This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
In 1941, the publisher Collins launched what Owen Hatherley calls a “paroxysm of island backslapping”. This was Britain in Pictures, a government-backed series of morale-boosting books with volumes on ships, clocks, cricket and statesmen. Though many well-known writers contributed, it was “at every level except for the texts an entirely Central European endeavour”.
This is just a tiny example of how Britain was “transformed” by the artists, architects, publishers, planners, designers and filmmakers who fled Central and Eastern Europe during the 1930s. They introduced and developed elements of what can loosely be described as “Weimar culture”, illuminated fresh parts of the national landscape and challenged many cherished myths.
For example, there had been few examples of the International Style in Britain until, claims Hatherley, émigrés such as Ernó Goldfinger and Berthold Lubetkin helped turn it into “one of the world centres of modern architecture, which it has largely remained ever since”.
The book’s first section considers photography and cinema. Magazines such as Picture Post (1938–57) introduced modern photojournalism to this country. But although it “specialised in eccentric Englishness, in observations of all that was ‘typically’ British”, its photographers were mainly German, Austrian and Hungarian. Similarly, it was the Hungarian-born Alexander Korda who directed The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), in which Charles Laughton pioneered the still prevalent image of the Tudor monarch as “a sort of Falstaff turned king”.
After surveying the work of Powell and Pressburger, the book moves on to the Free Cinema movement (or British New Wave), in which my father Karel Reisz was a leading figure. It is central to the power and originality of his documentaries and feature films such as Sunday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), Hatherley argues, that he approached England as an outsider who “lacked the belief that there is a done thing, that there is a conventional way of representing British life, which you stray from at your peril”.
Hatherley declares himself to be “a sentimental English socialist” and starts the book at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, “the most prominent building of the National Health Service”. Though this faces the Houses of Parliament, it refuses to be overawed by them and is designed, largely by Eugene Rosenberg, in the uncompromising “classical modernist” style he had used in his famous Palace of Pensions in Prague.
Two of the four ghostwriters for the Beveridge Report were Central European émigrés, and Hatherley celebrates the fact that the generation he surveys was largely committed to “a serious popular press”, “mass-market publishing as an educational endeavour” and “a welfare state, whether left-liberal or socialist in hue” — all things he believes have since been subjected to “45 years of assault” by British governments and media.
This is particularly relevant to the longest section of the book, “A Refuge Rebuilt”, which notes how émigrés were very prominent in “British planning departments between the 1940s and the 1970s”, but also figured in the “counter-movement … which stands against ‘planning’ in toto … by the end of the 1970s, it was these dissenting voices [such as Friedrich Hayek’s] that had the ear of those in power”. There is no doubt which side the author is on.
Whatever one thinks of his perspective, it is hard not to be dazzled by Hatherley’s extraordinarily capacious book. Research has taken him all around “this divided, sickly, unfair, unhappy island”, and he enthusiastically surveys a remarkable range of public sculptures, municipal murals, apartment blocks and idealistic housing estates.
He makes the intriguing suggestion that much of “the most impressive artistic response [to the Holocaust] in public art” can be found in churches and resurrects some impressive work which has been largely neglected due to dwindling congregations. I don’t totally agree with his view of my father’s films (and would dispute some minor factual details), but his responses always feel stimulating, generous and first-hand.
Particularly impressive is the section subtitled “Central Europeans Redesign the British Book”. This might sound like a specialist topic, yet for several decades “the bookshelves of the average political activist, mature student, trade unionist, art student or art-gallery goer” were dominated by titles with “a certain look”. Houses such as Thames & Hudson were founded by émigrés, whilst designers such as Jan Tschichold at Penguin and Berthold Wolpe at Faber created a distinctive aesthetic.
This book urges us to remember and celebrate their profound impact on “popular education in Britain, taking a country that had been conservative in both aesthetics and politics and seducing it with serious ideas through beautiful design”.
