The Noisy Landscape – Modernism at Heathrow

This is the story of a prize-winning modernist school and its early demise, and entangled with this is a larger story about the landscape in and around Heathrow airport, about the local versus the global, and about noise and its tolerance (perhaps also about ‘affordance’). The school in question – Woodfield County Secondary Modern – was one of the first secondary modern schools built under the dispensation of the 1944 Education Act, and its architect (Denis Clarke Hall) attempted to combine some of the ideals of continental modernist schools with forms suitable to the idea of a vocational technical education.  The paper offers an analysis of the particular conditions and ideals that shaped the school and how they immediately came into conflict with the school’s environmental conditions, particularly the noise pollution of its site; such was the conflict, in fact, that within fifteen years the school was abandoned and demolished. The paper asks, how were ordinary local needs like housing and schooling reconciled, or not, with the imperatives of a facility like an international airport with its apparently superordinate claims to make or maintain London’s global status (in the face, for instance, of imperial decline)? How, more specifically, was aircraft noise to be mitigated, how was it even to be measured in its effects? How far was noise ‘annoyance’ a cultural or learnt matter, and what might this mean not only for the skins of buildings but to the forms of life that they contained?


Mark Crinson is Emeritus Professor of Architectural History at Birkbeck, University of London. He was Vice-President and President of the European Architectural History Network (2016-2020), and he is a Fellow of the British Academy. His books include Shock City: Image and Architecture in Industrial Manchester (2022), Rebuilding Babel: Modern Architecture and Internationalism (2017), The Architecture of Art History – A Historiography (2019, co-authored with Richard J. Williams), and Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (2003, re-issued 2019). He is currently researching a Leverhulme-funded book, Heathrow’s Genius Loci.  

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