The Regent’s Park Estate, St Pancras: ‘catering for the main bulk and backbone of our people’

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1950s, Camden, St Pancras

Imagine knocking down some old Nash Regency terraces to build council houses.  If that idea fills you with horror, you should probably stop reading now.  If, on the other hand, it might capture a democratic moment, a time when we wanted to build houses for the people and cared less about the interests of the few, read on.

Derwent: Davies and Arnold, Zone C

This was the vision of Eric Cook in 1944.  Cook, a left-wing journalist, was the vice-chair of St Pancras Borough Labour Party.  (Elected to the Council in 1945, he died aged only 42 just three years later.) Admittedly, his idea had had some help from the Luftwaffe but the buildings were poorly built (‘by Regency jerry-builders’, he said) and thought at the time to be beyond repair.  Modern bulldozers, he went on, could easily create ‘one of the finest building sites in all Britain…the ideal site for the careful planning of a great sweep of working-class flats, catering for the main bulk and backbone of our people’. (1)

Meanwhile, the Crown Commissioners, who owned the land, were planning luxury flats. (Does that sound familiar?)  To Cook, this was ‘a plan which must be fought and beaten’:

The people of St Marylebone and St Pancras and their borough councils must persuade the Crown Commissioners…that something better can be done with this site.  What an inspiration it would be for the hundred of thousands who come to Regent’s Park every year… if they saw, instead of a restricted number of luxury flats for the very wealthy, right around the ‘outer circle’ of the Park a magnificent sweep of modern flats where people like themselves, service couples and families, had their homes overlooking one of the loveliest of London’s parks.

These initial ideas were too radical and soon watered down but it’s a sign of the times that modified plans were supported by a public meeting of planners and architects held in the nearby headquarters of RIBA and endorsed by Patrick Abercrombie himself. (2)

The Gorell Committee established by the new Labour Government in 1946 to investigate the future of the Regency terraces was, as might be expected, a little less gung-ho.  It recommended seven of the terraces be preserved but accepted the demolition of Someries House (which would later become the site of Lasdun’s Royal College of Physicians’ building), Cambridge Terrace (Nash’s least accomplished work, it said) and Cambridge Gate (a later, 1876, construction ‘of no architectural merit’).  The removal of the latter two would have the: (3)

advantage of opening up the Park for the immediate enjoyment of the inhabitants in a redeveloped area of terraced houses around Munster Square, Clarence Gardens and Cumberland Market [and] would remove a feeling of isolation and of living behind a barrier of more favoured property.

If you wander up the Outer Circle now, you’ll notice that those buildings survive and do, indeed, create a barrier separating the council estate behind from any view – indeed from any sense of adjacency to or ‘ownership’ – of the park which lies so close to hand.

The world wasn’t turned upside down after all.  Normal service was resumed; the privileges of the elite maintained.  Still, St Pancras Borough Council did build its Regent’s Park Estate and we’ll turn now to what was achieved.

The Crown Commissioners agreed to sell some of the land to the east of the Outer Circle and the Council acquired some 69 acres for clearance and redevelopment.  Two elements of Nash’s original scheme – Munster Square and Clarence Gardens, speculative housing for the middle classes gone bad and almost obliterated in the war – were demolished.

In their place the first plan, approved by the Council in 1946, envisaged, in classic Zeilenbau form, a ‘straight, uniform, high block system of flats spaced at intervals of approximately 55 yards’. (4)

Given that even the Council report approving the plan concluded ‘the whole effect is inclined to be one of regimentation’, it’s perhaps not surprising that this scheme was abandoned.  Frederick Gibberd was called on to design a revised lay-out and construction of the first phase of the Estate – Zone A with buildings designed by Gibberd himself – began in 1951.

Hawkshead: Gibberd, Zone A

Ainsdale: Gibberd, Zone A

These are the nine-storey T-shaped blocks running along Stanhope Street.  Interspersed among them – at a time when the principles of neighbourhood planning were running strong – were three-storey maisonettes, a nursery, two pubs and a small shopping centre.  The taller buildings were of reinforced concrete frame construction but Gibberd made some effort to add visual interest and variation, using brickwork facings in a chequer-board pattern as well as patterned tiling varied across the blocks.

Stanhope Parade: Gibberd, Zone A

The second phase south of Cumberland Market, along and off Robert Street – actually Zone C – was begun in 1954: 245 flats and six shops and three blocks of 11 storeys, all faced with yellow stock brick, designed by the Davies and Arnold partnership.

Borrowdale: Davies and Arnold, Zone C

The third phase (Zone B) – the work of Thomas Sibthorp, St Pancras Borough Architect – runs along the west side of Augustus Street: two six-storey blocks and one four-storey.

Kendal: Sibthorp, Zone B

Peggy Duff – chair of the Housing Committee from 1956 – later described the new buildings of the Estate as ‘horrible, barrack-type structures’ but most contemporary architectural opinion was kinder.  To the Times’ architectural correspondent, Sibthorp’s Zone C was the most disappointing of the scheme – ‘a step back even when compared with the 30-year-old work alongside’ but he praised other elements of the Estate as ‘far more agreeable’, particularly the designs of Davies and Arnold who had treated their façades more simply than Gibberd and been given greater latitude to vary building heights. (5)

Swallowfield: Armstrong and MacManus

It was the later phases of the overall scheme which most excited contemporary opinion.  Here Edward Armstrong and Frederick MacManus were given scope to depart ‘from the more usual open type of planning with rather loosely sited, separate blocks’, allowing them, it was said, ‘to regain the traditional character of English urban planning which gives a more compact and intimate environment’. (6)

Clarence Gardens: Armstrong and MacManus

The matter of council rents in St Pancras is a whole other story (we’ll write about it another time) but it’s worth noting one oddity here.  Labour had returned to power in St Pancras in 1953 (having narrowly lost to the Conservatives four years earlier), determined to revise the local differential rents scheme.  Its solution was to charge tenants two shillings more the higher their flat was above ground level.  Thus a tenant in one of the top-storey flats of Gibberd’s blocks was paying up to 18 shillings more than a tenant on the ground floor.  Even at a time when high flats were not as reviled as they later became, this seemed a perverse decision and it was abandoned in 1956.

Newby in foreground: Davies and Arnold, Zone C

If you live on the Estate, you can tell me different but it looks in good nick – well-maintained, and attractive overall with its mix of design and aspect and with the ‘touches of colour’ that the Times correspondent noted back in 1955 though enhanced more recently.  It does feel slightly cut off by the Regency terraces to its west and the rather desolate Hampstead Road to its east.  This was an unintended consequence of the failure to ‘knock through’ to the Park but it was taken then to some extent as a positive in creating a ready-made neighbourhood unit.

Of course, there have been many changes since the 1950s. The new Borough of Camden spent £1m on environmental and safety improvements in 1986. In 1990 a ‘£7m Swedish overcoat’ was used to insulate eight renovated blocks.  In 1994 – in a comic irony which probably escaped people at the time – the installation of new security doors was delayed by vandalism. (7)

Pangbourne: Armstrong and MacManus

Demographically, it’s a very different estate too with the ethnic mix you’d expect to find in an inner London borough and a more elderly population – one in five of residents are over 60 according to one sample survey.  Around a quarter of the Estate’s homes are now privately owned.

Ainsdale: Gibberd, Zone A

Most dramatically, the north-western corner of the Estate is threatened by the proposed HS2 development out of Euston.  A minimum of 168 homes face demolition to accommodate existing plans for new lines and station buildings; over 150 more are likely to be affected by the proximity of construction work.  In its opposition to HS2 at least, Camden can make common cause with those in the leafy shires similarly impacted. (8)

Silverdale: Gibberd, Zone A

There’ll be no elite outcry to save Eskdale, Ainsdale and Silverdale blocks in the Regent’s Park Estate from the planners and bulldozers as there was back in the 1940s to save Nash’s Regency terraces  but let’s imagine a world where housing for the ‘main bulk and backbone of our people’ was our first priority as it was briefly in 1945.

Sources

(1) Eric Cook, ‘Big Building Opportunities around Regent’s Park. Will they be seized?’ North London Press, November 24 1944

(2) ‘Development East of Regent’s Park.  Scheme to House 8000’, The Times, October 18 1945

(3)  Gorell Report quoted in CS Bainbridge and Frederick Gibberd, Plan for Saint Pancras (1947)

(4) Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras, ‘Regent’s Park Redevelopment Scheme, 1946. A report adopted by the Borough Council on 17 April 1946′

(5) ‘Peggy Duff, Left, Left, Left (1971)and ‘Rebuilding In London: Efforts to Avoid Monotony’, The Times, November 28, 1955

(6) St Pancras Borough Council, The Story of the Regent’s Park Redevelopment Area (1955)

(7) London Borough of Camden, Press Releases, 8 September 1986, January 29 1990, 30 June 1994

(8) Camden Council, ‘Regents Park Estate HS2 proposals Regeneration profile’ (ND)

With thanks to the excellent resources and always helpful staff of the Camden Local Studies and Archives department.

The Hufeisensiedlung, Berlin: ‘light and air, dignity and order’

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1920s

Looking at Liverpool last week, we saw the influence of Berlin’s 1920s public housing schemes and, in particular, Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner’s Hufeisensiedlung (Horseshoe Estate) built between 1925 and 1927.  It’s a good opportunity to drag out some photos of the Estate I took last year.  More seriously, it allows us to ‘compare and contrast’.  We’ll see a very different model of public housing and design and a cultural ambition which the UK couldn’t match but there are similarities too.

The Hufeisensiedlung: aerial view

Germany emerged from the ruins of war with, in 1919, probably the most progressive constitution of any in the world.  Article 155 stipulated the right of the state to control all land for the public benefit and promised a ‘healthy home’ for every German family.  In the new Greater Berlin, created in 1920 with a population of 4 million, this was urgent – it was estimated the metropolis required over 130,000 new homes.

The failure of the private sector to build forced federal government intervention: a new rent tax in 1924 was used to provide public subsidies for construction.  In the seven years which followed, 140,000 new flats were built in Berlin alone.  You’ll note, firstly, that these were flats rather than the cottage homes that British reformers favoured. Moreover, they were built principally not by the local state, as in the UK, but by cooperatives and housing associations. In Berlin, two-thirds of the new housing was constructed by the socialist trades union housing association, GEHAG. (1)

It was GEHAG which built the Hufeisensiedlung in Britz, a south-eastern suburb of Berlin which sometimes gives the Estate its name, and its ambitions for the project were signalled by the appointment of Bruno Taut, a socialist and modernist, as its chief architect.  Taut brought a range of influences to his designs – from garden city pastoral to plate-glass futurist – and a painterly sensibility to colour but, above all, he brought a commitment to high-quality housing for the masses.

That ideal was shared by his fellow socialist and modernist Martin Wagner, a founder of GEHAG, and Berlin’s Director of Planning from 1925.  Wagner’s support for new construction materials and methods which would bring ‘light and air, dignity and order’ to working-class homes would also mark the Hufeisensiedlung. (2)

Paster-Behrens-Strasse

Underlying these ideals lay an ethos, a belief in a Neues Bauen: a new way of building – a difficult concept to summarise but one which here seems to marry humane functionalism and modernist style with ideals of community and progress.  A new environment, new ways of living, would create a neuer Mensch – the new human proof against the militarism and injustice which had hitherto shaped Europe’s story. Alfred Döblin wrote of this effect in Britz in 1928: (3)

As elsewhere, people live separate lives; but the magnificent buildings are wiser than they themselves and express what is happening here.  The effect is slowly educative, like a silent, daily sermon.

As a final, tangible sign of the totality of the vision here unfolded and the encompassing nature of German social democratic politics, the Hufeisensiedlung would be constructed not by private enterprise but by cooperative building guilds.

The 72 acre Estate was built on a former feudal estate bought by the municipality in 1924. The finished scheme, completed in two years, comprised 1285 flats in three-storey blocks and 679 houses arranged in asymmetric terraces.

Hüsung, street view

In design terms, there is a deliberate variety of plan and height between the buildings and different parts of the Estate.  Equally striking is the abundant use of colour – on walls and design elements, in windows and doorways and stairways.  Taut had urged architects not to ‘despise this wonderful gift of God’; colour, he said, had ‘absolutely the same rights as form’.  The prevalent use of red is a more secular tribute to the politics of the Estate’s founders.

Then there is the single most powerful element of the Estate – the 350 metre long horseshoe-shaped central block which gives it its name.  At the time, the block was most controversial for its flat roof, perhaps the first in Berlin and interpreted as a deliberate challenge to the architecture of German Romanticism.  Now you’re more likely to notice the building’s verdant setting – the shared gardens of its perimeter and the parkland which surrounds a natural pond at its centre.  (Here the credit belongs to Leberecht Migge, the leading German landscape architect of his day, who oversaw this aspect of the Estate’s planning.)

The homes themselves were more conventional but were, of course, well-equipped for their time, with separate bathrooms, kitchens and bedrooms. Flats were provided with balconies and attic space.

Let’s leave further description to a contemporary visitor – Franz Hessell, writing in 1929: (4)

We enter the central ring and finally set eyes on the pond, the rising banks of which form a horseshoe lined with houses.  With pleasing regularity, the houses present a row of dormers, windows large and small, and colourful, recessed balconies.  On the narrow side of the horseshoe, this happy little township has its own marketplace, lined with the shop windows of co-ops that cater for the residents in – we are assured – a socially responsible way.  We enter one of the houses.  It is colourful inside as well as out, but there is no superfluous ornament; everything is unadorned, and yet good-looking.

That too was a mark of the new world being constructed in Britz – an aesthetic and political rejection by Taut and others of bourgeois society’s baggage.

Middle- and working-class interiors, Taut (1923)

According to the Estate’s journal, ‘the changed situation of the people of today has become the necessary starting point for new expectations about our home’ – a new Wohntechnik (living technique) to be expressed in hygienic living, simple furnishings, orderliness and rational housework.  There was, it has to be said, no challenge to traditional gender roles here and, for some, the domestic respectability of this vision marked a neutering of more colourful life-styles and more class-conscious forms of politics. (5)

It is true also that, as in the UK, this was a relatively well-off population – a skilled working-class in steady employment that could afford the higher rents of the Estate.  In 1927, of 1800 residents only 85 were classified as unskilled.

The echoes here of the supposedly middle-class mores promoted by Britain’s suburban council housing estates are strong – but equally mistaken.  This was not (that elusive thing) a revolutionary working-class but it was collectivist and – with no contradiction – self-improving.  It was, in other words, as authentically social democratic as its Labour-voting counterpart in the UK.  In the 1930 municipal elections, about 50 per cent of Britz tenants voted for the Social Democrats and 16 per cent for the Communist Party.

By 1933, all had changed, changed utterly, of course.  Employment had declined catastrophically. Red Berlin continued to resist Nazism but the split between left-wing forces was fatal, literally so in too many cases though both Taut (who was Jewish) and Wagner escaped into exile.

Surprisingly, the Estate survived the war relatively unscathed and emerged as a suburb of West Berlin in the Cold War after it.  GEHAG, transformed into an instrument of Nazi rule in the 1930s, was re-formed after 1945 but privatised in 1998.  The sale of it 679 terraced houses to private owners followed.  In 2008, the cultural significance of the scheme was recognised when it was declared – along with five other interwar Berlin estates – a UNESCO World Heritage site.

If that makes the Hufeisensiedlung a monument, it remains a powerful and vibrant one.  You could say it is a vanquished history, defeated in the end not by fascism but by resurgent capitalism but its confidence, quality and style survive and remind us not only of the past but of an imagined future whose loss we might lament.

Sources

(1) Anthony McElligott, ‘Workers’ Culture and Workers’ Politics on Weimar’s New Housing Estates: A Response to Adelheid Von Saldern’, Social History, Vol. 17, No. 1, January, 1992

(2) Paul Knox, Palimpsests: Biographies of 50 City Districts. International Case Studies of Urban Change (2012)

(3) Alfred Döblin, first published in foreword to Mario von Bucovich, Berlin (1928) and extracted in Iain Boyd-Whyte and David Frisby (eds), Metropolis Berlin, 1880-1940 (2013)

(4) Franz Hessel, ‘I Learn; via Neukölln to Britz’ (1929), extracted in Boyd-Whyte and David Frisby (eds), Metropolis Berlin, 1880-1940

(5) Adelheid von Salder, ‘The Workers’ Movement and Cultural Patterns on Urban Housing Estates and in Rural Settlements in Germany and Austria during the 1920s’, Social History, Vol. 15, No. 3 October, 1990

Liverpool’s Interwar Multi-Storey Housing: Building an ‘A1 community in a properly planned township of flats’

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1930s, Multi-storey

The alleged English antipathy to multi-storey living (the Scots are different) is well attested but Liverpool – in this and much else – is an exception.  Its Corporation embraced tenements for practical reasons, as we shall see, but also as a conscious mark of the city’s urbanity and global status.  In so doing, it created some of the most striking council housing of the interwar period though sadly very little of it remains.

Gerard Gardens

The immediate context for the drive to inner-city multi-storey accommodation was a scale of slum housing unparalleled in the country.  In 1919, 11,000 Liverpool families were living in one room – over 6 per cent of the city’s population.  The Medical Officer of Health estimated 8000 new homes were needed and Liverpool – a pioneer in municipal housing – acted quickly to build the new cottage estates that the Tudor Walters Report recommended and Christopher Addison’s 1919 Housing Act funded.

The practical reasons for inner-city tenement building, however, were well expressed by Sir Leslie Scott, the Conservative MP for Liverpool Exchange, in the House of Commons in 1925. (1)

The position in many of our great cities, particularly in Liverpool, and particularly in my own division of Liverpool, is that it is vitally necessary that the workers should live in the centre of the city near their work. The dock labourers of Liverpool have to go every morning to the stand on the dockside for employment…They are employed, as we all know, by the half-day, and, if they are unemployed, they have to turn up again at the stand at mid-day.

Thus, as he went on to explain, long tram journeys back and forth to the new suburban council estates (such as Norris Green) were impractical.  The more cynical might see in such solicitude a desire to maintain the cheap and competitive pool of labour on which the profits of Liverpool’s global trade depended.

The Liverpool waterfront – a contemporary view

That sense of itself as a world city was important too, however, and the Liverpool townscape had a powerful presence and dignity – maybe those shtetl Jews who had bought tickets to the New World but found themselves dumped on the Liverpool waterfront weren’t as gullible as we might think.  In the interwar period, as Matthew Whitfield argues, this civic project allied with a Modernist dynamic in a shared commitment to urban scale and density and rational planning.

In this, the Corporation appointed men who shared such a vision, notably in the first instance, John Brodie, City Engineer from 1898 to 1926 and the designer of the UK’s first ring road (Queen’s Drive), its first intercity highway (the East Lancs Road) and what is said to be the country’s largest ever municipal construction project, the Mersey Tunnel. (2)  In October 1924, Brodie led a Council delegation to Amsterdam.  They went with a mission to examine the Dutch municipality’s construction of concrete cottages but returned far more impressed by the city’s grand housing schemes.

Lancelot Keay (1883-1974)

But Brodie’s most critical contribution to Liverpool’s housing history lay in his appointment in 1925 of Lancelot Keay as his chief architectural assistant.  Poached from Birmingham (where there was a firm dislike of flatted schemes),  Keay – as acting director on Brodie’s retirement and then director of housing from 1929 – became the leading municipal architect of his day and one of the most influential advocates of multi-storey solutions.

Keay undertook the apparently mandatory visit to Vienna to view its municipal housing in 1926 but he returned impressed by its scale, sure enough, but critical of the small size, poor ventilation and facilities of the flats.

A trip to the International Housing and Town Planning Congress in Berlin in 1931 was more positive:  his official report praised the ‘breadth of vision exercised in the layout of the various estates’ and their ‘modern lines’, singling out the Hufeisensiedlung designed by Bruno Taut.   Keay’s appointment in the same year of a bright young graduate from the Liverpool School of Architecture, John Hughes – already a recognised exponent of modernist-style flat design – consolidated the Council’s commitment and capability in the field.

Liverpool had already built some large multi-storey schemes of more conventional design in the suburbs in the later 1920s.  Here, along some of Brodie’s grand arterial roads (such as Mather and Muirhead Avenues), they were intended to provide a mass and impression appropriate to the new urban landscape being constructed.

In all, then, Liverpool needed little encouragement to embark on more ambitious plans to develop its central districts but it was given a leg-up by the housing legislation of the 1930s.  Greenwood’s 1930 Housing Act gave financial incentives to the rehousing of slum-dwellers and to the construction of flats in central areas with high land values.

St Andrew’s Gardens, a contemporary view

Its breakthrough scheme, however, was St Andrew’s Gardens, from a design by Hughes in 1932 and completed in 1935.  Of the original large scheme, strongly reminiscent of the Hufeisensiedlung, now only one semi-circular five-storey block remains but it retains a commanding presence – its conventional walk-up design superseded by its clean, sweepingly curved lines and horizontal accents (note the windows and the banded brickwork).  The development included so-called private ‘sun balconies’ for the first time (as distinct from the balcony access galleries of traditional schemes) and benefitted from high-quality landscaping and play areas.

St Andrew’s Gardens, a contemporary view

Further legislative impetus was offered by the 1935 Housing Act which replaced ‘Clearance Areas’ (where slum housing had to be specifically represented on sanitary grounds) with more general ‘Redevelopment Areas’ which could be zoned for clearance on broader grounds such as overcrowding, poor amenities and bad layout.

It was no coincidence that Lancelot Keay had joined the Ministry of Health’s Technical Committee on Slum Re-housing one year earlier or, in the year of the Act’s passing, that Liverpool Corporation was the first in the county to apply for redevelopment powers under its provisions.

Myrtle Gardens central courtyard

The broader ambition of the Corporation and its architects was seen fully in the schemes which followed.  Gerard Gardens was part of the newly designated Central Redevelopment Area and constructed between 1935 and 1939.  Myrtle Gardens (1936-1937), Caryl Gardens (1936-1937), Warwick Gardens (1938), Sir Thomas White Gardens (1938-1940) and the Corlett Street flats (1938-1939) followed in quick succession.  All follow the same broad lines of St Andrew’s Gardens though Whitfield notes an Expressionist tendency in the Gerard Street scheme in particular, drawn from the German architect Erich Mendelsohn.  Mendelsohn had lectured at the Liverpool School of Architecture in 1933 and the School was an important background influence on the design of Liverpool’s municipal housing at this time.

Gerard Gardens in decline, 1973

Keay’s ambitions ran larger than the mere provision of housing, however.  The internal facilities of the flats were relatively conventional (though improved by the insistence that a bath – and later a hand basin – be included within a designated bathroom rather than scullery) but Keay believed that their denser development allowed recreational space and the inclusion of amenities not possible in the cottage suburbs.

Writing in 1939, Keay proudly enumerated the facilities of Caryl Gardens: ‘rest gardens for aged tenants’, ‘playgrounds with a liberal supply of gymnastic equipment for both infants and juniors’, ‘a boys’ club and a girls’ club in the blocks’, ‘a gas-heated drying room (for which no charge is made)’ and, last but not least (for its recognition of the reality of the lives and deaths of Corporation tenants) , ‘a House of Rest which has been erected for the reception of the dead pending burial’.

Warwick Gardens

At nearby Warwick Gardens there was also, ‘following continental practice’ as Keay put it, a children’s meal centre and shops at the end of the blocks. (2)

Warwick Gardens children’s meal centre

The question remains who were the beneficiaries of this progress?  The rents – ranging from 3s 7d a week for bed-sitters to 10s 6d for five-bedroom flats – were lower than those on the cottage estates and the living expenses equally so.   A survey of St Andrew’s Gardens tenants shows over 60 per cent of household heads were unskilled workers and 20 per cent semi-skilled – almost a quarter employed on the docks and some 17 per cent in shipping.  Four fifths were families displaced by central slum clearance. This was authentically the poorer working class that councils up and down the country had found difficult to house affordably and Liverpool deserves credit for the achievement. (3)

When Keay asked in 1935…

Is it less possible to raise an A1 community in a properly planned township of flats than in a garden city or suburb? Is there any doubt that the rising generation in the great continental cities of Europe will not be as fit physically and morally as the children of Wythenshawe and Dagenham and Norris Green?

…he was in no doubt of the answer.  He was certain that the Council’s modern schemes would provide first-class accommodation for the Liverpool working class (though not, it should be said, without a little education for their new tenants who he believed had been adversely conditioned by slum living).

CH Reilly, who had headed the Liverpool School of Architecture, was equally positive about the architectural quality of the schemes in 1936 (and we might forgive the anti-German sentiment at that date at least): (4)

‘The Architect’, formerly at Gerard Gardens, now in the new Museum of Liverpool

We shall soon be placing Liverpool and Manchester well before Vienna for this class of work. Admittedly these buildings are not conceived nor laid out with the mathematical precision to get the maximum sun…that a German architect would strive for. He would place his thin blocks of flats marching across the town, one behind the other, like a regiment of gaunt grenadiers…Keay’s great groups, while providing an abundance of light and air, give a sense of communal life comparable to the great court of Trinity, Cambridge.

It’s an interesting prefiguring of some of the later criticisms of starker Zeilenbau schemes and an anticipation of Reilly’s own post-war attempts to create community in social housing schemes.

Gerard Gardens, 1986 © Liverpool Echo

Still, the comparison with a Cambridge quadrangle might seem a little fanciful but there are plenty who remain who will attest to the community spirit of the estates: ‘Charabanc trips would be arranged, mammoth football matches between rival squares and games such as kick the can and alallio within the confined of the square and the bonfire nights were legendary’. (5)

Now, though, only a remnant of St Andrew’s Gardens survives – and that as a student hall of residence.  The other blocks were progressively demolished from the 1980s. How to explain this apparent failure?

The straightforward point is that the estates became obsolescent – that housing standards and tenant expectations had risen and what was once state-of-the-art became old-fashioned and inadequate.  Others, however, would place greater blame, on the Council’s failure to refurbish and modernise and would point, in fact, to a deliberate policy of neglect.

Looking beyond the kind of architectural essentialism which characterises so much writing about council estates, there’s also a context here.  Council housing was increasingly allocated to the least well-off and ‘problem tenants’ to the least popular estates – with the cycle of decline and self-fulfilling failure that followed.   Liverpool itself suffered almost unprecedented economic decline from the 1970s onward.  Its population fell from 700,000 in 1945 to 460,000 in 1983.

New council housing built by the Militant-led council © Dave Sinclair/Socialist Party

The Militant-led council in power between 1983 and 1987 famously – and, in some ways, creditably – built thousands of solid brick council houses in central Liverpool, arranged in closes and cul-de-sacs and conforming to then fashionable theories of ‘defensible space’ (or ‘Alice Coleman’s walkway turd-counting’ in Owen Hatherley’s phrase).  For Hatherley, Keay’s schemes were a glorious attempt ‘in making an English city as honest about its urbanity as a Scottish or European one’.  He labels the look of their replacement as ‘utterly ridiculous’: ‘one moment you’re in Berlin, the next in Basingstoke’.

I’d be happy to hear what people from Liverpool think and especially people for whom either Keay’s flats or their more modest replacements were home.  It’s ironic, though, that it is Keay’s paternalism which envisaged a forward-looking, future-busting housing form – a vanguardist vision, you might say – and the Militant efforts which seem reactionary in comparison.

Sources

(1) Matthew Whitfield, ‘Multi-Storey Public Housing in Liverpool during the Inter-War Years’, Manchester Metropolitan University PhD, October 2010. Much of the analysis and detail which follows is drawn from this source and from Whitfield, ‘Lancelot Keay and Liverpool’s Multi-Storey Housing of the 1930s’, Twentieth Century Architecture, No. 9, Housing the Twentieth Century Nation (2008)

(2) LH Keay, ‘Redevelopment in Central Areas in Liverpool’, RIBA Journal, vol 46, no 6, 23 January 1939

(3) Colin G. Pooley, Sandra Irish, The development of corporation housing in Liverpool, 1869-1945, University of Lancaster/Centre for North West Regional Studies (Lancaster, 1984) quoted in Whitfield, Multi-Storey Public Housing in Liverpool

(4) CH Reilly ‘The Year’s Work at Home’, The Architects’ Journal, 16 January 1936 quoted in Tatsuya Tsubaki , ‘Postwar Reconstruction and the Questions of Popular Housing Provision, 1939-1951’, University of Warwick PhD, 1993

(5) Ged in the thread ‘Gardens, Tenements and Courts’ on the excellent Yo! Liverpool forum.   Nostalgia for the schemes is also powerfully represented in Paul Sudbury’s documentary film Gardens of Stone (2007) and the website Inacityliving.

(6) Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (2010)

Homes for Workers, a 1939 documentary narrated by Keay himself, gives a wonderful overview of the city’s interwar housing efforts.

Apart from the websites mentioned in (5) above, additional images and commentary on the flats can be found at Streets of Liverpool and on the website of Phil Maxwell.

For a sense of how radical the Corporation’s vision for Liverpool was in the early post-1945 period, go to Back to the Future: Liverpool 1948 from the fine A Sense of Place blog on the city.  See the same blog, for before and after images of some of the developments mentioned here and evocative images of Liverpool in the 1980s from Dave Sinclair’s new book on the subject.

The Honor Oak Estate, Lewisham: ‘the forgotten estate’

Tags

LCC, Lewisham, Regeneration

We left the Honor Oak Estate last week, perhaps as oppressed by the inequality and constraints that have marked the lives of our poorer citizens as by Nazi bombs.  1945 brought the defeat of Hitler; the struggle to achieve decent conditions for all our people would be longer-fought.  In this and for the new generation of planners, the Estate would feature as a warning of what to avoid.  The ‘neighbourhood units’ and ‘mixed developments’ favoured – in principle rather better than in practice – in the post-war years were a conscious reaction to the design failings of interwar council estates, of which Honor Oak was taken to be a prime example. (1)

Barville Close

The General Election of 1945 saw a Labour landslide and a shift, it seems, in the politics and identity of the Estate too: ‘After the war we all went voting for Labour’, largely, as remembered, through the efforts of one party activist. ‘And it was only Mr Cooper who did it.  He went round this estate, “Vote for Labour”. He got everybody out’. (2)  I hope that gives heart to some of you pounding the pavements.

In a poignant turn of phrase, another resident recalls:

They had what was called the Labour Party then.  They used to come round and collect our money each week and see what could be done.  The majority of the estate was in it and it was that man who came round collecting who got all our action otherwise we had got nobody.

How you read that particular account will depend on your politics.

More concretely, additional shops and a pub arrived in 1948 – the pub, the Golden Dragon, in the ground floor of a new housing block.  (It closed in 2009 and the building has been demolished.)

The former Golden Dragon pub just prior to demolition © Oxyman, Wikimedia Commons

There were other changes too.  The first black and ethnic minority residents, mainly of African-Caribbean origin, moved into the area in the sixties and racial tensions were strong.  Nesta Wright and her three young children moved on to the Estate in 1970.

Her son Ian, seven at the time, remembers a difficult childhood and a struggle against the racial bigotry and antagonism that sought to hold him back.  Fortunately, he met a teacher at the Estate’s Turnham Primary School – ‘my mentor and my major, main man’, he says – who made the difference (as good teachers can).  Let’s hear it for that teacher, Sidney Pigden, and Ian Wright of Arsenal and England. (3)

These tensions dissipated only slowly.  The Joseph Rowntree Foundation instigated a ‘Partnership Initiatives for Communities’ (PICs) project on the Estate in 1998.  At a time when about half the residents were of black African and African Caribbean heritage, the project found little contact between them and their white neighbours and a sense that an older-established and more conservative white community monopolised community facilities.

Ironically, these ‘rival’ groups actually shared similar concerns and problems and both felt that the Estate was neglected and its people disrespected: (4)

The way the council looks at people on the estate, their perception of the people they are housing reflects the service that we are given. Most of them think we are brain dead.”

“Sometimes you go in to the council office and as soon as you say you are from Honor Oak you can see what they are thinking.

In fact, the Estate was subject to a plethora of initiatives.  Some of the flats, particularly those of the ‘modified type’ which shared bathrooms, had been rehabilitated in the early post-war period and later the railway line on the western border of the Estate was replaced by Coston Walk, a new low-rise scheme of flats and maisonettes built by the Greater London Council in 1970.

Coston Walk

But still, the Estate’s troubles and a sense of isolation continued: (5)

Hopelessly out-dated and lacking in facilities by modern standards, cramped and comfortless, the flats were fair game for vandals, their tenants discontented and demoralised.

When the Estate was transferred from the Greater London Council to Lewisham in 1971, the Borough declared it a General Improvement Area and major refurbishment followed.  In Skipton House, for example, one of the last to be renovated, forty flats were replaced by 28 with larger rooms, fitted kitchens and bathrooms and new gas heating at a cost of around £10,000 a unit.  Lifts were added and landscaping improved but the finishing touch was to invite Ideal Home to decorate a show flat.  This was the 1970s so naturally there was Laura Ashley wallpaper in the hallway.

The 1977 History I’ve quoted from, published by the Honor Oak Estate Neighbourhood Association, was another conscious attempt to support and strengthen the Estate’s community:

The writers of this book also want to let the authorities know how much better the estate was managed and serviced in the past. Thus they hope to create improvements.

Such improvements were promised and partially fulfilled when Lewisham opted to participate in the Department of Environment’s Priority Estates Project in 1980 – one of twenty across the country.  The Project brought various local management initiatives and some improvements to security and the physical environment. (6)

Sulby House

These seem to have increased residents’ satisfaction with the Estate and, though Lewisham’s bid for Estate Action funding in 1992 was unsuccessful, money was found to upgrade bathrooms and heating across the Estate.  That much remained to do is clear from the three-year PICs project mentioned earlier:

I look out of my window and I see abandoned cars, kids hanging around, dog dirt everywhere. What do I want to go out for?

Honor Oak’s problems were far from unique, of course.  At this time, the residents’ complaints of ‘disaffected youth and out-of-control children, crime and vandalism, drugs and alcohol abuse’ were replicated in ‘problem estates’ nationwide.

And, likewise, underlying such problems were economic difficulties felt with peculiar force in council estates increasingly housing a poorer working class. Of the families that made up half the Estate, almost two thirds were headed by lone parents.  (No disrespect to single mothers of course but a group which can be assumed to be peculiarly disadvantaged.) Around one third of the Estate’s adults were on benefits.

To some that might seem all we need to know.  Poverty blights any community and, in this regard, the quality of the Estate itself – its housing and environment – could be taken as almost irrelevant.  The PICs focused on ‘soft regeneration’ – an attempt (in its fashionable jargon) ‘to build capacity and empower, and hopefully integrate, a fractured and excluded estate community’.  A ‘citizens’ workshop’ was held and from it emerged a multiracial steering group to represent the Estate and lobby for improvements.

Thomas Joseph House on St Norbert Road

This ‘soft regeneration’ was fortunate, however, in finding its aspirations backed by some hard cash. In 2000, the Borough Council promised £18.4 million to refurbish the ‘forgotten estate’.  The deputy mayor of Lewisham spoke with disarming honesty when he stated:  (7)

We’re finally going to do something about Honor Oak. It’s going to be the biggest programme of housing investment Lewisham has had for ten years.

Over the years that followed, of the blocks which remain, all have been modernised with new kitchens, bathrooms and toilets, double-glazing and central heating.  Externally, a visit to the Estate shows a green and pleasant and well-maintained environment.

Turnham House rear

Other initiatives accompanied and reinforced these physical improvements: in 2000 a £156,000 Home Office grant provided six wardens to patrol the Estate for a two-year period – ‘to reassure tenants, not act as security guards’, it was said, and wearing bomber jackets in a colour chosen by the residents.

In the following year, a Sure Start scheme opened; in 2003, a neighbourhood housing management centre and in 2005 a one-stop centre offering a range of services and support.  Honor Oak’s first neighbourhood manager was one of the three unemployed single mothers who had joined the first steering group.  The neighbourhood association is now said to be a diverse and representative organisation.  Even that security team and the local police beat officers won awards.  Either the Joseph Rowntree Foundation are brilliant self-publicists or something went right.

Honor Oak Medical Centre, Turnham Road © Malc McDonald and made available under a Creative Commons licence

We can agree that money alone is not enough – but we might also conclude that it sure does help. The longer history of the Honor Oak Estate shows that the social costs of building cheaply far outweigh any short-term financial savings.  The story is of catch-up and always, from the outset, exclusion – that buzz-word does capture something here. On the other hand, while money can’t create community, investment in its infrastructure certainly supports it. For the time being, the parting words of the residents’ history contain a plaintive truth that I can’t express better:

Why is it that housing continues to be geared more towards costs than the needs of the people?

Sources

(1) Ruth Glass and LE White, A Warning to Planners: the Story of Honor Oak Estate (1945)

(2) Maybe this was Fred Cooper of Revelon Road. He’s listed as the secretary of the local Clarion Cycling Club – a socialist organisation – in the 1930s by Hayes People’s History. Does anyone know for sure?

(3) See Rick Glanvill, The Wright Stuff (2012) and ‘Passed/failed: An education in the life of Ian Wright, footballer and broadcaster’, The Independent, 20 March 2008, from which the quotation is drawn.

(4) David Page, Respect and Renewal. A study of neighbourhood social regeneration, Joseph Rowntree Foundation (2006)

(5) ‘Design for Living Honor Oak’, Ideal Home, May 1978, vol 115, no 5

(6) Anne Power, Running to Stand Still. Progress in local management on twenty unpopular housing estates, Priority Estates Project (PEP), 1991

(7) Vicky Wilkes, ‘£18.4 million package for “forgotten estate”’, Mercury, 23 February 2000