Book Review: Stephen Willats, Vision and Reality

Stephen Willats, Vision and Reality (Uniformbooks, 2016)

Stephen Willats has been one of the most interesting and innovative artists in Britain for many decades.  To those who see the significance of art as existing beyond the academy and to those of us, in particular, with an interest in social housing, he is one of our most important artists.  Uniformbooks, are to be congratulated, therefore, for publishing this new book as a permanent record of his many community-based artworks on council estates up and down the country.

As Willats states in the introduction to this book, ‘it is the audience of a work of art which gives it meaning’ but, rather than hope for a public better-educated in the language and mores of the art world, he was clear that it was the ‘wall-mounted, object-based tendency of art galleries’ which had come to seem ‘archaic’.  To Willats:

a work of art exists between people, and only has meaning when it in some way addresses their society.

He wanted ‘a new function and meaning for art, and that the artwork could then become an agency for transformation’.

Display boards, Harvey House, 1985, p102 (c) Stephen Willats [Brentford Towers, Hayes]

Here lies the credo and the mission. The form he chose was the creation of what he called a ‘Symbolic World’ – a series of installations, of text and images, made collaboratively with estate residents and placed in the key meeting places of those estates, representing and articulating the residents’ life and experience and the meanings placed on them.

If all this sounds somewhat hifalutin (and I’ll confess it does to me), the finished product is something rare – a view of estate life largely created by (not for and, for once, not against) estate residents in all its (and their) diversity, complexity and contradictoriness.

Willats is clear that the outcome is not mere ‘descriptive documentation’ but I hope he’ll forgive me as a social historian if I do treat it as a record, a significant record of time and place and people usually neglected and often denigrated.  As such, it defies easy summary – you’ll need to read the book to appreciate its richness – but I’ll pick out a few of the themes I found most compelling. It’s a testimony to the interest of his work that I’ll be questioning too of some of its approaches and assumptions.

Linacre Court, Hammersmith, West London, p20 (c) Stephen Willats

Willats captures an important moment in the history of council housing – an incremental turn from its being aspirational housing, a site and symbol of upward mobility, to being something lesser and something troubled and, to many, troubling.  With hindsight, from what might come to seem (if the present government has its way) the end of this proud and complex story, we see the beginnings of a process by which social housing has been designated (though not, of course, by its residents or those who know its essential role and purpose) housing of last resort, a safety net for the poorest and most vulnerable incapable of either aspiring to or achieving something ‘better’.

As Willats notes:

When I first started, people on the whole seemed quite optimistic about their ‘modern’ surroundings, which were often new to them, but gradually as the 1970s progressed, with the media’s stigmatisation of social housing, and the withdrawal of essential services such as maintenance, the mood in most of these recordings turned more negative with a critical, sometimes even depressed, tone prevailing.

Ben Johnson Road, Ocean Estate. Photo by Sharon Irish and made available through this Creative Commons licence.

By 2001, a BBC report described the Ocean Estate in Stepney as ‘one of the most deprived in Britain, ravaged by poverty, crime and drug use’. (1)  In 1978, Willats talked to an elderly couple, long-term residents (to those who dwell in stereotypes, his photographs of their home capture a world of utmost ‘bourgeois’ respectability) who recalled a different time:

These flats, when they were originally opened, were a showpiece for all over the world and they used to come to these flats…Then you could walk into the lift and the lift would be spotlessly clean because we had a porter there. He was fantastic.

We’ve seen the same stated of the Brandon Estate in Southwark (which Willats also covers) and of high-rise blocks in Birmingham.  The truth was that the removal of on-site caretakers was often as much the result of rising antisocial behaviour as its cause but the reality of the latter was undeniable.

So the trajectory – from ‘showpiece’ to ‘problem estate’ – is a familiar one.  Willats captures it well and it was not his task to fully explain it but the deep dynamics underlying the shift are worth a brief mention.  The rise of working-class owner occupation from the 1960s and needs-based assessment (which gave priority to our poorest and most vulnerable citizens in allocations) in the 1970s played their part. Right to buy and the halt on council housing new build in the 1980s – and the unforgiving media coverage which Willats identifies – did much to complete the process by which council housing became ‘residual’.

As the least desirable council housing became hard to let, Willats also captures another moment which might be familiar to some readers – that time when (either officially or unofficially) some of its flats became home to young people – Willats focuses on the most countercultural of them here – willing to take on accommodation that by now traditional council house residents were refusing. (We’ve seen this too, most melodramatically in Manchester’s Hulme Crescents.)  Again, there is reciprocal cause and consequence here to explain the changing perceptions and realities of council housing.

Dobson Point, Newham, East London, p17 (c) Stephen Willats

What I haven’t mentioned yet is the most common explanation of council housing’s decline, that of ‘design disadvantage’ or, to put it as crudely as it was more usually understood, the trouble with tower blocks.  This is an agenda which Willats shares to some extent.  He asks a lot of questions about the ‘isolation’ of high-rise living, about its lack of neighbourliness.

Skeffington Court and the Grand Union Canal, Hayes. Photo by Sharon Irish and made available under this Creative Commons licence.

Much in the book could be taken to taken to confirm the worst stereotypes – the residents of the fifteen-storey Skeffington Court block for example:

I am not as friendly since I have been here, once you get into your flats, you shut your door and you don’t see anybody…You feel so enclosed.

You should never have to suffer living in a tower block all your life…It can become a prison.

Charville Lane Estate, Hayes, Middlesex, p14 (c) Stephen Willats

But although Willats asks the leading questions, the residents speak for themselves and actually give very varied responses.  Charville Lane is another Hayes estate, a low-rise interwar cottage suburb. Unexpectedly, maybe, one its residents tells a very different story:

I’ve got used to it now but I missed the company at first, ‘cos being in a flat we always had a sort of open house and everybody in the block would pop in and have a cup of coffee.  Once we got here most of the neighbours are out.

Marlborough Towers, Leeds.

Another resident, living in the seventeen-storey Marlborough Towers in central Leeds, also turns the ‘common-sense’ assumptions around:

You do get to know quite a lot of people living in the block. We have lived in a street, and if you live in as street you may know your neighbour at that side and your neighbour at the side, but further down the street you don’t get to know them, but here, moving in and out of the lifts and using the buses, and coming into the block you get to know everybody.

You can see similar views of life in a multi-storey estate expressed in my post on the Pepys Estate in Deptford in its heyday. And for very resident who decries the isolation of their high-rise flat, there is another for whom it is a window on the world.

Kelson House and Topmast Point, Isle of Dogs, East London, p21 (c) Stephen Willats

None of this should be taken as a denial of the problems of the tower blocks. At the very least, you needed the lifts to work reliably and you wanted their shared spaces properly respected.  All too often neither was the case at their lowest point when maintenance and security were shamefully neglected.

But it gives, I hope, a more rounded picture – one reflecting the very varied real-world experience of residents as opposed to the commentators’ caricatures.  I think it raises another issue too – what is the metric here? What is the implied alternative?

Homecourt, Feltham, Middlesex, p19 (c) Stephen Willats. [Demolished in 2005]

It feels too often – I am speaking generally here rather than in relation to Willats’ work – that the experience of estate living is juxtaposed to some lost world or some form of notional community which ought to exist.  Sometimes this is explicit, expressed in an idealisation of the close-knit life of the slum terraces – the life that so many generations of working-class people were desperate to escape, of course.  Sometimes it seems based on a simple but surely questionable assumption that streets are always friendlier, more neighbourly – that closing the front door of a suburban semi is somehow less isolating than the same action in a high-rise flat.

What’s missing in all this discussion is class. What’s common is that it is invariably the working class who are the object of this discussion.  Working-class lives are dissected and held to standards that are never applied to the middle-class.  Who bothers about middle-class community?  Who even uses the phrase?

That, in a sense, is the great paradox of Willats’ work.  He does allow – it is his purpose – council house residents to speak for themselves, to tell their own stories, but the exercise as a whole is an artistic intervention of a form that would never be applied to middle-class owner-occupiers because they are never – to use the jargon – problematised.   Of course, you could make the same criticism of this blog and I raise it, not as condemnation of Willats’ work – far from it – but as an issue we might all want to consider.

Friar’s Wharf Estate, Oxford. Photo by Sharon Irish and made available by this Creative Commons licence.

Snow Hill Estate, Bath. Photo by Sharon Irish and made available under this Creative Commons licence.

To return to the book and the body of work it represents, its great strength is the variety of estates it covers – twenty-two in all, most in London but including estates in Bath, Leeds, Oxford and Milton Keynes, illustrated in over 500 black and white images across 288 pages.  Many of these are the tower blocks that sprang up in the sixties but it includes interwar cottage estates, more recent low-rise developments as well as traditional five-storey flatted schemes.  And within those, a complete range of their residents – a range which completely belies the lazy stereotypes that much contemporary commentary and much of what passes for policy seem to rely on.

The interviews and images capture and celebrate this variety. Opinions are expressed forcibly on one side or another but the overall effect is one of nuance.  If there’s a constant, it’s only the individuality and care that residents applied to making council housing – that bland generic term – their home.  As a resident of the Friar’s Wharf Estate in Oxford expressed it, they were all people ‘trying to make their own lives in their own way, which is what we’re here for’.

This is a rich, though-provoking book, perhaps unique in both its specificity and breadth.  If it has one great revelation, perhaps it is only that there is no great revelation; it simply portrays decent people in, overwhelmingly, decent homes.  For that reason alone, it should be widely read.

Vision and Reality is available direct from Uniformbooks or from online booksellers and independent bookshops.

Notes

As noted, all black and white images here are the copyright of Stephen Willats. My thanks to him for making them available and to Colin Sackett of Uniformbooks for his assistance.

Stephen Willats’ website has much more detail and illustration on the full range of his creative work.

Sharon Irish has a website detailing her work and interests. My thanks to her for sharing the fruits of some of her own research.

Sources

1. Dan Coles, ‘The Ocean Estate: Sink or Swim?’, BBC News Online, 15 January 2001. It should be noted that the Estate was about to become a key site of New Labour’s New Deal for Communities programme and much has happened since. In 2015, major reconstruction saw the refurbished Estate nominated for two design awards. (See Mike Brooke, ‘East End’s “deprived” Ocean Estate is shortlisted for top UK design award’, Inside Housing, 11 July 2015.)

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Post-War Housing in Hackney: ‘Far removed from the pre-war conception of “council flats”‘

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

The drive towards high-rise housing which began in the late 1950s is often crudely represented as evidence of the inhumanity of architects and planners and the megalomania of their local authority enablers. Leaving aside, for the time being, the question of just how misguided this trend was, the reasons for it were far more complex. A single borough can tell much of the story.

In 1948, Hackney Metropolitan Borough Council declared it would build no new housing above three storeys in height and, true to its word, in the early 1950s it built some of the most celebrated low-rise housing in the country.  Yet by the middle of the decade it was approving fifteen-storey tower blocks. What happened?

The more limited ambitions of pre-war construction provide a prologue. The Council had completed 2147 council homes by 1940, over two-thirds built in the previous five years as the drive to clear the slums and alleviate overcrowding took off.  These were overwhelmingly the five-storey tenement blocks of a form, with minor variations, ubiquitous across the capital.

Banister House

Shacklewell House

The 160-flat Banister House in Homerton, designed by Hackney’s preferred architects, Messrs Josephs, was opened in 1935; the three block Shacklewell House, six storeys with its mansard roof, the year after. Similar blocks followed – Nisbet House in Homerton and Hindle House in Shacklewell – and the Council received special dispensation to complete Wren’s Park House and Wigan House, in Clapton, during the War in 1940.  These are all solid homes but only Wren’s Park House (another Josephs design), with the Moderne balconies then in vogue, might claim any architectural distinction. (1)

Wren’s Park House

Much of this work of reconstruction was nullified by the War; around 4000 Hackney homes were destroyed by enemy action, a further 3180 severely damaged. Understandably in 1945, as Henry Goodrich, the Council’s Labour leader, stated, ‘the people of this country were looking more anxiously at the housing question than anything else connected with post-war plans’. (2)

To cope with the immediate crisis, the Council erected 450 prefab Uni-Seco bungalows and requisitioned empty properties across the Borough – 3800 by 1950. (3)  But the Borough’s ambition to build lastingly and better in the post-war era was shown when it asked RIBA to suggest six practices to undertake its housing design work.  In the event, the star names, Frederick Gibberd and Graham Dawbarn, figures of national significance in post-war public housing, weren’t on this original list but came from onward recommendation.

Mayfield Close

Hackney’s first post-war housing was completed in Mayfield Close in Dalston in 1947 – brick-built blocks, three-storeys high as the Council had prescribed.  But circumstances and fashion determined more imaginative solutions.  In 1948, the housing waiting list stood at 12,157.  A breakdown of applicants showed that one third required only one bedroom. (4)

The reality of diverse needs and the aspiration to build mixed communities was one incentive to move beyond the uniform two- and three-bed homes which had dominated council house-building to date.  Another was the opportunity provided to design more architecturally interesting and visually appealing schemes. Gibberd was clear that ‘buildings with quite different formal qualities such as blocks of flats, maisonettes and bungalows are needed to provide “contrast” and “variety” in the “composition” of an area’. (5)

Somerford Grove: early images of top-left and clockwise block of flats and terraced of flatted houses, old people’s bungalows, flats and houses and terraced two-storey houses

The result would be, in the words of GL Downing, Hackney’s Borough Surveyor:

more interesting and open lay-outs…and, with attention paid to landscape gardening, schemes far removed from the general pre-war conception of ‘council flats’.

This ‘mixed development’ ideal came to fine fruition in Gibberd’s Somerford Grove Estate, completed in 1949.  It was based, firstly, on what he called the ‘precinctual theory’.  The area’s through road was closed and replaced by a series of interconnected squares ‘throughout which the pedestrian receives priority’.  It was elaborated in a ‘series of closes, each with its own character’.  But it rested on a range of building types to meet a diverse community’s varied needs: three-storey blocks of two- and three-bed flats, single bed and bedsitter flats, two-storey blocks of two-bedded flatted houses with small private gardens, two-storey three-bed terraced houses and private gardens, and a terrace of single-storey bungalows for the elderly. (6)

Somerford Grove: contemporary view

In terms of design, additional variety and warmth was provided by the use of a range of surface treatments: in Gibberd’s description, pale pink and putty coloured walls for the flatted houses, alternating warm brick and rendered walls on the terraced houses, dark red and blue bricks for the old people’s housing.

Somerford Grove: contemporary view

This was the so-called New Humanism, taking its inspiration from Scandinavian social housing and reflecting too the model provided by the showpiece Festival of Britain Lansbury Estate on which Gibberd had also worked.  It’s unsurprising, then, that the Somerford Grove Estate received an Award for Merit from the Festival of Britain’s architectural committee.

It was all, according to The Times, ‘encouraging proof that even dense housing need not be inhuman’. (7)

Graham Dawbarn had also worked on the Lansbury Estate.   On Sandringham Road, the Housing Committee accepted his arguments that taller housing would be occupied by households without children and would add interest to the overall design.  It allowed a fourth storey but this was not yet the thin end of the wedge.  The three-storey maximum was reasserted at Norman and Dawbarn’s Wilton Estate.  This also showed characteristic Scandinavian and Festival of Britain features, notably in its cantilevered cast concrete projecting balconies, coloured facing panels and careful landscaping. (8)

Wilton Estate

All this seems to make Hackney’s rapid and comprehensive embrace of high-rise  all the more surprising and yet, in reality, the pressures and incentives to do so were very considerable.

As RIBA’s 1955 symposium on tall flats had concluded: (9)

the high cost of land, the encroachment of buildings on agricultural land and – too often – the featureless spread of housing estates beyond the confines of their cities are compelling a growing number of authorities to consider the contribution that the building of high flats can make to their housing and reconstruction programme.

Five years later, Hackney itself drew attention to the ‘lack of building sites and the ever increasing cost of site purchase [which] left the Council with no alternative but to build higher’.

Many other factors came into play too, particularly the rising number of households and the increase in smaller households – a function of both increased life expectancy and rising divorce rates.  Slum clearance (reducing density), higher space standards and improved community facilities on council estates, and land zoning also reduced the area available for building.  All this at a time when the private rented sector was in serious decline.  The 1956 Housing Subsidies Act – which offered higher subsidies the higher councils built – was therefore both cause and consequence of the drive towards high-rise housing.

The Beckers: eleven-story point block

The Beckers: four-storey maisonettes with community hall and tower to rear

In Hackney, an influx of younger councillors, replacing a more traditionalist ‘old guard’ in 1953, eased the transition.  Gibberd’s design for The Beckers on Rectory Road, which included two eleven-storey tower blocks of one-bed flats and bedsitters, was approved in mid-1955.  In other respects, it remained true to mixed development ideals with its low-rise block of two-bed flats and terrace of three-bed houses. That Scandi influence remains too, seen here in the landscaping and external treatments of coloured panelling and cream rendering.  (10)

The Beckers: elevation and plan

The Trelawney Estate on Paragon Road in central Hackney, designed with less architectural finesse by Ernest Joseph and including two fifteen-storey towers, was approved later that year as a direct result of the subsidies legislation then going through parliament.  Unexpected costs had made the impending subsidy regime more attractive and overcame the Housing Committee’s initial preference for lower blocks. Most of this large estate was completed in the early 1960s.

A Halesowen councillor who viewed the estate thought the scheme ‘made his own authority, which thought it was progressive, look like a snail which had lost its way’. (11) His words capture the more intangible dynamics which would also fuel the sixties’ drive to high-rise – the desire to impress, emulate or surpass.

Trelawney Estate

By January 1961, Hackney had built 4000 homes since the war – an achievement marked in the official opening of the Morland and Fields Estates to the west of London Fields. By now, one third of Hackney schemes were being designed in-house; this last by the Borough’s Chief Assistant Architect, RH Harrison. In another sign of confident municipalism, two-thirds of the Borough’s housing was now constructed by the Council’s direct labour department. (12)

The Morland Estate: gardens and community hall, twelve-storey tower to rear

The Morland Estate: maisonette block

Hackney, then, had come a long way from the modest yet exacting vision of council housing it had laid out in 1945 but it’s hard to see any great betrayal in the shift towards increased size and height that had occurred by the early 1960s. The desire to house the people well was consistent but, in the end, the very scale of that ambition, alongside the practical and financial pressures which have always shaped council housing fashions, seemed to compel high-rise solutions.  The new Borough of Hackney (incorporating Shoreditch and Stoke Newington), created in 1965, would build far more tower blocks and would, latterly, demolish many but that is another story.

Note

I’ve added additional images of Somerford Grove, the Wilton Estate and The Beckers to my Tumblr account.

Sources

(1) More details on slum clearance and rebuilding can be found in the volumes of the Survey of London: Hackney: Homerton and Hackney Wick, Hackney: Shacklewell, and Hackney: Clapton.

(2) Quoted in Michael Passmore, ‘From High Hopes to Tall Flats: The Changing Shape of Hackney’s Housing 1945-1960’, Hackney History, vol 15, 2009

(3) The Metropolitan Borough of Hackney Official Guide, 1950

(4) George LA Downing, Borough Engineer and Surveyor and Director of Housing Development, Metropolitan Borough of Hackney, ‘Some Aspects of Housing in a Metropolitan Borough’, The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, September 1949; vol. 69, no. 5

(5) Quoted in Harriet Atkinson and Mary Banham, The Festival of Britain: A Land and Its People (2012)

(6) Frederick Gibberd, ‘Housing at Hackney’, Architectural Review, vol 106, No 633, September 1949

(7) ‘Mixed Housing at Hackney’, The Times, September 6, 1949

(8) Love Local Landmarks: Hackney’s Locally Listed Buildings, 1-99 Wilton Estate, Lansdowne Drive, E8

(9) This, the following quotation and the analysis which follows are drawn from Peter Foynes, ‘The Rise of High-Rise: Post-war Housing in Hackney’, Hackney History, vol 1, 1995

(10) FRS Yorke and Frederick Gibberd, Modern Flats, The Architectural Press, London (1958)

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

(12) Metropolitan Borough of Hackney, ‘The Official Opening of the 4000th Post-War Dwelling, Morland Estate, Lansdowne Drive, 21 January 1961’ (Hackney Archives)