The Spa Green Estate, Finsbury: ‘an outstanding advance in municipal housing…one of the showpieces of London’

Tags

1940s, Finsbury, Lubetkin, Multi-storey

The Survey of London, not prone to hyperbole, describes the Spa Green Estate as ‘heroic’. Nikolaus Pevsner called it ‘the most innovative public housing’ of its time. English Heritage listed it Grade II* in 1998.

And you can see for yourself – it’s south of the Angel, just by Sadler’s Wells – that the estate looks good, achieving something very rare, being both impressive and intimate. The engineering and design are first-class and it’s a good place to live. That’s a rarer combination than it might be.

Tunbridge House and St John Street to fore

We’re back in Finsbury – one of London’s smallest boroughs before the war but, politically, one of its most ambitious. That ambition is best seen in the council’s partnership with the architect Berthold Lubetkin and his Tecton Group firstly in the famous Finsbury Health Centre and then in the Spa Green Estate.

Berthold Lubetkin

Lubetkin was a constructivist. It’s an ugly term for a rather beautiful concept – the ‘artist engineer’ who believes in the power of technology and design to transform and improve people’s lives. The Labour council of Finsbury – in the third most overcrowded borough in London – wanted more prosaically to clear slums and build decent homes for its people.  But it set high standards.

Slum housing in the area now occupied by the estate had been scheduled for demolition in 1936 and Tecton commissioned to design new housing – three blocks of multi-storey flats – in 1938.

In the event, war intervened and destroyed both these initial plans and 11 per cent of Finsbury’s housing stock. In 1945, Finsbury had a smaller population – of 38,000 – but a waiting list for council accommodation of some 4500 families. More audacious plans were called for, spurred by these increased demands and helped by the technological advances of war. The current scheme in its essentials was approved in May 1945, before the war’s end – an early symbol of Labour’s intention to ‘win the peace’.

Nye Bevan, Minister of Health and Housing, laid the foundation stone of the new development in July 1946.  He commended the estate for its ‘many novel features’ and gave it his ‘every encouragement’. Herbert Morrison, leader of the London Labour Party and deputy prime minister, performed its opening ceremony in 1949. A young Princess Margaret planted a plane tree which has survived longer than she did.

Undated aerial view,early 50s?

The finished development comprised 126 flats in three blocks. The largest – Wells House and Tunbridge House – eight storeys high, 190 feet long and 30 feet deep, were set in parallel north-south orientation across a large open court. The smaller Sadler House, four and five storeys high, is distinguished by its sinuous curves which make the most of the restricted space of the 3.9 acre site.

Spa Green illustrated in Margaret and Alexander Potters’ book, Houses, published in 1948. Click for a full-size view.

Technically, the buildings owe a huge debt to the engineering genius of Ove Arup whose innovative concrete box-frame enabled the clean, spacious lines and lack of internal ‘clutter’ that were a much remarked-upon feature of the new flats.

Architecturally, it is Lubetkin’s constructivist ideals which come to the fore. The larger blocks were plain in form but brilliantly enlivened by the design and detailing of their facades. The quieter courtyard side of the buildings (where the bedrooms were situated) featured a chequerboard design influenced by Lubetkin’s study of Caucasian textiles. The outward sides which faced the streets had a rhythmic pattern of windows and balconies and the whole was accentuated and enhanced by a rich use of colour – reds, yellows and blues.

Wells House, courtyard side. Note the roof terrace drying area

Wells House, street side

Sadler House

The estate was too small to warrant an on-site laundry but roof terraces and covered drying areas with specially designed aerofoils to capture and maximise the breeze were provided on both larger blocks.

In Austerity Britain and smoggy London and as a contrast to the bleak terraces and tenements which preceded it, the Spa Green Estate must really have seemed to mark the advent of a brighter future.

Internal arrangements affirmed a new age of the common man – or perhaps woman given the centrality of women’s domestic role in the period. As the Islington Gazette noted when Bevan opened the new estate:

the new flats will have most of the amenities of pre-war luxury dwellings but will be let at very moderate rentals.

The flats had balconies, light and ventilation from both sides, central heating, fitted bathrooms and kitchens. The kitchens were equipped with slide-away breakfast counters and ironing boards, inbuilt waste disposal and large serving hatches to the living room.

A current resident, born on the estate the very day that Bevan inaugurated it, recalls ‘My mum used to say “we’re living in luxury”‘.

This wasn’t hyperbole. No wonder that Finsbury Borough Council’s 1949 handbook to the estate proudly stated:

The estate is an outstanding advance in municipal housing. It will become one of the showpieces of London and there will be many visitors.

Such pride brought consequences. The Council also stipulated rather primly:

Washing must not be hung up on the balconies … The blocks have exceptionally well-designed architectural features, and the display of washing on the balconies will spoil the appearance.

One resident remembers a woman on a bicycle employed by the council to visit the estate and check compliance.

Indeed, expectations of tenants were high. Tenancy conditions required regular cleaning of fireplace surrounds, sweeping of stairs and landing daily, washing of stairs weekly on a rota basis. No carpets were to be beaten after 11am, no rubbish emptied after 10am, no music to be played between 11pm and 8am.

Originally the caretaker’s lodge, now a meeting room

This is where the ritual reference to council paternalism should come but let’s avoid that contemporary reflex and simply note that this was a discourse of reciprocity, of rights and responsibilities.  Anyway, aren’t low expectations more patronising?

Of course, such mutual investment from council landlord and council tenant came easily to Spa Green – an attractive and genuinely popular development. Other schemes – blander, bleaker – were less easy to love.

Spa Green also benefited from its relatively small size. Residents could expect to know everyone that lived on the estate, at least by sight. Children growing up on the estate remember a widening but always secure universe – from landing to block to courtyard and playground as they grew older.

Into the 1970s, children

would be out playing but at 8pm someone came out with a whistle and they all had to go to bed. They did as well. No-one argued.

That’s better than ASBOs, isn’t it?

After what comes a little too close to nostalgia, you’re probably waiting for the usual ‘what went wrong?’ Well, not much. There were complaints in the nineties about rubbish and the estate’s run-down appearance. In 1996 a Spa Green Management Organisation was established – with 98 per cent support from residents – to take over day-to-day management of the estate from Islington Council.

Long-term underinvestment accelerated an inevitable deterioration in fabric but a major £5m refurbishment, completed in 2008, has restored the estate to its founding vision and modernised facilities where necessary.

Entrance ramp to Wells House with restored colour scheme

Right to buy has had its inevitable impact and around one third of flats are now privately owned. The refurbishment sparked controversy, not least because of the very large bills – between £28,000 and £42,000 – faced by leaseholders who had purchased flats on the estate.  That aside and on this occasion ignoring larger issues about the marginalisation of social housing, maybe this is a social mix we should applaud. A one-bedroom studio flat in Wells House is currently on the market for £235,000 if you want to play your part in that.

As one commentator has observed (1):

Over half a century later Spa Green still radiates a sense of optimism that defies the commonplace dismissal of flatted estates as a modern urban aberration.

Spa Green looks good and feels good. Lubetkin’s daughter, Sacha, attending the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the estate, spoke of the ‘enormous love, care and attention to detail into the design’ that her father put into the estate and his determination ‘to provide for ordinary working people just as good a life as the rich had’. Here’s a vision – and an accomplishment – that we can applaud.

Sources

(1) John Allan in Berthold Lubetkin (2002) quoted in a good Wikipedia article on the estate. 

The Survey of London entry found on British History Online provides very full information on the estate and additional illustrations as does the very thorough Local Local History [sic] website.

Matt Weaver, ‘Designed to Infuriate‘, The Guardian, 16 November 2005 discusses the controversy over refurbishment costs and more recent developments.

James R Payne, ‘Long live Lubetkin’s republic‘, BDOnline, 25 July 2008, gives a good analysis of the refurbishment.

Most quotations and further detail are taken from the newspaper cuttings file on the estate in the Islington Local History Centre.  My thanks to them for their assistance.

The Beautification of Bermondsey: ‘Fresh air and fun’

Tags

1920s, Bermondsey

Excuse me if I begin my blog this week with a lengthy quote. It’s just that it seems to me to convey something simple and powerful about the drive and vision of a group of people who dreamed of nothing less than transforming a slum into a garden city.

If elected it will be our main aim to make Bermondsey a fit place to live in. We shall do everything we can to promote health, to lower the death rate, and to increase the well-being and comfort of the 120,000 people who live here.We will not allow our district to continue to be a by-word among the Boroughs and to be vilified by the Daily Press as a horrible, evil-smelling, slum-ridden and unlovely place. We will do what is possible to cleanse, repair, rebuild and beautify it, and to make it a city of which all citizens can be proud.   Bermondsey is our home and your home.  We will strive to make it a worthy home for all of us.  This is our conception of the object and purpose of local government…

Those were the opening words of the Bermondsey Labour Party’s address to local electors in November 1922. The party won 38 seats and an overall majority on the council which it retained till the borough’s abolition in 1965.

If ever such ambition was needed, it was needed in interwar Bermondsey. It was one of the smaller London boroughs but one of the most densely settled. Of its 1300 acres, 400 consisted of docks and warehousing. In the remainder, industry sat cheek by jowl with terraced housing and courts. In 1922, just 8.6 acres of the borough were public open space.

If such conditions oppressed local residents, they outraged the husband and wife team, Alfred and Ada Salter, who spearheaded local Labour politics. Alfred was the local GP, both were ardent Christian socialists. Their concern for the health and moral well-being of the people joined irresistibly in their fight for social justice.

Of those who had created this Bermondsey – ‘one huge slum’ as he described it unapologetically – Alfred could only lament:

They did not realise that they had cut off the people from the chiefest means of natural grace. They did not appreciate the curse and cruelty of ugliness.

And it was Ada who would do all in her power – all that local government allowed – to create grace and beauty in Bermondsey. One of the first actions of the new Labour administration was to set up a Beautification Committee and Ada chaired it for eleven years. Its first meeting in January 1923 announced its goal – ‘Fresh air and fun’ – and its agenda.

Ada Salter, shown with George Lansbury, then First Commisioner of Works in the Labour government, to her left, 1930 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

That agenda was ambitious. Council officers were to identify any waste ground – private or public – that could be planted with trees and shrubs and ornamented with tubs, rockeries, fountains and statuary.

The council was to provide window boxes free of charge to any resident that requested them and organise horticultural shows and gardening competitions to encourage those with green fingers.

Leisure would be catered for by a permanent bandstand and regular summer concerts. ‘Healthful exercise and bodily development’ would be promoted by providing new winter gardens and ‘other suitable places of public resort which can comprise gymnasia, bowling alleys, fives courts and open air baths’.

Even the borough’s public conveniences – an ugly necessity under the jealous eye of the Public Health Department – were to be made easier on the eye by screens of foliage and shrubs. The Committee would also seek powers to restrict unsightly advertising, dumping and constructions – in fact, ‘anything offensive to good taste.’

Not all of this was possible. The more elaborate plans for fountains, statues and the like just didn’t happen. The Town Clerk was adamant that the council’s powers did not allow free window boxes but free plants and compost were apparently permissible. Bermondsey never got its winter gardens though the London County Council did build a lido in Southwark Park in the 1930s. Those draconian powers restricting offences to good taste weren’t possible either though the railway companies were persuaded to better maintain the sidings which were a prominent feature of the borough.

Tulip beds, St James’s Churchyard, May 1931 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

St James’s Churchyard, ND © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

Still, what was achieved was impressive: (1)

Bermondsey became a place of unexpected beauty spots. Amidst soot-grimed buildings one suddenly came upon splashes of brilliant colour, red dahlias, yellow daffodils They were like vases of flowers in a dusty room.

The Observer claimed that ‘outside the Royal Parks it would be difficult to find anywhere such masses of colour’. The Labour councillor who proclaimed in 1928 that ‘what was good for the West End was equally good for the East’ would have been proud of this literal vindication of principle.

Storks Road, 1935 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

Storks Road today

Ten thousand trees were planted and seventy of the eighty grimy miles of street in Bermondsey became tree-lined. Most of the trees and shrubs – in the huge numbers that the Beautification Committee’s plans demanded – came from Fairby Grange in Kent, the house and gardens purchased by the Salters and given to the council as a convalescent home for nursing mothers and their children.

Keeton’s Road, 1932. View from Peek, Frean’s factory © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

Keeton’s Road today. This housing dates to the 1980s. The area was heavily bombed on 7 September 1940 – the first night of the Blitz with severe casualties in Keeton’s Road school which was being used as an evacuation centre. © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

To those who complained of the expense of all this tree planting, the Council simply pointed out that the work – subsidised by a 60 per cent subsidy from the Unemployment Grants Committee – provided work for those who would otherwise be on the dole.

Arthur Carr, chairman of Peek Freans at the opening of the ‘Joy Slide’, October 29, 1921 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

The dense, built-up nature of this inner London borough limited what could be provided in terms of additional open space but the existing parks and gardens – mainly former churchyards – were greatly improved in appearance and facilities. The pride and joy here was the large and elaborate covered slide in St James’s churchyard which had actually been donated by Peek, Freans, a large local employer, in 1921. Otherwise, the scope was limited and only three small open spaces were acquired and ‘beautified’ by the council in the twenties.

Opening of Tanner Street playground, May 1929 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

In fact, it is the intense quality of Bermondsey’s vision and the detail which capture the imagination. The Council was helped here by the dedication of two Superintendents of Gardens, Mr Aggett and Mr Johns – such proprieties of title were observed in those days – for whom beautification was both a labour of love and a matter of deep professional pride.

There’s no glamour in the dry detail of council staffing but it’s worth pointing out that the Beautification Department employed 36 people in 1926 and a further eight who were full-time caretakers of the parks and open spaces.

Local Labour’s 1925 manifesto uses a phrase that rings strangely today but the ‘mass upliftment’ they proclaimed was a two-way street.  The socialists of the day were both practical reformers and moralists.  They saw no contradiction in the two – betterment was something which both came from and was ‘done to’ the poor.  This was a community which treated morally would act morally. This was the radical respectability of the Salters and of the Labour rank and file in action.

Alfred Salter, planting a Tree of Heaven at the opening of the Tanner Street playground, May 1929 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

In 1928, Alfred Salter, celebrating six years of Labour rule, stated:

The Party is like this because it is inspired by idealism, because it has a vision, because its efforts for human welfare are part of its religion. A great spiritual motive is working itself out in devoted service and practical achievement.

Trees, window boxes, flower beds and slides, even two new strains of dahlia (Salter’s favourite flower) named the Rotherhithe Gem and the Bermondsey Gem and created by Mr Johns, all played their part in this.

As Elizabeth Lebas argues: (2)

In Bermondsey, ‘beautification’ was not a substitute to political action, but a political action in itself.

And it was, I hope you agree, a rather beautiful form of political action.

Sources: 

(1) Fenner Brockway, Bermondsey Story: the Life of Alfred Salter (1949)

(2) Elizabeth Lebas, ‘The Making of a Socialist Arcadia: arboriculture and horticulture in the London Borough of Bermondsey after the Great War’, Garden History, vol 27, no 2, winter 1999.

All the historic images are taken, with permission, from the superb collection of photographs held by the Southwark Local History Library and Archive. Most of the direct quotations above are taken from contemporary newspapers and election leaflets held in the library’s cuttings collection.  A big thank you to library staff for their generous assistance in this and related posts on Bermondsey.

The other major source is the very useful and interesting article by Elizabeth Lebas referenced above.

The Park Hill Estate, Sheffield: ‘Streets in the sky’

Tags

1950s, 1960s, Brutalism, Multi-storey

You either like or loathe the Park Hill flats. For one thing, they’re hard to ignore – if you arrive by train, you’ll see them immediately, lowering above the steep hill just behind the station. Then there’s their Brutalist look. It’s an ugly term but by strict dictionary definition – a stark style of functionalist architecture characterised by the use of steel and concrete in massive blocks – Park Hill conforms exactly.

© Wikimedia Commons

For all that, much of the Park Hill story is familiar: desperate need, high ambition, official acclaim, sorry decline – from hero to zero like many of the social housing developments we’ve looked at. But Park Hill’s story deserves a closer look and some revision.

The area of Park Hill was: (1)

a close-packed mass of insanitary back-to-back slums and other unfit housing…mingled with outworn, industrial buildings and begrimed with the smoke of the railway and city centre.

Much of the housing had been condemned as unfit for human habitation before the Second World War and slum clearance attempts had begun. But after the war, the City Council decided a bigger and bolder solution was needed. Their model was to be le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation development in Marseilles, completed in 1952.

Sheffield’s own version of these ‘streets in the sky’ was designed by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith under the guidance of J Lewis Womersley, Sheffield’s City Architect. Construction began in 1957 and was completed in 1961.  The estate was officially opened in June that year by Hugh Gaitskell, Labour Leader of the Opposition.

© Copyright Dave Hudson, licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

There were 996 flats, housing around 3000 people, (2):

so planned as to give each household privacy and quiet despite the essentially communal nature of the project. . . Each dwelling, irrespective of size, is provided with a large sheltered balcony where small children can play in the open air, where a pram can be put out and on which an occasional meal can be taken.

The flats fronted on to the 3 metre-wide street decks which are one of the best-known features of the estate, wide enough for a milk float and friendly enough to allow easy socialising with neighbours.

Externally, the blocks harnessed the steeply sloping site, maintaining a flat roof line but ranging from four storeys high at the top of Park Hill to 13 at the lower end.

The 32 acre site also contained four pubs, 42 shops (including ‘the best fish and chip shop in Sheffield’ according to many), a community centre, social clubs, a health centre, dentists and nursery and primary schools. Grenville Squires – a caretaker on the estate for 26 years, one of a team of twelve – says it ‘was like a medieval village; you didn’t have to leave.’ (3)

And far more than many other developments, there were strong attempts to maintain and develop a community feel. Those decks were ‘allegedly the product of close study of working-class life by [the architects] who sought to reproduce the safe and sociable streets of yore without the danger and din of traffic’. (4) Old neighbours were housed next to each other, former street names were re-used, even the cobbles of the terraced streets were used to pave the pathways down to the station and city centre. 

Municipalism’s vocabulary rarely soars. Alderman DW Gascoigne, Public Works Committee deputy chair and leader of the City Council, stated simply: ‘A squalid area has been transformed into an area where human beings can live in dignity.’ (5)

Less than forty years later, ‘dignity’ was the last word that many would have associated with Park Hill. Concrete fared less well in the colder, wetter climate of Yorkshire than in Marseilles. People complained about the lifts not working and problems with noise. The Garchey refuse disposal system – ‘from sink to incinerator’ – broke down frequently and certainly couldn’t cope with disposable nappies.

© Wikimedia Commons

More significantly, the estate had acquired an evil reputation – those ‘streets in the sky’ were now said to be the perfect getaway route for local muggers. The estate was seen as ugly and criminal – ‘a cloud of bad breath hanging over Sheffield’ and a terrible symbol of the city for those visitors by rail.

Brutalism never seemed better named and had the flats not been controversially Grade II* listed in 1998 they would perhaps have been demolished.

Park Hill was taken by many to be another nail in the coffin of social housing and its grander architectural ambitions.

Let’s examine this view. Firstly, the simple but too often forgotten point needs to be made that it represented far better housing than any the vast majority of its tenants had ever known (6):

It was luxury. Me, my husband and our baby were living in a back-to-back. My parents were there, too, and my brother. We had no bathroom, just a tin bath on the back of the door. So when we got here it was marvellous. Three bedrooms, hot water, always warm. And the view. It’s lovely, especially at night, when it’s all lit up.

Then there’s the possibly apocryphal remark that is often quoted of one satisfied resident: ‘You think I live in council housing.  I’ve got a penthouse.'(7)

© Wikimedia Commons

Secondly, nearly all speak of a tight-knit and supportive community. Often these views held even as Park Hill was being designated the Sheffield badlands (8):

Everybody seemed to get on with their neighbours and there was a strong bond between families and the friends I made there I regarded as friends for life.

I lived there most of my life. No one who didn’t live there, can say anything bad about it at all. We all stuck together and looked after each other and felt safe.

Such comments are readily dismissed as rosy-hued nostalgia. But shouldn’t the views of actual residents be privileged over the urban myth and moral panic of much of what passes for social commentary in relation to working-class communities – from Victorian times to the present?

More objectively, the estate’s resident sociologist – there really was one – reported outstanding success and ‘an exceptionally vigorous tenants’ association’ in the estate’s early years.

But the fact of later decline is undeniable. What changed?

© Wikimedia Commons

We can blame the council (or, more sympathetically, the tightness of local authority budgets) for poor maintenance.

Some tenants also blame the council for its allocations policy: ‘They gave anyone who wanted one a flat’; ‘problem people’ were concentrated in the estate rather than being ‘spread around the council housing stock’.

With greater distance, maybe we see here the impact of the political and economic whirlwind that ravaged Sheffield in the 1980s – and the reasons why Mrs Thatcher’s demise may be less lamented in Sheffield than elsewhere.

Labour’s well-meaning 1977 Homeless Persons Act placed strict duties on local councils to house some of society’s most vulnerable people. But it was followed by Mrs Thatcher’s Right to Buy and virtual ban on the building of new council housing.

Then came the decimation of the local economy. A sixth of the local workforce – some 40,000 people – lost their jobs as the local steel industry collapsed. Unemployment in the city as a whole reached 15 per cent in 1984.

One resident recalls Park Hill as ‘a marvellous place to live’ into the late 70s, a time when ‘everybody seemed to work…a thriving community’. The contrast is obvious.

So let’s not blame the design. Ivor Smith, one of the original architects, rejects the label ‘Brutalist’ (or, at least, its connotations): ‘We didn’t think we were Brutalists. We thought we were quite nice guys’. Asked if he would have done anything differently, he said the flats should have had windows onto the decks – ‘a street has windows at street level’ – but cost-saving at the time had ruled this out. (9)

And let’s not condemn those practical dreamers who believed in society’s duty to house all its people well and built housing on a massive scale to do it.

The Park Hill story is not finished. In 2003, the Council outlined a new vision for the estate as a ‘vibrant, mixed tenure estate with owner occupation, rented and affordable for sale properties with high quality retail and commercial premises’. Park Hill, they hoped, would become ‘a fashionable city centre address’.(10) Urban Splash were appointed developers in the following year.

At this point, alarm bells may be ringing. A process of gentrification, involving the further marginalisation of social housing, is plain. The Council has stipulated that one third of the 900 new flats will be ‘affordable’ but, of these, two-thirds – just 200 – will be for social rent. The price of the flats for sale is generally higher than former residents can afford.

Could things have been done differently? I’m not close enough to know and it’s obvious that we live in a very different world – for good and ill – than the one inhabited and imagined by those earlier municipal reformers. It is private money and privatised aspirations that are creating the new Park Hill.

Old and new: refurbished flats to the right © Keith Pitchforth, licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

Urban Splash are good self-publicists and there is certainly a buzz around Park Hill and a flair in its refurbishment that will provide the estate with a new lease of life.

But I’ll leave the final word to someone who loved the estate in its former heyday, Grenville Squires (11):

She’s lovely. She’s my mistress, the only lady who’s fetched me from the marital bed at two in the morning and made demands. She has come on hard times, but all she’s got to do is wash her face and put on a new dress and she will be fine.

Sources:

(1) ‘Sheffield Replanned’, 1945, quoted in The Open University, Park Hill, Sheffield: continuity and change.

(2) JL Womersley, City Architect, 1955, quoted in The Open University, Park Hill, Sheffield: continuity and change.

(3) Quoted in Rachel Cooke, ‘How I leant to love the streets in the sky‘, The Observer, 23 November 2008.

(4) Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture. The History of a Social Experiment (2001)

(5) Quoted in The Open University, Park Hill, Sheffield: continuity and change.

(6) Quoted in Rachel Cooke, ‘How I leant to love the streets in the sky‘, The Observer, 23 November 2008.

(7) Quoted in BBC South Yorkshire, Park Hill, 2007, as are most of the following quotes from tenants.

(8) Quoted in Rowan Moore, ‘Park Hill estate, Sheffield – review‘, The Observer, 21 August 2011.

(9) Quoted in Rachel Cooke, ‘How I leant to love the streets in the sky‘, The Observer, 23 November 2008.

(10) Sheffield City Council, Park Hill, 2003.

(11) Quoted in The Open University, Park Hill, Sheffield: continuity and change.

Owen Hatherley provides a very critical perspective on Park Hill’s renovation in ‘Regeneration?: what’s happening in Park Hill is class cleansing‘, The Guardian, 28 September 2011.

Edward Platt, ‘Multi-million-pound make-over for Sheffield’s notorious Park Hill Estate‘, The Daily Telegraph, 21 September 2012, is more positive.

There are good blog postings on Park Hill.  Single Aspect‘s blog on social housing is well worth following and has an entry on Urban Splash’s renovation. Sid Fletcher writes with passion on Park Hill in a guest post on Wondrous Places. The Wookie has images of Park Hill shortly before the renovation.

Urban Splash have a large site on their Park Hill project with some background information – and full details of properties for sale if you’re interested.

Finsbury Health Centre: ‘Nothing is too good for ordinary people’

Tags

1930s, Finsbury, Lubetkin

Finsbury Health Centre is not your usual obscure and unsung piece of municipal design.  Even today, somewhat faded and hidden behind some rather overbearing vegetation, it looks something special.  In its day, it was famously daring in both vision and design – in both its ideal of comprehensive, unified and free healthcare for all and in the bold architectural fulfilment of this ideal.

Finsbury was a typically overcrowded and poor inner London borough.  But it was one with an unusually radical political history, rooted in the close-knit artisanal trades of the area.  It elected its first Labour councillor in 1900 and Labour gained its first – bare – majority in 1928.  Though the party lost heavily in the debacle of 1931, Labour regained – and retained –  a secure hold on power in 1934.  The council intended to use that power purposefully.

The driving figures in this were the council’s leader, Alderman Harold Riley, a local teacher descended from a Black Country mining family, and Councillor Chuni Lal Katial, a recent migrant from India, now a GP practising in the borough and chair of the public health committee.

The 1936 Public Health (London) Act empowered local authorities to provide medical services to their local population.  Finsbury Council took up this challenge but aspired to more.  Its Finsbury Plan outlined a far-reaching and coordinated strategy to elevate the conditions and well-being of the borough’s people.  It included a health centre, baths, libraries and nurseries.   Whilst war and financial difficulties prevented the entirety of that vision being fulfilled, the health centre was achieved triumphantly.

It was Katial himself who approached the modernist architectural firm of Tecton to devise plans for the clinic – the first public commission of a modernist design.  Of the proposals submitted, the council selected the most expensive for its quality and space.   The building was intended to live up to the maxim of its chief architect Berthold Lubetkin and the principles of its commissioners: ‘Nothing is too good for the workers’.

The illustrations below – part of the design outline provided by Tecton – contrast the ‘open planning’ ideals of the design to the heavy and rather overbearing architecture that typically preceded it.

Lubetkin believed the purpose of modern architecture was ‘to improve…the living conditions of the people, to create a language of architectural forms which…conveys the optimistic message of our time – the century of the common man’.

But his genius lay in the humanism of this ideal.  The Centre was to be accessible and inviting, a drop-in centre before the term had been invented.   For Lubetkin, ‘the centre’s opening arms and entrance were a deliberate attempt to introduce a smile into what is a machine’.

The brochure which marked the opening of the Centre, noted more dryly:

Care has been taken to give to the whole structure a light and clean appearance, to make it an edifice to the splendid service it represents; a building which will inspire confidence through its thoroughly modern and up to date appearance.

Glass bricks at the front entrance and side wings, red-painted columns, sky-blue ceilings, an open-plan reception – all were both practice and propaganda for a life lived more fully, more openly, more colourfully by a working population immured in poverty.

And if that wasn’t clear, murals on the wall exhorted the Centre’s users to ‘Live out of doors as much as you can’ and seek ‘Fresh air night and day’.

Finsbury’s ‘megaphone for health’ spoke loudly of a better, healthier life.

Practically, the Centre incorporated doctors’ surgeries, an antenatal and mother and baby clinic, TB clinic, chiropody clinic, dental surgery and solarium. The solarium provided ultraviolet-ray treatment to the children of the polluted and sun-starved borough – on chairs designed by Alvar Aalto.

The basement included facilities for cleaning and disinfecting bedclothes and a lecture theatre, even a mortuary for those past benefiting from the Centre’s services.

The Centre opened in 1938. Cllr Katial spoke to the thinking which inspired it:

For some time the disadvantages of a service which has grown up piecemeal, retarded in its development and scattered here and there through lack of accommodation, have been only too apparent to my council.  Fully appreciating these difficulties, and actuated by a desire vastly to improve existing facilities and to establish new services, we have unanimously gone forward to erect this new health centre.  Its opening marks…the dawn of a new era in public health service

It’s a dry, almost bureaucratic, language – the stuff that makes municipalism hard to sell and Municipal Dreams seem almost oxymoronic.  But embrace that studied practicalism: it is precisely this realism and eschewal of rhetoric that changed lives. (It’s true, however, that Lubetkin always had the best lines. Those translucent glass walls seen above were intended to be ‘as beautiful as the hair of a beautiful young girl in the summer sunshine.’)

Barely a year later, Britain went to war and the Centre was pressed into service to meet the needs of more immediate casualties of man’s inhumanity to man but it was already an exemplar and a promise of a better tomorrow.

One year after the Beveridge Report itself seemed to herald that tomorrow and as the thoughts of ordinary people were already turning to winning the peace, in 1943 a poster was issued by the Army Bureau of Current Affairs which used the Finsbury Health Centre as its central symbol of the new postwar world.

In the event, the poster was deemed too radical.  Churchill himself apparently considered its depiction of a child with rickets in a slum setting to be a ‘libel’ on working-class conditions.  The poster was withdrawn but the aspirations which it represented that Churchill either feared or couldn’t comprehend were not so easily suppressed.  Labour secured a landslide victory in the 1945 general election and the Finsbury Health Centre was to be a model for the National Health Service established three years later.

Today, it’s a Grade 1 listed building but it looks a little tired and that sparkling vision of municipal healthcare has been superseded.  At the time of writing, it is still a local health centre but there have been plans to sell off the building and relocate its services.  Opposition from local residents and architectural campaigners seem to have stalled these for the time being but the outcome remains uncertain.

What is certain is the practical idealism of the Centre’s creators.  Their belief in an ethos of public service and their implementation of the principle of public provision of healthcare for all, free of the distortions of market and profit, is as relevant today as it has ever been.

Sources:

The Save Finsbury Health Centre blog is a vital source for this article and for anyone concerned for the future of the Centre.  There are many webpages focusing on the Modernist architectural heritage of the Centre; the best is in BD Online.

The Wythenshawe Estate, Manchester: ‘the world of the future’

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs

Back in 2007, the Wythenshawe Estate became the poster child for ‘Broken Britain’.  David Cameron had visited the estate to make his call to ‘hug a hoodie’. But whatever love Cameron was offering didn’t appear to be reciprocated.

It was ironic that Wythenshawe should be singled out in this way, tragic that the ideals and vision which had built the estate had been so signally eclipsed.

Lest we forget, the story begins with a level of overcrowding and human misery that is – thankfully – almost unimaginable in Britain today. In 1935, Manchester’s Medical Officer of Health condemned 30,000 (of a total of 80,000) inner-city homes as unfit for human habitation; 7000 families were living in single rooms.

In contrast, it was the garden city movement of Ebenezer Howard which provided the other major element in Wythenshawe’s genesis. Howard and his followers advocated a utopian ideal of economically self-sufficient communities, cottage dwellings in parkland surroundings – the polar opposite of the Broken Britain of that day.   

In Manchester, these currents coalesced in the drive and vision of three people: Labour alderman WT Jackson and then Liberal husband and wife team, Ernest and Shena Simon.

Jackson rejected the modernism that attracted some as a solution to the slum problem: ‘We are not emulating Vienna and I have not been there…In general we favour the cottage type of dwelling’.  For Ernest Simon ‘the tendency of country conditions [was] to preserve life…the tendency of town conditions [was] to depress vitality’.  The solution they envisaged lay in large-scale development of agricultural land to the south of Manchester beyond the city boundaries.

Simon purchased Wythenshawe Hall and 250 acres of land in 1926. He donated them to the city, directing only that they ‘be used solely for the public good’.

Jackson for his part persuaded the city to buy 2500 acres of surrounding farmland in the same year and secured the incorporation of the future estate within city boundaries – against horrified opposition from Cheshire locals – in 1931 by private act of parliament.

The beginnings of development, late 1920s

Jackson visited the garden city showpiece of Letchworth in 1927 and brought in Barry Parker – its co-designer – as planner of the new Wythenshawe Estate.  Building began the same year.  Parker was given sole control of the project in 1931.  Parker built on the garden city ideal by adding two new features.

One was the parkway – a concept borrowed from the more motorised America of the day – intended to smooth transit but, more importantly, to prevent ribbon development and preserve open space. The scenic route Parker created – the Princess Parkway – is now the M56.  Perhaps not quite what he had in mind.

His second innovation was neighbourhood units set around green spaces and tree-lined roads with, in this instance, Wythenshawe Hall and Park preserved at their centre.  This principle has been better honoured – some 30 areas of park and woodland remain.

Parker’s plan for the new estate

Development was rapid. By 1939, the estate boasted a population of 40,000 and some 8145 dwellings, now described waspishly in Pevsner as ‘conventional, Quakerishly undecorated’.  Parker was a Quaker so this plain and simple approach  reflected his ideals but it fulfilled more strongly Shena Simon’s wish that the estate have a ‘cottagey’ feel.  

Wythenshawe housing in the early 1930s

If the housing was modest, the ambition which underlay the project wasn’t.  For Shena Simon, the estate was the ‘boldest [scheme] that any municipality has yet embarked upon’. To the local Cooperative Women’s Guild, it was nothing less than (1):

the world of the future – a world where men and women workers shall be decently housed and served, where the health and safety of little children are of paramount importance, and where work and leisure may be enjoyed to the full.

This future world was a place in which ‘every working mother [would enjoy] a clean, well-planned home which will be her palace’.  If this seems a stereotyped view of a woman’s role today, let’s note their rider: these were homes ‘so well and wisely planned that [a mother’s] labour will be lightened and her strength and intelligence reserved for wider interests’.

Who got to enjoy this brave new world?  Rents were typically between 13s and 15s a week (65 to 75p) at a time when the average working wage stood at around £3. Ernest Simon calculated this was just affordable – provided there was a ‘willingness of the wage earner to be content with a very small amount of pocket money, and competent and economical management on the part of the housewife’.

In reality, the estate was principally confined to the better-off working class as this oral testimony suggests (2):

Not everyone could get a house in Wythenshawe. Before we got one an official from the Town Hall wanted to know all about us…We had to prove we were good tenants. We…heard that some people were from the slums but we never met any of them.

Despite – more probably because of – this exclusivity, there was great pride in the estate. Local activists were committed to making ‘Wythenshawe worthy of the time and money spend on it’. A ‘Wythenshawe ethos’ grew which enjoined a ‘common bond’ predicated less on shared recreation than on notions of self-improvement.

As with Becontree (see my previous posting on that London County Council estate), gardening was a particular locus of this and the annual flower and vegetable show an important event in the local calendar.

Piper Hill Avenue, Northenden 2012 © Gene Hunt, licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons licence

Yew Tree Lane, Northenden 2012 © Gene Hunt, licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons licence

Many residents also spoke favourably of a world where people weren’t forever popping round for a chat or – worse still – on the cadge, ‘where people kept themselves to themselves’. All this has upset some later commentators who see in it some corruption of working-class community and ideals.   But maybe we shouldn’t pay too much heed to this liberal academic nostalgia for a world they never knew and tend now to romanticise.

That there was a shift – to a more privatised and domesticated focus on family and home – is undeniable.  But I see it less an example of malign social engineering or embourgeoisification, more as an opportunity working people desired and acted upon, one that – in key ways – they created.

Practically, as so often, execution failed to fully match conception. Shops, community facilities and employment followed belatedly on housing and population growth.  There was an incomplete and dormitory feel to the estate in its early decades though the Second World War and 1947 Town and Country Planning Act were to give a boost to further ambitious growth. New industrial zones were completed in 1950s.  Higher density housing was planned and built. The population grew to 100,000.

Postwar plans for houses and three-storey flats © Pagan555

Aerial view, 1940s © Pagan555

The shopping centre – confusingly called the Civic Centre – was finished in the 1960s.  An actual civic centre – the Wythenshawe Forum incorporating leisure centre, library, theatre and meeting rooms – was finally opened in 1971.

Proposed public buildings in the new civic centre envisaged in the 1940s © Pagan555

Wythenshawe Civic Centre – the flats at the top were demolished in 2007 and replaced with a local authority ‘services hub’ © Wikimedia Commons

By the turn of the century the Wythenshawe infrastructure was largely in place. So what went wrong? In the aftermath of the hoodie affair, a New York Times journalist, visiting the ‘endless housing project’ of Wythenshawe (’pronounced WITH-en-shah’ she added helpfully), noted bleakly ‘the absent fathers, the mothers on welfare, the drugs, the arrests, the incarcerations, the wearying inevitability of it all’. (3)

And it’s true that levels of deprivation on the estate were significantly higher than the Manchester average, twice as high as the national average. In 2000 Benchill was named the most deprived council ward in England.

This doesn’t seem to me to reflect some original sin in the conception or design of council estates.  Rather it speaks of crushing realities that would hobble the ideals and potential of any community. Criticisms of estates as single-class and socially isolated have merit but they lack historical perspective – specifically an understanding of the ‘respectable’ and aspirational foundations of social housing and the massive demographic shift that has hit it since the 1980s.

Council estates, which were once a symbol – a site, in fact – of upward mobility, now represent downward mobility or social stasis; this reflecting not some moral failing on the part of social housing’s poorer tenants but the hard fact of economic changes that have all but destroyed traditional working-class livelihoods.

The new Woodhouse Park Lifestyle Centre opened in 2006 © Copyright Anthony O’Neil, licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

However, this depressing perspective should not be the final word. There has been huge investment in Wythenshawe in recent years.  The shopping centre was substantially renovated between 1999 and 2002. (In a sign of the times an Asda store with multi-storey car park replaced the old Coop.)  £18m has been spent on the Wythenshawe Forum to modernise and extend its facilities which now include additionally an adult learning centre, nursery, café and health centre.

A lot has been done by central and local government and community organisations and activists to shift realities and – perhaps almost as importantly – perceptions.  There’s no need to sugar-coat here: significant and real problems remain but the estate deserves to be more than a caricature. And the ideals which inspired it should be valued, maintained and fulfilled.

Sources:

(1) This and most of the foregoing quotes are taken from Andrew Davies, Workers’ Worlds: Cultures and Communities in Manchester and Salford, 1880-1939 (1992)

(2) Quoted in John J. Parkinson-Bailey, Manchester, an Architectural History (2000)

(3) Sarah Lyell, ‘How the Poor Measure Poverty in Britain…‘. New York Times, 10 March 2007

Pagan555’s Wythenshawe images can be found in his Flikr photostream and are used with his permission.

Andrew Davies, cited above, offers an excellent social history of the estate.

Articles by David Ward and Owen Hatherley in The Guardian provide some contemporary views and this article by Mark Hughes in The Independent will update you on the young man greeting Mr Cameron in the opening image.