In Praise of Savagery Read Online Free Page A

getting down to their work.
    In 1933, at the age of twenty-three and not long down from Oxford, Wilfred Thesiger made a decision.
    ‘I will bloody well go and do it myself,’ he said.

Harlow New Town

    It was, as houses on the outskirts of Harlow New Town go, a fairly normal one.
    It was semi-detached, and vaguely modern in style; or what would have been considered modern sometime in the mid-1960s, when it was built. It had large double-glazed picture windows with brown frames, and a bit of dark vertical wood-cladding in some parts and off-white render in others, and it sat in a row of houses that were identical—or that would have been identical at one time, before the replacement-window and flat-roof-extension salesmen came around. Also the stone-cladding salesmen, for one of the houses nearby had pinkish and yellowish crazy-paving up its walls, for reasons best known to its owner, and also to the owners of other similar houses I had passed on the way. It was in a cul-de-sac, the house, a cul-de-sac with only half a name. I say half a name, but it was a whole name—‘Winchester’ or ‘Gatefield’ or something—but it was a name without a description—it wasn’t Winchester
Road
or Gatefield
Close
or whatever—it was just what it was without the attachment. Things were like that, round that way, when they built Harlow New Town. It was a time when people knew better, you see.
    The end of the Second World War—the cities bombed to smithereens, the population subsisting on powdered egg and dripping, the biggest and most powerful empire the world had ever known vanishing—
poof!
—just like that, gone in a puff of smoke, like a magician’s party-trick. It was plain that the old ways of doing things were worn out, and that they no longer applied in the modern age.
    Road-names were part of it. For centuries, as long as roads had been around, they’d always been called Something Road, and Streets called Something Street, and so on and so forth; but no one, apparently, had ever thought to ask why. This, it was felt, would no longer do. There had been too much unnecessary adornment and frippery for far too long, the thinking went, and it was about time people started behaving rationally.
    And so, in 1947, when the planners got down to work on Harlow New Town, roads called roads and streets called streets were to become things of the past. Henceforth, they would just have the functional part of the name, without the redundant descriptor (‘Yes, I can see that it’s a bloody road—you don’t have to tell me that!’).
    And then there was the Town Centre itself, which was to be truly a Town Centre for the coming age. Because old-style town centres, in the pre-war world, had just happened—they’d grown up higgledy-piggledy over God knows how long, around lanes and alleyways, and were messy and crowded at the best of times; and when there were cars and delivery vans to add to the equation, they really just didn’t work any more.
    It was now time to go back to the drawing-board and plan the whole thing properly, from scratch.
    So Harlow New Town got an urban ring-road, for the traffic to go around, and it got the country’s first-ever pedestrian shopping precinct, all planned out by modern planners and designedby modern architects and built—well, probably still built by blokes in flat caps and donkey-jackets with packets of Woodbines in their pockets, but at least they did it using the latest reinforced concrete this time, and put raised walkways all over the place and flat roofs throughout. Which leaked, the roofs—but this was considered a small price to pay for what was manifestly a work of progress. In the words of the great American modernist Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘If the roof doesn’t leak, the architect hasn’t been creative enough.’ Or, as he put it, rather more bluntly, to clients who had the temerity to complain about their leaks, ‘That’s how you can tell it’s a roof.’
    In 1951 Harlow got