There are two free exhibitions on in public spaces in London at the moment that act as untimely reminders of a meeting between architecture, politics, and socialism in the recent past. Both How We Live Now, on the feminist socialist architecture collective Matrix, in the foyers of the Barbican Centre, and an exhibition of the pages of the GLC People’s Plan for the Royal Docks outside Pontoon Dock DLR station, part of Jessie Brennan’s project Making Space, document something called the New Architecture Movement, which emerged in the ’70s, thrived in the early ’80s, and disappeared apparently without trace in the first half of the ’90s.

The ‘NAM’ had the support of grassroots groups, left-wing Labour councils, and scores of activists, and aimed not only to provide an alternative to the neoliberal redevelopment programmes that kicked in during the Thatcher years, but also to the high modernist planning it replaced. The resurgence of interest, after years of cynicism, in the problems of socialism and liberation are obviously behind the newfound interest in NAM; but how do their ideas stand up today?

What one notices pretty quickly in both exhibitions is the harshly critical attitude towards post-1945 social democratic planning. This might be a surprise for enthusiasts of the modernist social housing of that era, especially given that nothing better has been built for ordinary people in Britain since then – but it was commonplace in the London New Left to reject these places almost as firmly as the luxury flats and suburban villas that replaced them. They argued instead for, shall we say, a Third Way – ‘Neither Barratt Homes nor Le Corbusier’ could have been a slogan. Sometimes, the results were pretty dull – cul-de-sacs of little semis with streets named after radical heroes would not have been an atypical project. But there’s surprises here too, and many insights that have been forgotten.

The People’s Plan for the Royal Docks might be the best known of the London New Left’s forays into planning and architecture. Those who know London’s history know what it was aimed against – the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC), an unelected quango designed by the Tory government to take swathes of the ‘loony left’ east and south-east London boroughs out of the control of their elected local authorities; it tore up planning regulations and succeeded in building a hugely successful extension of London’s financial district around Canary Wharf on the Isle of Dogs, and, less famously, a lot of very suburban housing schemes, big boxes like the ExCel centre, and malls like the one in Surrey Quays – American-style, car-centred suburbanism, though leavened a little by the public Docklands Light Railway. What did the GLC, then in the hands of the radical left, and the many activist groups working with it propose instead?

Of course, there was a lot on opposing the City Airport which so totally disfigures the area today, but most of it is based on a positive programme. It advocated building new, low-rise housing around the vast Royal Docks in the London Borough of Newham (and bent the truth a little about how it was Newham came to have so many council high-rises, claiming as was then commonly believed that they were a form of housing middle-class people would never live in – Hampstead, it tells you, has only five tower blocks, and Newham has 107; but of course Hampstead was in the borough of Camden, which had dozens!). It demanded more security for existing flats, more disabled access, and a new park (all of which happened, the latter in the form of by far the best LDDC project in the area, the lovely Barrier Park), but also youth centres, a community-owned theatre and nightclub, and a black women’s centre in North Woolwich (which didn’t).

But the crux of it was an argument not over aesthetics or space as such, but over economic development. Rather than being driven by finance capitalism, aviation, and property development, it imagined the future of the Royals being driven by industrial co-operatives controlled by their workers, doing things such as boat repair, building sound systems, ‘electronic aids’ for the elderly, and making ‘crafts’, all subject to the direct control of local residents.

If some of the specifics on buildings and planning seem dated, these parts on democratic control and industrial strategy are strikingly current – none of it would have been out of place in the 2019 Labour manifesto, unsurprisingly given the leading role of John McDonnell in both the GLC and the 2015-19 Labour Party. And the failure of both is all around you when you go to the exhibition. Brennan has simply printed the pages of the Plan out in poster size, and posted them up on a substation outside the DLR station, so you just get the content, and nothing else, which makes the contrast with the reality, always in your frame of vision, very stark.

To your east are the terraces and towers of North Woolwich, a still very impoverished area, with a tall concrete ‘Berlin Wall’ screening off the Crossrail line running through it (now with a very mordant artwork of local opinions on the area running across it, by Sonia Boyce), the sprawling, still working Tate and Lyle factory, and remarkably few public amenities for inner London (the original Tate Institute, for the factory’s workers, has been derelict for decades, while its later cousins have become a multi-million pound tourist draw). To your west is ‘Royal Wharf’, a private development of luxury high-rises (it turns out the middle classes liked towers after all) with streets named after great colonial explorers, based around privately patrolled public spaces. The river is almost blocked off by these. ‘Water, water everywhere, and none of it for us’, went one of the ‘People’s Plan’s slogans, and that’s still true for the people of Silvertown and North Woolwich. Nothing much has ‘trickled down’ to them.

The Matrix exhibition focuses on an offshoot of the NAM – the explicitly feminist and socialist architectural collective that thrived for a time in the ’80s and early ’90s. Their built work has been noticed by a new generation of radical architects. Matrix’s Jagonari Bangladeshi women’s centre in Whitechapel, created through close collaboration with the building’s users, as shown here by a wonderful scale model of its various rooms and functions, has been showcased in the Open House festival in recent years, though this didn’t stop it finally closing last year from lack of funding. The exhibition takes a more general look at the group and the milieu they came out of. In designers Edit Collective’s spaces, an intimate series of wooden enclosures features several short films playing, tables strewn with magazines and pamphlets, and a couple of models and plans, all in the vast concrete foyers of the Barbican.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of attention devoted to the exhibition has centred on its specifically feminist points – the way in which cities have been designed by and for men, and specifically men in cars, with little attention to a largely female pedestrian population pushing prams and dragging bags of groceries up and down stairs to underpasses and along dark alleyways, which is the specific focus of Heather Powell’s film on Birmingham, Paradise Circus. This is all predicated not so much on what was wrong with new housing in planning in the ’80s, but what was left by the ’50s and ’60s. The 1980s was an era in which the issue wasn’t so much ours of the absence of public housing, and the outrageous unaffordability of private, but rather how to make what was built by the mass construction of the immediately prior era into something more humane and more responsive to residents’ wishes and needs. One could perhaps argue this was a nicer problem to have, but it was at the time a serious enough issue.

They were often right, and many of these insights would become urbanist common sense in the ’90s, when much of this generation went into the New Labour establishment, though it is hard to say that the rebuilt Bull Ring is any less obnoxious and hostile because it lacks underpasses and walkways. Yet, peruse the pamphlets here and you’ll find a lot that wasn’t assimilated into the Blairite urban growth coalition. The booklets of the Women’s Design Service, on public toilets—now an endangered typology—and on women’s safety on housing estates, are cases in point.

In the latter, Vron Ware points out how much the 80s’ discourse on ‘defensible space’ in housing estates was paranoid and racist, and resulted in cosmetic, photogenic rebuilding projects with little long-term positive effect. Next to that booklet is Ayo Akingbade’s brilliant film Street 66, on Dora Boatemah, and her role in the rehabilitation without demolition or ‘decanting’ of the Angell Town estate in Brixton; this shows the best of Matrix, a sense that problems could be solved through democracy and activism, not through the benevolence of bureaucrats, developers, or regeneration agencies. Vron Ware was one of a few unexpectedly familiar names in the exhibition – in the list of Matrix members and collaborators I spotted one architectural historian who I knew from campaigns to save the Elephant and Castle shopping centre and the Aylesbury Estate, and an official in my CLP who had been suspended for a motion supporting Jeremy Corbyn, who was a major NAM supporter in the ’80s. You’ll also find, as the author of a Matrix-aligned pamphlet on Diversity, a future president of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

The exhibition’s setting in the Barbican is incongruous, but not quite in the same grim, ‘we have lost and lost and lost’ sense as the People’s Plan exhibit in the Royal Docks. It’s strange nonetheless to see it in what is, with most of central Birmingham levelled, now probably the biggest multi-level modernist space left in the country. What Matrix would have made of it in the ’80s is hard to imagine, but I doubt it would have been complimentary. Yet, its public areas are today clearly successful and even, to use the current parlance, ‘inclusive’ spaces – on the day I visited the exhibition, dozens of people from all walks of life were relaxing in the rare sun on the square facing the lake, in a way you seldom see in London today; the sort of actual relaxation that comes with being somewhere in which nobody is asking you to buy anything. Of course, here, unlike in the precincts of 1980s Brum, the lifts that enable people with prams or wheelchairs to enjoy the space actually work, given the huge quantity of money the Barbican’s owners, the Corporation of London, spend on it. It does pose the question of how much the problem with Birmingham was design, and how much simple maintenance.

A lot of ‘NAM’ inspired architecture now looks very small-scale and unambitious – when combining modern architecture, feminism, socialist politics, and public participation could result at the same time in something as vast and confident as Lina Bo Bardi’s SESC Pompeia, it’s a bit of a shame to see that in London it tended to translate into little things with pitched roofs. But, as one of Matrix’s collaborators comments in an interview playing in the exhibition, the specific buildings might not have stood the test of time; they weren’t the point. Matrix were actually exemplary socialist modernists in their concentration on process, function, and ideas – not on ‘style’ or what a building ‘looks like’, but on how it works, and for whom.

These ideas survive in something like the Community Plan for the Latin Village in Seven Sisters, which uses a similar process of collaboration to that of Matrix. The point is not the exteriors of the buildings that survive, but a different way of building. That insight will never be dated, until we finally build cities that follow it.