Vandalism
Vandalism brings the town a certain amount of publicity—it is a favourite subject for visiting louthalists and television producers—but it is played down by the Corporation staff, who be- lieve that publicity aggravates it. Their policy is to put the damage right as quickly as possible and assume that it will not occur again. Some- times the Corporation go so far as to suggest that an act of vandalism is their own fault, because they have not protected young trees or shrubs adequately, or not helped people to feel that everything in the town is theirs. Gibberd,
who has carried out a good deal of development work at Hackney, compares Harlow favourably with it in this respect. 'At Hackney if .I had tubs of flowers in the open they'd be gone in half an hour. At Harlow they're rarely touched. Yet the people are the same.' (This is true; many of Harlow's inhabitants come from Hackney.) Gibberd attributes this to the educative effect of good building and landscape. Sylvia Crowe, the landscape consultant, goes further. 'It's important to get a house and a street looking decent before people come and live in it. If you simply stick them down in a sea of mud, they feel that nobody cares about them, and they don't care what happens to it. On the other hand, if you have it all looking nice by the time they arrive, nothing is too much trouble for them.'
Nevertheless, in a town with so many small children a good deal of damage occurs. I noticed huge holes under the paving-stones when walking down a residential street with the General Mana- ger of the Corporation.
'They've been burrowing again,' he said, fiercely eyeing toddlers who had been carrying out mole-like activities with the help of plastic spades. But he went on to say that nothing done by children under seven really counted as vandalism—it was sheer childishness in their case.
Harlow has some fine pieces of sculpture, col- lected by the Harlow Arts Trust and magnifi- cently mounted on open-air sites. These pieces, though more or less intact, have had a hazard- ous history, due rather to childish high spirits than to the kind of idiocy which used to make adults tar and feather Rima. Family Group— Henry Moore's statue at Harlow—is a favourite scrambling ground for small children, presum- ably by design, since it was a commissioned job and the sculptor knew what his work was in for. Indeed, he was warned not to leave any holes in which small boys might get their heads stuck. Barbara Hepworth's Contrapuntal Forms, which Harlow won in a raffle after the Festival of Britain, caused a good deal of ribald comment at first, but there was considerable local oppo- sition when the Corporation suggested changing the site. People could not be brought to say that they liked it, but claimed they had 'got used to it.'
People in Harlow are quick to tell you what the town lacks. 'We want,' they say, 'a decent
Architecture as a background to a Market.
dance-hall, a Marks and Spencer's, a C & A. and a good bus service.' As a visitor to the town / wanted, but could not find, a hotel in the town centre, and somewhere to dine. Pubs and collco bars are the only places in the centre of the town where one can eat and drink with one's friends after dark. This adds to the spartan air of the town, a combination of high thinking and simple living which has an almost Marxist a:r. But elegance and frivolity can only appear in Harlow when public demand produces them.
The landlord of 'The Chequers,' the old pub at Commonside, remarks that people's taste for social life is declining. 'You don't get the people who'll sit down for a quiet game of crib or dominoes like you used to. lust one drink now and they're off out. Or they buy beer to take home and drink by the telly. Our old customers used to come for the evening to meet their friends.'
The real success or failure of the town, people say, will appear in November when it is seen how many decide to make daily use of the new electric railway to London. When it is possible to travel to London in thirty-five minutes, how many will decide to commute daily, and help to turn Har- low into yet another dormitory town? Some Harlow citizens accuse the Corporation of having held up the electrification unnecessarily, just to prevent this happening.
'An open prison, that's what Harlow is,' one man said to me. 'The Corporation want you to eat, sleep, live and die here. One of them the other day said they didn't want to improve the rail communication to Bishop's Stortford, be- cause that would encourage people to shop out- side the town. It's all right for him. He just nips into his car and goes up to town, but people like us who can't afford a car are just stuck here.'
Members of the Corporation staff have had to stand up to a constant battering df criticism, argument and comment from the Harlow people, and in view of the great power and responsibility placed in their hands this was an excellent thing. Their attitude to the town seemed to me a kindly and a paternalistic one, and from the General Manager down to the secretaries in the office everyone talked with intense idealism about the town. I expected at first that after a number of interviews and drinks, lunches and casual social meetings with members of the Corporation staff, I should see the mask slip, and beneath it a condescension for the 'masses' of Harlow, and a tendency to talk about 'them.' This never hap- pened.
Probably what does most to distinguish Har- low from ordinary towns is its self-consciousness. Its inhabitants are submitted to an endless stream of visits from Royalty, politicians, foreign diplo- mats, television producers, journalists, social workers, architects, engineers, students and people who are merely curious. The plant has now been pulled up so many times to have its roots examined that one fears for its growth; the people who live in Harlow are so used to being asked intimate questions about their lives that they have the answers out almost before one has asked them. Its General Manager complains wistfully that the place has become a laboratory 'in which everything and everyone exists to be analysed and reported upon. The time has come,' he continues, 'for Harlow to be thought of as just another town.'
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