New Books on Brutalism: ‘Raw Concrete’ and ‘Concrete Concepts’

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1960s, 1970s, Brutalism

Barnabas Calder, Raw Concrete

Brutalism is in vogue and, at the risk of offending a few readers, I’ll admit to being annoyed by some of its fans – those who merely see it as ‘brutal’ and celebrate the fact or the architectural groupies who lack any sense of its context.  I could be annoyed by Barnabas Calder too if he weren’t so charmingly self-deprecating about his own love affair with Brutalism – he describes his falling for the Barbican as a twenty-one year old as his ‘intellectual eyebrow piercing’, the nearest this (self-avowedly) middle-class youth came to youthful rebellion. And if he hadn’t written such a very good book.

Raw Concrete is, in Calder’s words, ‘a rather personal greatest hits of British Brutalism’ but it’s far from the ‘catching the Zeitgeist’ potboiler that might imply.  It’s an eclectic but representative mix and his ability to weave in thoughtful context, telling detail and balanced appraisal provides, to my mind, an excellent – and highly readable – guide to the topic as a whole.

Trellick Tower (c) Barnabas Calder

At the risk of emulating the famous (but, sadly, spoof) review of Lady Chatterley’s Lover which examined it for its insights into gamekeeping, I’m going to mainly focus on what we learn from the book of the role of municipalism and the wider public sector.

As Calder argues:

British Brutalism has been widely seen as the architectural style of the Welfare State – a cheap way of building quickly, on a large scale, for housing, hospitals, comprehensive schools, and massive university expansion.

There’s plenty in the book to support that contention (though when done well it wasn’t cheap) but he makes the less common argument that Brutalism could also mask social conservativism – ‘scene dressing to disguise lack of change with apparent modernisation’ in his words – and that sometimes its style meshed all too well with the ‘edifice complex of the powerful’.  He also locates Brutalism in a unique and likely unrepeatable moment of time – an era of cheap and plentiful energy before we had to think about sustainability.

Balfron Tower (c) Barnabas Calder

Chapter Two, ‘Monuments to the People’, is for me – you won’t be surprised to hear – the heart of the book: a paean to Ernő Goldfinger and his two council housing masterpieces, Balfron Tower and Trellick Tower.  (I’ll earn my pernickety reviewer points here by pointing out that Goldfinger’s Hungarian forename – it means, appropriately perhaps, ‘earnest’ or ‘sincere’ – is properly spelt with a double acute accent over the ‘o’, not an umlaut.)

I’ve visited Balfron Tower, with considerable misgiving, during some of the recent artwashing events. (Artwashing: the process by which corporations seek to disguise their more nefarious actions by providing a cultural sheen to their activities.)  It’s a tribute to Calder’s descriptive verve that he makes me want to visit it again to admire the perfectionism and detailing of Goldfinger’s work.

Balfron escape stair (c) Barnabas Calder

The draft specification for the Tower’s bush-hammered concrete ran to forty-one pages. Or take the cutaway parapet to an escape stair shown above – ‘elegant, charming and curiously delicate’, in Calder’s words. ‘Finesse’ isn’t a word usually associated with Brutalism but Calder makes it sometimes seem entirely appropriate.

Critically, however, all this energy wasn’t dedicated to some abstract architectural ideal but to the service of the people.  Ernő’s zealotry (he was a notoriously difficult boss) and he and his wife’s occasionally mocked temporary sojourn in Balfron were proof of this: ‘real effort and thought went into producing good living environments and a sense of community for people who were not well off’.  The comments of the actual tenants on their new homes were overwhelmingly positive.

Balfron Tower entrance (c) Barnabas Calder

It’s necessary to say this, not just to those who glibly claim to see in Balfron and Trellick (and other blocks of similar quality) only evidence of architectural inhumanity and state megalomania but to some of Brutalism’s fans too who care so little for its sometime social purpose.

Goldfinger’s archive (held by RIBA) also contains a hand-written breakdown of the employment status of every head of household among Balfron’s early residents.  With one exception, all – apart from ten pensioners and one woman described as a ‘housewife’ – were in paid employment; fifteen in white-collar occupations.  The block was completed as the era of full employment was drawing to a close and much that ‘went wrong’ in Balfron and Trellick subsequently reflects the deteriorating circumstances of their tenants rather than any flaw in design or construction.

Ironically, of course, as Calder argues with respect to the current era, ‘as soon as it became widely recognised that Balfron Tower was excellent housing it seemed immediately as though it was too good for social tenants’.  Poplar HARCA, the building’s owners, are selling it off to those who can afford it.  Calder is judicious on the dynamics here but his sense of loss and betrayal seems clear and appropriate.

The Barbican (c) Barnabas Calder

The Barbican (described in Chapter Three, ‘The Bankers’ Commune’) has, on the other hand, served its founding purpose very well.  The City of London, manifestly anachronistic in democratic terms but a powerful guardian of London’s financial sector, and fearful of a forced merger with more representative authorities, needed to increase its residential electorate.  The Barbican was ‘built in order to preserve the privileged autonomy of the City’.

That wealth and the continuity of politics also built a very fine estate.  The Golden Lane Estate, developed by the City to provide genuine social housing just over the border in Finsbury, proved the credentials of the radical young architectural team selected by the City for its grander project.  Chamberlin Powell & Bon worked with immense skill and vision not only to design the Barbican and oversee its twenty-year construction but to ‘sell it’ to the Corporation, comparing ‘each aspect…to historical examples whose safe poshness and unrevolutionary grandeur made them easy to swallow for the City men’.

The Barbican (c) Barnabas Calder

Some of those City men would be residents.  One show home advertised in the 1960s was described as ‘furnished for a merchant banker and his wife who frequently play host to their international friends and business colleagues’; another, capturing a different element of the Barbican’s residential clientele, for ‘an intellectual couple interested in the arts’. (1)  At rents reaching £12 a week for a two-bed flat at the time (equivalent rents in Balfron stood at £4 15s 6d), this exclusivity should not be surprising. The workers built but could not aspire to live in such housing.

The Anderston Centre in Glasgow (discussed in Chapter Eight) lies 400 miles to the north but much further away in terms of resources, vision and execution.  It’s a sorry tale but a revealing one in which two powerful, though ultimately unequal, forces conjoined.  One was the boost given to local government ambitions of comprehensive redevelopment contained in Labour’s 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. The other was a ‘speculative frenzy’ among commercial developers unleashed by the Conservatives as post-war restrictions were abolished in the 1950s.

The Anderston Centre (c) Barnabas Calder

The 1945 Bruce Report envisaged the wholesale reconstruction of central Glasgow.  Shortly after, the City Council declared the Anderston Cross district a Comprehensive Development Area. As Calder writes:

The council’s plan was to use its considerable powers of compulsory purchase, demolition, and road replanning to delineate and clear a viable site.  Private developers would then use their expertise in the property market and their sharpness about the construction industry to design and build the new development, paying a good rent to the council, and sharing the profits with them.

Well, as Robert Burns had noted, ‘the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men, gang aft agley’ and these plans were perhaps not particularly well-laid in the first place.

I’ll spare you the twists and turns detailed in the book.  Suffice to say, as commercial circumstances changed but the pursuit of private profit stood constant, the Council felt its own interests and investments systematically, comprehensively, sidelined.  The scheme itself was only partially and bleakly fulfilled. The shopping mall and business premises failed. Three 19-storey tower blocks (five lower floors originally dedicated to shops and offices, 14 residential floors) existed – for once the rhetoric might be fitting – in ‘dystopian isolation’.  (Their refurbishment and, naturally, their recladding was completed in 2011.)

Richard Seifert was, architecturally, the presiding genius here – the developers’ go-to guy who knew how to exploit every planning loophole going in order to design and build to maximum commercial advantage.  In London, the LCC repeatedly amended its bylaws with what some planners dubbed ‘Seifert clauses’ in a largely vain attempt to limit this process.

Not much in the overall picture seems to have changed here as the story of the Heygate regeneration in Southwark (to take only one of the most glaring examples) illustrates. (2) The reality is that the private sector has the resources, expertise and will to evade most attempts by local authorities to impose a wider public interest, especially with regards to genuinely affordable housing. The other reality is that, under the current regime, local councils are too often forced into unholy alliance with commercial interests.

That was me, not Calder. He’s good on the mismatch and contradictions just discussed but, typically, he’s also able to acknowledge the better of Seifert’s schemes (Anderston’s Cross not among them) and the snobbery (even the subtle anti-Semitism) of many of his critics.

This was a time, let us remember, when prestige attached to public sector work and when most of the better architects either worked in local government or took most of their major commissions from the state. Architects then could advance their careers and please their consciences in service to a wider public interest. Contemporarily, that is less often the case.

Leicester University Engineering Building, Stirling and Gowan – the commission secured with the support of Leslie Martin (c) Barnabas Calder

The role of Leslie Martin (Chapter Five ‘The Establishment’s Radical’) , Chief Architect of the LCC between 1953 and 1956 but then, as a Cambridge Professor of Architecture, an Establishment éminence  grise in distributing plum state sector commissions to aspiring architects, is significant here. The fact that Martin chose so often to commission Brutalist work (the Leicester Engineering School being the prime example) is a mark of his time.

I’ve written more than intended. There’s much more in the book, some of it unaccountably less relevant to municipalism but illuminating on the broader aesthetics and ideals of the Brutalist movement and moment.

The National Theatre (c) Barnabas Calder

I haven’t even discussed National Theatre by Denys Lasdun (Calder’s particular hero), the subject of the book’s final chapter. If you don’t like it, Calder’s exquisite account of its design and construction might cause you to change your mind or, at least, examine it more sympathetically.  I’ll only conclude, typically, by noting his description of ‘the massive success of the South Bank’ as ‘a lasting memorial to the vision and courage of the London County Council’.

If you’re interested in Brutalism as architecture and construction practice, if you’re interested in its meaning and its context, buy the book.

Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism is published by William Heinemann on 21^st April, Hardback, £25.00.  

Christopher Beanland, Concrete Concept

I’d also like to recommend the new book by Christopher Beanland, Concrete Concept.  For Beanland too:

it was the architecture of the mid-20th century that was really creative, that really bared its teeth…Brutalism settled into the city and became the stage set for millions of ordinary lives. Those Brutalist buildings were meant to impress…

This is a very different beast but it’s irreverently and engagingly written (including a typically quirky A to Z of Brutalism by Jonathan Meades) and lavishly and beautifully illustrated.

From the book, the Geisel Library, UC San Diego: architect William Pereira (c) Alamy and used with permission.

Indeed, it’s the images of the 50 case-studies which Beanland selects from across the globe which are the book’s major strength and make it a necessary addition to a fan’s bookshelves.

They will introduce you to some of the world’s finest – sometimes beautiful, usually striking, always ‘statement’ – buildings.  Some you will know – British examples include Balfron and Trellick again, Robin Hood Gardens and the Preston Bus Station.  Many – such as Skopje Post Office in Macedonia or the Palace of Assembly in Chandigargh in India – you will not unless a true devotee.

Taken together, the words and pictures might indeed convince you that Brutalism was, to quote Calder again, ‘one of the greatest ever flowerings of human creativity and ingenuity’.  I’m glad we’ve found authors to celebrate and perhaps convince of us that fact.

Concrete Concept by Christopher Beanland is published by Frances Lincoln. Buy a copy at www.quartoknows.com.

Sources

(1) My thanks to Tim Dunn for posting these descriptions on Twitter.

(2) This is well described by Olly Wainwright in ‘Revealed: how developers exploit flawed planning system to minimise affordable housing’, The Guardian, 25 June 2015.  You can follow the Southwark specifics in more detail on the excellent website of the 35% Campaign.

My thanks to Barnabas Calder and William Heinemann for permission to use the copyrighted images in the first section of this post.

You can find my posts featuring Brutalist buildings collected here.

 

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The Castle Vale Estate, Birmingham, Part II: ‘a dignified low-rise estate’

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1990s, Cottage suburbs, Multi-storey, Regeneration

We left Castle Vale last week, an undoubtedly troubled estate, damaged by the construction flaws specific to much system-built housing of the sixties and beset by the social problems affecting estates across the country as a traditional working-class economy collapsed and council housing itself became increasingly allocated to the most vulnerable of our community.

Castle Vale, 2004. Compare to the similar aerial view taken in 1993 in last week’s post (c) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

Something needed to be done but hostile central government attitudes and policy – notably Right to Buy and the deadly squeeze on new housing investment – ensured (quite deliberately) that local government was in no position to do it.  Thatcherism was hostile both to council housing and the (predominantly Labour) authorities which still managed it.  Conversely, the 1988 Housing Act had established privately managed and well-funded Housing Action Trusts (HATs) to regenerate some of the country’s ‘worst’ estates.  It’s not difficult to read the political agenda here.

The estate from one of the Farnborough Road towers in the 1960s (c) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

Birmingham’s Director of Housing, Derek Waddington, was authorised to discreetly investigate what was happening on the North Hull Estate, the first HAT in the country.  Though some Labour councils and tenants (such as those in Hulme, Manchester) resisted this apparent privatisation of assets and homes, the pragmatic case for following suit seemed unassailable.  As Waddington describes: (1)

Eventually I had to stand in front of the Labour group and tell them the professional facts. And then I left the council chamber and they sorted out the political elements. In the end they accepted it. For this one simple reason…the Government quango gets direct gift money up front to plough in the infrastructure.

Political backing from the Council and central government and a twelve-month campaign in favour was enough to ensure that 92 per cent of tenants voted to transfer to the HAT on a turnout of 75 per cent.

The Castle Vale HAT was established in June 1993.  After some wrangling, it secured greater tenant representation (the management board eventually comprised four residents, three local authority representatives and five independents) and government funding of £160m.

Chivenor House and school, 1960s

The first priority was to tackle the estate’s housing problems – the 1994 Masterplan proposed demolishing seventeen of the estate’s 34 tower blocks.  In the end, it was determined that costs outweighed the benefits of refurbishing fifteen further blocks. Currently just two remain – Chivenor House (now housing for the elderly) and Topcliffe House; both were attached to schools which would also had to have been demolished.  Twenty-four system-built and flawed four-storey maisonette blocks were also cleared.  In their place, 1458 new homes have been built and 1381 refurbished.

The new housing reflected the changed sensibilities of its time.  The sheltered housing scheme, Phoenix Court, built on the site of the Centre 8 blocks won a Secured by Design award from the police.  Twenty-eight ‘Reinventing the Home’ family houses were built by the Mercian Housing Association on Cadbury Drive, designed to adapt to changing domestic needs. There are small pockets of self-build and ‘eco-homes’ too.   Some of the new build looks fashionably gaudy; most of it safely suburban.

Chivenor House today

Though, as I write, ‘regeneration’ threatens good (and sometimes expensively renovated) housing and solid communities across the country, there seems no real need here to lament the loss of these particular blocks which were clearly poorly built from the outset.  But, then as now, ‘regeneration’ is accompanied by a host of attitudes and policies which should be questioned.

For one, there was now the familiar emphasis on the importance of tenure mix.  As often as not, this is now a means of generating income in a world in which the market rules and traditional and highly cost-effective means of investment – in other words, public loans which were repaid (with the benefit of both providing genuinely affordable housing and lasting community assets) within thirty years or so – are deemed unacceptable.   But there is also the assumption that estates themselves were a flawed social model, that ‘successful’ communities require higher levels of owner occupation and injections of middle-class affluence and aspiration.

Demolition of Castle 8 blocks, 1996 (c) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

It’s worth pointing out that council estates were once both a site and symbol of working-class affluence and aspiration and that – before they were deliberately designated as housing of last resort – they did contain a social mix.   Furthermore, on Castle Vale itself almost one in three homes had been built for owner occupation. Still, the HAT instituted a Tenant Incentive Scheme in 1997 which offered a £10,000 grant to existing tenants to purchase their home.  By 2004, owner occupation on the estate had reached 39 per cent (from 29 per cent in the 1990s).

1997 takes us back to the New Labour era and its slogan, espoused by Tony Blair, that his government would be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’.  Not too many speak up for New Labour nowadays but again, in the interests of balance, it should be pointed out that criminality and antisocial behaviour were problems which hurt, disproportionately, still overwhelmingly ‘respectable’ working-class communities.

The Trees pub prior to demolition (c) Valeboy and the Birmingham History Forum

All five existing pubs – which ‘had long been dominated by drug dealers and criminals’ according to the HAT – were demolished.  The HAT (as did some local authorities) also adopted toughened tenancy regulations which eased the eviction of households considered to cause nuisance.  Members of the so-called and locally notorious Green Box Gang were evicted in 1998. Further evictions followed. Tough police action, in cooperation with ValeWatch (a joint police-HAT initiative), directed against drug dealing and gangs also followed and, of course, lots of CCTV. Although crime rates didn’t start falling until 2000, it all seems a strong fulfilment of the New Labour mantra.

Refurbished housing (c) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

The great claim made by the HAT programme is that it tackled problems holistically by recognising that social, economic and physical problems were related.  Not a unique or searing insight perhaps but one that Castle Vale HAT practised at least by a concerted programme of interventions tackling, for example, employment. I won’t list the various schemes here (read No Longer Notorious, linked to below, for the HAT’s own celebration of its record) but by 2005 unemployment on the estate had fallen to 5.3 per cent – below the Birmingham average of 7.6 (though the fall in the latter suggests that the HAT can’t take all the credit). (2)

New housing (c) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

Health, rightly, given that life expectancy in Castle Vale was eight years below the national average, was another focus.  In fact, the estate had been an early pioneer of integrated healthcare with its doctors, midwives, social workers, and health visitors all based in the same building from the 1960s.  But a comprehensive 1992 survey paved the way for a wide-ranging set of initiatives to tackle the estate’s particular problems of alcohol and drug abuse, infant mortality, domestic violence and mental illness.  The Sanctuary, a model of one-stop multi-agency working, was opened in the heart of the estate in 1991.  Life expectancy has increased by seven years.

The Sanctuary (c) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

It’s hard to challenge such an apparently unalloyed good news story and why would you want to unless you’re a committed municipal curmudgeon like myself but it’s an undeniable and self-confessed fact that the HAT worked very hard on public relations.  As Angus Kennedy, Chief Executive of the HAT stated:

Image management is as important as physical improvements. If we can’t attract people to an area, then it doesn’t have a sustainable future.

Positive publicity featured in Mornement, No Longer Notorious

From 1996, Castle Vale HAT employed a full-time PR officer with an assistant and a £100,000 budget.  He or she worked well, perhaps with good material.  Positive press stories increased from 29 per cent in 1979-1981 to 93 per cent in 2000.  In 2001 the HAT began to develop its own ‘image management strategy…driven by a baseline study conducted by MORI’. (3)

It’s easy to be cynical about some of this, to think at least that all this effort could be better directed towards concrete improvements rather than communications flimflam and yet perception, if not all, has enormous impact on reputation and well-being – as many housing estates can testify.  We saw this recently when we looked at North Shields’ Meadow Well Estate.  A study of both estates demonstrated how ‘a problem reputation can reinforce or even magnify an estate’s material difficulties’.  (4)

We’ll make some allowances here then (whilst looking at some opposing views) – just imagine how council housing might have fared if it hadn’t been subject to such relentless press negativity in recent decades.

Then, of course, we lived in the era of ‘private sector good, public sector bad’ (a perception that I’d like to think might have shifted more recently).  Given that, it’s no surprise that a new shopping centre and particularly the opening of a new Sainsbury’s as its anchor in July 2000, was heralded by the Progressive Conservatism Project as having a ‘profound and important effect on morale and confidence’ in Castle Vale, previously a ‘brand desert’. (5)

Castle Vale shopping precinct, 1994 (c) Mornement, No Longer Victorious

All this allowed one journalist to gush in 2003: (6)

These once bleak streets are now lined with attractive new houses and mews flats, piazzas and courtyards, travel agents and delicatessen counters, a new football stadium and a thriving college for the performing arts.

According to Adam Mornement, ‘the forgotten wasteland populated by towers had become a dignified low-rise estate’.

Whatever the reality – and I suspect that Castle Vale remains grittier than that language implies – the whiff of gentrification is plain to see.  And not everybody embraced the changes. There was significant resistance to the HAT in its early years from the Tenants’ Forum who felt a loss of democratic control and ownership – one protest featured ‘You’ve Been Quangoed’ tee-shirts to make the point.  The HAT records this as a heeded reminder of the need to strengthen consultative processes. (7)

Looking back, a correspondent on the Birmingham History Forum regrets ‘all the green space, swallowed by the new housing, the Park Lane fields just across the railway…now an industrial complex’. (8)

For a real alternative perspective, read the anonymous (though perhaps not representative) comment on a laudatory article in a June 2013 edition of the Tyburn Mail: (9)

Let’s celebrate Castle Vale that may have needed work and tlc but ended up having everything taken away and replaced by things chosen by a certain few. Castle Vale went from a bustling busy estate to a dull and miserable former shadow of itself. Well done to the money men is all I can say – you spent little, pocketed lots, and left!

Others have criticised the quality of the refurbishment which has taken place. (9)

Still, it’s clear that most residents, old and new, have welcomed the changes and the positive improvements which have taken place.  A police officer who worked on the estate in the 1970s and 80s considers that the HAT ‘worked a miracle…the place now is a lot better than it ever was’.

The HAT was wound up in 2003.  A ballot of the HAT’s 1327 tenants that year voted by 98 per cent to transfer housing management to the Castle Vale Community Housing Association set up in 1997.  I’ll confess a sneaking admiration, though, for the 18 tenants who opted to return to Birmingham City Council control (and perhaps got better tenancy conditions as a result).

John McKenna, ‘Knight of Castlevale’, 2002 (c) Wikimedia Commons

Castle Vale is held up as the great Housing Action Trust success story and taken by many to symbolise what ‘good’ regeneration can achieve, particularly when freed from the ‘dead hand’ of local authority control.  I think you could read this post and draw that lesson.

Or you could draw another lesson.  Estimates vary but it’s probable that (to 2005) the estate’s regeneration cost £318m – £205m from public funds and £113m, ‘leveraged’ in, principally from the private sector.  Imagine if local government had that money to spend and a similar freedom to build, rebuild and act – democratically and ‘holistically’ – to defend and support its community.

Sources

(1) 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.

(2) Adam Mornement, No Longer Notorious – the Revival of Castle Vale, 1993-2005 (Castle Vale Housing Action Trust, 2005)

(3) Alison Benjamin, ‘Putting the record straight’, Roof, November/December 2000

(4) Jo Dean and Annette Hastings, Challenging images. Housing estates, stigma and regeneration. The Policy Press and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation 2000

(5) Max Wind-Cowie, Civic Streets: the Big Society in Action (Progressive Conservatism Project, Demos, 2010)

(6) Helen George, ‘New Castle’, Housing (magazine of CIH), February 2003

(7) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

(8) ‘Valeboy’, comment in Birmingham History Forum, October 21st, 2012.  The comment from the police officer below is taken from the same source.

(9) The extended comment is even more trenchant and has much more to say. See ‘Castle Vale plans Year of Celebration: 20 years of regeneration for an estate that should be proud of its democracy’, Tyburn Mail, June 17, 2013

(10) Patrick Burns, ‘Midlands: On the Vale’, BBC West Midlands, 4 March 2005

The Castle Vale Estate, Birmingham, Part I: ‘Utopia’ to ‘civic pigsty’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Cottage suburbs, Multi-storey, Regeneration

In January 2016, David Cameron promised, as part of a new ‘blitz’ on poverty, to rebuild one hundred of the worst council estates in the country – the so-called ‘sink estates’ of ‘brutal high-rise towers and dark alleyways that are a gift to criminals’. (1)  There were plenty of people to point out the lies (let’s put this bluntly) that lay behind this latest PR announcement but to many it would have seemed strangely familiar too – another retread (like the Right to Buy announcement of the 2015 general election) of 1980s Thatcherism.

The appointment of Michael Heseltine to head the new ‘estate regeneration advisory panel’ completed the echo.  It was Heseltine, as Secretary of State for the Environment (in John Major’s government), who announced the selection in December 1991 of one such ‘sink estate’, Castle Vale in Birmingham, as the latest candidate for an earlier iteration of Cameron’s idea, the Housing Action Trust (HAT) scheme.

Castle Vale, 1993 (c) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

The estate is usually claimed as a shining example of the success of this earlier phase of estate regeneration and it has (as we shall see) some very good publicists to make the case. Although it provided a decent home to many of its first-generation residents (generally coming from far worse accommodation in the slum clearance areas of Aston and Nechells), Castle Vale was never a showpiece estate and by the later seventies it was seen as epitomising all that was wrong with large-scale and predominantly high-rise peripheral estates of its type. The Castle Vale HAT was established in June 1993, and since then much has changed, by nearly all accounts for the better.  Let’s examine the narrative.

We’ve looked at the beginnings of this story before.   In the interwar period, Birmingham had a council house building record second to none but in 1946 over half the city’s 283,611 homes still lacked a separate bathroom and some one in ten were back-to-back.  The decision was taken (against local tradition) to build high, seen as the only way to maintain appropriate densities in the inner-city.  More surprisingly perhaps, high-rise solutions were adopted in the city’s suburbs too. Almost two-thirds of Birmingham’s 464 tower blocks came to be built along or beyond the city’s ring road, justifying the soubriquet Saucer City by which it came to be known.  Thirty-four of these blocks were built in Castle Vale.

Castle Vale construction with Councillor Matthews and members of the Housing Committee

This hadn’t been the intention.  In 1960, the Council acquired the land of the 375 acre redundant Castle Bromwich airfield.   The City Architect, AG Sheppard Fidler, drew up a plan for a Radburn-style layout (of traffic arteries and cul-de-sac feeder roads, separating cars and people) which placed neighbourhood blocks of housing, shops and offices around communal green spaces. Sheppard Fidler had been Chief Architect at Crawley and brought such New Town sensibilities to his planning.

The City Council, however, was interested in building big and bold and less concerned with the niceties.  When his plans were rejected – the last straw in a long-running battle – Sheppard Fidler resigned. A second plan, envisaging a population of 20,000 based on spines of high-rise flats along the length of the estate, was adopted instead. (2)

Farnborough Road under construction (c) Birmingham Mail

Construction began in 1964 and was largely complete by 1969.  A settlement of around 4800 homes emerged, housing at peak nearly 11,000.  Unusually for the time, around 30 per cent of homes were built for owner occupation but, of the 3400 council homes, over half were in blocks of over five storeys. (3) Seventeen of these were laid out along Farnborough Road on the estate’s periphery and eight (the so-called Centre 8) in the middle of the estate. Two local shopping centres, five schools, two churches, a swimming pool and other community facilities completed the estate.

Castle Vale, 1968 (c) Birmingham Mail

All seemed well in these early years.  Geoff Bateson’s history records ‘a growing list of thriving community activities’ and states:

Crime rates were lower than many other areas. Turnover of residents was small. People wanted to be there and wanted to stay there.

Sue Spicer moved to a flat in the Centre 8 blocks in 1969: (4)

It was a huge improvement on our house in Aston. We had an indoor toilet, and there was so much green space. Mobile butchers and grocers came to our door. It seemed like Utopia.

Castle Vale Reed Square shopping centre, 1968. From the Phyllis Nicklin collection.

Others speak of misgivings.  As new families arrived, at one point, a third of the estate’s population was under 14 and some questioned the suitability of high-rise accommodation for many. (5)  Others spoke of the isolation of the estate.  Theoretically well-connected (major roads and two railways lines joined it to the city), at six miles from the centre and separated by those same roads and railways, it could still feel distant.

Pat Smith, a health worker on the estate from the late 1960s, argued:

People felt unsettled, on the edge. Many had come from the old back-to-backs, places with strong social ties. Castle Vale was a shock to the system. The lack of safe play space and the cost of under-floor heating were major bones of contention. People were used to coal fires which were much cheaper to run. But housing was the focal point of discontent.

At looking at what went wrong, we can begin with the construction flaws that bedevilled the estate from its early years.  The decision to use a Bison Wallframe system used by local builders Bryants (with whom, shall we say, certain officers and members enjoyed a close relationship) seems quixotic and partly dependent at least on the fact that the Council had pre-ordered a large number of Wallframe components from Bison and needed somewhere to put them (though the broader contemporary support for system-building should not be forgotten). (6)

Castle Vale, faulty block being checked by ‘spidermen’ (c) Bateson, A History of Castle Vale

Problems of water penetration though windows and faulty joints were found as early as 1967.  Some Bryants-built low-rise blocks suffered from cold bridging in roof members.  In 1974, when a London swimming pool roof built of high alumina cement collapsed, news that some of the Centre 8 blocks used the material reached residents although the Council had decided to monitor (pending major structural repairs that would be necessary in the future) rather than remediate.  Scaffolding erected around the affected blocks in 1985 remained until their demolition in 1994.

Problems with cladding (c) Bateson, A History of Castle Vale

The combination of design and build problems and council inaction was toxic to the estate’s reputation.  It became unpopular and, as such, a place where the Council placed the most vulnerable housing applicants who lacked choice and faced immediate need.  According to one resident, Castle Vale’s ‘problems began when people were moved here who didn’t want to be here’.  Another, who moved to the estate after separating from her husband in 1991, describes it as ‘a dumping ground full of single parents, alcoholics, and the mentally ill’. (7)

Castle Vale blocks (c) Bateson, A History of Castle Vale

It’s an unsympathetic turn of phrase but it captures the emerging tensions between longer-established tenants and new people moving in, often younger and single, often with particular problems.  The number of single person households doubled after 1981, families halved.

The rest is a familiar litany of the issues which faced so-called ‘sink estates’ up and down the country by the 1980s.  Crime and fear of crime rose – by 1992 it was claimed that 41 per cent of Castle Vale’s residents were victims of crime and 55 per cent afraid to go out at night.  Some blamed elements of the estate’s design for this: the HAT succinctly summarised the prevailing ‘defensible space’ theories of the day: (8)

the physical design of the estate…means that public and private domains are ill-defined, communal areas are not overlooked or supervised, and there is an intricate maze of ill-lit alleyways, making escape from the scene of crime or vandalism very easy.

Castle Vale, 1983 (c) Birmingham Mail

To others, of course, this wasn’t theory: (9)

When we were kids we were proud to come from the Vale, it had a feared reputation. There were alleyways everywhere and we knew them like the back of our hand. You used to get cars squeezing down the narrow alleyways, trying to get away from the police.

The criminality and antisocial behaviour was real enough, I’ll only add – like a cracked record – that it didn’t just occur on estates designed like Castle Vale but it did occur on very differently laid-out estates with a similar range of social problems.

Joblessness reached 26 per cent (against a Birmingham average of 19 per cent) as local employment opportunities fell and the B35 postcode became increasingly stigmatised.  And – always, to me, the most powerful and poignant index of inequality – people died earlier:  life expectancy on the estate stood at 68 compared to the national average of 76. (10)  That scaffolding around the Centre 8 blocks was both mark and metaphor of the estate’s dissolution.

Castle Vale in the 1970s (c) Bateson, A History of Castle Vale

It was obvious something needed to be done but, as demands rose in the 1980s, the City Council found its hands increasingly tied by the public spending curbs imposed by the Conservative government’s cuts to the Housing Investment Programme.

Looking back on this time, the then local MP Robin Corbett, who would become a major supporter of the HAT, recalled: (11)

I was absolutely appalled by what I saw, an estate of tower blocks like giant battery cages. It was a civic pigsty. It was clear that Birmingham City Council didn’t have the funds to make the necessary improvements.

But central government did.  We’ll look at the story of the HAT in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Press release, ‘Prime Minister’s Office, ‘Prime Minister pledges to transform sink estates’ 10 January 2016

(2) See Geoff Bateson, A History of Castle Vale (2005) and Thomas Deckker (ed) Modern City Revisited (2005)

(3) Richard Turkington, ‘Regenerating Large Housing Estates: Setting the Agenda at Castle Vale, Birmingham’, International Conference Housing in Transition, Piran, Slovenia, 3-5 September 1997 Conference Proceedings

(4) This and the quotation which follows are drawn from Adam Mornement, No Longer Notorious – the Revival of Castle Vale, 1993-2005 (Castle Vale Housing Action Trust, 2005)

(5) Carl Chinn, Homes for People: 100 Years of Council Housing in Birmingham (1991)

(6) As argued 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.

(7) Both quotations drawn from Mornement, No Longer Notorious

(8) Castle Vale Housing Action Trust, Castle Vale Masterplan Written Statement, September 1993

(9) Michael Lutwyche, Hardcore (2008)

(10) Max Wind-Cowie, Civic Streets: the Big Society in Action (Progressive Conservatism Project, Demos, 2010)

(11) Quoted in Mornement, No Longer Notorious