INTRODUCTION

ON A BITTERLY COLD DAY IN MARCH 1931, THREE travellers left the railway station in the provincial German town of Dessau, in the Free State of Anhalt. Dressed in long, dark overcoats and trilby hats, they made their way along a short street of 19th-century wooden-framed houses, bracing themselves against the biting wind. Turning a corner, they stopped in their tracks. Before them lay the Bauhaus, the revolutionary school of art, architecture and design founded by Walter Gropius. They gazed at the complex of stark, geometric buildings, linked by an aerial glass bridge. It was a powerful vision of the future.1

One of the three, the English entrepreneur Jack Pritchard, reached for his cine-camera. Sensing this was a moment for posterity, he filmed his friends, architects Wells Coates and Serge Chermayeff, as they strode ahead of him towards the Bauhaus. Then through the camera’s lens, he avidly devoured the buildings’ architectural details, sweeping back and forth across the vast glass curtain wall, cantilevered steel-framed balconies, flat roofs and grey and white concrete facades. The shots were unsteady, as his hands shook with excitement. The school building, which had only opened just five years earlier in 1926, was now virtually deserted, under threat of imminent closure by the local Nazi party. In the Director’s office they were told that ‘Dr Gropius was no longer there, in fact no-one was there.’2 Disappointed, but ‘greatly impressed with the building as a building’, the trio explored the site, peering into empty workshops, classrooms, theatre, offices, student apartments and refectory, absorbing everything, including the radical serif-free font of the typography proudly proclaiming the art school’s name:

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As snow began to fall, the men made the short journey to the nearby suburb of Törten. They wandered through the streets of small, low-cost, prefabricated houses that Walter Gropius had designed for industrial workers, leaving tracks of dark footprints in the gathering white.

Years later Pritchard recalled the significance of the visit: ‘It had a very powerful impact on me. I did not know it then, but both the Bauhaus and Walter Gropius were to have an enormous influence on much of my future.’3

In fact, the Bauhaus, its ideas and protagonists would influence not just Pritchard’s life, but also play a key role in the story of 20th-century design and architecture – in Britain and across the globe. Pritchard’s cine footage, rediscovered in 2016, contains some of the earliest-known moving images of the art school, and was certainly the first to be brought back to Britain. It represents the beginning of an important dialogue between the ideas of the Bauhaus Masters and a group of pioneers of British Modernism, which will form the narrative of this book.

Founding members of the British Twentieth Century Group, Pritchard, Canadian Coates and Russian-born Chermayeff were part of a small, but growing band of individuals in Britain embracing the new architecture at the start of the 1930s. The movement was already well established in continental Europe – particularly in France, the Netherlands and Germany, where the Weimar government had been swift to realize the economic imperative of marrying art and industry.

The three men had travelled from London to Stuttgart on the Orient Express, ostensibly on a business trip, but the journey became something of an architectural pilgrimage, taking in many of Germany’s new modern developments – department stores, factories, private houses and residential estates.4 In Stuttgart they toured the experimental 1927 Weissenhof Estate, the work of 17 architects and a showca