industries and the houses of this second wave of development were all new. Whilst the prospect of available labour was touted as a good reason to locate business in Wythenshawe, Ferranti were keen to ensure that appropriate housing stock was provided.⁶³ The company contemplated creating their own housing association under the provisions of the Housing Act (1936) that allowed industrial firms to do so.⁶⁴ The Corporation Finance Committee rejected Ferranti’s request for assistance towards the construction of fifty houses in view of the firm’s financial standing. It was a bold demand on the part of Ferranti who had the buildings, all of their contents and its future phases fully funded by the MoS.⁶⁵ Nor did they pay for the site – it was the MoS who took the lease on that too!⁶⁶ Sir Vincent Ferranti was known to insist that ‘the state should provide most of the funds for developing and making the products it required’.⁶⁷ Such an attitude had proven results as, ‘by 1952 [Ferranti] had reached the stage of being Britain’s only commercial computer manufacturer, with six firm orders, without having taken any risks and without having invested any significant resources of its own in the venture’.⁶⁸ The financing opportunities from local and national state sources were fully exploited at Wythenshawe.

As a ministry-sponsored project, the scheme was not subject to usual planning processes and no record of an application exists among the minutes of the Town Planning Committee.⁶⁹ The buildings were ostensibly without context, on a level greenfield site at the edge of the city. The only definitive marks on the verdant surface were those of the new roads and existing runways of RAF Ringway. Planning for the organisation of the buildings on site began in 1947.⁷⁰ The proximity of the airport limited the height of the development and its anticipated mass was approved under the Ministry of Civil Aviation Airport Safeguarding Direction, 1949.⁷¹ Four options were prepared, none of which were much more than proximity diagrams, shown with scale and orientation, to assess the feasibility of the site and define the required floor area. Each was drawn in a simple orthogonal arrangement and with few formal constraints.⁷² Instead of responding to context, the arrangement of the buildings on site was dependent upon operational demands.

Of the feasibility studies, ‘Scheme B’ was the most resolved and reflected the need to exercise secure control over space and personnel by presenting a series of discrete buildings arranged along a connecting corridor [Figure 2.05]. It was not always essential that groups of engineers knew what others were up to and sometimes it was in the national security interest that they didn’t. Access and egress was important, as was the capacity to engineer building services as required by the internal function of each block. The design team had to respond to the programmatic demands of research groupings and the production and handling of missiles. The architects were instructed that ‘complete functional efficiency in the laboratories should be their first priority’.⁷³ Despite the overtly functional nature of the brief and a site, apparently without context, there was one short reference to style amidst the largely quantitative feasibility studies: the arrangement of option B was described, in positive terms, as ‘more modern’.⁷⁴ The buildings had to be flexible, ‘owing to the rapidly developing research programme’ and designed to be extended from the earliest briefs.⁷⁵ A framed structural solution permitted both internal flexibility and the potential to add bays in the future. In this case, the frame was steel; the external columns were clad in concrete. Steel was not readily available in the immediate post-war years but ministerial support, backed by huge defence expenditure, meant that issues such as the supply of materials rarely featured in project records.⁷⁶

Figure 2.05 ‘Scheme B’. Discrete laboratory blocks arranged orthogonally in groups of four with connecting corridors to the outside edges. These drawings are without context, but it is assumed that the bottom of the image would have run parallel to Simonsway. The author of this drawing is unknown.

As a part of the post-war rearmament strategy the development of a guided missile system was of some urgency. This was reflected in correspondence between Dr N. Searby, Chief Engineer, Ferranti and the MoS, where the exact specification for the buildings changed as construction was under way. The design testing of the gyroscopes began at Ferranti’s works in Moston, but soon outgrew its home and was housed in temporary quarters on site at Wythenshawe until the laboratories proper were established. Research trips by Ferranti also influenced the demand for space, particularly for the testing of missiles; the practice and methods for this were informed by a visit to the United States.⁷⁷ Ferranti were also keen to see other sub-contracts for missile components developed at Wythenshawe. Here, state technopolitics met with the regional convergence of knowledge, expertise and policy. The state enabled the use of the site – owned by Manchester City Council and leased by the MoS on behalf of Ferranti. The national security situation influenced the buildings’ organisation and ensured the supply of steel that was difficult to obtain for ordinary construction purposes. Work began on detailed design in October 1950 and construction in 1951.⁷⁸

Ferranti Wythenshawe was the second explicitly modern building designed by Arthur Gibbon and his team at C&S; the first was a new company headquarters for Renold Chains at a nearby site that won an award from the RIBA in 1954 [Figure 2.06].⁷⁹ Several of the details were adopted from the earlier scheme and the modern language of C&S evolved through such adaptations. One of these was the articulated concrete frame with flush jointed brick spandrel panel infill, another, the use of structural concrete to achieve cantilevers.⁸⁰ The buildings were relatively simple, but Gibbon knew how to deploy resources to maximum effect. The volume that formed the main entrance to the facility was a little taller than the rest and supported a curtain wall extending over the full two-storey height. A slender, sculpted concrete canopy neatly hid the rainwater pipe in its cast depth and its soffit formed a continuous surface from outside to inside [Figure 2.07].⁸¹ Within, a robust, but elegant, cantilevered concrete staircase connected the two floors, itself illuminated by the expansive glazing. Many of the details seen in later C&S buildings had their first iterations in this, and the nearby office for Renold Chains, and were drawn by Gordon Hodkinson, Gibbon’s assistant for most of his career. Whilst these were not hi-tech they were undoubtedly modern and the beginnings of C&S’s post-war revival, which included a rapid increase in workload and a stylistic shift to modern architecture [Figure 2.08].

Figure 2.06 Renold Chain Company headquarters, Renold House, Ringway, Manchester, 1954.

Architecturally, Gibbon and his team drew on continental and North American influences. Gibbon was known, for example, to ask his assistants to ‘add a bit of a Nervi canopy’ and other calculated borrowing of elements.⁸² He used the widely known titles Switzerland Builds and Sweden Builds as source material.⁸³ In the buildings at Wythenshawe for Ferranti the influence of Mies’s work at IIT was apparent in the rationally gridded facades and the curtain wall glazing.⁸⁴ The scheme was realised in phases; the first, research laboratories and workshops, was opened by Duncan Sandys, Minister of Supply, in June 1954. The buildings were described in the popular press as making ‘lavish use of glass’.⁸⁵ They were steel framed, with external columns and beams encased in concrete. Infill panels were of a typical northern dark red brick. Most of the adjoining blocks were two-storey although some single-storey elements housed ‘special laboratories’. The laboratory buildings themselves were portal framed so that there were no columns internally and the space was easily adaptable as technology and machining advanced. Internal walls were simply formed from a bespoke sectional timber partitioning in the offices, and steel partitions in workshops and laboratories. Much of the servicing was integrated into the construction of the scheme, either within raised floor voids or within the wall or floor build-up. The site was designed to accommodate future extensions and the internal circulation routes and spaces between the first phases of construction facilitated such.

Figure 2.07 Entrance canopy to the Ferranti facility. The simple concrete frame with brick infill panels was common to several early buildings designed by Arthur Gibbon for Cruickshank & Seward.

Figure 2.08 The modern architectural language in the Ferranti facility extended to the gatehouse.

The earlier notion of discrete blocks arranged along a spine corridor served operational security needs, created good conditions for research and development and allowed for expansion. Each of the six wings of laboratories was organised according to the size of the research teams and sub-divided into a further six sections with space for five engineers. Dedicated lab and office space permitted concentrated research and communal refreshment areas in each wing allowed for the exchange of ideas and the sharing of technical problems. Every wing had a group leader who reported to the chief engineer on a monthly basis. The hierarchical structure of the organisation was reflected in the ordering of space and, according to Ferranti’s official history, this arrangement ‘proved to be a great success, both in encouraging small group work and effective communication through informal and formal channels’.⁸⁶ The canteen for the site was a standalone building and its interior furnished in a manner befitting of the atomic age with suspended lamps and stylised graphic prints on the curtains.

Figure 2.09 Option studies for extension to missile testing facility at Wythenshawe.

Whilst early archival documents and correspondence were labelled ‘secret’, the activity on site did not remain so, the expansion of the testing facility was publicly reported under the headline ‘Two New Bays for Rocket Factory. Guided Missile Research’.⁸⁷ Where the laboratory buildings were organised by the structure of the research teams, the factory was designed specifically around the missile testing bays and the production of gyroscopes [Figure 2.09]. In the engineering tradition, specialist components for the guidance systems were designed and engineered on site – US-style subcontracting and outsourcing were seen as cheapening the product. This was true at Wythenshawe and also later at ICL.⁸⁸ C&S’s services were retained by Ferranti for the extension and for a number of smaller buildings through to the late 1950s – these additions were subject to planning regulations and recorded through building control processes.⁸⁹ The client remained as the MoS and, regardless of the information published in the press, the planning applications recorded the ‘intended use of the building and each floor’ as ‘Experimental work. Exact nature of work not disclosed’.⁹⁰

Wythenshawe was part of the Corporation’s post-war rebuilding plans and, as such, the perceptibly hi-tech and clean manufacturing processes of Ferranti fitted perfectly with the city’s ambitions. The government demand for weapons projects dovetailed with the site and skills available. The only formal context for the scale and appearance of the building was the height restriction imposed due to the proximity of the airport. The laboratories and testing facilities were really determined by the functional and operational demands of very specific working practices. In this sense the policy objective of missile production had its impact on form, while the local conditions at Wythenshawe informed the buildings’ scale and materiality.

Computers at West Gorton: palimpsest of production

Unlike at Wythenshawe, the site that would eventually accommodate new buildings for International Computers Limited at West Gorton was not greenfield; it was a former iron foundry rooted in the eastern industrial area of Manchester. The history of this site, before its transformation, provides a good lens through which to explore the relationship between new technologies and architecture in post-war Britain. In the following I unfold a sequence of events and constructions that tally directly with post-war ‘make-do-and-mend’ mentalities and the engineering and manufacturing traditions of the north of England.⁹¹

Making machines

The early history of attempts to forge a computer industry from the research pioneered in Manchester is peppered with mergers in the race for control of the domestic market and in the face of stiff imports from the United States [Figure 2.10]. In one such coalition English Electric merged with unlikely computer developers J. Lyons & Co., the caterers! Lyons & Co. catering company were able to imagine the commercial applications of the new technology and ordered one of the first business computing machines in the UK. Computer manufacturing at West Gorton began with Ferranti and was consolidated through government-sponsored mergers to form International Computers and Tabulators (ICT) and International Computers Limited (ICL), but ultimately failed to survive against strong US competition.

The route to production for Ferranti was not a straight course from the successful research at the University. Political happenstance and a number of resilient and resourceful individuals all had their impact on the bumpy road to realisation. Among them was the divisional manager at Moston, Eric Grundy, who, despite managerial direction to the contrary, pursued the development of a computer project. In October 1948 Patrick Blackett arranged for Sir Ben Lockspeiser to observe Baby in action at the University.⁹² Lockspeiser noted:

Figure 2.10 Diagram to show British computer mergers from the 1940s onwards in the creation of ICT/ICL.

Shortly afterwards, Grundy was informally instructed to proceed with the construction of ‘an electronic calculating machine to the instructions of Professor F.C. Williams’ and appointed Dr Dietrich Prinz to research the viability of the technology.⁹⁴

On return from a US visit, Prinz declared that Williams and Kilburn were ‘far ahead of anything the Americans had achieved with stored programme computers’.⁹⁵ At this point Lockspeiser made a formal approach to chairman and managing director Sir Vincent de Ferranti about forging a link with the university team, though Ferranti had provided informal support and components for some years prior. Grundy’s instrument department was not the natural home for the computer, nor was he the best candidate to collaborate with Williams, but it was the conditions of expertise and capability that drew funding to Manchester.⁹⁶ The award of this money by Lockspeiser ‘broke many of the rules of government contracting’,⁹⁷ and Lockspeiser’s intervention is one indicator of the difficulty of researching Cold War history. Shrouded in secrecy, his actions may have been cavalier, but could equally have been clandestine – Prime Minister Clement Atlee ploughed ahead in secret with the British rocket programme in January 1947 without seeking parliamentary approval. Some of this activity was eventually disclosed in Parliament in January 1951.⁹⁸ Dependent upon the focus of research and development, contracts were awarded by the NRDC and the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) under direction of the MoS. To add further complexity, contracts usually included a commitment from the government to purchase an agreed number of the completed computers!

Within this tale of innovation and ad hoc approvals it is easy to recognise the traits of the ‘British Problem’ and a sense of defiant modernism in a declinist context.⁹⁹ In technopolitical terms the precise aims of the state and its agents remain unclear – the computer and its attendant military applications were shrouded with cover stories and the realisation of both civil and military applications served the interests of successive post-war governments. The complex organisation, funded and procured by the state, and its regional networks across higher education and industry, impacted on the built environment as existing facilities were adapted and new ones constructed in service of the computing and nuclear cluster.

The development of the Mark I computer was funded by the NRDC and its formal commissioning took place on 9 July 1951. Despite its pioneering status, only seven Mark I machines were made and Williams’s team had very little to do with the production; they had moved on to work on Mark II (Meg), which would become the Ferranti Mercury model.¹⁰⁰ The Mark I machines were built at the factory in Moston and at Gem Mill in Chadderton; neither was designed for the manufacture of computers, and the latter was cotton factory until 1937. This typifies the approach to new technologies and particularly civil technological development in Britain – new premises were not built until market viability was established. Sir Vincent’s attitude to computing was observed thus: ‘if Sir Vincent were looking for a new enterprise to invest Ferranti money in, he would not himself pick computers. He has, however, no objection to a Government agency picking computers for him provided that he is fully compensated for the use of Ferranti facilities.’¹⁰¹ Bowden, however, was unequivocal in his support for the development of the computer, he wrote: ‘I feel … that Ferranti’s stake in this new enterprise is a very large one and that the possibilities are unlimited.’¹⁰² Ferranti struggled to gain funding for the development of the Mark II, but the move of a team of engineers from Elliott Brothers to Ferranti led to the transfer of project funds and the development of their Pegasus computer [Figure 2.11]. It was this development that necessitated the acquisition of premises at West Gorton [Figure 2.12].¹⁰³

Ferranti built computers on the site at West Gorton from the late 1950s onwards. They purchased the former ironworks from Brooks and Doxey in 1956 for £250,000. Brooks and Doxey manufactured textile machinery on the 11.5 acre site from the 1850s, latterly in buildings constructed between 1939 and 1945. The site allowed for rapid occupation and expansion and Ferranti were reported in March 1956 as ‘likely to begin [production] in about a month or six weeks’.¹⁰⁴ By October the facility had been operational for four months and was already Europe’s largest computer manufacturer. They had built five machines in four months and had orders for thirty-four more, valued at £2m.¹⁰⁵ Despite being heavily insulated against losses by virtue of their government funding, Ferranti invested very little on physical alterations to the ironworks site. From a marketing perspective it seems peculiar that a company at the vanguard of a technology that would change the world had no built manifestation of this, a new headquarters or factory, like their US competitors. Regardless of American attitudes, in West Gorton in 1956, the machines were new and the buildings were simply adapted for re-use.

Figure 2.11 Production of the Pegasus computer inside a former ironworks and textile factory in east Manchester c.1957. More of a workshop than a cleanroom.

Figure 2.12 Plan of the West Gorton site (Brooks and Doxey works) at the point of acquisition by Ferranti in 1956.

Adaptation to the existing buildings at West Gorton was minimal. When considered in light of Sir Vincent’s view on the compensatory nature of government research funding, the lack of investment in new buildings makes more sense. A lack of commercial interest and failure to grasp the potential of the computer within political sectors meant that there was no drive for new buildings to act as marketing tools. Archive images of West Gorton from the 1960s show ICT logos mounted upon two of the remodelled site entrances [Figures 2.13 and 2.14]. It is unclear whether this remodelling was commissioned by Ferranti or by ICT. The styling of the entrance from Thomas Street appears to be from the 1950s – one might assume Ferranti made it after 1956. In any event, neither recorded intervention speaks of high technology. The site itself can be viewed as a palimpsest of production – from its earliest day as an ironworks to the manufacture of textile machinery and then computers, new layers of built fabric were not constructed until new processes were commercially established. New building for the research and manufacture of computers did not arrive on site until 1967, eleven years after computing machine manufacturing had commenced.

Figure 2.13 Gorton, ICT offices, Thomas Street, from Hoyland Street, facing south, 1964. Minimal intervention on the part of ICT to alter the fabric of the existing site.

Acquisition, mergers and reorganisation

From the mid-1950s Ferranti had serious discussions with ICT about the merging of their computer interests. It was not until September 1963 that the two companies came together.¹⁰⁶ ICT was originally formed from the merging of British Tabulating Machine Company and Vickers.¹⁰⁷ According to historian Martin Campbell-Kelly it was the R&D and manufacturing capacity of Ferranti’s operation that was attractive to ICT; as well as being the largest in Europe, the R&D division was known for its innovation in software programming.¹⁰⁸ ICT acquired all of Ferranti’s mainframe computers and the manufacturing plant at West Gorton.¹⁰⁹ Several Ferranti personnel were given senior positions in ICT, most notably Basil de Ferranti, who soon became managing director, but also Peter Hall – manager of the Ferranti computer department – who became a deputy director.¹¹⁰

Figure 2.14 Rebranded ‘factory gate’ to the ICT site. ‘Gorton, Kelsall Street from Thomas Street, facing South’, 1964.

ICT’s chairman, Sir Cecil Weir was not in business for ‘fun’ (as Sir Vincent de Ferranti was accused). His vision was for the firm to become the ‘dominant British supplier of data-processing equipment, and eventually the leading European company’.¹¹¹ As such, their public profile in the industry was much higher than that of Ferranti. Their logo was produced in a clean sans-serif font, with the kerning compressed, implying a tight efficiency. One of their adverts won the first prize in the Premio Europeo Rizzoli competition in Milan.¹¹² Their desired dominance would require ‘one of the largest computer rooms in Europe’ as well as new offices, a cinema and presentation suite.¹¹³ Prospects were promising as the company was reported as receiving £100m investment, under ‘arrangements made with the help of Morgan Grenfell and the Ministry of Technology’.¹¹⁴ The commercial business of computers in Britain faced serious competition from US rivals. Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson knew this; on his first day in office he formed the Ministry of Technology and told Frank Cousins, the (first) Minister of Technology, that he had ‘a month to save the British computer industry’.¹¹⁵ The Flowers Report, Computers for Research, was commissioned to determine (and create a case for) the number of machines required by higher education and research councils.¹¹⁶ The conclusions of the report highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of the domestic industry and pointed to a particular gap in the provision of large-scale computers.

The creation of the Ministry of Technology had vastly expanded the scale of the NRDC and one of Cousins’s first actions was to award ICT £5m for their 1900 series computers in May 1965.¹¹⁷ An energised company with grand ambitions required new facilities to realise their potential and it was ICT who commissioned Cruickshank & Seward to develop the West Gorton site in 1966 – Peter Hall was a friend of John Seward.¹¹⁸ In Peter Sainsbury’s perspective painting of the tower and adjacent two-storey block designed in 1966 [Figure 2.15], the buildings’ profiles sharply cut the Mancunian skies. The sky was rendered to a vanishing point, giving the impression that the bright-white buildings were moving forwards. Following Wilson’s re-election in March 1966, the Ministry of Technology and the newly formed IRC were the two main instruments for continued attempts to revitalise British industry.¹¹⁹ The electrical and electronics industries were the IRC’s first focus. Among its early directives was the merger of English Electric and Elliott-Automation; this would ultimately lead to the creation of ICL and, in turn, promised a more secure outlook.¹²⁰

The secure outlook provided by ICL was, like Ferranti before it, topped and tailed by government support. ICL was formed in March 1968 by the merging of the computer interests of ICT and Plessey English Electric.¹²¹ It was reported as an initiative to create a British commercial competitor for the US computer giants IBM and Honeywell.¹²² The Ministry of Technology provided funding of £13.5m and took up 10.5 per cent of the equity. Its equity share was the first use of the Industrial Expansion Act (1968).¹²³ In central government in the late 1960s the procurement policy for ‘large computers’ favoured ICL in an almost exclusive contract. Other British machines were said to have a ‘25% preference’.¹²⁴ However, in many respects, the impetus and perhaps the advantage had already been lost to the United States. In 1968 Professor Stanley Gill was ready to resign his role as advisor to the Ministry on the basis that they were not moving fast enough to protect the interests of the British computer industry.¹²⁵ The consensus between government advisors was that IBM had stolen the march and was developing fast machines – in sleek new buildings.

Figure 2.15 Watercolour perspective by Peter Sainsbury of the proposed tower for ICT at West Gorton. The old Victorian buildings are shown as swept away and the existing brick buildings to be retained on site are deliberately hidden by soft landscaping.

Figure 2.16 The research building with tower behind.

Construction caught up

Almost the entire site at West Gorton was eventually reconfigured in phases to replace the repurposed buildings with bespoke construction, directed by John Seward of C&S. The first part of the site to be developed was outside of the curtilage of that owned by Ferranti and was leased from the Corporation. Phase I of the construction programme was the Research Department Building, a two-storey slab at the foot of the Phase II tower – they were conceived together [Figure 2.16]. C&S’s original commission, by ICT, was approved by Corporation planners in October 1966 but, presumably due to the mergers and creation of ICL, construction did not commence until June 1969.¹²⁶ Following the typological standard set by Noyes, the computer hall in the Phase I building was surrounded on all sides by other rooms and had no windows to the outside. For security purposes there was a direct visual link from the ground floor offices across the computer hall and into the tape rooms – the three spaces were separated by glazed screens [Figure 2.17]. A lecture hall was designed to share new knowledge in the field or to introduce prospective clients to the new machines. Product promotion was still important, even in an established market.

Figure 2.17 Internal screening within the research building, for security and overlook.

The offices on the first floor were sited above the computer hall and had external courts that allowed light into the deeper areas of the plan. The interiors of office and administration areas had a partition system on a grid that could be moved and adapted according to need; the ceiling lighting plan permitted the same. Each space had very specific humidity and temperature requirements and the building was serviced by four different plant rooms, for the hall, tape rooms, offices and lecture hall respectively. As such, the building had its own substation. This heavy mechanical engineering demand had its impact on the appearance of the building, with long lines of louvres provided for the venting of the various served spaces. Externally, these banks of louvres were complemented by concrete cladding panels, faced in a light-grey mosaic tile, and contrasted against Blockley’s black facing brick with black mortar.¹²⁷ The robust and secure masonry at ground floor level gave way to the punctuated lightwells and ventilated plant rooms of the upper floor and provided an architectural language for the rest of the site – a securitised, serviced and sleek aesthetic [Figure 2.18].

Figure 2.18 Drawing showing the elevations of the research building. A strong horizontal emphasis is accentuated by the brick ground floor and cladding panels with ribbon windows above.

The eleven-storey tower was the most prominent building on site and the second to be constructed. The material palette was the same as the research block and used the contrasting tones of dark brick and light mosaic panel to good effect in the articulation of function. The dark brick was used to face the vertical circulation core and the light-grey tiles deployed on the outside of each office floor. The ribbon window, as opposed to floor to ceiling curtain walling (by this time a sign of commercial office space), mimicked the fenestration of the lower block, but had residual benefits. Writing about the tower, Peter Hall recalled, ‘glass walls are fine if the occupants keep things tidy inside. Development people never do. Hence the Tower Block has what I regard as rather sensible windows.’¹²⁸

Figure 2.19 Gorton, Wenlock Way off Clover Street, ICL in view, flats. The brave new world of late 1960s Manchester and the reinvestment in east Manchester is evident in this composition that appears to deliberately situate new housing and industry side by side – the new terrace. The low block to the left of the image housed the research department.

The development of the site by ICL was in line with the Corporation’s objectives for the area. West Gorton was a former industrial zone characterised by heavy industry. Like the ironworks and nearby locomotive works, much of the workforce had been housed in back-to-back terraced housing. The demolition of the terraces as part of the post-war clearance made way for new social housing in cul-de-sac estates and tower blocks [Figure 2.19]. The arrival of a new and cleaner industry with the prospect of employment and residual benefits to a reconfigured community in east Manchester was very welcome, but not officially a component of a master plan or Corporation initiative. The ICL tower sat as a counterpoint to the adjacent blocks designed by the local authority and was a sentinel to change in society at large:

Figure 2.20 Drawing to show the familial nature of the satellite buildings on the growing campus. The small gatehouse adopted the architectural language of the earlier major phases.

ICT was buoyant before ICL was created and continued success led to on site expansion in the 1970s. The next major building was a second computer hall, an expanded and value engineered version of the original research building. A PVC-coated, steel cladding panel, still in light grey, replaced the mosaic tile. The dark brick was again deployed at ground floor and the ribbon windows were now a feature of the growing family of objects. As the main computer hall was designed, so were a series of peripheral buildings, to serve and support the plant. A restaurant, telephone exchange and security booth, all single storey, adopted the simple black brick and black mortar scheme in a group of small buildings that were like components to the whole [Figure 2.20]; only the restaurant was constructed. The master plan for the full scheme shows the suite of buildings connected by a narrow circulatory band, an external covered walkway [Figure 2.21]. The site can be read as a motherboard, a rational gridded landscape into which buildings were inserted as demanded and connected to the rest of the machine. The final addition was a small building on an adjoining site for SUN Microsystems, a US manufacturer, to develop computer-aided engineering solutions.¹³⁰

Figure 2.21 ICL West Gorton. Proposed site plan October 1979. The buildings are ‘plugged’ together by connecting covered walkways and tie neatly into the gridded ‘motherboard’ of the master plan. The buildings to the north of the main site were built during 1939–45 and never demolished. The remote Sun Microsystems building (top right) also configured to the same orthogonal projection.

A deal with an American firm was contradictory to the aims of the Ministry of Technology in first sponsoring ICL, but emblematic of the change in market conditions and government. The Common Market of the European Economic Community was well established and international trade had grown significantly, Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister and Conservative economic policy opened the British industrial sector to foreign competition and investment. In the preceding decades the support, predominantly financial, of central government had ultimately fostered (some have said ‘saved’) the British computer industry. Like the case of Ferranti at Wythenshawe, for ICL the central state provided the funds for construction and contracts. Furthermore, the Ministry of Technology and the IRC had actually formed the company and taken an equity share! Up to May 1970 ICL had £13.5m of government grants to establish the manufacturing and R&D at West Gorton and other sites. In the same period it received over £8m of orders from central government departments.¹³¹

This history of the site at West Gorton illustrates how investment in new technologies was directed by the whims and will of high-ranking civil servants and ministers. The fluctuating conviction of various administrations, from the earliest days of the Mark I machine, was reflected in the way the site evolved according to the grants and loans from the various government departments that sponsored such activity – mirrored in the piecemeal additions to the existing buildings and the slow transformation of the site. Ferranti manipulated the advantages gained in their sponsorship of early computation at the university. Much like the factory at Wythenshawe, the interests of the local authority did not play a significant part in the development of the site, other than a broad alignment with renewal objectives. The pace and form of architectural production was a signifier of the levels of state investment – ICL’s state sponsorship was manifest in the quick construction of the most significant building on the site, whereas Ferranti’s earlier minor adaptations testified to the uncertainty around the future of computing. In the case of the computer as machine, central government administrations were generally in favour of policy that developed research and manufacturing in the interests of the British economy. In the case of computing as an application, there was less clarity or consensus in the realisation of Britain’s first National Computing Centre, also founded in Manchester. Its procurement phases ran parallel to the sponsored mergers that created ICL and reinforced Manchester’s position as the home of computing in the UK. It was also a story of political urgency and boosterism that lasted for almost a decade.

The National Computing Centre

Frank Cousins publicly announced the creation of the NCC in Parliament in March 1965.¹³² Its functions were described as to ‘set up a national library of computer programmes and to carry out research on the development of new programmes’.¹³³ Manchester was announced as the preferred location in December 1965, though the exact details of the site were not revealed until January 1966.¹³⁴ The proximity to existing centres of expertise at the University and UMIST was one reason for its selection – situated next the new urban motorway, Link Road 17/7 (Mancunian Way), and the site for the British Broadcasting Corporation’s new northern headquarters on Oxford Road. Its physical position was sandwiched between machines of communication and mobility, which, like the computing centre, epitomised post-war modernity.

Figure 2.22 Plan showing ‘Area G’ of the proposed UMIST campus, which became the site for the National Computing Centre.

In the Corporation’s Approved Development Plan the 2.6-acre site was originally intended to form part of the Higher Education Precinct and provisionally reserved in 1964 for development by the Institute of Science and Technology [Figure 2.22].¹³⁵ Following a direct request from Ministry of Technology, the City and the Institute agreed that the location was ‘ideally situated for this important national project’.¹³⁶ The Ministry did not purchase the site; instead, as with Ferranti at Wythenshawe, it was leased from the Corporation by central government.¹³⁷ Again, the mechanisms of government created their own specific contractual circumstances in service of modernisation, be it for civil or military aims. Similarly, the procurement and delivery of the first phase of NCC construction was forged from a set of existing relationships, in personnel and in geography, which also emerged from state structures.

Professor Gordon Black was appointed as the first director of the NCC.¹³⁸ At the time of his selection he held two posts, one as professor of automatic data at UMIST, and another as technical manager (computing) at the UKAEA site at Risley near to Warrington. At Risley, in collaboration with the university, Britain’s first fully transistorised nuclear reactor was commissioned in July 1964.¹³⁹ The governing council of the NCC was convened in May 1966.¹⁴⁰ It comprised representatives from government and industry. Among those chosen were Peter Hall (colleague of Bowden, Williams and Turing at the TRE and a director at ICT, later ICL), Andrew St Johnston (joint managing director of Elliott-Automation), W.E. Scott (managing director of English Electric-Leo-Marconi Computers) and F.J.M. Laver (director of the computer division of the Ministry of Technology).¹⁴¹ This grouping reflected the public–private enterprise envisaged by Ministry of Technology as one established with central government funding but ultimately intended to attract its own revenue from the services provided. As such, the NCC was founded as a limited company.¹⁴²

Surprisingly, ICT, who had developed their hardware from Ferranti’s Pegasus and Atlas machines at works in nearby West Gorton, were not the preferred provider of computers for the NCC. Instead, Professor Black chose to procure an English Electric KDF9. The reasons for this were manifold, not least the difficulties experienced in programming early Ferranti and ICT machines, but also that Ferranti and ICT had effectively enjoyed a commercial monopoly in Manchester and Black was keen to encourage market competition, in line with the objectives of the Ministry of Technology, the NCC’s main sponsor.¹⁴³

The contractual arrangements for the construction of the first phase were indicative of the urgency to establish the NCC. In January 1966 before the council was convened or the limited company formed, the Ministry of Technology proposed that the UKAEA architects acted as agents on their behalf.¹⁴⁴ The design of the Computer Building, the first component of the centre, was ‘virtually a replica of that at Culham’ and delivered under the direction of R.S. Brocklesby, ARIBA on behalf of the Ministry of Technology.¹⁴⁵ Brocklesby was also charged with negotiating the position of the Corporation and the University Grants Committee (UGC) over the lease agreements for the site.¹⁴⁶ Architects from UKAEA designed the first phase ‘under considerable pressure’. It was such a rapid decision to construct that there was not really a design brief and the interior plan for the main building, proposed as a tower, was said to be ‘left until the new board can be consulted’.¹⁴⁷ For its first few months the NCC was actually based at Risley within the UKAEA estate.¹⁴⁸ Quay House on Quay Street in Manchester was the next address and would remain so for years afterwards.¹⁴⁹ The initial urgency for the creation of the Centre was not manifested as a desire to build the entire headquarters.

A computer centre without a computer would have been disastrous, and the first phase emerged rapidly. The building itself was a spartan grey box with minimal amounts of fenestration [Figure 2.23]. It was clad in ‘dark grey PVC coated sheeting’ onto a precast Bison concrete frame. It was essentially a two-storey building, with offices and plant room on the ground floor and the computer hall, tape rooms and operator rooms on the first floor. A further volume, equivalent to a second floor, or third storey, had large trusses, which afforded space for wide plenum ducts to move big volumes of air. Like its precedents, the computer hall was surrounded by other spaces and had no visual connection to outside. The supervisor’s office had windows into the computer hall, much like that at ICL. The value of the computer and computation was such that industrial espionage was a perceived threat and there was a sense of an inverted panopticon in the building type.

Figure 2.23 The spartan grey box of the first incarnation of the National Computing Centre, R.S. Brocklesby ARIBA, UKAEA Architects, c.1967.

The site for the NCC was, literally, pivotal in the reconstruction of Manchester in the second half of the twentieth century. It was at the physical junction of two major Corporation planning initiatives, the Education Precinct running north–south and the east–west aerial motorway, Link Road 17/7 (later Mancunian Way). The Education Centre was part of the ambitious 1945 Plan and recognised the value of the university to the economy of the city. Mancunian Way was a component of post-war highway planning, its purpose being to connect the manufacturing centres of the east of the city with the docks to the west. As television grew as a medium an adjacent site was allocated to the BBC for their new northern headquarters. Additionally, the focus on higher education at UMIST drove the growth of further education at the municipal technical college across Oxford Road and directly opposite the site (Figure 2.24).¹⁵⁰ The prominence of the NCC site in both policy and physical terms situated it firmly in the new Manchester – it was seen to be technological and on the move.

The first scheme conceived by UKAEA was for an administration building that could be extended at a later date.¹⁵¹ The initial phases of construction (the spartan grey box) were under way as phase two was reported as ‘a tower building to take offices, computing libraries and conference rooms … At first it will be five storeys high. Later it will be extended to 20 storeys.’ This, as the reporter observed, would ‘make it the tallest building in the educational precinct’ and it was ‘being designed as one of the focal points on Oxford Road next to Mancunian Way’. The facade was to be formed from precast units ‘modelled to give the building an interesting facade’.¹⁵² Conversely, the City Planning Officer, John Millar, viewed the outline planning application, submitted by C&S in May 1969, as having ‘adopted a deliberately reticent architectural approach to avoid [the] building competing with the BBC Regional Headquarters immediately to the north’.¹⁵³ It is similarly difficult to know to which BBC scheme Millar referred. The multidisciplinary practice Building Design Partnership (BDP) were appointed as architects and prepared a design that was included in Wilson & Womersley’s Education Precinct master plan (1967) [Figure 2.25].¹⁵⁴ It featured an upper floor that cantilevered over those below to form an exaggerated colonnade to Oxford Road, the underside of which was anticipated as the soffit of a first-floor pedestrian walkway, part of the vertically separated vision of the planners [Figure 2.26]. This building was not constructed and BDP eventually provided only mechanical engineering services to a design prepared by in-house BBC architect, R.A. Sparkes.

Figure 2.24 Photograph taken from between the National Computing Centre, Cruickshank & Seward, 1967–74 (left) and the BBC North headquarters, R.A. Sparkes, 1971–75 (right), looking across Oxford Road to the recently completed Phase II of the Municipal College of Technology (later Manchester Polytechnic), W.B. Heppell, City Architect, 1974.

Figure 2.25 Early drawings by BDP for the BBC North HQ. This scheme was incorporated into Wilson & Womersley’s proposals for the Education Precinct.

The twenty-storey tower [Figure 2.27] proposed by the UKAEA Architects’ Department, without a real programme or design brief, can be seen as satisfying the national ambition of Wilson and his pet project, Ministry of Technology, but also responding to the local prestige assigned to the site by the Corporation – the tower would have been the tallest building on Oxford Road, which was undergoing significant change at the time. It would have been a new symbol in a new district of new policy and signified the commitment of the government to new technology as well as the Corporation’s support for new industries in the knowledge and service sector, as manufacturing continued to shrink. Ultimately, though, the true forces of capital and the financial control exerted by the Treasury made short work of dismissing the proposals for a tower block largely due to the lack of certainty over the operational functions of the NCC.¹⁵⁵ The notion of a more substantial building on site, which would achieve the aims of politicians as well as the needs of the organisation, became drawn out.

Figure 2.26 Extract from the Education Precinct plan showing the interconnected upper-level pedestrian walkways in yellow.

Arguments persisted over the scale of the scheme and the accommodation required for the fledgling organisation, which struggled to justify its purpose. The Corporation pressed the NCC for resolution about when the headquarters would be built, but the rate and type of expansion of services and employees was never explicit and became the subject of extended correspondence between the Ministry of Technology and the Treasury.¹⁵⁶ Treasury officials questioned the logic of a building that appeared to be too big for its programme and were of the opinion that Manchester Corporation had put too much focus on ‘prestige’.¹⁵⁷ They wrote to the Ministry of Technology to warn them that the project was a ‘possible candidate for savings in 1968–69 and 1969–70’.¹⁵⁸ The building eventually delivered by C&S can be read with direct reference to these discussions and the anomalies between the figurative representation and actual programmatic requirements. The building had to be sufficiently substantial in its stature and appearance to fulfil the vision of a national flagship project, yet modest enough to avoid being a white elephant.

Figure 2.27 Model by BDP that included the UKAEA Architect’s proposal for a twenty-storey tower to house the NCC.

Exactly how C&S were appointed to design the NCC is subject to speculation. Harold Wilson visited Manchester in May 1967 to open Phase 1 of the NCC and Mancunian Way on the same day. He made a speech in the Renold Building at UMIST.¹⁵⁹ The Renold Building was the best of Arthur Gibbon’s work for C&S, had state of the art acoustics designed by Hope Bagenal and top quality Rank projectors. It was technologically superior to other spaces in Manchester and perfect for a piece of political propaganda about progress. If the directors of the NCC, including Peter Hall, had been asked for a recommendation for ‘an architect who can prepare a dazzling drawing as the backdrop to a speech by the PM’, they would most likely have pointed in the direction of C&S – Peter Hall was a friend of John Seward, and Bowden, who held his ministerial post in 1966, was effectively Arthur Gibbon’s main patron. C&S were considered a safe pair of hands by Ministry of Technology as they had plenty of public-sector experience in university projects.¹⁶⁰ Like the first building for the NCC, this scheme was also prepared hurriedly overnight by John Seward and Peter Sainsbury, architect and perspective artist. By all accounts the plans were retrospectively composed, by John Seward and Stan Barker, with reference to the watercolour painting [Figure 2.28].¹⁶¹

Figure 2.28 Perspective painting by Peter Sainsbury of the proposed NCC building, March 1967.

The NCC was never large enough to have filled the twenty-storey tower, but a building with some physical presence as a national centre was necessary. To the Ministry of Technology in 1967 ‘the NCC [was] an important element in the Government’s declared policy of seeking to promote a rapid increase in the use of computers’.¹⁶² In these terms two of the buildings’ formal characteristics begin to make sense – the plan and the inverted ziggurat section. In the earliest plans by C&S the cruciform geometry created a lateral extension to the site edges without making too much floor space [Figure 2.29]. The new building encompassed the original UKAEA grey box and its exterior was reclad with a dark brick to match the C&S scheme [Figure 2.30]. Most of the new ground floor comprised circulation or service space; the only real piece of programmed space was the lecture theatre. The scheme as built had a further wing to the NW corner which created an internal courtyard with a landscape plan by Derek Lovejoy and Partners [Figure 2.31]. The design of the building in section also helped the mass to overstate its presence. This formal gesture increased the footprint of the upper floors and created an exaggerated colonnade, similar to that proposed by BDP for the BBC next door. The inverted ziggurat form afforded the building an almost overbearing muscular stature that belied its spatial provision.

Figure 2.29 Early iteration of the ground-floor plan for the NCC, 1967. Mancunian Way would appear to the right of this sheet if included on the drawing. The discernibly separate section of the plan to the top right is the original UKAEA computer building.

The adjacent aerial motorway and emerging northern television headquarters meant that the scheme also had to assume a particular height for simple contextual massing – it could not really be any lower than either of these flanking edifices [Figure 2.32]. The cantilevered upper floors were a reaction to the Education Precinct master plan and would allow the insertion of first-floor walkways and connect to the planned wider pedestrian aerial domain. In formal terms the NCC building was a negotiation between central government objectives (intangible) and local government projects (tangible). It was also a piece of technopolitics, big enough for the site, big enough for the Corporation and big enough for the Ministry of Technology to appear credible as the building was finally completed in 1975, ten years after the NCC had been set up.

Figure 2.30 Photograph of model with SW aspect. The dark cuboid form is the original NCC building (spartan grey box). Not only is it flanked by the wings of the new scheme, but the stairwells also step out to further camouflage the rudimentary genesis of the institution.

The white tiled façade of the upper sections of the NCC made clear reference to computer-age motifs and futuristic aesthetics.¹⁶³ The neutrality of the grid could be seen as a visual tool to carry messages about societal freedoms and controls in other media – though this seems more relevant with historical distance than it probably did to the architects at the time. The grid also implied network and both network and control were in the minds of the Ministry of Technology as they conceived the NCC and sponsored the computer industry. The Ministry understood that one of the ‘social consequences’ of the computer would be ‘the much greater possibilities … for government surveillance of the individual’.¹⁶⁴ The use of white can be viewed in the context of C&S’s works, from the faience of the Ritz Ballroom (1928), through Arthur Gibbon’s use of Snowcrete in the 1960s and in John Seward’s palette for ICL (1969) and other commercial projects.

Figure 2.31 Landscape plan (redrawn by author).

Structurally, the NCC was conventional, formed from reinforced concrete. An orthogonal square grid extended across the entire ground plan and columns were spaced on the nodes of the grid as required. The logic extended to the hard landscaping – cobbled setts picked out the column line of the structure and extended this line from the face of the building to the back of the pavement where trees were planted in an aligned cluster [Figure 2.33]. To the north façade the car parking spaces were similarly picked out in cobbled setts and aligned with the columns. Much of the ground-floor plan was arranged using the same grid, though the upper floors were less rigidly organised and walls were mostly partitions. The only deviation from the square grid and 90 degree angles was the landscape plan for the internal courtyard that used diagonal geometry in contrast. The internal court was echoed by another internal water garden, above the lecture theatre. The courtyard was really the only spatially remarkable image that the building could project. Other than the lecture theatre, most other space was given to conventional office accommodation so the marketing brochures of the NCC prominently featured a photograph of employees enjoying the sunshine and water [Figure 2.34]. In this sense, the skin of the building was the branded identity of the NCC. Its drama was all on show and disguised a conventional interior – the logic of the grid aligned with this convention.

Figure 2.32 NCC under construction. The shadow of Mancunian Way fills the frame on the right. The left foreground is the edge of the John Dalton Building, and in the background is the BBC.

Figure 2.33 Hard landscape at the NCC.

Figure 2.34 Promotional brochure for the NCC.

In technopolitical terms, the NCC was a manifestation of central government policy. However, its location in Manchester was a product of regional structures. Whilst the majority of government buildings directly related to rearmament were built before 1960, here I have shown how interconnected civil and military R&D were centred in one region, through sites, personnel and organisations over more than a decade. The site itself was a piece of Manchester Corporation’s post-war jigsaw, requisitioned for national interests. Both the form and material of the building were influenced by interplay between national and local policy objectives and infrastructure. The orbit of agents and the orientation of their networks towards Manchester began in the TRE during the war. The NCC was given a home in Manchester because of the legacy of Turing, Williams, Newman and Kilburn that was, in turn, mythologised by Bowden, who perpetuated the idea of Manchester as the birthplace of the computer. If the building was a metaphor for the competencies and power of the Ministry of Technology and the rhetoric of White Heat, then its over-amplified physical stature would be hot air, the drawn-out process to completion would reflect the gestural nature of policy and the cloaking of the original building would be papering over the cracks. So, while the shining white form stood prominently against a new horizon and signified investment in technology, the long development of the institution, and the eventual construction of its headquarters, reveals an alternative picture of post-war architecture and its relation to policy and political objectives.

Computing, a conclusion

New technology in post-war Britain and the perceived explosion of modernity, in the form of motorways, nuclear power, urban renewal and computation, was not without its idiosyncratic conditions. The generally held expansionist view of the period does not always reveal the ad hoc, best-fit and ingenious approaches to activities like R&D amidst scarce material and capital resources. In this chapter, through the detailed examination of a series of interconnected sites and buildings, I have tried to address several key ideas and their impact upon the production of architecture. Primarily, the notion of a continuous state of preparedness for war has provided a context to explore issues attached to finance and procurement in relation to policy definition by central and local government.

This approach has also enabled an exploration of the relationship between military research and the civil applications of knowledge over three decades. The commission, design and construction of these buildings, all sponsored by central government, were not delivered under the direction of a particular political party – indeed, they survived the traditional cull of projects by successive incoming administrations. This serves to reinforce Edgerton’s premise of the Warfare State and the underlying interests in the continuing defence of Britain. It also points to political consensus towards infrastructural modernisation and the fact that Wilson’s government built on ideas and policy fostered by Macmillan and the Conservatives during the 1950s.¹⁶⁵ However, this book is concerned with the ways in which policy was interpreted, rather than the party political motivations that drove its definition. The regional networks of industry, knowledge and research that were created by, or grew from, conflict, influenced where development would take place. Local planning and administrative conditions impacted on the selection of particular sites and existing master plans informed spatial and material decisions. Vivian Bowden and Peter Hall had some association with each of the buildings discussed in this chapter and, whilst Bowden served as a minister in the Labour government and had a clear socialist agenda, his passion for technology and education were the main driving force behind his advice and intervention. The regional networks of people, policies and plans affected the form of the city and its buildings in very particular ways.

The regional scale helps to reveal latent contexts within which mainstream architecture can be considered. These contexts are invisible through conventional modes of measure, survey, observation and comparison. The form and material of the NCC offers the best example of this – its strongly gridded, shining white assembly is easily and conventionallyunderstood as a product of the twentieth century, with rationalist and sci-fi undertones. Describing its design, as related to the planning policy objectives of the local authority (its situation in the city) and as a response to central government agenda (its need to be significant), demonstrates how the regional scale reveals relationships between policy and form and the types of policy and interplay that an architect must negotiate. The clients were diverse in their composition of state, industry and academic representatives and each had their own influence at the various stages of procurement, design and construction. In all three cases, particularly that of the NCC, the needs of central government effectively overrode demands of the local authority. It could be argued that Ferranti, both at Wythenshawe and West Gorton, capitalised on prioritised governmental objectives and had as much influence as Whitehall in terms of the forces acting upon procurement, but that Manchester Corporation was a silent partner. In the final two chapters I explore the Development Plan and two of the central area CDAs – where the local authority exercised strong vision and influence in a period of rapid urban renewal. Before moving to the renewal of the central area, the following chapter addresses another CDA, a piece of linear city – the Higher Education Precinct.