The Ugly Beautiful

London’s Love-Hate Affair with Brutalism

Imagine you’re standing on the South Bank on a grey Tuesday morning, which is, let’s be honest, the most London of all possible mornings. The Thames is doing its usual thing: wide, brown, entirely unbothered. Behind you, the city is waking up: coffee cups, lanyards, the smell of Central Line. And then you turn around, and there it is. Looming over you, magnificent and slightly threatening, like a concrete cliff face that has somehow decided to become a theatre. The National Theatre. All horizontal slabs and jutting terraces, its raw concrete walls still bearing the grain of the Douglas fir planks used to cast them back in 1976. It looks, famously, like a nuclear power station. At least according to Prince Charles, who said exactly that in 1988. And yet here you are, staring up at it, and you cannot look away.

That is the thing about brutalism. It is not supposed to be pretty. Pretty is not what it was going for. It was going for something harder, stranger, more honest than pretty. And whether you love it or loathe it, London without its brutalist buildings would be a city missing something essential about itself.

Where It Came From: Rubble, Optimism, and a Lot of Concrete

To understand why London went brutalist, you have to understand what London looked like in 1945. The answer, across a horrifying number of square miles, is: flat.