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Cedric Price: From the‘Brain Drain’ to the‘Knowledge Economy’Stanley Mathews looks at Cedric Price’s Fun Palace and Potteries Thinkbeltas polemics addressing the changing economic and social character ofpostwar Britain moving into a period of deindustrialisation, with theexpansion of higher education, and the emergence of information technology.

Cedric Price, Fun Palace, 1964 Cedric Price and structural engineer Frank Newby designed a structural matrix withoverhead cranes to allow assembly of prefabricated modules.

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In his 1626 book New Atlantis, Sir Francis Bacon described amythical utopia, an ideal society of learning and scientificadvancement. The centrepiece of this New Atlantis was‘Salomon’s House’, which amounted to a technical collegededicated to scientific research into ‘the knowledge of causes,and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the boundsof human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.’1

There are striking similarities between Bacon’s New Atlantisand the late British architect Cedric Price’s Fun Palace andPotteries Thinkbelt. In their respective projects, both Bacon andPrice proposed new modes of knowledge and inquiry thatrejected established systems of education and thought. Bothmen confronted a crisis of knowledge at a time of paradigmshift. In Bacon’s time, this was England’s transition from amedieval worldview that revered received knowledge andancient authority, to an era of modern methods of scientificinquiry. For Price, it was an awareness of an epistemologicalshift from the structures and traditions of Britain of the FirstMachine Age to the postindustrial, postimperial era ofinformation technology and the knowledge economy.

In his 1964 Fun Palace and the 1967 Potteries Thinkbeltprojects, Price addressed what he perceived to be the new andrapidly changing conditions of knowledge and society inpostwar Britain. These were not proposals for buildings in anyconventional sense, but were instead impermanent,

improvisational and interactive systems, highly adaptableto the volatile social and economic conditions of their timeand place. At a time of uncertainty and instability, Price’swork reflects a new approach to architecture as a site ofchange and impermanence, rather than as permanent andmonumental symbols of cultural cohesion and consensus.

When Price first met avant-garde theatre producer JoanLittlewood in 1962, she described her ideas for a new kindof theatre. From her beginnings in working-class agit-propstreet theatre to her string of successes on the Londonstage with her Theatre Workshop, Littlewood had longedto create a theatre of pure performativity, a space ofcultural bricolage where people could experience thetranscendence and transformation of the theatre not asaudience, but as players themselves. Her innovative visionprovided the conceptual framework on which Price beganto design an interactive, performative architecture,endlessly adaptable to the varying needs and desires of theusers. Working in collaboration, Price and Littlewooddeveloped the Fun Palace as a ‘university of the streets’,2

providing educational opportunities in the guise of leisureentertainment in order to prepare society for the advent ofthe technological age. It was an improvisationalarchitecture endlessly in the process of construction,dismantling and reassembly.

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Price and avant-garde theatre producer Joan Littlewood conceived of the FunPalace as a ‘university of the streets’, combining entertainment and education.

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Cedric Price, InterAction Centre, Kentish Town, 1976Price’s InterAction Centre incorporated many of the concepts and features of theill-fated Fun Palace but on a much-reduced scale. It provided community servicesand creative outlets for local citizens until its demolition in 2003. In 1977, ReynerBanham noted Price’s influence on the design of the Centre Pompidou, writing:‘The concept of a stack of clear floors that can be adapted to a variety of culturaland recreational functions seems to recall the … Fun Palace of Cedric Price andJoan Littlewood, even if the project was never as radical as the floorless FunPalace, or as casually innovatory as Price’s InterAction Centre.’ 14

The working-class population of east London could usecranes and prefabricated modules to assemble learning andleisure environments, creating spaces where they mightescape everyday routine and embark on a journey of creativityand personal development. The ideas for the Fun Palace were,in many respects, similar to the ‘spontaneous university’ thatPrice and Littlewood’s mutual friend, the Scottish ‘Beat’ poetand situationist Alexander Trocchi, was also proposing at thesame time. Trocchi described his project as ‘a vital laboratoryfor the creation (and evaluation) of conscious situations … it isnot only the environment which is in question, plastic,subject to change, but people also.’3 It is clear that while Priceand Littlewood influenced Trocchi’s project, Trocchi’ssituationist ideas on creativity and improvisation also helpedto shape the developing Fun Palace.

Price and Littlewood enlisted a cadre of scientists,sociologists, artists, engineers and politicians, includingRichard Buckminster Fuller, Yehudi Menuhin, Gordon Paskand Tony Benn, to help with the Fun Palace. Their ambitiousgoal was to create an interactive environment, a new kind ofarchitecture, capable of altering its form to accommodate thechanging needs of the users. Using cybernetics and the latestcomputer technologies, Price hoped to create animprovisational architecture that would be capable oflearning, anticipating and adapting to the constantly evolving

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Cedric Price, Potteries Thinkbelt, regional site plan, 1966 The North Staffordshire Potteries were once a centre for the British ceramicsindustry and home to such famous names as Wedgwood, Spode and Minton.But by the 1960s they had fallen into ruin and rust, the victims of rising costsand foreign competition. Price proposed using the derelict rail network of the Potteries as the basic infrastructure for a new ‘educational industry’ toreplace the old manufacturing economy. More than a dozen small towns were incorporated into the Thinkbelt, which covered more than 260 squarekilometres (100 square miles). Price hoped that the Potteries Thinkbelt wouldhelp to reverse the tide of the Brain Drain and put the nation at the forefront of advanced technologies. (Colour keys added by the author for clarity.)

programme. An array of sensors and inputs would providereal-time feedback on use and occupancy to computers thatwould allocate and alter spaces and resources according toprojected needs.

A site was chosen for the Fun Palace, on the banks of theLea River in London’s East End. However, after years ofdevelopment and design, construction was blocked by mid-level bureaucrats in the Newham planning office. Price andLittlewood struggled to overcome bureaucratic opposition to the Fun Palace until 1975, when Price declared the then 10-year-old project obsolete. However, the failure of the FunPalace was not the end of Price’s attempts to realise aninteractive and improvisational architecture. In 1976, he builta greatly reduced version of the Fun Palace in Kentish Town.Known as the InterAction Centre, this design incorporatedmany of the features and innovations of the Fun Palace,though on a smaller scale. It resembled a ‘bargain basement’version of Centre Pompidou and, along with the Fun Palace,influenced Richard Roger’s designs.

Even before the final demise of the Fun Palace, Price hadbegun work on an even more vast and far-sighted project. His 1966 Potteries Thinkbelt was a plan to convert a region ofthe UK’s once-thriving industrial heartland into a 260-square-kilometre (100-square-mile) think tank, recuperating derelictindustrial sites and railways as the basic infrastructure for a

Price proposed using the derelict rail network of the Potteries as the basic infrastructure for a new ‘educationalindustry’ to replace the old manufacturingeconomy

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new ‘educational industry’, in part to stem the tide of theBrain Drain.

Like many industries in England, the coal and ceramicsindustries of North Staffordshire had fallen on hard timesafter the Second World War and, by the 1960s, the Potterieswas a ruined industrial landscape. The conditions wererepeated in scores of industrial centres throughout the UK, andas early as 1960 the situation had become so alarming thatLabour MP Anthony Crosland publicly complained to theHouse of Commons: ‘Our production and export performanceis almost the poorest of any advanced industrial country …much of our technical education [is] equally backward. Wecling to every outmoded scrap of national sovereignty,continue to play the obsolete role of an imperial power, andfail to adjust to the new dynamic Europe.’4

Price sought to re-establish the North StaffordshirePotteries as a centre of science and emerging technologies,much as they had been during the Industrial Revolution. Heenvisioned his Potteries Thinkbelt as a wholesale conversionof England’s rusting industrial infrastructure into a new‘industry’ of technical education and scientific research,focusing on practical applications.

Mike Webb, Sin Centre, London,proposed section, 1959 to 1961The only contemporary project thatcame close to the spirit of Price’swork was Webb’s Sin Centre, aninnovative entertainment centre for thesite of the Empire Theatre in LeicesterSquare, London. Pedestrian andvehicle circulation were broughttogether along spiralling ramps, andmost of the structure was wrapped ina tensile skin of plastic and steelcables. Although the Sin Centrepredates the Fun Palace, Webb doubtsthat his ideas had any significantimpact on Price’s designs for thatproject.

A 1964 article from the Times Educational Supplement,entitled ‘Noddyland Atmosphere?’, quoted Price as saying thatBritish universities were out of touch with current social,economic and scientific conditions.5 He avoided referring tohis Thinkbelt project as a ‘university’ because he disliked theupper-class connotations of the word, and complained thatEnglish universities were little more than ‘medieval castleswith power points, located in gentlemanly seclusion’.6 In 1966,Price wrote that ‘further education and re-education must beviewed as a major industrial undertaking and not as a servicerun by gentlemen for the few’.7

Despite the promises of postwar educational reform byboth the Labour and Conservative governments, British highereducation in the postwar years was still largely associatedwith prestige, high social status and the classics, lagging farbehind western Europe and the US in research opportunitiesand technical training.8

Even in the new ‘redbrick’ universities that sprang upacross the UK in the postwar years, pure science andtheoretical research were privileged over technical educationand applied science. A mandate for new universities to boosteconomic development failed to produce any significanteconomic improvement, for while educational authoritiesacknowledged a correlation between education and nationaleconomic development, they remained oddly sceptical aboutthe relevance of technical and scientific education toindustrial progress.9 In a 1965 House of Lords debate on thelack of technical education, Lord Aberdare complained: ‘I havea feeling that the universities … are still inclined to give greaterimportance to the arts than to the sciences, and to the academicthan to the technological. There still exists a kind of intellectualsnobbery that pays greater respect to the man who misquotesHorace than the man who can repair his own car.10

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Notes1. Sir Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis, 1626.2. Joan Littlewood, ‘A laboratory of fun’,New Scientist, 14 May 1964, pp 432–3.3. Alexander Trocchi, ‘A revolutionaryproposal: Invisible insurrection of amillion minds’, first published as‘Technique du coupe du monde’,Internationale Situationniste 8, January 1963.4. Anthony Crosland, ‘Encounter’,October 1960, quoted in ChristopherBooker, The Neophiliacs: A Study of theRevolution in English Life in the Fiftiesand Sixties, Collins (London), 1969, p 153.5. Peter Laslett and Cedric Price,‘Noddyland Atmosphere?’, TimesEducational Supplement, 29 May 1964,Potteries Thinkbelt document folioDR1995:0216:400, Cedric PriceArchives, Canadian Centre forArchitecture, Montreal.6. Cedric Price, ‘Life conditioning’,Architectural Design 36, October 1966,p 483.7. Cedric Price, ‘Potteries Thinkbelt: Aplan for an advanced educationalindustry in North Staffordshire’,Architectural Design op cit, pp 484–97.8. Michael Sanderson, Education andEconomic Decline in Britain, 1870s to

the 1990s, Cambridge University Press(Cambridge), 1999, p 81.9. Martin Weiner, English Culture andthe Decline of the Industrial Spirit,1850–1980, Cambridge UniversityPress (New York), 1982.10. Lord Aberdare, ‘Response to LordRobbins’ Statements on HigherEducation’, Parliamentary Debates,House of Lords Official Report 270:12,HMSO (London), Wednesday, 1December 1965), col 1281, Fun Palacedocument folio MS1995:0188, CedricPrice Archives, Canadian Centre forArchitecture, Montreal.11. Cedric Price, ‘Potteries Thinkbelt’(unpublished manuscript), February1966, p 2, Potteries Thinkbeltdocument folio DR1995:0216:400,Cedric Price Archives, Canadian Centrefor Architecture, Montreal.12. Cedric Price, ‘Potteries Thinkbelt: A plan for an advanced educationalindustry in North Staffordshire’,Architectural Design op cit, p 484.13. Cedric Price, ‘10.3 Housing Areas:Unit Provision’, in ‘Potteries Thinkbelt’(unpublished manuscript), op cit.14. Reyner Banham, ‘Centre Pompidou’,Architectural Review 161, May 1977, pp 270–94.

Price coined the neologism ‘thinkbelt’ to describe theeducational orientation as well as the regional scale of hisproject, describing it as ‘a kind of cross between Berkeley inCalifornia and a College of Advanced Technology’, for 20,000students.11 He hoped that his Potteries Thinkbelt would help tobreak down the traditional wall between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’science and technology, lure scientists and technologists backto the UK, and help to put the nation at the forefront ofadvanced technologies.12

His plan for the Potteries Thinkbelt was to utilise theabandoned rail network of the Potteries as the infrastructureof his new think tank. Using the technologies ofprefabrication and containerised shipping, he designedmobile, rail-mounted classrooms, computer and data storagemodules, laboratories, and lecture and demonstration halls,which would shunt constantly from place to place along therefurbished railway lines.

At three locations, Price designed large transfer stationswhere the mobile modules could be assembled and movedusing enormous gantry cranes. He also designed 19 immensehousing complexes using four types of prefabricated, modularhousing units: ‘capsule’, ‘sprawl’, ‘crate’ and ‘battery’.

In all, there were to be 32,000 living units.13 Like themobile teaching units, the housing modules could be movedaround and rearranged by cranes and rail as the programmechanged over time. Students could leave their homes in themorning, board the mobile classrooms, and learn whiletheir classroom moved along the Potteries Thinkbelt railcircuit, from a demonstration laboratory, to a modelfactory, to an experimental station, returning back to theirmodular homes at the end of the day. Price’s plan definedan interactive network of static and mobile structures,inspired and controlled by emergent computer andinformation technologies on which new social, economicand industrial patterns might develop. The mobile learningunits were like information quanta, the switches andtransfer stations like the logical gateways of a vastcomputer circuit. The Potteries Thinkbelt defined a newkind of architectural monumentality, not of large object-buildings, but as a vast and dispersed field of discreteobjects and disparate events.

In the Potteries Thinkbelt, Price enlarged on theimprovisational, adaptable model of architecture he hadfirst explored in the Fun Palace to create a landscape ofconstant change and activity, more like an electronic circuitthan a static building. His redeployment of the ruinedindustrial landscape of the Potteries was a microcosm of hisvision for architecture and for the future of the UK (a radicaldeparture from the stolid monuments of traditionaluniversities or the new redbrick schools), offering newmodels of economic, educational and social developmentwithin an active architectural matrix far more extensivethan that of the Fun Palace.

Like the Fun Palace, the Potteries Thinkbelt was neverrealised. Price had never identified a client for it, and hisproposal failed to attract much more than bemused interest.

The technical complexity of the project seemed too far-fetched to a public and a government unfamiliar withcomputers and advanced technology. Moreover, many of thegovernment officials who might have been interested inPrice’s novel educational ideas were otherwise occupied withthe development of the fledgling Open University.

Price recognised that the UK was in an irreversible cycle ofdeindustrialisation and, in order to remain competitive in anincreasingly technological world, nothing less than a completereorientation of the British system of higher educationtowards science and information technology would berequired. Yet he also realised that the mercurial conditions ofthe postwar years required a new impermanent and agilearchitecture, capable not only of adapting to inevitablechange, but of encouraging and advancing socialtransformation. Price’s radical redefinition of architecture hasinfluenced architects since the early 1960s, when he took onthe role of avuncular guru to the young members ofArchigram. In the Fun Palace and Potteries Thinkbelt, Priceemerged as one of the first architects to develop innovativearchitectural responses to the new social and economicconditions of postwar Britain. 4

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