Post-war High-Rise in Birmingham II: ‘Get these people out of the slums!’

Tags

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Multi-storey

Last week’s post looked at some of the contextual forces behind Birmingham’s post-war volte-face – from a city proclaiming a ‘prejudice against flats’ as ‘one expression of its independence of character’ to one which led the country in building big and high.  Today, we’ll examine the internal dynamics – a potent combination of ideals, money and power – which brought this love affair with high-rise to its peak and ensured that it would all ultimately end in tears.

The Sentinels, Holloway Head, built by Bryants between 1971-72. Birmingham’s highest blocks at 32 storeys, they were intended to surpass the recently completed Red Road flats in Glasgow © Oosoom and made available by Wikimedia Commons

Birmingham had been home to some of the ‘big beasts’ of local government since the days of Joseph Chamberlain. That tradition continued.  Labour had won control of the Council in 1945 but a Unionist (Conservative) administration, highly critical of the inadequacy of its council house building record, was returned to power in 1949.  A House Building Committee was set up under the chairmanship of the civil engineering contractor, Sir Charles Burman.

Burman, according to Patrick Dunleavy, ran a ‘one-man show’, excluding councillors linked to building trades unions or private house-builders, preferring to build close relations with the large construction firms such as Laing, Wimpey and Wates. (1)

In a generally more favourable climate, housing completions increased rapidly, reaching an early peak of 4800 in 1952 when already 20 per cent of completed homes were flats.  That success notwithstanding, Labour returned to power in the same year; its housing supremo, Alderman Albert Bradbeer complaining that Birmingham would soon be surrounded by a ‘ring of forts’. (2)

Labour appointed a City Architect in 1952, AG Sheppard Fidler (formerly the Chief Architect of Crawley New Town), with the apparent intention of improving the design and planning credentials of its house-building programme.  But Sheppard Fidler was condemned to work under Herbert Manzoni’s powerful Public Works Department for the first two years of his tenure and had to fight for influence thereafter.  He recalled: (3)

When I went to Birmingham, you could have called it Wimpey Town or Wates Town. The Deputy City Engineer came into my office the very first day I arrived, shoved all these plans on my desk, and said ‘Carry on with these! ‘  He was letting contracts as fast as he could go, didn’t know what he was doing, just putting up as many Wimpey Y-shaped blocks as he could!  This rather shattered me, because we’d had very careful schemes prepared at Crawley, with very great interest on the part of the Development Corporation, whereas in Birmingham the House Building Committee could hardly care about the design as long as the numbers were kept up – I’d been used to gentle Southern people!

Burman, for his part, described the City Architect as:

 a very nice chap, but he was a perfectionist – he liked to get things just so. This meant that he did not push the housing programme along as quickly as he might have done, because building and planning well and carefully was more important to him than building a lot of houses.

The lack of self-consciousness in that last statement can speak for itself.

Sheppard Fidler’s stock was not helped by the sharp fall in council completions in the early sixties and the frustration caused thereby to  the latest of the Council’s big beasts – nicknamed the ‘little Caesar of Birmingham’ or sometimes just ‘the boss’ – Labour councillor Harry Watton.

Richard Crossman, Minister of Housing and Local Government, and Harry Watton (to the right). Druids Heath, 1965. Crossman’s presence is an indication of the high-level government support for Birmingham’s Industrialised Building drive.

Watton’s patience, already stretched by Sheppard Fidler’s carefully contrived mixed development schemes, apparently broke when the latter proposed using the French firm Camus to build the Castle Bromwich estate.  Against the City Architect’s opposition, Watton redirected almost all the high-rise building programme to local firm, C. Bryant & Son.

Castle Bromwich, 1965: a Bryants system-built scheme

By now, we are talking of Industrialised or System-building.  Conservative and Labour governments competed in a political arms race to build the most homes – the Conservatives pledged 350,000 a year in 1963 only to be outbid by Labour’s 400,000.  The means was system-building: the Conservatives had expected 25 per cent of new dwellings to be constructed by this method; the new Labour government raised the figure to 40 per cent. Councils which ‘seemed to be co-operating were “rewarded” in terms of enhanced capital allocations, speeding approvals, etc.’ (4).  Industrialised building seemed not only the inevitable means to achieve housing goals but a modern and progressive one too.

Bell’s Lane, Druids Heath, 1965: a Bryant Bison-wallframe 13-storey scheme

In 1963, the first Bison Wallframe blocks were completed in Kidderminster with Minister of Housing and Local Government Keith Joseph present at their opening.  A group of Birmingham councillors visited too.  As one member of the party recalls:

the way to the blocks was through this great marquee – which was loaded with drink and, er, food…So we stayed there quite a long time and then we went out and looked at the flats.  Well by this time they could have been inlaid with gold!  In fact they looked pretty awful from the outside – they had this grey and white panelling.  Inside they were all right…

As they left, it was decided, ‘”Right, we’ll take five blocks.” Just as if we were buying bags of sweets.’ In fact, the Council went on to place a contract for 12 standard plan 11-storey Bryant-Bison blocks.  Sheppard Fidler was told to find sites for them.

Great Russell Street (now gone), Newtown, 1967. From the Phyllis Nicklin collection.

He resigned the following year, concluding ruefully that Birmingham was ‘an engineering city’ which ‘felt it didn’t need a City Architect’.  He was briefly succeeded by former Leeds City Architect, J R Sheridan Shedden who, in an all-out dedication to the goal of raising output, reorganised his department into effectively a large contractor’s design team.  One sensitive ex-LCC architect concluded:

That was an appalling mediaeval baron of an architect, a man of zero architectural quality, a primeval creature who could have gone to work for Wimpey or some other contractor – he could have been a Soviet general, with a huge hat and a coat buttoned up to his chin!

But Sheridan Shedden achieved results.  Completions climbed to 4728 in 1966 and peaked the following year at 9023 (proportionately three times the figure for the whole of London).   The City Architect himself had died prematurely one year earlier but, if that gave his critic any comfort, it was surely rapidly dissipated by the new head of department, Alan Maudsley.

Alan Maudsley (to the left) and Bill Reed, Gas Street Basin, 1969

First some background: between 1966 and 1968 Bryants had won 66 per cent of all Birmingham’s high-rise contracts.  The fact that its public relations were handled by former councillor and local Labour MP, Dennis Howell, and that Labour alderman WT Bowen was one of the firm’s directors was, of course, coincidental;  Bryants’ 2000-strong Christmas gift list merely a sign of the company’s festive spirit.

But Maudsley’s guilty plea in a 1975 High Court case alleging a corrupt relationship with a local architectural practice and the subsequent imprisonment of Bryants’ managing director and two directors, charged with providing gifts to various West Midland councillors, are a matter of record.  Allegations were also made of money paid by Bryants to Maudsley.

More anecdotally, Private Eye tells the story of a topping-out ceremony for a Bryants’ scheme performed, at Dennis Howell’s request, by a somewhat tired and emotional George Brown.  ‘Brown ‘waved an all-embracing hand over the assembled dignitaries saying “You’re all in Chris Bryant’s pocket” before unsteadily despatching the last shovelful of concrete’. (5)

This was not local government’s finest hour and there’s no need to sugar-coat the corruption here.  Glendinning and Muthesius are kind to Maudsley, however, noting his ‘dynamism’ and the impressive cost-consciousness of Birmingham’s building programme under his stewardship.  They quote an official from Bryants stating: ‘he’d tell the councillors what to do…while we’d end up doing jobs at his behest and his price!’.

These were, in all honesty, febrile times for local government as the idealism of the slum clearance and rehousing programmes collided with the more questionable dynamics of municipal ambition and personal power.  Add to that the reliance on system-building (and we haven’t even examined the practical problems of that – see next week’s post) and an oligopoly of major contractors and you get a very toxic mix indeed.

The Bromford Estate © UK Housing Wiki

Still, William Reed, Maudsley’s deputy and successor, offers a perspective we would do well to remember: (6)

It was exciting to be part of that particular period. There may have been things going on in the background – graft and so on – but they weren’t the things at the top of people’s minds. What was in people’s thoughts was – ‘For God’s sake get on and build those houses, and get these people out of the slums!’

Sources

(1) Patrick Dunleavy, The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain, 1945-1975. A Study of Corporate Power and Professional Influence in the Welfare State (1981)

(2) Phil Ian Jones, ‘The Suburban High-Rise Flat in the Post-War Reconstruction of Birmingham, 1945-1971’, Urban History, Vol 32, Part 2, August 2005

(3) This and the following quotations are drawn from Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block – Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (1994)

(4) Association of Metropolitan Authorities, ‘Defects in Housing Part 2: Industrialised and System Built Dwellings of the 1960s and 1970s’ (1984)

(5) ‘Sharpesville’, Private Eye, 12 July 1974, quoted in Phil Ian Jones, ‘The Rise and Fall of The Multi-Storey Ideal: Public Sector High-Rise Housing in Britain 1945-2002, with Special Reference to Birmingham’, PhD thesis, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Birmingham, 2003

(6) Quoted in Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block

The collection of 446 photographs of the late Phyllis Nicklin, a tutor in Geography at the University of Birmingham, has been made available under the Creative Commons licence.

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Post-war High-Rise in Birmingham I: ‘Saucer City’

Tags

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Multi-storey

In 1971, Birmingham City Council owned 464 tower blocks, built in the preceding twenty years.  By 2001, through transfer or demolition, only 305 remained and that number has continued to fall.  The figures alone will conjure in most readers’ minds an established grand narrative – of planners running amok, of megalomaniac councils, of high-rise slums unfit for purpose.

Aston New Town

Perhaps nothing I write will challenge that story – it’s a compelling one after all – but it is worth examining its forceful internal dynamics and finer grain.  If you’re not more forgiving, you might end up a little more understanding at least.

As we’ve seen in previous posts, Birmingham was not ‘by tradition…flat-minded’ and the 51,000 council homes it built in the interwar period were overwhelmingly located in traditional cottage suburbs. (1)  So what changed?

The view from Salford flats in Aston in 1957 gives a good idea of pre-existing conditions in inner-city Birmigham. From the Phyllis Nicklin collection

A national post-war commitment to end ‘the scourge of the slums’ once and for all played its part.  The Council’s own 1946 Housing Survey revealed more than half the city’s 283,611 homes lacked a separate bathroom and some one in ten were back-to-back.  (Remember this when our anger at future mistakes leads us to romanticise the past.)

Birmingham’s ambition to clear its slum-ridden Inner Ring was made clear in June 1947 when it was given the go-ahead to compulsorily purchase five central areas for comprehensive redevelopment – 33,000 homes on 1391 acres of land: the Council immediately became the city’s largest slum landlord. There was no intention to rebuild at such density but there was a need to re-house as many as possible at acceptable density and, in this, the Council adopted the then prevailing idea of ‘mixed development’.

Duddeston and Nechells Redevelopment Area, Unit 1, 12-storey blocks under construction in 1951. From Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block

In the first area to be redeveloped, Duddeston and Nechells, a mix of high-rise and lower-rise flats were proposed alongside maisonettes and traditional housing.  The planners were clear, however, that all but ground floor flats were to be reserved for the elderly and those without children; in fact, the 15-storey blocks in the 1947 plan were intended as hostels for single people.

There was a contradiction, however: only single people already engaged and planning to apply for Corporation housing on marriage could apply to the waiting list. Still, the blocks went ahead (though reduced to twelve storeys) and their two-bed flats were allocated to smaller families.  A significant slippage, perhaps.

Twelve-storey flats in Nechells described by City Architect AG Sheppard Filder (who inherited them) as ‘mud pies’. 1953. From the Phyliis Nicklin collection.

Significant also was a statement by Herbert Manzoni, City Engineer and a dominant (not to say domineering) figure in Birmingham planning, to the Council in 1950 (2)

On a number of existing estates and on new estates it is proposed to build blocks of six-storey flats to help utilise the existing land to the fullest advantage and increase the overall density of population without destroying the open character of the area. Most of these flats will be two-bedroom type and will cater for grown up families.

From such modest and confined ambitions, high-rise – blocks above five-storeys – spread rapidly to the suburbs, so much so that by 1957 one critic of Birmingham’s housing programme, David Eversley, described the emerging metropolis as ‘Saucer City’.  In that almost two-thirds of high-rise blocks would come to either line or lie beyond the city ring road, this was a prescient comment.

Tracking back, in 1953, it had looked as if Birmingham’s plans for suburban high-rise might be thwarted by the existing subsidy regime.  The first multi-storey blocks actually completed (in 1953 and limited to six storeys due to their proximity to Elmdon Aerodrome) were on the city’s eastern fringe at Tile Cross.

Some of the five Wimpey Y-shaped flats built in the early 1950s along Tile Cross and Shirestone Roads

To its consternation, Birmingham found its application for a flats subsidy – then limited to inner-city sites – refused. It applied its muscle: (3)

They said, “Look, Minister, you’ve got to change this! We’re the City of Birmingham, not some tiddly little country town – we want these rules changed!

And they were. The City was granted a discretionary subsidy which was effectively formalised and universalised in the 1956 reform which instituted a new subsidy scheme incentivising local authorities to build high – the higher you built, the higher the subsidy. Thus Birmingham’s multi-storey flats were both cause and effect of one the most crucial drivers of high-rise in the period.

In other respects, Birmingham reflected immediate post-war planning ideals more faithfully.  The West Midland Group’s 1948 study Conurbation envisaged the population of Birmingham stabilising and population growth occurring in ‘an archipelago of urban settlements, with each settlement isolated from its neighbours and set in green open land’.  Jackson and Abercrombie’s West Midlands Plan of the same year, commissioned by the Ministry of Town and Country Planning, promoted overspill settlement in surrounding towns.

Coppice House, Hollypiece House and Homemeadow House – twelve-storey blocks completed in 1964

It was the failure of such plans which provided another factor in Birmingham’s growing predilection for building high. The Conservative government elected in 1951 had no interest in building another generation of New Towns; neighbouring local authorities were resistant to providing homes to overspill Brummies – by 1957 neighbouring authorities had allocated just 38 houses to Birmingham’s overspill families .

Exacerbated by the fact that multiple-occupancy of inner-city slums and the need to rehouse households separately necessitated more than a one-for-one replacement of demolished properties, there were growing fears of a land shortage in the city.  In 1955 Birmingham’s Labour MPs petitioned Duncan Sandys, Minister of Housing and Local Government, claiming the City had only enough land for 8000 of the 50,000 new homes needed.

The case seemed even more compelling in 1960 after the rejection of Birmingham’s plan to build 54,000 homes on green belt land at Wythall on the city’s southern borders.  The need to build within the city borders and the logic of building at higher density came to seem unarguable. It became enmeshed in local patriotism too – as the Council’s Labour leader, Harry Watton, declared: (4)

Birmingham people are entitled to remain in Birmingham if they wish, and Birmingham industry has the right to remain in the city it has done so much to make great.

At this point, however, we might pause for thought.  For Patrick Dunleavy, one of the puzzles of Birmingham’s increasing reliance on high-rise was that equivalent if not higher densities could be achieved by low-rise construction. (5)  That ‘open character’ landscaping – a layout forced by the height of point blocks – praised by Manzoni could also be seen (and was increasingly seen) as barren wasted space.

Hockley (Newtown), 1967

Furthermore, Birmingham’s fears of a land shortage were unfounded.  In 1960, the Corporation acquired the land of the redundant Castle Bromwich airfield.  This became the site of the vast Castle Vale Estate – home by the end of the decade to 20,000 people. Shortly afterwards, it purchased the former Bromford Bridge racecourse, eventually housing some 10,000.  Land for Chelmsley Wood, an overspill estate with a population of 12,000 built on 1500 acres of green belt land south of the city, was acquired in 1964.

The Bromford Estate, 1968. From the Phyllis Nicklin collection.

Despite this sudden surplus, Birmingham’s dependence on multi-storey housing grew.  By 1963, 85 per cent of the Council’s building was high-rise. At the same time, the height of its multi-storey blocks increased – twelve-storey blocks were the norm by 1958, rising to 14 storeys in the suburbs and 16 in central redevelopment areas the following year.  In 1960, 27 per cent of new approvals were for blocks of over 15 storeys in height.

High-rise schemes did not achieve higher density, nor were they significantly cheaper than low-rise.  It’s true that they could, as system building took off in the mid-sixties, be built more quickly.  By this time, however, there were other, non-rational – critics would say irrational – drivers in play.  High-rise schemes had come to represent modernity and ambition and here Birmingham’s civic traditions and powerful civic leaders – and other less savoury forces – would come to the fore.

Next week’s post will examine how these dynamics played out. It’s a hubristic tale of human pride and folly.  Don’t miss it.

Sources

(1) AG Sheppard Fidler, ‘Post-War Housing in Birmingham’, The Town Planning Review, Vol. 26, No. 1 April 1955

(2) Quoted in Phil Ian Jones, ‘The Rise and Fall of The Multi-Storey Ideal: Public Sector High-Rise Housing in Britain 1945-2002, with Special Reference to Birmingham’, PhD thesis, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Birmingham, 2003.  Other detail and analysis in this week’s post come from this excellent source.

(3) AG Shepherd Fidler quoted in Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block – Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (1994)

(4) Quoted in Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block – Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (1994)

(5) Patrick Dunleavy, The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain, 1945-1975. A Study of Corporate Power and Professional Influence in the Welfare State (1981)

The collection of 446 photographs of the late Phyllis Nicklin, a tutor in Geography at the University of Birmingham, has been made available under the Creative Commons licence.

Highgate New Town: dreams and nightmares

Tags

1970s, 1980s, 2000s, Camden, Regeneration

As we saw in last week’s post, as Stage Two of the Highgate New Town redevelopment was winning plaudits, Stage One – the Whittington Estate – was unloved and, in some contemporary accounts, troubled.  By 1983, it was described by the local press as a ‘haven for hoodlums’.  In 2015, it appears to have become a haven for architects.  Though some may fail to see the distinction, we’ll look at what’s changed and examine in more detail the contemporary face of social housing.

Trend Five: ‘Defensible Space’

Back in the 1980s, then fashionable theories of ‘defensible space’ ruled.  Its ideologues argued, firstly, that public housing schemes were peculiarly liable to problems of crime and antisocial behaviour – because they were public, because their residents (or those passing through) felt no pride in ownership or sense of responsibility for them.  They argued, further, that public schemes typically shared design flaws which both encouraged and facilitated crime. (1)

All this can – and should – be picked apart: the inappropriateness of Oscar Newman’s US model, the ludicrous failure to apply any socio-economic context, the failure to acknowledge that contemporary problems of antisocial behaviour afflicted schemes of very varying design.  But the ‘common sense’ of an age is a difficult thing to oppose and it was taken up with gusto with regard to the Whittington Estate.

Stoneleigh Terrace, the Whittington Estate

That alarmist headline quoted earlier came from the St Pancras Chronicle. Its report continued, in similarly lurid style, to describe the Estate’s residents living ‘in daily fear of robbery, burglary and vandalism’ and the Estate itself as ‘a warren of lonely walkways and blind spots’.  Council officers commented on the ‘large number of potential hiding places for attackers who can then make their escape through any one of the many entrances to the area’. (2) The Council and the police promised to step up their patrols.

This was the ‘defensible space’ thesis in full flight and, of course, the problems it describes – the experience of crime and, as importantly, the fear of crime – were real enough even if one resident did wonder what all the fuss was about and thought the design of the estate ‘not better or worse than anywhere else’.

The problems – and the apparently compelling narrative which accompanied them – seem to have become even more entrenched fifteen years later. The Estate was a ‘dream that became a nightmare’: (3)

as an experiment in social housing, the Highgate New Town development has failed.  Its white walls are daubed with graffiti, walkways cluttered with syringes, the heating system is defunct and cars are frequently set alight in its underground car parks.

Children at play: an early image of the Whittington Estate

Yet when Su Rogers described the Estate in a generally critical piece back in 1973, she noted how its walkways retained ‘the functions of a traditional street with much local activity, the milk float, children playing and the supervision from the dwelling units’.(4)

And a contemporary resident praises the design: (5)

as it’s pedestrianised the kids all play outside together without fear of the traffic. It’s easy to bump into neighbours and have a quick chat or wave from the balconies, there’s a real sense of community.

I don’t have a judgment to offer on all this, only a perspective.  That is, whatever the specific factors which played in to the rise of antisocial behaviour in the 1970s and 1980s, they owed far more to dynamics in the wider society than they did to any given form of council housing.  The long view and the wider view should allow us to move beyond any simple demonisation of council housing, then and now.

Lulot Gardens, Whittington Estate

We can agree, I think, that the large underground car park built under the Estate – a last gasp of the car culture that briefly held thrall in the 1960s – was a mistake.  It was certainly an engineering nightmare.  Problems of water seepage instigated a £4m repair job in 2006 which, in conjunction with an overall refurbishment of the Estate, took three years and may in the end have cost the Council – as claims and counter-claims between it and contractors ensued – as much as £10m in total.

Leaseholders, who faced bills of up to £20,000, were particularly critical of the Council’s management of the process but were fortunate in having the expertise of six architects living on the Estate to make their case. (6)

Trend Six: ‘Tenure Diversification’

These, of course, were not council tenants.  Around one third of homes on the Highgate New Town estates are now privately owned, a product of Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy legislation of 1980. For one former tenant, who bought his five-bedroom home for £39,000 and has seen its market value rise from £70,000 to over £600,000, this was ‘perfect, absolutely perfect’.

But many of those original purchasers have sold on, of course – one who bought his flat for £30,000 to an architect (what else?) who paid £250,000.  ‘He bought a yacht, I expect’, says the latter; more likely he moved to Essex. (7)

These new leaseholders, overwhelmingly belonging to the professional middle class, love the Estate for ‘its Modernist aesthetic and attention to detail in the design’ and ‘the amount of space you get for your money’. (8)  Yes, this is the council housing we’ve been taught to despise.

The newcomers are often active in the community and likely to praise its friendliness and mix.  I’ve no interest at all in criticising them personally but, as a group, they are the beneficiaries of a process that in London particularly has vastly reduced the amount of affordable social housing available to those who need it most.

Highgate Newtown Community Centre

The weekly community lunches and food bank at the Highgate Newtown Community Centre tell another story – of those left poor and marginalised in our unequal society: (9)

There’s a lack of benefits, lateness of benefits, increases in rent, increases in food prices, electric, gas… just a general increase in everything.

Working-class families who once dreamed of moving into council homes of the quality of Highgate New Town are now, with no possibility of buying a property, forced to rent inferior and costly accommodation from private landlords whose income we subsidise though Housing Benefit.  Over one third of council homes purchased through Right to Buy in London are now privately rented, some are even rented back by local authorities. (10)  Madness!

Critically, councils were prevented from using the receipts of council house sales to build new homes.  Presently, most of the new social housing being built is predicated on a financial chicanery – the sell-off of older social units and real estate, the construction of homes for sale and homes for ‘affordable’ rent which are nothing of the kind – which destroys existing estates and communities.

The now demolished terrace of shops on Chester Road © Modern Architecture London and used with permission

The most recent phase of construction in Highgate New Town is a very benign example of this.  As we saw last week, the small prototype scheme at the corner of Chester Road and Raydon Street was arguably overdue for demolition. Twenty-five council homes were lost; of the 53 which replaced them, 23 are social rented, four for shared ownership and 26 for private sale.  (All the latter are now sold – the cheapest studio flat at £300,000 in 2013.)

In the current topsy-turvy world of housing finance, Camden Council – which still manages directly about 33,000 homes in the Borough and houses around a quarter of the population – probably deserves some credit for this.

Not that you can please everyone.  One of the private buyers has recently been bought off by the Council – there were teething problems in the build but he seemed most exercised by neighbouring tenants using their balconies: (11)

We bought this flat knowing there was a bit of a risk, because it was half council and half private.  We were told there was a lease that was enforceable. We said we were quite worried, but they said they could not put laundry on the terrace or rubbish on the terrace. Now they are telling us the lease is not enforceable.

To be fair, as this blog always is, there’s a pretty long paternalist tradition of Council tenancy conditions banning laundry and the like on balconies to encourage ‘respectability’ within the working-class communities.  It’s just that the attempt gains piquancy when tenants are expected so directly to defer to middle-class sensitivities.

Now all this will have frustrated the architectural groupies among you because most would see the real significance of the new scheme in terms of its design standards and principles.

Trend Seven: ‘Sustainability’

The £9.25m Chester-Balmore Scheme (as it’s known) built to replace the temporary and failed high-tech first phase of Stage Two, designed by Rick Mather Architects, is the first social housing scheme in the country and the largest scheme of any kind to be built to Passivhaus standard.  The buildings’ insulation, triple glazing, high-tech boilers and air circulation systems – the only actual heating provided is a towel rail – are all intended to keep fuel bills down to less than a £100 a year…and help save the planet.

Raydon Street and Chester Road corner

In terms of appearance, the scheme’s two residential blocks of stacked maisonettes with universal ground-floor front door access are intended to ‘fit’ the existing streetscape while a larger ‘gateway’ block (which will include new shops) marks the corner of Chester Road and Raydon Street. (12)  Observers will have different views on how well its fulfils this brief.

Balmore Street

Perhaps I’ve treated this last and significant development rather briefly but I may already be trying your patience.  I hadn’t expected to write so much on Highgate New Town but the more I researched the more it revealed of the architectural fashions that have shaped council housing and the political and social forces which have moulded the lives of its residents.

I’ve no great conclusion other than to advise a longer view which accepts that tastes change and context is all.  It is the latter which inexplicably is so often forgotten in much of what passes as analysis of social housing and it is that omission which has caused such damage to what should be understood as one of the proudest achievements of our welfare state.

Sources

(1) The key texts here are, from the US, Oscar Newman, Defensible Space (1972) and, his British acolyte, Alice Coleman, Utopia on trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing (1985)

(2) Terry Messenger, ‘Haven for Hoodlums’, St Pancras Chronicle, 15 April 1983

(3) Lara Lambert, ‘The Dream that Became a Nightmare’, Hampstead and Highgate Express, 17 January 1997

(4) Su Rogers, ‘Preview: Highgate New Town’, Architectural Review, September 1973

(5) Modernist Estates, ‘Chrissie Macdonald and Andrew Rae: Whittington Estate, London N19’, 1 July 2013

(6) The reference to six architects comes from Dan Carrier, ‘Estate revamp “sacking” chaos’, Camden New Journal, 26 April 2007; the £10m figure from Dan Carrier, ‘Town Hall pay out millions to sacked builders’, Camden New Journal, 22 October 2009.  Residents were complaining that the repairs had been carried out inadequately as late as 2011 – see Kate Ferguson, ‘Highgate residents hit out at “shoddy’ management of estate’, Ham& High, 14 September 2011.

(7) Brian Milligan, ‘Right-to-buy: Margaret Thatcher’s controversial gift’, BBC News, 10 April 2013

(8) Modernist Estates, ‘Chrissie Macdonald and Andrew Rae: Whittington Estate, London N19

(9) Kate Beioley, ‘The food-bank family: Highgate residents in crisis and the community project easing the pain’, Ham & High, 31 January 2013

(10) Daniel Boffey, ‘Private landlords cash in on right-to-buy – and send rents soaring for poorest tenants’, The Observer, 12 January 2014

(11) William McLennan, ‘Town Hall faces £1m bill over trouble-hit flagship estate after couple offered £60k payoff’, Camden New Journal, 5 February 2015

(12) Rick Mather Architects, Chester-Balmore 

Thanks again to Modern Architecture London for permission to use photographs taken in August 2011 of the now demolished section of the original development.  Its post on Highgate New Town offers a range of good images and further detail on the development as a whole.

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

The Dartmouth Park Hill Estate, Camden: ‘memories of Edwardian villas and the welcoming scale of a delightful suburbia’

Tags

1970s, 1980s, Camden

Last week’s post looked at Stage One of the Highgate New Town development – Peter Tábori’s Whittington Estate.  That’s the estate which sets architectural pulses racing now but back in the day it was unfashionable even before it was finished in 1979; it was Stage Two – very different in design and conception – that won awards and kudos.

Stage Two: Dartmouth Park Hill

The construction problems and delays associated with the Whittington Estate had led Camden to decide upon a very different path for later phases of the redevelopment as early as the mid-seventies. In the first place, however, the Council opted for a quick fix but the prototype design it selected was surprisingly innovative in both technique and form.

Trend Four: High Tech

The two new terraces – of shops and maisonettes along Chester Road and maisonettes and bedsitters on Balmore Street – were designed by Bill Forrest and Oscar Palacio of the Council’s Department of Technical Services in the emerging High Tech form, marked by a ‘preference for lightweight materials and sheer surfaces, a readiness to adopt new techniques from engineering…and the celebratory display of a building’s construction and services’. (1)

‘Highgate New Town – stage 2a/2b’, © Modern Architecture London and used with permission

But there the comparison with the Lloyds Building ends.  The scheme was completed ahead of time in March 1978 and its ‘rather delicate prefab aesthetic…its light touch, thin blue railings against white and terracotta asbestos-cement panels…looked fine when finished – and for a few months after’.  After that, however, it came – in the eyes of one astringent commentator, at least – to look more like ‘a pair of abandoned trams or the beat-up housing compounds of migrant workers in Africa, its form and construction ‘quite unsuited to public housing’. (2)

‘Highgate New Town – stage 2a/2b’, © Modern Architecture London and used with permission

The terraces, given a life-time of 25 years, would somehow survive another thirty years, replaced only recently by the current state of the art development we’ll examine in the next post. (3)

In the interim, the next stage of Forrest and Palacio’s plans – usually called the Dartmouth Park Hill Estate – was designed with a very different aesthetic and garnered very different reactions.

Trend Three again: ‘Back to the Future’ – the rejection of estates and a return to streets

Stage One, the Whittington Estate, had had a difficult birth and turned out – in architectural terms at least if not to the many it provided a fine new home – an unwanted child.

Roger Stonehouse, writing two years after its completion, captured the mood: (4)

It is a typical story of the 60s and 70s – a dramatic swing of attitude away from massive high density redevelopment in complex forms of innovative construction, towards gradual renewal at lower density in low rise, traditional forms of housing using traditional construction.

This was reflected in the new guidance from the then Department of Environment supporting gradual renewal of run-down areas through a combination of rehabilitation and selective infill. Camden itself had adopted a policy requiring all families with children to be housed on the ground floor.

Thus it was that around half the houses originally scheduled for demolition in the succeeding phase were retained and refurbished.  The new-build began in 1978 and was finished in 1981 at a total cost a little over of £1.5m, providing homes for some 287 people in a combination of two and three-person flats and four to five-person houses.

Camden’s signature dark-stained wood remained and the scheme retained some colourful elements and flourishes in its glazed and metal-framed access stairways, white panelling and red-brick detailing.  But, brick-built and two-three-storey, it was in essence – as Stonehouse describes – ‘a return to housing which is more clearly related to its surroundings’.

To Lionel Esher in A Broken Wave – an early elegy on the ebbing of the briefly-linked tides of Welfare State ambition and architectural modernism – Dartmouth Park Hill was a key example of this shift in thinking: (5)

Even the Camden Borough architects, hitherto whiter than white, switched to yellow brick with red stripes and pretty ironwork.

The Civic Trust, which commended the scheme in 1983, was more positive, indeed effusive; the new housing suggested: (6)

memories of Edwardian villas and the welcoming scale of a delightful suburbia.  Every element of the design, down to the last detail of sign-writing, has been carefully considered and sensitively handled.  The environment created is rich in content, colour and texture, and the imagination is stimulated by a wealth of delightfully rendered images and totems – entrance urns, porches, balcony ironware, trellises, archways.  It is not often that nineteenth century housing appears at a disadvantage in comparison with new-build, but this scheme enhances the surroundings.

If all this does suggest to modernists a too homely and home-spun design, the scheme remains striking, particularly in its long three-strong barrier block fronting Dartmouth Park Hill.  The red, green and white detailing adds colour and interest and the block possesses a scale and presence.  The access stairways break up the long terrace, creating a deliberate echo of the Edwardian homes facing, but it’s still the later development which has more bravura.

The rear of Dartmouth Park Hill

Balconies to the rear provided a little outdoor space though Stonehouse expressed concern that some were already ‘a little cluttered’ – a minor point perhaps but (as we’ll see next week) one that can cause alarm to those for whom this small sign of council house tenants taking ‘ownership’ of their homes can spoil the aesthetic they seek.

Corner of Raydon Street and Dartmouth Park Hill

The short terrace of houses on Raydon Street facing the Whittington Estate looks timid in comparison – a ‘thoroughly turned-tide, pointless humility’ according to Douglas Murphy (7) – but the small triangle of houses built around an attractive, green open space on Doynton Street looks pretty good and the resident I spoke to was happy to live there and happy to have it photographed once she’d ascertained there was no nefarious purpose.

Doynton Street

While wandering around the Estate, I also met the widow of one of the original team of architects – also a resident (and a tenant, mark you, not a leaseholder), she too was very fond of the scheme and proud to have it recognised.  It’s due to have its heating and water systems updated and she was anxious that new exposed pipework would disfigure the archways providing through access.  I hope the Council will be sensitive to this.

Finally, and a clear prefiguring of another concern that will take centre-stage next week, the public open spaces of the scheme were kept to a minimum for reasons of maintenance and – the key issue perhaps – security.  Roads were retained either as roads or as pedestrian through-routes – this was ‘good’ open space – offering permeability in the modern jargon.  The separation of traffic and pedestrians and the very enclosedness that was an initial virtue of the Whittington Estate were now seen as problematic, estates themselves had become a problem.

The next post will look at the next trend that would mark our understanding of council estates, the theories of ‘defensible space’ that dominated the nineteen-eighties.  It will examine the fall and rise of the Whittington Estate, the changes of tenure which have transformed council housing and the very latest building forms and principles which replaced the flawed design of the High Tech element of this second phase of the Highgate New Town development.

We’ll conclude today, however, with words spoken in 1983 which were, sadly, even then anachronistic.  Whether you applaud the architectural bravura of Stage One or the more ‘in keeping’ urbanism of Stage Two, we should remember above all this was housing built to serve the needs of the people.  As Cllr Bill Birtles, then chair of the Council’s Housing Development Committee stated: (8)

Not only have we the obligation to rehouse thousands of people in the borough; we also have an obligation to house them well and to house them in the most pleasant and elegant surroundings we can manage.

Camden did that in some style.

Sources

(1) RIBA, High Tech (‘The Brits who built the Modern World’)

(2) ‘Astragal’ in the Architects’ Journal, 1980, quoted in Fabian Wilkinson, ‘The Rebuilding of Highgate New Town’, Highgate Society Buzz, Winter 2001

(3) My thanks to Modern Architecture London for permission to use photographs taken in August 2011 just prior to demolition.  Its post on Highgate New Town offers a range of good images and further detail on the development as a whole.

(4) Roger Stonehouse, ‘Building Study: Housing of Highgate New Town, London N19, Architects’ Journal, 12 August 1981

(5) Lionel Esher, A Broken Wave: the Rebuilding of England 1940-1980 (1981)

(6) Quoted in Camden Council, ‘Press Release HNT Stage 2 got Civic Trust award’, 29 November 1983

(7) Douglas Murphy, ‘A Trip to N19’, 7 September 2011

(8) Quoted in Camden Council, ‘Press Release HNT Stage 2 got Civic Trust award’

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