The Old Oak Estate, Hammersmith: ‘that line of beauty which Hogarth said was in a curve’

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Cottage suburbs, Hammersmith, LCC, Pre-1914

Imagine a Hampstead Garden Suburb built for working people.  Better still, if you’re in London take the Tube and get off at Acton East and visit the Old Oak Estate where you’ll find just such an estate.

Du Cane Road

We’ve looked at the work of the LCC’s Architects’ Department Housing of the Working Classes branch before – at the Millbank Estate, at Totterdown Fields, and at the White Hart Lane Estate. These are all fine arts and crafts-inspired estates but to Susan Beattie, Old Oak stands as ‘the culminating achievement of the Council’s venture into garden suburb planning before the first world war’ – a work of ‘splendid maturity’. (1)

Rising costs of land and labour were forcing the LCC to look to what were then the London fringes.  In 1905, the Council purchased 54 acres in Hammersmith from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners at a cost of £29,858.  Eight acres were sold on to the Great Western Railway for its Ealing-Shepherd’s Bush branch line which still bisects the Estate.  The open space of Wormwood Scrubs lies to the north-east.

Initial plans projected a density of 27 cottages an acre and some 1527 cottages in all which would house – they estimated very precisely – 11,438 people. (2)

An early photograph of the Erconwald Street/Wulfstan Street junction with ‘butterfly’ plan typical of Unwin and Hampstead Garden Suburb

Contemporary view

Building of the first phase of the Estate, west of the railway line, began in 1911.  By January 1914, 304 cottages and five shops had been completed. Each of the cottages and flats had ‘a scullery and the usual offices’ but only the cottages of five and four rooms and 14 of the three-roomed cottages were fitted with baths. (3)

Roads and sewers for the second, eastern, section were completed before the war but construction was halted until 1920 when the Estate (and the neighbouring Wormholt Estate built by Hammersmith Borough Council) became significant components of the ‘Homes for Heroes’ campaign of the day.

Two more shops and 722 houses were built by 1922 and an additional 14 houses in 1927.  In all, the finished estate comprised 1056 homes – 228 five-room, 443 four-room, 341 three-room, 27 two-room and 16 one-room houses or flats plus ‘a superintendent’s quarters’. (3)

These are dry statistics though we understand today well enough just how vital such numbers are in the balance between housing supply and demand. Still, what was and what remains most striking about the Estate is its design and aesthetic – and the ideals these reflect.

Fitzneal Street

Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow was published in 1898.  The Fabian Society published Cottage Plans and Common Sense – Raymond Unwin’s manifesto addressing how municipalities might best ‘provide for the Housing of the People’ – in 1902.   Unwin would be appointed Architect and Surveyor of the Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust in 1906.

These currents all directly influenced the Old Oak Estate. And, in fact, one of the LCC architects responsible for the design of the Estate was Archibald Stuart Soutar, the brother of – and sometime collaborator with – JCS Soutar who replaced Unwin in Hampstead in 1914.

The 1909 Housing and Town Planning Act (partly modelled on the private 1906 Hampstead Garden Suburb Act) was also critical to the accomplished design.  Previously, planning had been hamstrung by well-meaning but unimaginative and restrictive bye-laws.  These were intended to enforce safe and sanitary housing construction but they also forced rigid building lines and tightly regulated streetscapes.

The 1909 Act’s promoter, John Burns, President of the Local Government Board, spoke eloquently of ‘that line of beauty which Hogarth said was in a curve’ and passionately of the moral as well as physical purpose of high quality housing and planning. The object of the bill, he proclaimed, was: (5)

to provide a domestic condition for the people in which their physical health, their morals, their character and their whole social condition can be improved…The Bill aims in broad outline at, and hopes to secure, the home healthy, the house beautiful, the town pleasant, the city dignified, and the suburb salubrious. It seeks, and hopes to secure, more houses, better houses, prettier streets, so that the character of a great people, in towns and cities and in villages, can be still further improved and strengthened by the conditions under which they live.

From that to the ‘privet hedging, grass verges, street trees and the provision of small cottage gardens’ and ‘the widespread use of wooden mullioned window frames (both sash and casement), brick façades, pitched and gabled roofs, small dormers and panelled doors’ – as noted in contemporary conservation guidelines –might seem a come-down. (6)

But it’s these features and the Estate’s overall design which combine to create, in the words of Susan Beattie, ‘the LCC’s finest contribution to the revival of English domestic architecture’.   Consistency of style, variety between blocks and an intimacy of detail make the Old Oak Estate a showpiece of public, vernacular architecture.

An early photograph of Henchman Street

A contemporary view

But social housing is never just bricks and mortar.  It reflects its times and the public priorities and policies of those times.  Early council housing catered principally for the better-off working class – those in regular employment who could afford its generally higher rents.

In 1920, a survey of the Estate reported no serious arrears with one exception – a Mr Mcneff: an ex-soldier, suffering from shell shock, struggling to pay his 16s (80 pence) a week rent from an army pension.

Others were more fortunate: from the approximately 500 households, around 150 men were reported as taking advantage of the new workmen’s fares to Liverpool Street (8d – 3.5p – for a day return if you left before 7.30am), an indication perhaps of the East End origins of many of the new tenants. (7)

Junction of Du Cane Road and Fitzneal Street

In another sign of the ‘respectability’ of this early population, the Old Oak Cooperative Women’s Guild – always respectable, always aspirational – complained of the poor condition of the school playground and requested that the Estate’s cinder paths be replaced with proper paving. (8)

Ninety years on, new residents also complained of poor facilities for children and young people.  One teenager grumbled: (9)

There was a youth club but it’s shut and it was only on once a week, you had to be over 13 and it only had a broken pool table! There should be a youth club with proper stuff and not broken.

Generally, however, residents liked the Estate.  ‘It’s alright – though new people see it as rough. It’s OK when you live here’.  Another, long-term, resident concluded:

Along here it’s an established community – many of them have been here for 30-40 years and we look out for each other, especially for the older ones who live on their own.

It was certainly some kind of tribute to the quality of the Estate’s housing and layout that so many exercised their right to buy after 1979.  The public landscaping of the Estate is also impressive and, to my eyes when I visited recently, superbly maintained.

By the early 2000s, only 54 per cent of homes in the College Park and Old Oak ward which contains the Estate were socially rented.  Most of these were now managed by the Old Oak Housing Association, formed in 1999, as part of a stock transfer from Hammersmith and Fulham council.  A £23 million refurbishment of the Estate’s homes followed.

Social housing in this new guise had changed also – it no longer housed an upwardly mobile working class and had come, in the eyes of many, to be seen as housing of last resort for the less well-off.   Old Oak was very far from being a so-called ‘sink estate’ but it did not escape these changes – 22 per cent of the population (as against 14 per cent nationally) were in receipt of some form of benefit.   And local people called for better policing to tackle the problems they perceived of anti-social behaviour, drug-dealing and car theft.

Erconwald Street

This was not the vision of John Burns and those early LCC housing reformers.  But the Estate itself – whilst it cannot escape the social and economic dynamics which have so damaged council estates and their communities in more recent years – remains a superb example of an ideal and a duty that we should seek to emulate.

Note

I’ve posted some additional early photographs and plans of the Estate on my Tumblr account.

Sources

(1) Susan Beattie, A Revolution in London Housing: LCC housing architects and their work 1893-1914 (1980)

(2) Letter from LCC Architect’s Department, 19 March 1907, in LCC/HSG/GEN/01/008, London Metropolitan Archives

(3) London County Council, Housing of the Working Classes, 1855-1912 (1912)

(4) London County Council, London Housing (1937)

(5)  Quoted in Beattie, A Revolution in London Housing

(6) Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, Design and Conservation, Development Services Division, ‘Design Guidelines for Old Oak and Wormholt Conservation Area’ (1996).  The Estate was designated a conservation area in 1980.

(7) Memorandum 9 December 1920, in LCC/HSG/GEN/01/009, London Metropolitan Archives

(8) Letter to LCC from Mrs M Swallow, Old Oak Cooperative Women’s Guild, July 1920, in LCC/HSG/GEN/01/009, London Metropolitan Archives

(9)  This and the following quotation are taken – as are subsequent statistics – from Laura Lane and Anne Power, LSE Housing and Communities, Low income housing estates: a report to Hammersmith United Charities (September 2009)

Early photographs of the Estate are taken from the Hammersmith United Charities website.

Aspen House Open Air School, Lambeth: doing ‘the world of good’

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1920s, Lambeth

There’s something counter-intuitive about exposing ‘delicate’ children to the elements, come rain, come shine: (1)

Sometimes, when we got there in the morning the snow would have blown in on to the tables and chairs and we would have to clear it off before we could start.

But by all accounts, it did Norman Collier, a pupil at the Aspen House Open Air School in Streatham in the 1930s, ‘the world of good’.

‘Open Air Schools’: photograph from Gibbon and Bell, History of the London County Council, 1889-1939

The school was opened by the London County Council in 1925 for pupils described at the time as ‘pre-tuberculous’ – children who were anaemic, asthmatic or malnourished.   It was the fifth of the LCC’s open-air schools.  The first had been opened in Bostall Wood in Woolwich on land donated by the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society in 1907.  But it was the first built to the council’s ‘improved design’ which would go on to be used in fourteen schools across the capital.

Administrative offices were contained in the adapted stable block of the villa which had formerly occupied the property and there was additional space provided for dining and sleeping – both important parts of the school’s regime we’ll examine later.

But the heart of the school lay in its classrooms – four square pavilions, built on timber posts with timber half-walls and exposed roofs.  The continuous windows above the dado were unglazed until sometime in the 1950s. (2)

Open-air classroom, Aspen House, with added glazing © English Heritage

Interior view © English Heritage

Of equal importance were the school grounds.  For the school’s first head teacher, Mr IG Jones, there was no such thing as too much fresh air: (3)

Although our classrooms are open-sided shelters which cannot be closed, yet it is much pleasanter to work in the open-air without a roof overhead whenever possible.

This outdoors teaching required ‘stands’ and raised pathways – ‘eighty large duckboards or wooden slats were made; measured and cut by the bigger boys and nailed together by the smaller ones’.  The boys also made ‘coat-racks, toothbrush racks, soap boxes, carrier boxes with handles for gardening purposes’.

Later, as the school developed, work requiring ‘more skill and accuracy’ followed – ‘clog stands, a bird table, a sunshine recorder and stand, moulds for concrete work, a sundial, and bathroom equipment’.

Open-air teaching: this at Charlton Park School (www.charltonparks.co.uk/the-parks/special-places/)

There’s no mention here of the school’s female pupils but they played their full part – albeit in traditionally gendered fashion – in the gardening, nature study and handicrafts which were a major part of the Aspen House curriculum.  Mr Jones founded a bee keepers’ society, for example, for older pupils and one admiring observer noted: (4)

one of the most remarkable results of the training in this delightful school is the spirit of cooperation that makes the children feel the garden belongs to all, and its pleasures should be shared by all.

In 1930, the school roll comprised some 204 pupils – perhaps the peak number: 115 boys and 89 girls.  They travelled from across London, receiving breakfast before lessons began at nine. They remained until around four, provided dinner and tea and required to take an early afternoon nap of between one and two hours in special hammocks with their own designated blankets.

In these early years, each pupil also received a weekly bath. A full-time matron on-site and regular medical examinations completed a regime which catered to body and soul.

This was an education rooted squarely – though without the rhetoric – in the principles of the Swiss pedagogue, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi: a focus on the equilibrium between head, hands and heart, a belief in the free development of each child’s potential through observation and discovery of nature and the material world.  Don’t tell Mr Gove!

Norman Collier remembers that the pupils were all taught their Three Rs but generally they remained at the school for around eighteen months before resuming a more conventional education.  Students remember principally the kindness of teachers in an era where home circumstances and schooling were not always as kind.   JV Morley recalls only one instance of caning – ‘frankly deserved’ – when one boy had struck another with a milk bottle.  (5)

The school today, now Orchard School

Aspen House remained in these premises until 1977 when it moved to new purpose-built premises in Kennington Park where it still operates as a ‘Community Special School’.  In those fifty years and beyond, it serves to remind us of the best of local government education – now so maligned – and a vision of schooling which catered for the wellness and wholeness of its students.

Few now believe that its spartan fresh air regime was as restorative as its early adherents claimed but the space the school afforded for children’s personal development and, more prosaically but perhaps of greater practical impact, the clean environment and three square meals a day it provided were crucial.  Perhaps the cod liver oil, given at no charge on a daily basis to pupils who received free school meals, helped too. (6)

Uffculme School, Birmingham

In 1939, there were 155 open-air schools across Britain, fifteen in London alone which educated around 2000 children.  The LCC also boasted a residential open-air school in Bushey Park which gave every year ‘some three thousand London schoolboys a spell of camp life’ and similar schools for girls in St Leonard’s and elsewhere.  Open-air classes in London’s parks were attended by 6000 children. (7)

Impington Village College, designed by Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry, opened 1939

After the Second World War, the welfare state – its health services and structures of social security currently under unprecedented attack – combined to make the work of the open-air schools less pressing.  The 1955 Clean Air Act also did much to reduce the atmospheric pollution that had blighted the lives of so many.

But Aspen House and the movement it represents aren’t of merely historic interest. Many of its principles went on to inform post-war education – both in terms of school design and pedagogy – and we jettison these values in a numbers-driven vision of educational quality at our peril.

Sources

(1) Norman Collier quoted in Brian Cathcart, ‘School’s Out’, The Independent, 23 January 2005

(2) English Heritage listing details for Classroom D at former Aspen House Open Air School

(3) This and the following quotations come from LCC, Medical Officer of Health Report 1927, made available on-line by the Wellcome Library in London’s Pulse: Medical Officer of Health Reports, 1848-1972.

(4) Elizabeth Montizambert, ‘Gazette’s Budget of London Topics’, The Montreal Gazette, 18 August, 1928

(5) Quoted in ‘Not Just Another Brick in the Wall. A booklet celebrating the life of Aspen House School, 1925 to 1995’

(6) School Managers’ Minutes, 10 December 1926, quoted in ‘Not Just Another Brick in the Wall’

(7) Gwilym Gibbon and Reginald W Bell, History of the London County Council, 1889-1939 (1939)

My thanks to the staff of the Lambeth Archives for their help in accessing the primary sources noted above.   

The Aylesbury Estate, Southwark: ‘State-led gentrification’?

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1960s, Multi-storey, Regeneration, Southwark

In 1997, as we saw last week and graced by a visit from the prime minister no less, the residents of the Aylesbury Estate had reason to believe that their homes would be safeguarded and improved.  In the event a £56.2m grant from the New Deal for Communities fund promised – or threatened, depending on your point of view – something far more radical.

The grant was provided as the first element of a £234m regeneration scheme which would demolish the existing 2700-home estate.  Residents’ tenancies were to be transferred to the newly-formed Faraday Housing Association.  To fund the overall redevelopment, 60 acres of the Estate would be sold to private developers and some 1000-1500 private homes built for sale. Overall housing densities would increase significantly.

A key element of the scheme was its belief in ‘mixed communities’ – in practice, the insertion of better-off middle-class owner-occupiers or renters – in the belief that this would ‘lift’ the area and improve local commercial and community facilities.

To ideological opponents, this was nothing less than ‘state-led gentrification’. (1) But tenants were suspicious too. Some did fear a middle-class take-over or were, at best, doubtful of its benefits.  More practically, many were worried they would lose gardens or access to open space and parking places.  They feared that their new flats would be smaller and feared their rights would diminish and their rents rise under a new social landlord. (2)

View from balcony © aylesburytenantsfirst.wordpress.com

In general, residents were happy with their flats and, in many cases, defensive of the Estate.  They certainly had complaints about poor maintenance and security but felt that these issues could be addressed by refurbishment and greater investment, at least in preference to a long drawn-out and uncertain redevelopment programme.

In December 2001, on a turn-out of 76 per cent, 73 per cent of residents voted against stock transfer.  The whole scheme was blown out of the water.

The Council initially considered refurbishment but it concluded that the Estate’s system-built construction made this prohibitively expensive – a price tag of £350m was claimed.  In 2005, the then Liberal Democrat-controlled council voted once more to demolish the Estate and rebuild.

In January 2007, another masterplan for the Estate – the sixth in this long-running saga – was agreed with a twenty-year programme and an overall budget of £2.4bn.  A deal with London & Quadrant Housing Group to redevelop the south-western corner of the Estate as the first phase of the scheme was agreed in the following year. (4)

Ironically maybe, in the meantime, whilst the physical appearance of the Estate declined during this long period of uncertainty, the social environment improved.  In 2007 The People reported – in tabloid-style but in sharp contrast to earlier media ‘exposés’ – that crime was down by a third, fear of crime had halved, drug use had fallen by a quarter and education results had improved by 300 per cent. (4)

The Aylesbury New Deal for Communities programme, set up in 1999 with a £20m budget for what were termed ‘social interventions’ and its successor organisation, Creation Trust, established in 2009, can claim some credit for these improvements.

It wasn’t all roses.  In 2009, 44 per cent of households were on housing benefit and a similar proportion reported at least one serious problem with their property. (5)  In 2012, the Estate’s unemployment rate stood at 16 per cent, compared to the Borough average of 11. (6)

Still, Aylesbury Tenants and Leaseholders First could claim very plausibly that: (7)

Our lived experience of crime on the Estate does not match the myth – and this is borne out by the statistics. We need to counter these pernicious negative stereotypes…We are not going to be bullied into giving up good sound insulation, light, views and space because of exterior neglect and delays in re-housing growing families due to current housing scarcity.

It’s worth pointing out that almost one third of residents have lived on the Estate for more than twenty years so there is an established community for whom the Aylesbury – warts and all – is home.

Nevertheless, ‘regeneration’ has proceeded.  Demolition of the Little Bradenham block began in September 2010 – Phase 1a of a nine-phase scheme slated to take fifteen years.  The new-build is up and occupied.

In a sign of things to come, the tenure mix of the new homes in the six new buildings is 48 per cent private, 39 per cent ‘affordable’ and 13 per cent ‘intermediate’ (generally shared equity).

In this context, of course, ‘affordability’ is a deeply suspect concept. In 2011, Southwark estimated that a median household income of almost £36,000 was required for two-bed affordable housing and £42,300 for three-bed. (8)  In the most recent data available (2008), almost half of Southwark households had annual incomes of less than £15,000.

Currently on the estate, there are around 2250 homes rented from the council and some 500 privately owned – around 17 per cent of flats have been purchased through Right to Buy.  The regeneration scheme will build around 4200 new homes of which half are designated ‘affordable’.  This, by its own calculations, represents a ‘small loss of 150 affordable homes’. (9)

To unpick this further, of 2095 affordable units in the regeneration scheme, 1568 will be socially rented and 527 will be ‘intermediate’ (meaning here that they will be available to rent or buy to those earning above the financial threshold for socially rented property). (10)

So – in fact, fewer socially rented properties and fewer truly affordable properties. If ‘state-sponsored gentrification’ might seem a bit strong, it’s undeniable that council housing is being progressively marginalised and that low-income families are being squeezed out of central London. It’s also hard not to see ‘affordable’ as an essentially fraudulent term.

In this context, there is a suspicion that even the new social rented housing will not enjoy the safeguards traditionally granted. Documentation relating to Phase 2 of the redevelopment omits reference to the National Rent Regime which normally governs rent levels in social housing. (See the comment below for discussion of this.)

View from balcony © aylesburytenantsfirst.wordpress.com

Personally – I’m an outsider, of course, and I completely understand how some residents of the Aylesbury would feel differently about their homes – the choice to demolish the current blocks seems plausible.

Elements of the regeneration scheme seem attractive.  I guess cynics would say they always do in the public relations outreach but an aspiration to revive ‘the traditional grain and pattern of the streets obliterated by the sixties estate’ seems positive.  The Aylesbury’s walkways never worked as envisaged.  You can admire the Estate for its scale and ambition, even for its aesthetic up to a point though few would argue it’s lovely and it’s looking far from its best at present.

It’s also positive, I think, that design differences between private and social/affordable housing are being eradicated – in other words, that social housing doesn’t ‘look’ different and can’t be stigmatised.

The computer-generated vision of the future from the Aylesbury Area Action Plan

More radically, Catherine Bates, a Southwark planning officer, says: (11)

We’re determined to break down the estate concept…By the end of the development we no longer want the area to be conceived as a single perceptible entity but feel that it belongs to the city around it.

I guess all this shows how far we’ve come from those days in the sixties when Southwark Council’s ambition was to build big and boldly and when the Estate itself was seen as a powerful statement of the role – and duty – of the state, local and national, to house its people.

‘Regeneration’ remains – quite rightly – desperately controversial. In principle, it’s a good and necessary thing for many run-down estates and neglected communities. In context, it is mired in a world of private profit and a definition of ‘affordability’ which is a travesty of the word.  In practice, while ‘social cleansing’ may seem too emotive a term, regeneration acts against the interests of existing communities and reduces the housing opportunities of ordinary working-class people.

Regeneration, yes.  This regeneration, no.

Sources

(1) Loretta Lees, ‘The urban injustices of New Labour’s “new urban renewal”: the case of the Aylesbury Estate in London’, 2013

(2) David Blackman, ‘Where did it all go wrong?’ in Regeneration, Inside Housing, February 22 2002

(3) ‘Urban Initiatives remodels south London’s Aylesbury Estate’, bdonline, 3 October 2008

(4) Jon Kirk, ‘Welcome to the Aylesbury Estate – once so grim its residents dubbed it a hell-hole’, The People, 24 June 2007

(5) Southwark Housing Requirements Study 2008.  Sub-Area Report: Aylesbury Estate, June 2009

(6) Karl Murray, Understanding the impact of the economic downturn on BAME communities: A case study of the Aylesbury estate in the London Borough of Southwark, June 2013

(7) Aylesbury Tenants and Leaseholders First website

(8) Southwark Council, Affordable Housing: Draft Supplementary Planning Document, June 2011

(9) Southwark Council, Aylesbury Area Action Plan, January 2010

(10) ‘Aylesbury Area Action Plan evidence base: projected tenure split and bedroom mix, 2009’ quoted in the blog Southwark Notes – Whose Regeneration?, ‘Aylesbury Estate: All changes subject to change’

(11) Quoted in Ike Ijeh, ‘Aylesbury Estate: Taking back the streets’, building.co.uk, August 3 2012

For a recent and thorough analysis of regeneration in a number of London council estates, read the UCL Urban Laboratory’s Urban Pamphleteer #2, ‘Regeneration Realities’.

Ben Campkin’s new book, Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture, has a chapter on the Aylesbury and looks at ‘regeneration’ more broadly.

The Southwark Notes website also provides full analysis of a number of the regeneration schemes currently affecting the borough.

Aylesbury Tenants First have also have a blog on the Estate and their campaign to defend it.

The Aylesbury Estate, Southwark: ‘all that is left of the high hopes of the post-war planners is derelict concrete’

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1960s, Multi-storey, Regeneration, Southwark

Tony Blair made his first public speech after New Labour’s 1997 landslide election victory in the Aylesbury Estate.  This was a time of high hopes and Blair’s words capture the promise of the moment:

I have chosen this housing estate…for a very simple reason. For 18 years the poorest people have been forgotten by government…There will be no forgotten people in the Britain I want to build…

There are estates where the biggest employer is the drugs industry, where all that is left of the high hopes of the post-war planners is derelict concrete.

In the following year, the Aylesbury Estate was awarded £56m as one of 17 ‘pathfinder partnerships’ awarded cash under the Government’s New Deal for Communities scheme – ‘a key programme in the Government’s strategy to tackle multiple deprivation in the most deprived neighbourhoods in the country’.

That didn’t work out so well.  As we’ll see, the Estate continues to languish though it is now – fifteen years on – in the early stages of a second regeneration project.  Both – and the Estate itself – have been controversial.

The Aylesbury was ill-fated from the outset.  It was built on a 60 acre site, replacing a rundown area of terraces, tenements and works – a massive canvas for what would become reputedly the largest social housing estate in Europe.

Designed by Hans Peter Trenton and a team of young architects in Southwark Council’s Department of Architecture and Planning, it reflects the modernist ideas of the day.  Ben Campkin’s recent study of the Estate provides a better architectural description of their expression in the Aylesbury than I can: (1)

exposed concrete; ‘honest’ expression of structure; the repetition of geometric forms; and the elevation of slab blocks on piloti.

It would comprise around 2700 homes in all, accommodating a population of almost 10,000 at peak in 16 four- to fourteen-storey so-called ‘snake blocks’ including the largest single housing block in Europe.  It was built by Laing – whose interests exerted a heavy influence over the external appearance of the Estate – using the Jespersen system: a large panel system using prefabricated concrete slabs.

Construction began in 1963.  The collapse of the Ronan Point tower block in 1968 ensured this would be the last large-scale use of industrialised building methods.

If the construction – and, arguably, the appearance – were industrial, the overall design of the Estate reflected communal ideals, most strikingly in its ‘streets in the sky’ which were intended to ease pedestrian movement across the Estate, free from the danger and noise of traffic.

Walkways linked the Estate’s blocks – ‘route decks’ at second floor level for movement between blocks which included space for shops and other community facilities and ‘local decks’, with play areas, within the blocks.  Garaging and traffic movement took place below.  (2)

The flats were large and nearly always far better accommodation than new residents had known before as these three reminiscences remind us: (3)

To get a council flat was to go up in the world.

Oh, yes. There’s no doubt about it. Coming to the new estate for most of us at that time was like Shangri-La

We thought we was moving into Buckingham Palace!

But the overall ‘feel’ of the Estate was problematic from the outset.  The architectural press described it as ‘drab’ and ‘monotonous’.

Even as the first residents moved in and the Estate was formally opened by Anthony Greenwood, Labour’s Minister of Housing and Planning, in October 1970, one local Tory councillor described it, unoriginally, as a ‘concrete jungle…not fit for people to live in’. (4)

There were early design problems too – the walkways required noise insulation, some finishings were of low quality, little was spent on shared facilities such as lifts and open space

Southwark’s architects recognised this themselves and blamed the £1m cost-savings forced on the project by the Government prior to construction: (5)

There is little doubt that the public areas are the least successful part of the Development.  The lack of finishes and the poor quality of many of the materials provided has provided a very drab environment…This seems almost to have provoked mistreatment and vandalism.  The extensive areas of bare concrete, asphalt, and cheap obscured glass, contribute to the overall feeling of low cost Local Authority housing, and it is almost an insult to the many tenants who are proud of their homes…It is essential that adequate financial backing should now be given to put these deficiencies right.  Failure to do so will result in the Estate rapidly becoming a slum.

By 1976, the Council had spent £2.6m on basic remedial work.  And when Southwark’s housing chair formally ‘topped out’ the Estate in September that year, the local newspaper headlined its report ‘Epitaph to the “nightmare” Estate’. (6)

By the 1980s, the Estate was notorious for crime and anti-social behaviour and relished by the media as a potent symbol of the ‘Broken Britain’ of the day.  Naturally, it also became a poster-child for theorists of ‘defensible space’ including Oscar Newman himself who slated the Aylesbury’s design in a 1974 BBC documentary.

And, later, when Alice Coleman noted that ‘the notorious Aylesbury Estate has 18 km of walkways making it possible to reach 2268 dwellings from any single entrance without having to set foot on the ground’, she didn’t mean it as a compliment. (7)

That correlation might not mean causation, that similar problems bedevilled suburban ‘cottage estates’, that deeper social and economic causes might be at play was ignored – the superficial plausibility of the argument won the day and did, in its way, its own damage.

And the feelings and experiences of the actual residents were mixed and more complex.  Most liked their flats – they remained for the most part good accommodation.  Many liked their neighbours and resented the bad press the Estate received.  But the crime and fear of crime were real as were the difficult life circumstances of many of the residents.

And although, it’s a desperately unfashionable thing to say, Tony Blair was right to highlight the problems of the Aylesbury – and other similar estates – and to promise concerted, collective action to rectify them.  That would prove a rocky path, however.  We’ll look at that in the next post.

Sources

(1) Ben Campkin, Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture (2013)

(2) London Borough of Southwark Department of Architecture and Planning, Aylesbury Redevelopment, ND

(3) Long-term residents of the Estate quoted in Sarah Helm, ‘Lost souls in the city in the sky’, New Statesman, 17 July  2000 and Richard Godwin, ‘We shall not be moved: residents give their verdict on life on the Aylesbury Estate’, Evening Standard, 26 March  2013

(4) Cllr Ian Andrews, quoted in ‘”Showpiece” Estate is unfit to live in, says Tory councillor’, South London Press, 16 October  1970

(5) Borough Development Department, Aylesbury Development in Use, May 1973

(6) South London Press, 10 September  1976

(7) Alice Coleman, ‘Design Influences in Blocks of Flats’, The Geographical Journal, vol. 150, no. 3, November, 1984

My thanks to the Southwark Local History Library for help in accessing the primary sources noted above.