Norwich Council Housing, 1955-74: David Percival and ‘Regional Architectural Tradition’

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1950s, 1960s, 1970s, Multi-storey

As we saw in last week’s post, Norwich’s post-war building efforts into the mid-50s were heroic – at peak, around 1000 homes were completed annually to meet the needs of a local waiting list standing at 7000 at war’s end.  From a design perspective, however, the new City Architect David Percival, appointed in 1955, was dissatisfied, critical of ‘the monotonous appearance of the earlier post-war housing estates’ and their ‘constant repetition of neat but uninspiring types of dwelling’. (1)

Vauxhall Redevelopment Area showing Winchester Tower centre left, Vauxhall Street and Walpole Street low-rise to left and later Suffolk Square and Somerleyton Gardens medium-rise deck access to right   George Plunkett http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk

Percival (trained at the Bartlett, previously Deputy City Architect under Donald Gibson in Coventry) was lucky to get the chance, in his own words, to do something ‘much more interesting and rewarding’.  His timing was perfect.  The City completed its general needs housing programme in 1958 and turned again towards the redevelopment of its rundown inner-city areas.

The Heartsease Estate

At the same time, architectural critics were attacking both the dullness and uniformity of inner-city municipal flats and the alleged tedium of New Town development and the cottage suburbs from which it drew inspiration.  Gordon Cullen was developing ideas of townscape – a sympathetic urban environment – and respect to a place’s uniqueness, its genius loci. Notions of ‘community’ evolved too, entailing something more than the mechanistic focus on neighbourhood centres and facilities of the immediate post-war period.

For all this, Norwich would be the perfect canvas and Percival a man with the vision and ambition to paint beautifully – his aim was: (2)

not only to reflect the regional architectural tradition in housing schemes but to give individual character to each site.

Together, Percival and Norwich’s Labour Council built some of the finest council housing of its time.

One straightforward manifestation of these complex shifts was a new emphasis on ‘mixed development’: the principle of building a range of housing forms to both break the monotony of traditional forms of working-class housing – public and private – and provide housing appropriate to a range of people and households in different life stages.

Four storey flats on Midland Street in the Heigham redevelopment area, 1962 George Plunkett http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk

Practically speaking, almost 70 per cent of council homes in Norwich built to date were three-bedroom, the average household size a little under three.  Under-occupancy was a problem and the need for smaller units pressing.  A 1957 survey of waiting list applicants showed 60 per cent willing to live in central area flats. Still, the Council was at first resistant to even the four-storey point blocks that Percival proposed but visits to Tile Hill in Coventry, Harlow and Northampton and the quality of his designs brought them round.  Together, they would make a very good team.

Alderson Place

An early project at Alderson Place in Finkelgate is a good place to start – a modest, intimate scheme of old people’s flats in twelve small blocks, grouped around attractively landscaped courtyards and backing unobtrusively onto the ancient St John’s churchyard.

The genius loci, in the form of a flint-built church nearby, is acknowledged by use of greyish brick… courts and passages inside the development are quite intimate but always, in Townscape fashion, leaving a view to the surrounding wide-open streets.

It won the City – the first of several – a Good Design in Housing award from the Ministry of Housing and Local Government in 1959. Ian Nairn, no less, praised its ‘cottage units’ and ‘sense of community’.  It’s an approach which, in more vernacular forms, would be developed and extended throughout Percival’s tenure.

Vauxhall Street

At the same time, a much larger redevelopment of the Vauxhall Street area, just west of the city centre, was beginning which would eventually comprise full range of housing types – from one-storey housing for elderly people, to two-storeyed terraced housing, flat and maisonette blocks and even, in the end, one of Norwich’s very few tower blocks.

Much of this smaller-scale housing here is fairly conventional brick-built but raised in design terms by the use of panelling and some sculptural detailing

Later extensions to the development are more daringly modernist in design.  Norwich’s approach to the Yorkshire Design Group was rebuffed but home-grown adaptations were built in a later phase of the Vauxhall scheme – the Somerleyton Gardens/Suffolk Square and Johnson Place blocks built between 1968-1971.

Suffolk Square, Vauxhall Street

On the site of the former Nelson Barracks, the City developed two schemes in the late sixties.  Between Mousehold Street and Pockthorpe Gate, you’ll find a dense scheme of brick-built, mainly four-storey blocks set amidst green courts and connected by elevated walkways.

Nelson Barracks Estate from Pockthorpe Gate

Facing it to the east lies the Heathgate Estate, ‘Norwich’s most grandiose development…somewhat reminiscent of the best-known of British deck-access estates of this period, Park Hill in Sheffield’ (though this might require a little imagination on your part).

Heathgate Estate

These were medium-rise schemes but the City also experimented with high-rise. High-rise was originally seen as a means of housing single people and small households in the city centre but plans to build the city’s first tower blocks in centrally located Ber Street were scuppered by underground chalk workings.  The eleven-storey Compass Tower, designed by Percival and opened in 1964, was moved instead to the Heartsease Estate on the city’s north-eastern outskirts where Ashbourne and Burleigh Towers followed shortly after.  It was stipulated that none of the two- and one-bed flats be let to families with young children.

Bowers Avenue, Heartsease Estate Jon Welch and made available under a Creative Commons licence

The Lord Mayor, who performed the opening ceremony, was clear on the significance of the occasion:  the block was a ‘symbol of the changing habits, thought and customs of a new generation – a generation living at a fast tempo often with both husband and wife out to work all day’.  He concluded: (3)

Today the tall flats are here by demand and choice. Practical in purpose and imaginative in design, they add their own character and distinction to the Heartsease Estate.

That enthusiasm seemed echoed in the decision to order two 16-storey blocks (each with 63 two-bed and 32 one-bed flats) in a package deal from George Wimpey in 1965 – Winchester Tower, off Vauxhall Road and Normandie Tower, off Rouen Road.  The Housing Committee hoped, perhaps optimistically, that the layout – six flats per floor – would ‘encourage communities in case of a bad tenant on the floor’

Normandie Tower, Rouen Road

In fact, these were the last tower blocks to be built in the City.  The system-built towers weren’t unsuccessful but they remained unpopular within the City Architects’ Department which resented its loss of input and disliked in committee where members disliked the exclusion of local building firms.

These aren’t perhaps the schemes which win Norwich kudos for the quality and imagination of its housing design but they remind us at least that it was a forward-looking city.  We should see that too in the innovativeness of the smaller-scale and more intimate developments which became the City’s signature style in the later 1960s and 1970s.  This is labelled, in architectural terms, the Vernacular Revival but, in my eyes, it remains recognisably modern, something very far from pale, ‘in-keeping’ imitation and, most importantly, a political statement that working-class homes could and should be designed to the highest standards.

Camp Grove

Saunders Court

The steep western-facing slopes beyond the River Wensum provided the perfect site for such an enterprise.  The first two phases of the Camp Road scheme were designed by the City Architects’ Department in the early seventies – a warren of traffic-free landscaped blocks and courts joined by curving footpaths and unexpected entrance ways, enlivened by careful variations of texture and colour.  It echoes in part the earlier street pattern and small-scale housing of the area.  Percival himself felt that ‘the best contemporary work’ was achieved with ‘a catholic understanding of the past’ (4)

St Leonards’ Place: Tayler and Green

It’s Phase III, however, along Ladbrooke Place and St Leonard’s Road which is more celebrated.  Designed by Tayler and Green (chiefly known for their superb council housing schemes in south Norfolk), it’s a striking scheme of three-storeyed 87 two-bed and three-bed flats, employing gable ends – front and back – to echo a traditional Norwich streetscape and using extravagantly 16 different types of brick and flint, cobble and colour wash and four different pantiles to provide variation and contrast.  It was built, incidentally, by the City Council’s Direct Labour Department. (5)

Pottergate/Cow Hill

Back to the city centre, there was a matching need to develop in-fill housing schemes that complemented and raised their run-down surrounds.  The Pottergate/Cow Hill scheme of thirteen flats grouped around a central green was designed by Tony Whitwood of the City Architects’ Department and completed in 1970. Combined with rehabilitation of older adjacent properties, the quality of the design did much to revive the area and it provided a model for the Broadland Housing Association scheme along the road on Ten Bell Lane, designed by Edward Skipper in the early seventies.

Ten Bell Court

Horsey and Muthesius set out to explain why Norwich has done different and consistently produced – even in its more conventional or modern forms and styles – such consistently high-quality housing.  They point to local tradition – Norwich had its share of slum back-to-backs and courts but they tended to be a little more spacious than the common run.  That remained to shape local expectations and was complemented by the spirit and the letter (in these Parker Morris days) of contemporary council housing – that ordinary people deserved good quality and roomy homes.

Quality itself was assured by an expert and committed City Architects’ Department.  The Council employed as many as three dozen qualified architects at peak; this at a time, Horsey and Muthesius remind us, when:

many council architects considered their work and capability superior to those of private architects, and certainly far above the standards of the speculative house builder.

Local skills, good supervision, competent direct labour, a number of capable city-based building firms helped.  The use of traditional local materials not only promoted that regional flavour that Percival had identified as an early goal but was an additional guarantor of high-standard construction.

I’d add that this was a progressive council with deep roots in its community which reflected a local pride in the city and a powerful civic identity.  The Council felt with peculiar force its loss of unitary county borough status in 1974 and this would prove the trigger for David Percival’s retirement also.

JB Priestley always found himself ‘happy and at home in the cities where I am asked at once, confidently and proudly, what I think of the place’. He concluded: (6)

Norwich is one of those cities.  It may be minute compared to London, Paris, Rome, but nevertheless it lives its life as a city on the same level of dignity.

That was a dignity conferred on the residents of its council housing too.

Sources

(1) David Percival, ‘Redevelopment Work in Norwich’, Housing Review, July-August 1960

(2) Miles Horsey and Stefan Muthesius, Provincial Mixed Development, Norwich Council Housing 1955-1973 (Norwich, 1986).  The succeeding quotation is drawn from the same source. Much of this piece is dependent on the research and analysis of this work which is an essential read for further detail.  Unfortunately, it exists only in poorly reproduced typescript but it deserves professional republication.

(3) ‘An Englishman’s Homes is his 11-floor castle’, Eastern Daily Press, 1 October 1964

(4) RIBA, Architect’s File: David Percival

(5) ‘Local Authority Housing, Camp Road, Norwich’, Brick Bulletin March 1978 and ‘Norwich. A Place for People’, Era, Journal of the Eastern Region of the RIBA, Issue 30, Jan/February 1973

(6) JB Priestley, English Journey (1934)

Council Housing in Norwich: ‘I thought we were ever so posh’

Tags

1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, Cottage suburbs, Planning

The fine city of Norwich is known for its castle, cathedral and Canaries. I won’t detract from those, particularly the latter, but it deserves to be better known for its council housing. By the 1970s, Norwich had the highest proportion of council housing of any town in the country.  It also had some of the best. We’ll tell the first part of that story this week. It’s unique because in Norfolk (as they’ll proudly tell you) they do different, but there’s a lot too about the wider dynamics which have shaped council housing – for good or ill – across the country.

In 1919, 90 per cent of Norwich’s 28,000 homes were occupied by the working-class; of these homes, some 7000 were judged substandard.  In the short-lived enthusiasm for ‘homes for heroes’, the City Council committed to building 1200. Just under 150 of these were to be built in an extension of the city’s tiny Angel Road scheme – its twelve tenements opened in 1904 (since demolished) represented the council’s only pre-war building.  Most were to be built on new cottage estates at Harford Hall, Earlham and Mile Cross – the city’s interwar showpiece.  (1)

Early post-1WW housing on Angel Road © Northmetpit and made available under a Creative Commons licence

The Mile Cross Estate in the City of Norwich Plan (1945)

Labour and materials shortages in the immediate post-war period stalled this programme but, anxious to build, the Council investigated the alternative concrete-mix systems being promoted at the time. Three were commissioned: Duo-Slab (of which some remain in Mile Cross), Underdown and Winget. Of the 500 of the latter systems built, the last on the Earlham Estate were demolished in 2006. (2)

A close in the Earlham Estate from the 1945 City of Norwich Plan

Construction picked up as materials and labour shortages eased. Land was purchased for a new scheme in Lakenham in 1923.  Construction of the North Earlham Estate began in 1927, extended in the later-1930s when the new Larkman and Marlpit Estates were also being developed.  These in particular mark the new priorities of the time, built largely to rehouse those displaced by city centre slum clearance. By June 1938, as part of a comprehensive five-year programme,  the Council had demolished 2280 homes, displacing 7483 people and building 2346 homes to replace those lost.

‘The Woodrow Pilling Estate. Not one of the best Corporation Estates; probably the result of depression of standards by higher authority’ according to the 1945 City of Norwich Plan

This could seem an almost miraculous transformation as one long-term resident, moved to Earlham, as a child recalls: (3)

I can remember going into this brand new house and I can remember running about; I thought we were ever so posh or we’d come into money or something. Of course we hadn’t.  They were going to knock down all these slums in Ber Street and they put us all that had two or three children, they put them in all these new council houses.

But to managers, the re-housing of ‘slum-dwellers’ – typically poorer than those traditionally let council homes, sometimes viewed as almost a separate tribe – raised (or so it was felt) particular issues as the City Estates Surveyor, Mr RJ Allerton explains.

All prospective tenants, he tells us, were ‘visited at least twice before being moved to estates to learn of their family circumstances, needs and general cleanliness’ so they could be placed appropriately.  Once relocated: (4)

every house [was] inspected a short time after occupation and careful notes made as to the manner in which it is kept, its cleanliness, condition of furniture, conduct of children, state of decoration, condition of garden, shed, etc.

Naturally, grading followed.  Grade A tenants could ‘obviously be left alone’, Grade B were visited annually but Grade C people were ‘visited frequently and rendered help and assistance wherever possible’.  Any council tenant falling into serious arrears was brought personally before the Housing Committee.  You can decide if all this represents heavy-handed paternalism or compassionate support to those in need.

Slum clearance and the relocation of its residents also raised the question of disinfestation of furniture and bedding.  Typically, for Norwich (Labour-controlled from 1933) this was taken in-house – the council employing a team of four, operating a van large enough to contain the household effects of three families, ‘hauled by a mechanical horse’.  I’m guessing that looked something like this Borough of Wood Green example.  It’s a sign of lost innocence that Mr Allerton can casually name the Hydrogen cyanide gas used for the purpose, manufactured in Germany by IG Farben – Zyklon B.

These ‘slum clearance’ estates were located on the then periphery of the city; they became viewed as both geographically and socially marginal.  As we’ve seen in the case of Knowle West in Bristol, a complex process of stigmatisation can emerge in these circumstances, something both conferred and assumed.  This is true of the Larkman in Norwich, labelled with all the usual ‘Chavtown’ epithets you can imagine (or, if you can’t, a quick Google search will satisfy your curiosity). (5)

‘The Larkman Lane Estate, good in design and materials’ according to the 1945 City of Norwich Plan so not blighted in its conception

Back in 1938, Mr Allerton expressed the opinion that ‘the people of this part of the country may have become somewhat individual’ – ‘their characteristics certainly show a very strong antipathy to any suggestion of herding, such as is so evident in some of the larger cities of the country’.  (That’s ‘doing different’ in bureaucratese.)   He was convinced, therefore, that:

large blocks of working-class flats, such as are erected in some towns, would be very unpopular here and would be vacated as soon as opportunity presented itself.  The ingrained desire is for a separate dwelling and garden.

It’s an interesting view and one that would be powerfully tested in Norwich’s post-war building efforts.  Even at the time, Norwich had taken small steps – deemed necessary where they allowed ‘elderly people to be housed nearer their old interests and where employed people on early or late shifts can be near their work’ – in flat construction.  In 1935-1936, the city’s first tenement blocks were built in Barrack Street and Union Street.

Council flats, Union Street, 1939 © George Plunkett http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk

By 1939, the Council had built 7603 homes in the city (while private enterprise supplied just 3228 built).  Of these, around 44 per cent were built to rehouse those displaced by slum clearance.  That progress was vitiated by wartime bombing which destroyed 5000 homes in the city though many, it’s true to say, were overdue for demolition – scant consolation for the 340 that lost their lives.

To meet the huge and urgent post-war need for replacement housing, 350 ‘prefabs’ were erected in the city.  Expected to serve ten years, the last surviving prefab home – on Magpie Road – was removed in 1976. I can remember passing it on my way to Carrow Road in those days and it always looked as Mr and Mrs Miller, its last tenants, treasured it.

Prefab homes on Kett’s Hill, 1962 © George Plunkett http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk

Additionally, in 1946, the City built 150 British Iron and Steel Federation (BISF) houses, mainly in West Earlham, some in Tuckswood, intended for quick erection using non-traditional materials. People didn’t much like the appearance but their facilities were generally reckoned good.

‘Steel’ houses on the Tuckswood Estate © Paul Shreeve and made available under a Creative Commons licence

All this was a quick fix.  Like London, Plymouth and a number of other cities, Norwich too prepared a visionary blueprint for the rebuilding of the city along modern lines.  The 1945 City of Norwich Plan is a fascinating document, representative of some of the planning ideals of the day but challenging of others.

It proposed – sorry, Mr Allerton – that the ‘limited amount of residential redevelopment’ in the central areas (‘within the walls’) ‘should be in the form of flats or a combination of flats and maisonettes’.  It suggested that ‘obsolescent areas’ beyond ‘should be redeveloped as densely as good planning and amenities permit and not on what has come to be known as “Garden City” lines’.  This, it argued ‘should ensure real urban development’ [the emphasis is in the original]. (6)

‘A sketch of the redevelopment considered appropriate for the obsolescent areas outside the city walls’ from the 1945 City of Norwich Plan

Across the wider city, the Plan sat four-square with the planning mantras of the day with its call for the development of neighbourhood units.  It praised the Corporation’s interwar housing efforts but criticised their shortcomings too:

these housing schemes, in common with those in other places, had inherent faults; for apart from the fact that they catered largely for one class or income group, communal facilities and necessary to make the new estates into self-contained neighbourhood units in which a full life was possible, were lacking.

The Heigham and Westwick Redevelopment area from 1945 City of Norwich Plan

Twenty-five neighbourhood units were proposed which, dependent on size (varying according to the city’s topography), were to contain the prescribed range of shops, schools and facilities.  That’s a conventional (for its time) attempt to create or safeguard community but the wider contextualisation of the proposal is more interesting.  The Plan went to argue that:

Segregation of classes or income groups is a social evil which should be discouraged; it hardly exists in the small towns and villages and these should be the models for the neighbourhood units of tomorrow.  We have much to learn from one another and this can best be achieved by mixing in our leisure time with those whose income, education and outlook might be quite different from our own.

This was an unconscious prefiguring of Nye Bevan’s famous plea for ‘what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the…labourer all lived in the same street’ – ‘the living tapestry of a mixed community’ as he called it.  It was, note, not a demand that working-class areas be improved and ‘uplifted’ by affluent middle-class incomers (as contemporary regeneration would have it).  It was rather a vision of social democratic classlessness and it was given brief expression in Labour’s 1949 Housing Act which promoted council housing for general needs.

The working out of such idealism was prey to far larger forces than the will of Norwich City Council, let alone that of the City Architect, Leonard Hannaford, but they would do their best to implement some of these ideas.  A scheme of 224 three-storey flats and 38 houses was built in the Southwell Road area to the south of the city centre – of a similarly conventional design as the adjacent housing built at the same time and with Moderne balconies which (despite the epithet) harked back to the later thirties. (7)

Southwell Road flats

The new West Earlham Estate was begun in 1947 and by 1950 the Council had built 1469 permanent new homes. Some of these were state-of-the-art such as the Ministry of Fuel and Power-sponsored homes in West Earlham which were specially insulated and enjoyed ‘whole-house’ (or central) heating. The residents professed themselves satisifed with the five radiators.

The ‘whole-house heating’ trial homes in West Earlham

In 1954, when post-war restrictions on building had finally ended, the City began construction of the Heartsease Estate on its north-eastern outskirts, planned to contain 2500 homes on completion.

Terraced and semi-detached houses in the Heartsease Estate, 1956

Hannaford was a distinguished architect, an assistant to Sir Edward Lutyens both before 1914 and in his post-war work in New Delhi.  By 1955, when he retired, around 6000 houses and flats had been designed and built under his direction.  These were dignified homes on cleaner, more modern lines than the arts and craft styles or stripped-down neo-Georgian that predominated before the War but, to some, they lacked flair.

His successor, David Percival, ‘entered this scene like a breath of fresh air’ according to Miles Horsey and Stefan Muthesius. (8)  We’ll examine some of the most innovative and exciting council housing in the country built under Percival’s visionary leadership next week.

Sources

(1) JJ McLean, ‘A Fine City, Fit for Heroes?’ The Rise of Municipal Housing in Norwich, 1900-1939. An Historical Perspective (ND)

(2) Harry Harrison, Stephen Mullin, Barry Reeves and Alan Stevens, Non-Traditional Houses. Identifying Non-Traditional Houses in the UK, 1918-1975 (2012); Shaun Lowthorpe, ‘Last post sounds for concrete homes’, Eastern Daily Press, 21 January 2006

(3) Sarah Housden (ed), Norwich Memories (Norwich Living History Group, 2009)

(4) Mr RJ Allerton, Estates Surveyor, City Engineer’s Department, Norwich, ‘Housing in Norwich’, Annual Conference of Institute of Housing, September 1938

(5) Ben Rogaly and Becky Taylor, ‘Welcome to “Monkey Island”. Identity, Community and Migration Histories in Three Norwich Estates’, Sussex Migration Working Paper no. 38, University of Sussex, July 2006

(6) City of Norwich Plan 1945. Prepared for the Council by CH James and S Rowland Pierce (Consultants) and HC Rowley (City Engineer), City of Norwich Corporation, 1945.  For more on the City of Norwich Plan see the post here.

(7) ‘Post-War Building at Norwich’, Official Architecture and Planning, May 1954 and ‘New Housing at Norwich’, Official Architecture and Planning, May 1956

(8) Miles Horsey and Stefan Muthesius, Provincial Mixed Development, Norwich Council Housing 1955-1973 (1986)

As credited, a number of the images above are taken with permission from the collection of photographs taken by George Plunkett between 1931 and 2006.  If you’re interested in Norwich (and Norfolk) past and present, do visit the wonderful website put together by his son.

Open House London, 2015: A Tour of the Capital’s Council Housing, Part Two

Part One of our tour of Open House London council estates – the event is scheduled for the weekend of the 19th and 20th September – left us in Westminster at Churchill Gardens, one of the very few schemes envisaged in Patrick Abercrombie’s visionary Plan for the post-war reconstruction of London to be completed.  Still, the arduous work of slum clearance and rebuilding continued, nowhere more so than in the Metropolitan Borough of Bethnal Green whose council, so unfairly ignored in the Open House guide, was among the most ambitious and innovative in the capital.

Trevelyan House, designed by Denys Lasdun, built by Bethnal Green Metropolitan Borough Council

Completed in 1958, Trevelyan House (alongside the adjacent Sulkin House) was a pioneering example of the cluster block, designed by Denys Lasdun with a central, free-standing tower containing lifts and services and the separate towers containing accommodation and intended to allow more light and air into the building whilst simultaneously providing greater privacy and quiet to housing areas.

Keeling House from Canrobert Street, 1959

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

You can see all this worked out more fully and on a larger scale in Keeling House, a fifteen-minute walk away to the east off Bethnal Green Road.   Completed one year later, 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.

After a history of neglect and unable to pay for necessary repairs to the now Grade II-listed building, it was sold by Tower Hamlets Council to private developers for £1.3m in 1999.  I was told, on good authority, that almost half its current residents are architects.

Perronet House © Jpmaytum, Wikimedia Commons

Perronet House, designed by Roger Walters and built by the Greater London Council, was opened in Southwark the Elephant and Castle in 1970.  It won a Good Design in Housing award from the Ministry of Local Government and Housing a year later, commended for the ‘boldness and conviction’ of its design and its ‘good mix of amenities’.  Eleven storeys high, it’s noteworthy for its split level scissor section layout – the three-storey flats are wrapped around a central communal corridor and each enjoys a dual aspect outlook unobstructed by external corridors.

Ladlands and the view to the north, Dawson’s Heights

Ladlands, Dawson’s Heights

At around the same time in the leafy southern hinterlands of Southwark, another innovative design (from a young Kate Macintosh) was built by Southwark Borough Council. Dawson’s Heights – comprising two red-brick faced ziggurat-style blocks rising to twelve storeys at peak – stands on a commanding hilltop site in East Dulwich.   Despite effusive praise from English Heritage, commending its ‘striking and original massing’ and its ‘evocative associations with ancient cities and Italian hill towns’, the Estate isn’t listed yet but it remains largely social housing under the management of the Southern Housing Group.

Macintosh’s fine work has fared better in her sheltered housing scheme at 269 Leigham Court Road in Lambeth which was listed this year.  Sadly, the threat is all too real as residents in two of Lambeth’s superb housing schemes, both featured in Open House and designed under the visionary leadership of Borough Architect Ted Hollamby, know only too well.

Central Hill

Central Hill in Upper Norwood, completed in 1973, is also a stepped development designed to make best use of its attractive site but it reflects Lambeth and Hollamby’s signature style of this time in its intimacy and human scale – a deliberate attempt to escape the alienating size and impersonal quality of many of the larger and much-criticised local authority high-rise schemes of the 1960s.  Hollamby believed that ‘most people like fairly small-scale and visually comprehensible environments.  They call them villages, even when they are manifestly not’.

It’s worked; it’s a well-loved estate with a strong sense of community. Unfortunately, as part of Lambeth’s commendable pledge to build 1000 new homes at council rent in the borough, it has become another victim of ‘regeneration’; in actual fact the threat of demolition.

All these council estates – like homes everywhere – require upkeep and maintenance (and too many have fallen prey to poor maintenance over the years) but ‘regeneration’ in this context means the destruction of good homes and the wiping out of existing communities.  One driver of this madness is ‘densification’ – an ugly term to describe the ugly reality that many of our politicians and planners believe working-class homes must be built at greater density.  The other is money or the lack of it – the pressure to sell council real estate and build private housing for sale in order to raise capital for new social housing, at best, or so-called ‘affordable’ housing at worst.

The lunatic logic of this should be plain to all but those with a naïve faith or vested interest in the unfettered market – the very market which failed ordinary people in years past and fails us now.

The southern edge of Cressingham Gardens looking towards Holy Trinity church

Scarlette Manor Way, Cressingham Gardens

The plans to wreak this havoc on Cressingham Gardens, one of Lambeth’s finest estates – described in 1981 by Lord Esher, president of RIBA, as ‘warm and informal…one of the nicest small schemes in England’ – have already been approved, its residents still fighting valiantly a rear-guard action.  It’s a beautiful estate nestling on the edge of Brockwell Park which manages superbly, in Hollamby’s words again, to ‘create a sense of smallness inside the bigness…and to get the kind of atmosphere in which people did not feel all herded together’.   It’s worth a visit and its residents deserve our support.

Raydon Street, Whittington Estate

Retcar Place, Whittington Estate

Just as Lambeth had developed its own house style by the 1970s, so had Camden under the enlightened leadership of a progressive council and the architectural ideals of Borough Architect Sydney Cook.  This can be seen firstly in the Whittington Estate, begun in 1969, designed by Peter Tábori, another young architect then in his mid-twenties.

Stoneleigh Terrace, Whittington Estate

It’s a larger, grander scheme than those of Lambeth – in signature Camden style, six parallel linear stepped-section blocks of light pre-cast concrete construction and dark-stained timber.  It was designed to be a ‘form of housing…which related more closely to the existing urban fabric than the slab and tower blocks, and which brought more dwellings close to the ground’. Each home had its own front door and a walk through the front door of 8 Stoneleigh Terrace during Open House will allow you to glimpse the innovative interior design of the housing too, chiefly the work of Ken Adie of the Council’s Department of Technical Services.

When you leave take time to visit a later stage of the Highgate New Town scheme along Dartmouth Park Hill, marking a turn away from the estate conception to streetscape and more in keeping with local vernacular form but still housing of very high quality.  Finally, a view of the Chester-Balmore Scheme, built to Passivhaus standards to ensure the highest levels of sustainability, at the corner of Raydon Street and Chester Road opposite the Whittington Estate, will show you the very latest trends in social housing.

Rowley Way, Alexandra Estate in the 1970s © Martin Charles

A contemporary image of Rowley Way

The other Camden scheme in Open House is often regarded as the one of the most attractive and architecturally accomplished council estates in the country, Neave Brown’s Alexandra Road Estate,  listed Grade II* in 1993.  You’ll also have a chance to visit the Tenants’ Hall (also designed by Neave Brown – the only living architect to have had all his British work listed) with an exhibition on the Estate and the newly-restored linear park integral to the overall conception and liveability of the scheme. It’s all better seen than described but, in its scale and confidence, it marks (in the words of modernist architect John Winter), ‘a magical moment for English housing’.  It was completed in 1979 – the year in which such ambition would be consigned to the graveyard of history.

It’s a sad irony that some of the very best of our council housing was built just as its near century-long story of practical idealism and shared social purpose was drawing to a close.  I hadn’t intended this tour of some of London’s finest council estates to be so elegiac but the contemporary picture of social housing’s marginalisation and market-driven ‘regeneration’ creates a poignant counterpoint to the energy and aspirations of previous generations.  If you visit any of the estates on show during Open House London, my plea to you is to think of them not as monuments to a bygone era but as beacons of what we can and should achieve in a brighter future.

Addendum

It’s been pointed out that I haven’t mentioned the Noel Park Estate in Haringey. It was built by the Artizans, Labourers and General Dwellings Company (and so strictly didn’t qualify) between 1881 and 1927 but, taken over by Haringey Council in 1966 and a fine example of high-quality social housing, it’s definitely worth a visit.

Note

The residents of Central Hill and Cressingham Gardens both have active campaigns fighting to preserve their homes and communities.  See Save Central Hill and Save Cressingham Gardens to find out more and lend your support.

SHOUT (Social Housing under Threat) has its own website and is actively campaigning to defend social housing and promote it as the best and necessary solution to our housing crisis.

Open House London, 2015: A Tour of the Capital’s Council Housing, Part One

The most important buildings in London – those with the greatest social significance for the mass of its people and those which have made the greatest visual impact on the capital – are council houses.  It’s partly that ubiquity and their relative accessibility that means most council estates don’t make it into Open House London – the annual celebration of the city’s architecture and design taking place this year on the weekend of the 19th and 20th September.  And, then – let’s be fair here – there’s the fact that not all municipal schemes have represented the very best of architecture and design. That is not true of the London County Council’s pioneering Boundary Estate in Shoreditch, opened in March 1900.

The Boundary Estate

But there’s also a larger and more sinister process in play – the progressive marginalisation of social housing. We are being asked to forget or even malign all that social housing has achieved.  And, by the supporters and beneficiaries of a boundless free market, we are being asked to discount it as a solution to the present housing crisis.

A ‘pure’ focus on architecture and design can be complicit in this.  Indeed, Open House London is complicit in this – its listing on Trevelyan House, which it describes rightly as ‘a classic 1950s Grade II listed Brutalist building designed by Denys Lasdun’, ignores the cardinal fact of its existence: that it was built by Bethnal Green Metropolitan Borough Council to provide high-quality and affordable homes for local people.  This is a kind of architectural social cleansing to match the sad reality on the ground in London.

This post offers an alternative perspective: a chronological tour of the Open House London venues which do mark this progressive history – council housing to savour and celebrate.  I’ve written on many of these in the past so click on the links to get to those earlier posts and further information. Open House locations adjacent or relevant to the estates listed are picked out in bold.

An early image of Tower Gardens East Terrace

Houses on the Risley Avenue and Awlfield Avenue junction: a ‘butterfly junction’ of the type pioneered in Letchworth Garden City

We’ll begin in north London at the Tower Gardens Garden Suburb – designed and built by the London County Council before the First World War: a cottage estate for working people inspired by the Garden City and Arts and Crafts movements of the day.  Just under 1000 homes were built on the Estate before the war halted construction; a further 1266 houses and flats were added – in plainer style but in keeping with Garden City ideals – in a northwards extension to the Estate between the wars.

Those interwar years are largely absent from Open House though the LCC built 89,049 homes during the period.  Few are ‘statement architecture’ – just plain neo-Georgian houses and gardens in the suburbs (along the later lines of Tower Gardens) or the pervasive five-storey walk-up tenement blocks of the inner city – but they provided the first decent homes many Londoners had known.

Different housing types on the Becontree Estate

1924 plans for the Estate

In Becontree, the LCC built what was by most measures the largest council estate in the world – 24,000 houses on 3000 acres of market gardens, cottages and country lanes beyond London’s eastern borders in Essex: ‘built in England’, as its first chronicler Terence Young notes, ‘where the most revolutionary social changes can take place, and people in general do not realise that they have occurred’.

The Estate may be unfashionable but as one long-term resident recalls, ‘as far as my Mum was concerned, it was heaven with the gates off’.  Fortunately, this history has been recorded by the Mobile Museum which can be visited during Open House weekend at the estate’s Valence House Museum. (1)

One of the early eight-storey blocks on the original estate

Housing needs, of course, became even more pressing after 1945, firstly in the need to replace homes damaged or destroyed in the Blitz and secondly, from the mid-1950s, in the national drive to clear the country’s slums.  Woodberry Down, begun in 1946, was the first major post-war LCC scheme, heralded then as the ‘estate of the future’.   Its earliest eight-storey blocks marked the times – by their height and innovative use of lifts and by their construction of reinforced concrete from recycled air raid shelters.

Regeneration: Woodberry Park and the 27-storey Residence tower – built for private ownership

The Open House Woodberry Down Urban Sustainability and Place-making Tour speaks a more contemporary language and marks the recent and ongoing regeneration of the Estate but, if you go, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to look at the wider development.  Woodberry Down is by far one of the least bad examples of regeneration (I’ve even avoided the scare quotes for once) – 41 per cent of new homes are for social rent and shared ownership but the glitzy private new build in prime locations and the marginalisation of the Estate’s previous community tells its own story of contemporary priorities, values and pressures.

Lansbury Neighbourhood map 1951

Elizabeth Close

The LCC also built the more celebrated Lansbury Estate in Poplar, opened initially in 1951 as a living ‘Exhibition of Architecture, Town Planning, and Building Research’ for the Festival of Britain that year.  It’s easy to be unimpressed by its modest yellow-brick terraces and small blocks of flats and maisonettes – and much contemporary architectural opinion was – but take time to savour a moment when (in the words of the Festival’s on-site town planning exhibition) our politics were driven by ‘The Battle for Land’ and ‘The Needs of the People’ and the question ‘How can these needs be met?’.

Chrisp Street Market in 1951

Frederick Gibberd’s clock tower with its backdrop, Canary Wharf. Fitzgerald House, a 1968 council block, is to the right.

You’ll be visiting Frederick Gibberd’s Chrisp Street Market and clock tower, built to provide facilities and a focal point for the new estate – the first pedestrianized shopping street in the country. That too is subject to ‘regeneration’ by the local housing association landlord Poplar HARCA  – after all it’s so close to that beacon of our new world, Canary Wharf.

The developers’ vision for a new Chrisp Street Market – improvement or generic gentrification?

‘The vision’, according to United House Developments, is ‘to create a new food shopping destination, with new outside eating areas’ which, it is claimed, will benefit local traders and residents. That begs the question which local traders and residents – it looks more like gentrification to me and a local campaign is demanding ‘fruit and veg and social housing, not corporate brands and luxury flats’. (2)

Balfron Tower, 1969

Straying from our chronology briefly but keeping close geographically, the more controversial Balfron Tower, designed by Ernő Goldfinger, is a five-minute walk to the east – controversial at the time of its construction by the LCC and its successor, the Greater London Council, in the mid-1960s as one of the starkest and most imposing examples of Brutalism; more controversial  now as an illustration of the meaning of contemporary regeneration: its tenants ‘decanted’, the flats to be sold (by Poplar HARCA) to those with the means to buy them on the open market.

Trellick Tower

Balfron Tower doesn’t appear in Open House this year but its younger sister Trellick Tower in West London does and this, fortunately, despite Right to Buy, remains for the most part social housing owned by the Royal Borough Kensington and Chelsea.  I haven’t written on Trellick but I hope the post on Balfron can provide some useful background.

Courtyard and towers, the World’s End Estate

World’s End Estate, © Derek Harper and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence

Jumping forward again but keeping our geographical focus, a two-mile work westwards along the Thames brings you to another Kensington and Chelsea scheme, the World’s End Estate, designed by Eric Lyons (of Span fame) and built between 1969 and 1977.  It’s a dense, high-rise development of 750 homes in seven high-rise tower blocks of between 18 and 21 storeys joined by nine 9 four-storey walkway blocks in a figure of eight.

But its red-brick cladding, polygonal towers and green courtyards give it a romantic, almost castle-like appearance, enhanced by its spectacular Thames-side setting.  More importantly, it’s been a good home to generations of ordinary Londoners, built at a time when riverside settings and views weren’t reserved to the wealthy.

Chaucer House, Churchill Gardens Estate

Four-storey flat and maisonette block, Churchill Gardens

A brisk thirty-minute walk eastwards along the Thames and a quarter-century backwards, the Churchill Gardens Estate, officially opened in 1951, returns us to post-war idealism.  Built by Westminster City Council and designed by two architects, Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya, in their mid-twenties, it is – in my view – one of the most attractive council estates in the country and voted by the Civic Trust in 2000 as its outstanding building scheme of the last forty years.

The sheer size of the Estate is impressive – a  30 acre site, 1661 homes, 36 blocks, housing a population of some 5000 – but it is the quality of architecture, layout and landscaping which should be stand out from a walk through its blocks and terraces.

An early photo of the Estate showing the accumulator tower with Battersea Power Station, the original source of the Estate’s heating, in the background

It’s the Pimlico District Heating Undertaking, in the centre of the Estate, which is on the Open House itinerary but don’t feel short-changed.  According to Ian Nairn, its ‘best single building’ was ‘the crisp and elegant boiler house at the bottom of the big polygonal tower’.

We’ll continue our tour of Open House London council housing venues in next week’s post.

Notes

(1) Find out more about the Mobile Museum and its record of estates in Barking and Dagenham at its website here.

(2) You’ll find the proposals from United House Developments here and a Poplar HARCA consultation to which you can respond on-line here. You can follow @SaveChrispSt and the campaign against the redevelopment of the market on Twitter.

Municipal Saltash: a ‘Borough Town’

Tags

1920s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Saltash

Municipal Dreams is on holiday but, while some of you might come down to the West Country to lie on a beach, his relentless quest for all things municipal continues. The Cornish town of Saltash on the banks of the Tamar provided surprisingly rich pickings.

Saltash from the Brunel’s Royal Albert Bridge; Waterside in centre shot

Or perhaps not so surprising given its long history.  It might seem overshadowed by its bigger neighbour Plymouth nowadays but, as the locals will tell you: 

Saltash was a borough town, When Plymouth was a fuzzy down

And it’s true enough: Saltash was first incorporated in the late 12th century; its charter was confirmed by Richard II in 1382. That upstart Plymouth didn’t get its town charter till 1439.

St Nicholas and St Faith’s Church

This helps explain the longevity of Saltash’s first and most unusual piece of municipal history – the church of St Nicholas and St Faith, dating to Norman times, originally built as a chapel of ease to the nearby St Stephen’s but claimed as the ‘Corporation chapel’ – with the Corporation appointing its chaplains and deciding who got buried in the church – from the 17th century to 1881. It became the parish church of a new ecclesiastical parish coterminous with the borough in that year but the Corporation didn’t cede ownership of the building to the church authorities until 1924.  

The Guildhall

The Guildhall is a newcomer by comparison, built in 1775 as a Market House and Assembly Hall and not acquired by the Corporation until 1841. The ground-floor market area between its Tuscan colonnades was enclosed in 1910.  Grade II-listed and tastefully restored in 1999, it now provides a home for Saltash Town Council, a parish council formed when Saltash Borough Council was superseded by Caradon District Council in 1974 (itself replaced by the unitary Cornwall Council in 2009).

The Library

Cornwall County Council – which preceded the unitary authority (local government has got complicated nowadays) – built perhaps the most striking of Saltash’s local government buildings: its library.  Opened in 1963, the Library’s curved roofline sweeping up to a double-height frontage (all based, apparently, on the golden ratios of le Corbusier’s modulor system), was designed by Royston Summers of the County Architect’s Department.  To Pevsner, it’s ‘one of the most innovative of the County Architect’s post-war oeuvre’. (1)  

Two years earlier, a far larger and more unusual example of municipal enterprise had been opened – the Tamar Bridge.  Designed by Mott, Hay and Anderson, constructed by Cleveland Bridge and Engineering Company, the bridge – with its 1100 foot central span – the longest in the UK at the time, was commissioned by Plymouth City Council and Cornwall County Council.  

The Tamar Bridge with Brunel’s rail bridge to the rear.

Although the bridge was long overdue (the idea had been first mooted in 1823 and Brunel’s adjacent Royal Albert rail bridge opened as far back as 1859), in the Austerity Britain of the post-Second World War era, the Government had concluded this particular infrastructure project was too costly and the two councils secured parliamentary approval to proceed independently. Built at a cost of £1.5m without government subsidy (paid for by user tolls), construction began in July 1959 and the first traffic crossed in October 1961. (2)   

Housing is the usual focus of this blog and was once, of course, one of the major responsibilities of local councils.  Here, after a slow start, Saltash Borough Council had a major impact, transforming the town and in part (as we shall see) in ways which some would come to regret.  

The Council took so long to prepare a scheme under Addison’s 1919 Housing Act that spending cuts (the so-called Geddes Axe of 1921) halted construction before it began. The protest of one local councillor that this was ‘a dishonourable action the part of body of men who at the election taunted the electorate by promising them houses, and then threw their promises into their faces’ availed not a jot. (3)

The need for housing remained however. A 1923 report to council recorded 29 persons living in two houses in Fore Street; ‘in one room a woman, her son and his child were living, eating, drinking, and sleeping’. (4)

Lander Road

River View

It’s not surprising then that there were 106 applications for the Council’s first scheme – 18 houses built on Lander Road.  These were originally all planned as non-parlour homes but, in an interesting insight into the attitudes towards council housing at the time: (5)

the committee thought there might be people in the town who would like a better type of house.  They thought it was their duty to cater for the requirements of the whole of the population.

They ended up building ‘eight houses of the parlour type, eight of the non-parlour type and four of the flat type with separate entrances’.

Warfelton Crescent

By 1938, when the Borough had also built the much larger Warfelton Estate to the west of the town, it was claimed the council had built a higher proportion of council homes than any other in the West Country. (6)

In 1945, however, the Council applied for 60 Tarran-type prefabricated homes to partially address what was described as the town’s ‘dire housing need’.  Sturdier, permanent housing followed until, by 1950, the Council could claim that the ‘housing problem was nearly solved’, the waiting list reduced from over 1000 to 112. (7)

Liskeard Road, Burraton Estate

A total of 195 houses had been erected – 40 of these were prefabs and 12 flats, ‘the rest three-bed traditional houses’.  The prefabs were scattered around the town, most of the new houses on an extension to the Warfelton Estate.  The new Cowdray Estate contained 32 homes and new estates were underway or projected on Liskeard Road, Warraton and Burraton East.

With wartime replacement substantially complete, by the mid-1950s – like the rest of the country – Saltash turned towards the task of slum replacement.  Its obvious target was the Waterside area, huddled along the estuary beneath Brunel’s bridge – a mixed commercial and residential district: ‘a mixture of cottages and townhouses some as early as the sixteenth century, in a variety of styles and materials’. (8)

An undated, colourised postcard of the former Tamar Street

From a contemporary perspective, you might already be imagining the redevelopment possibilities and potential attractions of the area. Pevsner had already identified its picturesque quality: 

The thrill of Saltash is the excessive contrast between the small scale and the variety of the small shapes of the fishing town along the waterside and climbing up the steep hill, and the sheer height of the granite piers of Brunel’s Royal Albert Bridge. 

‘The Ferry Beach and Inn at Saltash, Cornwall’ as painted by JMW Turner in 1811. Now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Images of old Waterside, the Passage House Inn and the former Tamar Street at bottom. Note the archway entrance shown at top right.

But the housing and its layout were clearly, in their then state, ‘unfit for human habitation’ and ‘injurious to health’ and declared so in the Waterside Clearance Areas declared in 1956 and the compulsory purchase orders which followed. The Saltash branch of Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers also took a practical attitude and expressed its support for the demolitions. (9)

The new estate under construction, seen as repair works are taking place on the Royal Albert Bridge. The old Mission Hall to the left was demolished in 1963 and replaced by modern premises for the Saltash Boys Club.

A rearguard action by the Old Cornwall Society to preserve the Passage House Inn – the last of Saltash’s arch houses and immortalised by William Turner in 1812 – received only lukewarm support from the Ministry of Works which promised Grade II status allowing demolition so long as the need were justified. (10)  

Tamar Street and the Royal Albert Bridge from the quayside

The pub survived (without its arch) firstly as The Boatman and now, as of the summer of 2015, the Just Be Coffee Wine Lounge. In aspirational Britain and in Cornwall where tourism is a mainstay of the local economy that fits well with the new hopes for the Waterside as an amenity area to attract visitors.  The redevelopment which did occur has come to seem a lost opportunity.

The 1584 archway incorporated into 10 Tamar Street

Still, this blog celebrates earlier visions and ideals and in the Britain of the 1950s and 1960s housing for the people was the great priority.  The clearance was drastic – only the three pubs survived of the area’s old buildings, one side of Tamar Street was demolished and large open areas created to the waterside.  

This fine waterfront site wasn’t treated as prime real estate for the wealthy or for commerce but as land for affordable housing for local people.  A remnant only of the area’s antiquity survives in the doorway dated 1584 incorporated into the council flat at 10 Tamar Street.  

The development, that touch notwithstanding, may seem at first sight quite plain.  Compared to the old jumble of streets and styles and ungraced by any patina of age, there’s nothing picturesque about it but then, for those that lived in its previously substandard accommodation, its ‘picturesque’ appearance was probably not their prime concern.

The Council had originally commissioned the Louis de Soissons partnership (he had been the chief architect of Welwyn Garden City) to design the new scheme but opted in the end for cheaper in-house plans drawn up by the Council’s surveyor. (11)  

Still, there is some thought given to its architecture, notably in the deliberate attempt to replicate a Cornish idiom with a varied use of granite and tile facings and light-rendered frontages.  Its clean and well-equipped modernity won’t attract tourists but must have been very welcome to new residents. 

Tamar Street: no. 10 lies at the top end; the former Passage House/Boatman Inn at the end on the right

Tudor Close

The first homes (allocated to families displaced by slum clearance) were opened in 1960 by the Conservative Minister of Housing of the day, Henry Brooke for whom Brooke Close in the scheme was named. The development as a whole was completed in 1962.

Brooke Close

More council housing was built in Saltash and much more could be written about the town’s long history.  Still, you can forgive Municipal Dreams for finding its story of municipal endeavour and achievement inspiring – a reminder what local government can achieve when empowered to serve its community.

Note

My especial thanks to the Saltash Heritage Museum and Local History Centre for their help in providing background and illustration to this post. Do visit their museum and archives.  I also enjoyed visiting Elliott’s Store run by the Tamar Preservation Society. Both are on Fore Street and both are run by hard-working local volunteers who deserve our support.

Sources

1. Peter Beacham and Nickolaus Pevsner, Cornwall, The Buildings of England (2014)
2. AJ Brown University of Bath, ‘The Tamar Bridge‘, Proceedings of Bridge Engineering Conference, 27 April 2007, University of Bath
3. ‘Saltash Finance. Housing Protest’, Western Morning News, November 10 1921
4. ‘Alleged Overcrowding’, Western Morning News,  September 12 1923
5. ‘Saltash Council’s Plans for Better Homes’, Western Morning News, March 11 1925 and Twenty New Houses for Saltash Council to Build a Better Type’, Western Morning News, April 15 1925
6. Western Morning News,  July 13 1938
7. ‘Housing Problem Near Solution’, Western Morning News, June 16 1950
8. Bridget Callard, Cornwall & Scilly Urban Survey, Historic Characterisation for Regeneration: Saltash (September 2005)
9. Saltash Borough Council Housing Committee Minutes, 28 September 1956, Cornwall County Record Office
10. AD1338/1, 1956 Correspondence re Passage House Inn, Cornwall County Record Office
11. Saltash Borough Council Housing Committee Minutes, 3 August 1956 and 28 March 1958, Cornwall County Record Office