Keeling House, Bethnal Green: ‘We loved living in our crumbling tower block’

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1950s, Bethnal Green, Brutalism, Multi-storey, Tower Hamlets

A few weeks ago, Keeling House in Bethnal Green featured in BBC2’s Great Interior Design Challenge.  Its presenter Tom Dyckhoff paid due homage to the building’s architecture – a Denys Lasdun brutalist masterpiece – and to its history.  But let’s pay a little more attention to the latter here.  Now privately owned, Keeling House was once a vision of high quality housing for the people.

Before the Second World War, Bethnal Green was the heart of the traditional working-class East End – with social conditions to match.  At the height of the Great Depression, 23 per cent of the borough’s men lacked jobs and some 43 per cent of its population were overcrowded. (1) Both the London County Council and Bethnal Green Metropolitan Borough Council built extensively to rehouse local people.  The Claredale Estate was one such local council scheme, begun in 1932.

Claredale House, facing Keeling House, was a solid red-brick and rendered 73-tenement block – designed by the architect ECP Monson, also responsible for the Borough’s earlier and notorious ‘Lenin Estate’ nearby. It cost £38,000 but, as Mrs Rawle, the chair of the Housing Committee, stated: (2)

The present and past borough councils did what they could to improve property and bring it to a better level.  Their chief trouble was lack of money; in common with the other councils the Bethnal Green Council had not as much money for housing as it would like to have.

In a sign of the times, it’s now let by a housing association as single-room student accommodation. Back in 1945, there was added urgency to government’s mission to house the people – practically due to the impact of the Blitz, politically by the expectations raised by wartime promises.  Much wider clearance and redevelopment followed.

Sulkin House, Usk Street

The first contribution of Denys Lasdun to local housing came in 1952 when commissioned by the Borough Council to redevelop a bombsite off Usk Street. In Sulkin House – a small, eight-storey, two-wing block of 24 maisonettes, Lasdun pioneered the innovative ‘cluster block’ design that would mark out the larger Keeling House. (3) The key elements of this concept were the central, free-standing tower containing lifts and services and the separate towers containing accommodation which ‘clustered’ around it: (4)

The disposition of the plan is such as to eliminate the necessity of escape stairs and also isolates the noise of public stairs, lifts and refuse disposal from the dwellings.

It’s an ingenious design which breaks up the massed and repetitive appearance typical of normal tower or slab blocks.  It allows more light and air into the building whilst simultaneously providing greater privacy and quiet to housing areas. Lasdun had thought this through carefully and his ideas owed much to his well-meaning if slightly patrician conversations with local residents: (5)

These were people who came from little terraced houses or something with backyards.  I used to lunch with them and try and understand a bit more about what mattered to them, and they were proud people.  They kept pigeons and rabbits in their back yard and hung their washing there…And as a result of these contacts I didn’t have flats.  I said no, they must have maisonettes, two up and two down, or whatever it was, because this would give them the sense of home.  And from these conversations, they wanted a degree of privacy.  They said: you know, we’re not used to being in a great sort of huge block of one of thousands.  So the thing was radically broken up, this building, into four discrete connected towers, each semi-d. on a floor, each a maisonette.

Keeling House writ the cluster block concept large.  Completed in 1959, it was 16 storeys-high, four blocks around the central service core containing 64 homes in all – 56 two-storey maisonettes and, on the fifth floor and deliberately visible in the building’s profile,  8 single-storey studio flats. It’s an unashamedly brutalist design, constructed of reinforced concrete with precast cladding units of Portland stone finish.

From Canrobert Street, 1959

Ground level showing site-cast concrete and Portland stone, 1959

It’s not to everyone’s taste.  Locals reportedly found it stark and intrusive, out of keeping with the surrounding Victorian terraces.  One resident of the block itself described it as ‘the ugliest building I have ever seen – ugly and bleak’. (6) But, to my eyes, Keeling House has a strength and cleanness of line and variety of surface and angle which is striking – it’s a building which takes the ‘brutal’ out of brutalism.

Perhaps views have changed more generally. And despite its scale, Lasdun tried carefully to preserve the best of the old whilst incorporating the benefits of the new. This was an attempt, it was said, to stand those Victorian terraced streets – dilapidated but vital – on their end.

Ground floor maisonette, 1959

The services areas of each floor were common – a place to dry clothes (before the era of tumble dryers) and meet and chat.  Balconies, each serving only two flats, faced each other but did so obliquely, in a delicate balance of neighbourliness and seclusion.  Three-quarters of the tenants could reach their front door without passing another. The housing blocks were angled to provide shelter to each other and each home was angled to receive sunlight at some point during the day. Each had a private balcony.

All – unlike their Victorian predecessors – enjoyed fresh air and views. The 800 sq ft maisonettes comprised a lower floor with spacious living room and kitchen plus a hall, pram store and box store.  The upper floors comprised two double bedrooms, a bathroom and another, larger, box-store. This was not, despite the later jaundiced comment of a local councillor, a ‘monument to the stack-em-high principle of working-class housing’. (7)

Still, not all the high ideals worked out.  What was good for drying clothes – the wind eddied around that central service area – did not make for leisurely conversation.  Free access to the lifts, and thereby the common areas, left the block susceptible to problems – of vandalism and graffiti – which were common to many council estates in the 1970s and beyond. And structural problems emerged.

Tower Hamlets Council, Bethnal Green’s successor authority, spent £1.2m on repairs in 1984 –perhaps unwisely as we shall see – but within a few years things had got worse. Residents reported damp, cracks appeared in staircases and the concrete cladding started to crumble.  In October 1991, a Dangerous Structure Notice was served on the block and, in the following year, as its deterioration accelerated, residents were required to vacate.

Tower Hamlets estimated it would cost £4m to repair, money it could ill afford at a time when £500m was required to repair and upgrade its housing stock as a whole.  It was argued also that Keeling House’s two-bed maisonettes were unsuited to current local housing needs as larger families, single-parent families and the elderly came to predominate on waiting lists. The Council, desperate to get the building off its hands, was willing to sell the block to a housing association – the Peabody Trust could have had it for £1 – but none would take it on without the promise of very substantial central government or Lottery funding. In October 1993, Tower Hamlets voted to demolish the building.

Defenders of Lasdun’s vision and design rallied to save it and in the following month it was listed by Heritage Secretary, Peter Brooke.  He described it as an ‘architecturally outstanding example of 1950s public housing’.  It was the first tower block to be listed. Tower Hamlets, spending £80,000 a year on security for the empty block, was horrified by the decision – it couldn’t ‘afford to maintain an architectural mausoleum for the benefit of the DoE’, a spokesman said. (8)

Looking back, I’m not sure there are any villains of the piece here.  Defenders of Keeling House pointed plausibly to a history of neglect and to that repair job back in 1984 now generally conceded to have been ‘bodged’.  They argued that structurally the building was sound – most problems related to external panels – and that repair was a more economical option than demolition and building anew.

But the dire financial straits and circumscribed choices of the local authority were real too – as real as they had been in 1932. Critically, what did the residents of Keeling House think?  The Council claimed 75 per cent wanted to move, unsurprisingly perhaps given its then parlous state. Some, certainly, were critical but many loved the building: (9)

It was so peaceful.  Beautiful at night and you didn’t have to draw your curtains.  There was a very good atmosphere and we had lovely neighbours: a Jewish lady used to make us lokshen soup and latkes.

As the notices to move arrived, some residents marched in protest to the Council’s Neighbourhood Offices; one was moved to poetry: (10)

When the councillors are tucked up in bed so cosy and meek,

Will they think of our families they are throwing on the street.

Furniture in storage, bed and breakfast for our home.

You know about the crumbling block but now the time has come

Where all the neighbours will unite and try to make a stand.

We have feelings too but you just don’t understand.

What can we tell our children when they come knocking at the door?

Is this the sort of people our ancestors fought for?

HELP US STAND TOGETHER

 

One tenant told Lasdun that ‘we loved living in our crumbling tower block’.  Pam Haluwa of the Residents Association stated simply, ‘if you want to bring Keeling House up to a nice liveable state, we’ll all move in tomorrow’. (11)  Lasdun thought it had been a ‘happy building’ and perhaps, in general, he was right. In the end, the Council were forced to put the block on the open market and it was purchased by Lincoln Holdings for £1.3m in 1999.

A £4m refurbishment, masterminded by the architectural firm Munkenbeck + Marshall followed.  The spalling concrete was given a new protective coating, the flats were modernised internally and a new entrance foyer – with concierge – and landscaping were built at the front of the building.

Entrance foyer

A view from the roof with penthouse sun room to right

More radically, eight top-floor maisonettes have been converted into luxury penthouses with the addition of a roof-top sunroom.  The disused water tank standing at the very top of the building will be converted to a maisonette this year.

As might be expected, Lasdun, who died in 2001, was grateful that his building survived and approved the details of its redesign which won a RIBA award in the following year. But he lamented, as we should, that housing built for the ordinary people of Bethnal Green has been lost to the private sector.

Back in 2000, the new flats went on sale at prices ranging from £145,000 for a one-bedroom home to £375,000 for one of the three-floor penthouses.  A two-bed flat is currently on sale for just over £500,000.  But they don’t stay on the market for long.  I was told that 30 of the 67 flats are currently occupied by architects and it’s a much sought-after building in a rapidly gentrifying East End.

‘In the socially committed post-war generation, a lot more thought was put into social housing than into most accommodation in the private sector’. (12)  In our modern world, the market rules.

Sources

(1) T.F.T. Baker (Editor), Victoria County History, A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 11: Stepney, Bethnal Green (1998)

(2) Quoted in ‘Housing at Bethnal Green’, East London Advertiser, after 12 October 1932

(3) Details on Sulkin House, listed Grade II in 1998, can be found on the English Heritage website.

(4) Municipal Review, January 1954

(5) Quoted in John R Gold, The Practice of Modernism: Modern Architects and Urban Transformation, 1954–1972 (2007)

(6) Quoted in Patrick Kelly, ‘Listing the Unloved’, Inside Housing, 19 January 1993

(7) Quoted in Martin Delgado, ‘We loved living in our crumbling tower block, say residents’, Evening Standard, 30 April 1993

8) Quoted in Lee Servis, “Keeling Over!’, East London Advertiser, 9 November 1995

(9) Quoted in David Robinson, ‘The Tower block is back, but this time as a des res’, Daily Express, 22 July 2000

(10) Quoted in East London Advertiser, 23 October 1992

(11) Quoted in Robinson and Delgado respectively

(12) Elain Harwood, English Heritage, quoted in Jane Hughes, ‘Born again: the high-rise slum ‘, The Times, July 1 2000

The 1959 photographs are taken from Brian Heron, Disused Water Tank, Keeling House, Heritage Statement, December 2010.

I’m grateful also to the helpful staff of the Tower Hamlets Local History Library for their help in accessing its excellent resources.

Municipal Housing in Manchester before 1914: tackling ‘the Unwholesome Dwellings and Surroundings of the People’

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Pre-1914

Manchester has been described as the ‘shock city’ of the Industrial Revolution and if you lived in Ancoats it was, indeed, pretty shocking.  Ancoats was the world’s first industrial suburb – factories and workshops cheek by jowl with mean terraces of back-to-back working-class housing and courts.

Ancoats in the 1870s

In 1889, a report by Dr John Thresh on 36 acres lying off Oldham Rd detailed 25 streets, many less than 17ft wide, and housing, mostly over 70 years old.  The area contained over 50 courts; one third of houses were back-to-back.   A death rate of over 80 per 1000 led to his dry statistical conclusion that ‘3000 to 4000 people [were] dying annually here in Manchester from remediable causes’. (1)

The City Council declared it an ‘Unhealthy Area’ and determined to clear and rebuild.  A total of 1250 people were displaced and 239 dwellings demolished.

Manchester City Council had been established in 1838.  Its first efforts to tackle slum housing came under the terms of a local Police Act in 1844 – the upper classes who dominated local government then viewed the problem as one, primarily, of public order – which banned the construction of new back-to-backs, opened up some of the worst courts and stipulated the provision of more WCs.

In 1867, the Manchester Waterworks and Improvement Act went further by giving the Corporation power to declare individual properties unfit and enforce improvement. One year later the city appointed its first Medical Officer of Health, John Leigh.

Leigh’s efforts to improve working-class housing were strengthened in 1885 when the Council set up an Unhealthy Dwellings Committee to tackle the problem of the courts. The clearance on Oldham Road followed.

Victoria Square Dwellings © manchesterhistory.net/

In its place, the City Council erected its first municipal housing.  Firstly, and most imposingly, came the Victoria Square Dwellings (unofficially known as the Labourers’ Dwellings or colloquially as just ‘the Dwellings’).  Completed in 1894, from a design by Henry Spalding who had built similar blocks for the London County Council, the Dwellings comprised 237 double tenements and 48 single – 522 rooms in all, built to accommodate 825 persons.

The building was a five-storey, red-brick quadrangle, plain but for its front façade – with a ground floor of shops – which boasted Queen Anne detailing of terracotta, oriel windows and gables.  A contemporary description states: (1)

Each tenement is provided with a well-ventilated food store and coal locker; dust shoots are provided in convenient positions in the back wall; one WC  and sink is provided for every two dwellings, which is a disadvantage; and automatic or ‘penny-in-the-slot ‘ gas meters are supplied to each dwelling.

Communal laundry facilities and drying rooms were provided in each of the corner towers.

Victoria Square Dwellings quadrangle with ‘very wide balconies convenient for playgrounds’ according to Thompson © Copyright English Heritage

A similar 135-room, five-storey block, Granville Place, was built in Pollard Street though it was even more austere in design.

As a result of their relatively high rents (Thompson describes Victoria Square as being ‘occupied by a good class of tenants’), neither block was fully occupied in their early years.  Stung by this failure, the City Council would build only one other block before 1914 – a 64-tenement building on Rochdale Road, opened in 1904.  (2)

The Pollard Street block has since been demolished but the Victoria Square Dwellings survive and may be, as claimed, the oldest municipal housing still in occupation.  By 1931, a local housing group concluded that, ‘though much below modern standards’, the tenements were: (3)

amongst the best in Manchester. The tenants we saw were respectable working people; where they had adequate accommodation they appeared happy, and many had lived there for periods extending up to thirty years.

By the 1970s, as standards became yet more demanding, demolition was proposed but, since receiving Grade II listing in 1988, the flats have been extensively refurbished and converted into old people’s dwellings, managed by Northward Housing. It’s an attractive redesign, featuring 163 modern one- and two-bed flats, and good use of a venerable but problematic building. (4)

Sanitary (Anita) Street with Victoria Square Dwellings to rear

Despite the initial unpopularity of the blocks, the Council had not yet given up on tenements and a series of so-called ‘tenement houses’ were constructed in the same area, largely completed by 1897. The most beguiling of these is the Sanitary Street development – two rows of two-storey tenement terraces, either side of a 36 feet-wide thoroughfare, with two ground-floor and two first-floor tenements sharing a common entrance.

This was basic accommodation but each flat possessed its own sink and WC (though not yet a bath or hot water) and a shared backyard.  The street – renamed Anita Street in the sixties when ‘Sanitary’ became less a badge of honour and more a taint of municipalism – remains solid and attractive housing, though much renovated of course.

The Oldham Road area with the Victoria Square Dwellings to left. Sanitary Street forms the two centre rows of terraces with George Leigh Street to the rear.

Similar accommodation was provided in two other schemes in Chester Street and Pott Street.

Chester Street two-storey tenements

Caroline Street (off Pott Street) three-storey tenements

But the Council’s most ambitious early scheme of tenement housing was George Leigh Street where 18 two-storey five-room cottages were built.  These featured a third, attic, bedroom, allowing for the first time that girls and boys might sleep separately.

George Leigh Street

By 1899, the City Council claimed to have spent around £300,000 on working-class housing but debate was raging over what form that housing should take.  That year the Council organised a three-day conference on ‘Sanitary Reform and Progress’.  Some councillors were critical of the Dwellings and suggested that separate houses were: (5)

more in keeping with an Englishman’s idea of home that he should have a cottage to himself, and not occupy a portion of block dwelling rooms.

The reformers won out, aided by the economics at play.  Land in inner Manchester was expensive – with a consequent impact on rents in schemes intended as self-supporting.  At Oldham Road, the Council had paid over £5 a square yard; in the city’s newly-acquired suburbs, it could be bought for a little over 3p a square yard.

In 1904 the Council bought 238 acres on the new city boundary at Blackley for the sum of £35,643.  It planned to build 203 two-bed and three-bed cottages, generally in short terraces but also including an experimental development of 22 semi-detached homes.  Of the total, 171 included a bathroom.

The Council also set aside – as a further means of improving working-class health – 50 acres for allotments and would build a municipal tramway along Victoria Avenue to get the estate’s new inhabitants to work. Rents were set at between 6s 4d (31p) and 7s (35p) a week. (6)

Victoria Avenue, Blackley

Walton Road, Blackley

In 1910, progressive Liberal members of the Corporation even proposed a £400,000 garden city development but that would be blocked and it took a new politics formed by the First World War to launch the Council on its most ambitious out-of-town development – in Wythenshawe – in 1926.

By 1914, an influential progressive politics existed in Manchester – the home of the Manchester Guardian, after all – which combined with a powerful civic pride. These were exemplified by TH Marr, the secretary of the wonderfully-named Citizens’ Association for the Improvement of the Unwholesome Dwellings and Surroundings of the People. (7)

Marr himself would be commissioned in 1906 to direct what was in many ways the Council’s most effective intervention into working-class housing.  Up to 1906 around 500 houses were being reconditioned each year; after 1906 that figure rose to 2000.  At this time, the Corporation paid £15 per house to owners of back-to-back homes who converted them to through houses.

By 1914 most of Manchester’s back-to-backs and courts had been cleared or renovated – the Council had demolished 27,000 slums and merged around 3000. (8)  This was a record that placed it well ahead of most other industrial cities.

Ashton House

It’s worth mentioning one other manifestation of city pride. Ashton House, on Corporation Street, was the first purpose-built lodging house designed for women, opened in 1901.  City Architect HR Price created an arts and crafts building of genuine quality, both in design and materials, housing in separate cubicles 222 of Manchester’s poorest inhabitants.  It remains a monument to early social reform though, now Grade II listed, it is currently providing hotel and hostel accommodation to visitors to Manchester.

Much of the city’s early municipal housing was, by current standards, basic but this is a record of growing ambition and earnest endeavour.  By 1914, a Manchester principle – the construction of houses rather than high-rise flats or tenements – had been established that would hold good for all but a brief period in the sixties when the ambitious redevelopment of Hulme was undertaken.  That didn’t turn out so well and will be the subject of a future post.

Sources

(1) Quoted in Jacqueline Roberts, ‘”A densely populated and unlovely tract”: The Residential Development of Ancoats‘, Manchester Region History Review, Vol. VII, 1993

(2) Quotation from W Thompson, The Housing Handbook (1903) and additional detail from John J. Parkinson-Bailey, Manchester: An Architectural History (2000)

(3) Hulme Housing Association Re-housing Sub-Committee Preliminary Report, included in GA Wheale, Citizen Participation in the Rehabilitation of Housing in Moss Side East, Manchester, University of Manchester PhD, 1979

(4) Kim Wiltshire, ‘Victoria Square: a History’ (2008)

(5) Cited in Peter Shapely, The Politics of Housing: Power, Consumers and Urban Culture (2007)

(6) W Thompson, The Housing Handbook (1903) and Housing Up-To-Date (1907)

(7) Marr’s book, published in 1904, Housing Conditions in Salford and Manchester, contains a searing description of contemporary slum housing in the region and a rousing call to action.

(8) Shapely, The Politics of Housing: Power, Consumers and Urban Culture

(9) English Heritage, Ashton House

Early photographs are taken from Thompson, The Housing Handbook.

Robin Hood Gardens, Poplar: ‘presence, dignity and a bit grim’

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1960s, 1970s, Brutalism, GLC, LCC, Poplar, Regeneration, Tower Hamlets

We left Robin Hood Gardens in limbo last week. In 2008, Tower Hamlets Council had voted for its demolition.  Its supporters – primarily architects excited by its founding vision but also campaigners for social housing – mobilised to save it.

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

Much of the architectural case appears to me somewhat self-referential – an argument about the ‘iconic’ status of the buildings and ‘seminal’ role of the Smithsons with – in many, though not all, of the contributions – little regard for the lived reality of the estate for those who inhabited it.

It’s perhaps unfair to select the most egregious example of this approach but Stephen Bayley does, in my view, deserve special mention.  He wrote: (1)

Robin Hood Gardens suffered from the start with a singular lack of commodity and firmness.  Worse, the unintelligent housing policies of Tower Hamlets populated Robin Hood Gardens with the tenants the least likely to be able to make sensible use of the accommodation.  You have to whisper it but the Unité d’Habitation works because it is populated by teachers, psychologists, doctors, designers, not by single mothers struggling with buggies

Aaah, social housing made safe for the professional middle classes – what a vision!  In fact, to be fair to the Smithsons, they designed the estate very much with mothers in mind.  Perhaps it’s just single mothers Bayley objects to though they’re not that common on an estate with a significant Muslim community.

He continued, ‘As Marx asked, does consciousness determine existence or does existence determine consciousness?  Or, to put it less correctly, do the pigs make the sty or does the sty make the pigs?’.

This was not only insulting but stupid, given that Marx had concluded very firmly – it was the keystone of his philosophy – that being determined consciousness or, as Bayley might prefer, the sty made the pigs.  Not, therefore, a great encomium for Robin Hood Gardens.

Robin Hood Gardens, 2013

More serious commentators, headed by BDonline which has campaigned to save and renovate the estate, made a better case.   They pointed out that the poll of tenants was seriously flawed. Residents did want better housing conditions but their dissatisfaction focused on the poor upkeep of the estate and problems of overcrowding – neither of which problems can be blamed on its design.

Another resident conducted his own unofficial poll and concluded firmly that a majority of residents favoured refurbishment and most were wary of the alternatives on offer. Darren Pauling found that out of 140 households surveyed, 130 opposed demolition. (2)

At this point, I’d normally quote residents’ views as evidence – and plenty are available – but in this case, to be honest, they’re likely to offer little better than an anecdotal back-and-forth.  The reality is that responses tended to reflect the questions being asked and the choices being offered and often reflected the bias of the questioner.

I’m not claiming, therefore, to offer some definitive judgment but I hope these conclusions are balanced at least.

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

The residents do generally seem to think that the flats themselves, notwithstanding problems of overcrowding as families grew, are pleasant: (3)

You know what they call this place around here? They call it Alcatraz. At least the people who don’t live in it do. My friends ask ‘How can you live there?’ but they can’t believe how nice it is inside.

I don’t like the outside very much – but once you get inside your own flat it’s really very nice. You’ve got fresh air back and front – either on the street deck or on the balconies.

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

But the estate as a whole does suffer serious design flaws, agreed by their defenders and acknowledged even by the Smithsons. Those ‘streets in the sky’ never really worked – they were too narrow and placed inhospitably on the outside of the blocks.

© Christian Skovgaard and reproduced under the Creative Commons licence 2.0 Generic

The ‘pause places’ never offered even a simulacrum of personal space. Entrances and access points were unattractive. 

And then there’s the overall appearance.  As Rowan Moore concludes: (4)

Personally, I can see what they brought to make it stand apart from the average estate – presence, dignity, an integrity of concept and detail – but I can also see how, for almost everyone but architecture buffs, such concepts might seem vaporous next to the more obvious truth that it all feels a bit grim.

This has to matter, doesn’t it?  And Brutalism doesn’t really need to be quite so ‘brutal’.

Unlike many other much-criticised estates, Robin Hood Gardens never seems to have enjoyed a heyday.  It was born into bad times – a period of economic decline in the East End when racist thuggery and racial tensions were rife. This, of course, was not its fault.

Robin Hood Gardens, 2013

And, for all the superficial plausibility of the ‘defensible space’ thesis, the longer history of Robin Hood Gardens does not bear it out.  Antisocial behaviour has declined – even as the estate has been run down and its environment declined. Recent reports reveal much less graffiti and far less antisocial behaviour – these appear to have been a generational and social phenomenon rather than one rooted in the estate’s design.

Ironically, the estate’s problems may have reflected less its modernism and more a backward-looking design conception.  It was predicated on what had become – even when it opened – an old-fashioned view of working-class sociability.

The street-life it referenced and attempted to resurrect was finished – not killed by the Council or callous planners but superseded by working-class aspirations towards home and family and the relative economic affluence which fostered these.  Those that lament this shift should remember that streets and pubs loomed large when home circumstances were fundamentally inhospitable.

In fact, the estate received little architectural acclaim at the time of its construction.  It suffered the backlash against high-rise of the day – as did the World’s End Estate in Chelsea completed five years later.  When English Heritage controversially rejected the estate’s listing, they concluded that it was neither: (5)

innovative or influential. The case for historic interest is…lost precisely because the project came so late in this phase of modernist architecture in Britain, without however representing a glorious culmination.

If, as I think, the case for saving Robin Hood Garden is unproven, powerful questions remain about what will replace it.  For this, we have glossy brochures and slick websites in abundance to persuade us of the brave new world on offer.

Artist’s visions of the new Blackwall Reach development

What the £500m Blackwall Reach regeneration project offers is basically more – more housing, more commercial units, more open space and higher density.  Up to 1475 new homes will replace the 214 on the current low density estate.  In terms of design, however, as critics have argued, it all looks a bit generic.

But though we might feel some cynicism towards this developers’ dream, the context of housing need is Tower Hamlets is compelling. There are 23,400 households on the waiting list of which almost half are designated priority cases and two-fifths are suffering overcrowding.  The Council currently has 1500 families placed in temporary accommodation. (6)

In the new scheme, around half the dwellings will be privately-owned and some 35 per cent will remain social rented.  The remainder will be shared ownership.  

Those social rented homes will be transferred from Council control to the Swan Housing Association.  Current council tenants who want to be rehoused in the new scheme are concerned about being transferred to a new landlord.  They expect their rents to increase and rights to decrease.

The Council claims that 43 per cent of new homes will be ‘affordable’, of which 80 per cent will be socially rented. There is also improved provision of larger ‘family’ homes of three-bedrooms or more – 429 in all.

Of course, ‘affordability’ is a slippery concept.  The Government now defines ‘affordable’ rents as being up to 80 per cent of local market rents. According to Government figures, the average monthly rent for a two-bedroom property in Tower Hamlets in 2013 was £1777 which leaves a supposedly ‘affordable’ rent of £1422. (7)

Back in September 2012, before even the worst excesses of the London housing market, Tower Hamlets calculated that a four-person household would require an income of £48,464 to afford a so-called ‘affordable’ rent on a two-bed property. Median household income in the borough was estimated at £28,199. (8) 

Of course, housing benefit is available. As Colin Wiles has argued: (9)

the consequence of this policy is the creation of thousands of new benefit-dependent tenants while the £24bn housing benefit bill will continue to soar. The government has rendered the word affordable meaningless.

That is the reality of Benefits Street and the ‘welfare dependency’ suffered by millions of hard-working families in Britain today.

In conclusion, ‘affordability’ – as we noted in the case of the Aylesbury Estate – is a sorry, dishonest travesty of the term.  More homes are needed and there may be a case for social mix.  There seems – as things are currently organised – to be a necessity for private capital.

But it’s hard not to feel that all this is a long way away from those very practical municipal dreams which embraced our collective duty to house the least well-off and were driven by need not profit.

Tower Hamlets gave final approval for the demolition of Robin Hood Gardens in March 2012.  That demolition began in April 2013.  Architects, historians and – most importantly – residents will now have to comment on this modern vision of social housing and assess again how closely reality matches ideals.

Sources

(1) Stephen Bayley, ‘You want the brutal truth?  Concrete can be beautiful’, The Observer, 2 March 2008

(2) Darren Pauling, ‘I’m sick of concrete jungle creeping up on Robin Hood Gardens’, East London Advertiser, 6 December 2010.   See also, Chris Beanland, ‘Robin Hood Gardens: An estate worth saving?’, The Independent, 24 February, 2012

(3) John Furse, The Smithsons at Robin Hood

(4) Rowan Moore, ‘Robin Hood Gardens: don’t knock it…down’, The Observer, 5 December 2010

(5) John Allan, ‘Robin Hood Gardens, Poplar, London’ English Heritage, Conservation Bulletin 59, Autumn 2008

(6) The London Borough of Tower Hamlets (Blackwall Reach) Compulsory Purchase Order 2013. Statement of Reasons

(7) Valuation Office Agency, ‘Private Rental Market Statistics: England Only‘, December 2013

(8) London Borough of Tower Hamlets, ‘Response to Housing Issues‘. 11 September 2012

(9) Colin Wiles, ‘”Affordable housing” does not mean what you think it means‘, The Guardian, 3 February 2014

I’m very grateful to Soraya Smithson and the Smithson Family Collection for allowing me to reproduce Sandra Lousada’s evocative pictures of the estate.

Robin Hood Gardens, Poplar: ‘an exemplar – a demonstration of a more enjoyable way of living’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Brutalism, GLC, LCC, Poplar, Regeneration

What more is there to be said on Robin Hood Gardens?  Its architecture and its planned demolition have inspired voluminous and passionate writing on both sides of the debate – it’s become less a council estate, more a proxy in a cultural war.

© Will of Memory

This story begins in 1963 – though it stretches back further, of course, in terms of East End housing problems and the visions of politicians, planners and architects in solving them.  Still, in that year, three small areas of land became available to the then London County Council for redevelopment. Alison and Peter Smithson were commissioned to draw up designs for two separate buildings with plans for further which would form ‘one big linked dwelling group’.

Grosvenor Buildings in 1928

Two years later, the Greater London Council decided to demolish the adjacent Grosvenor Buildings – seven private tenement blocks opened in 1885, replacing slums cleared by the Metropolitan Board of Works.  The council acquired 1200 tenants in need of rehousing and an additional five acres of land.  The Smithsons acquired a new drawing board for their vision.

This, they hoped, would be: (1)

Alison and Peter Smithson

an exemplar – a demonstration of a more enjoyable way of living in an old industrial part of a city.  It is a model of a new mode of urban organisation which can show what life could be like.

They were influenced, of course, by le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation but had pioneered their own version of ‘the building as street’ in rejected plans for the City’s Golden Lane Estate in 1952.

Construction began in 1968, the first flats opened in 1971 and the scheme as a whole was completed in 1972 at a cost of £1,845,585.  It comprises two precast concrete-construction slab blocks – a ten-storey building adjacent to the Blackwall Tunnel approaches and a seven-storey running, more or less in parallel, along Cotton Street.  These are, visually, a fairly uncompromising example of Brutalist design.

There are 214 flats in all – 38 flats intended for old people at ground level and a mix of two- to six-bedroom maisonettes for the rest with a population of around 700 at a housing density of 142 persons per acre.  The flats are spacious and well-lit.

Aerial view from east: East India Dock Road to right and Blackwall Tunnel entrance below

The site was – and remains – problematic, sandwiched as it is between three busy roads.  The Smithsons countered this with a ‘stress-free central zone protected from the noise and pressures of the surrounding roads by the buildings themselves…a quiet green heart which all dwellings share and can look into’. (2)  They compared this open space – a little fancifully maybe – to a Georgian square.

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

The Smithsons also addressed the noise issue by placing bedrooms and kitchen-diners on the inner, quieter, side of the blocks and by the use of a number of other innovative design features.  It’s worth making this point to counter any simplistic view that this was design contemptuous of its residents: (3)

One of the men on site said that this, what we were trying to do, was too good for the people that were going to live in it.  We find this unacceptable to say that it is too good.

The Smithsons wanted the new Robin Hood Gardens to offer dignified, even – in their own terms – homely, accommodation for those who would live in the estate.

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

The other key design feature were the access decks to the dwellings, envisaged as ‘streets in the sky’ and intended to reference and encourage a traditional model of East End sociability:

The deck itself is wide enough for the milkman to bring his cart along or for two women with prams to stop for a talk and still let the postman by.

Additionally, although Robin Hood Gardens didn’t get the ‘yard gardens’ that the Smithsons had planned for Golden Lane, they did create small alcoves – they called them ‘pause places’ – off the decks which they hoped residents would personalise through the use, for example, of flower boxes.

So far, so good.  The GLC Householders’ Manual issued to the new tenants captures some of the anticipation and, perhaps, some of the trepidation that marked the moment: (4)

Although Robin Hood Gardens is of unusual design and has attracted much attention…only through the people who live here will it achieve any real life.  For it is how the place is used that finally decides the quality of life that a family can live here….It is now your turn to try and make it a place you will be proud to live in.

Just one year later, that pride seemed in short supply.  The American architectural critic Anthony Pangaro described the estate’s lifts as vandalised and defaced. He criticised those ‘pause places’ as allowing ‘no definition of private territory or any sense of belonging to individual occupants’. (5)

© Christian Skovgaard, Flikr. Reproduced under the Creative Commons licence 2.0 Generic

Here he echoed Oscar Newman’s critique in his book Defensible Space which had been published one year earlier.  Newman contended that public high-rise developments were particularly liable to crime and antisocial behaviour as their residents felt no sense of ownership or responsibility for them. Design flaws typically acted to facilitate such behaviour.

This was certainly the later conclusion of Alice Coleman, the UK’s guru of ‘defensible space’, and her team when it visited Robin Hood Gardens. The estate allegedly scored 14 out of 16 on the scale of features held to encourage crime. (6)

Another harsh critic of Robin Hood Gardens, Charles Jencks criticised those vaunted ‘streets in the sky’: (7)

They are under-used; the collective entries are paltry and a few have been vandalised.  Indeed they are dark, smelly, dank passage-ways, places where, as Oscar Newman has argued…, crime may occur more frequently than elsewhere.

We’ll come back to the validity of all this later.  What is undeniable is that Robin Hood Gardens quickly acquired a seemingly justified reputation as a very troubled estate, as confirmed in the descriptions and testimonies of John Furse’s 1982 doctoral thesis.  His verdict on the estate is damning: (8)

The access to the building is, to our mind, ill-conceived: the ‘stress-free’ zone is abused: the lack of common privacy is a constant worry: the vicious writing-on-the-wall is hard to ignore, and is undeniably related to much of the mindless vandalism that has broken down the communal facilities. The tenants do not make use of the decks and, consequently, the idea of ‘street’ does not have any factual validity…[Our] final assessment must be that, socially, the building does not work.  The lucidly argued Smithson aesthetic fails at Robin Hood.

Beyond the alleged design flaws and social issues, structural problems had also emerged.  A 2006 survey found the blocks to be ‘in poor condition’ with significant defects to the external envelope and roof coverings. It recommended the replacement of existing bathrooms and kitchens and identified problems with electrical wiring and other services.  A 2007 study concluded it would cost £70,000 per flat to bring them up to the Government’s Decent Homes Standard.

Tower Hamlets Council, the successor landlord to the GLC, voted for demolition in 2008 – a decision apparently supported by over 75 per cent of residents. We’ll come back to that too.

This, it turned out, was the beginning rather than the end of the debate about the future of Robin Hood Gardens.  At this point the Great and the Good of British architecture weighed in.  They argued passionately that the estate should be saved.

We’ll follow that debate and appraise its outcome next week.

Sources

(1) ‘The Smithsons on Housing’, BBC2 documentary, by BS Johnson, 1970, quoted in Alan Powers (ed), Robin Hood Gardens: Re-Visions, Twentieth Century Society, 2011.

(2) Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘Robin Hood Lane – A Housing Scheme for the GLC’ in Ordinariness and Light, 1970

(3) From ‘The Smithsons on Housing’ as is the quotation which follows.

(4) Quoted in ‘Robin Hood Gardens, London E14’, Architectural Design, September 1972

(5) Quoted in Hermione Hobhouse (General Editor), Survey of London: volumes 43 and 44: Poplar, Blackwall and Isle of Dogs, 1994

(6) Valerie Grove, Sunday Times, 7 June 1987, cited in Graham Stewart, Robin Hood Gardens  Blackwall Reach, ND

(7) Charles Jencks, The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Post-Modernism, 2002

(8) John Furse, The Smithsons at Robin Hood, University of Sussex PhD, 1982

I’m very grateful to Soraya Smithson and the Smithson Family Collection for allowing me to reproduce Sandra Lousada’s evocative pictures of the estate.