Leslie Martin and the Fitzhugh Estate, Wandsworth: ‘A Blueprint for Living’

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1950s, Wandsworth

I’m delighted to be able to feature another guest post, this by Sharon O’Neill.  Sharon is a photographer and curator. Her work and research explores ‘the ordinary and unexceptional’ but shows how, when we take time to pause, we can find the exceptional in ordinary lives and settings.  Full details of The Blueprint for Living exhibition and events celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Fitzhugh Estate are given at the end of the post. 

Fitzhugh Estate (c) Flats series, Sharon O’Neill

The Flats series is a photographic exploration of one architect’s vision of the ‘modern world’ as told through the lives of the current inhabitants of one of his buildings.

Through a mixture of archive material and contemporary photographs the series delves into the everyday world of the occupants of a council block designed and constructed in the mid 20^th century.

(c) Flats series, Sharon O’Neill

The work attempts to frame the young architect’s principles of modernism from the perspective of his idealistic vision of the 1930s.  Using the building and interiors of the current inhabitants, it develops a photographic dialogue to illustrate his ‘modern world’, in essence, the realised future of his 1930s vision.

The Flat Book (c) Flats series, Sharon O’Neill

In 1939, the architect John Leslie Martin and his wife, Sadie Speight, published The Flat Book, which outlined their principles of design when living in the modern apartment.  The introduction discusses the close relationship between planning and furnishing:

Furnishings…are affected in their design, like architecture itself, by similar radical changes in methods of production, changing social requirements and by the contemporary demand for convenience and efficiency.  It is in these basic conditions that all style has its roots.

The book, essentially a catalogue of furniture, fixtures and fittings, offered ideas and suggestions on planning the living space and touched on new developments in the design of the flat, e.g. less space given to kitchens and bathrooms to provide a larger general living area.

Fitzhugh Estate interior in the Architects’ Journal (1956) (c) Architectural Press/RIBA Collections

In 1937, Naum Gabo, the Russian sculptor and painter, Ben Nicholson, the British abstract artist, and Martin edited Circle: international survey of constructive art, a book which aimed to highlight the British contribution to the European abstract movement and brought together their shared ideology that constructive art, architecture and design would improve people’s lives. The book included contributions from Piet Mondrian, Le Corbusier, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Barbara Hepworth and Walter Gropius among others.

Past and present: from the Architects’ Journal (1956) and Sharon O’Neill (c) Architectural Press/RIBA Collections and Flats series, Sharon O’Neill

In Circle, Martin wrote eloquently about the machine age and the idea that art, design, architecture and society were not separate entities, but were all elements of the same conversation.

Martin was one of a group of architects who truly believed a better society could exist where social problems could be solved through intelligent design based on the scientific approach of identifying the problem, research and analysis.

Fitzhugh Estate point block from the Architects’ Journal (1956)(c) Architectural Press/RIBA collections

In 1953, work began on what was to be known as the Fitzhugh Estate, a collection of five eleven-storey point-block buildings set on the edges of Wandsworth Common and designed by Martin. Commissioned as part of the massive post-war building programme, the aim was to alleviate the desperate housing shortage.  This was in part due to bomb damage, but also as a wider initiative by the post-war government to provide decent, healthy homes for low-income working-class families.

(c) Flats series, Sharon O’Neill

The architect and historian John McKean poignantly describes the mood in post-war Britain at this time:

The new social agenda centred on the concept of ‘fair shares’: the people’s war was to be succeeded by the people’s peace; its achievement would be seen in the national health and educational services and in popular housing for all.

Widely viewed as a significant period for British modernist architecture, modernism was embraced by the civic architects who were handed the task of rebuilding post-war Britain.  The jewel in the crown was the Royal Festival Hall, designed by Martin in 1948 whilst at the London County Council Architects Department.   The building is widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of post-war British architecture and Martin received a knighthood in recognition.

(c) Flats series, Sharon O’Neill

The LCC Architects department in this post-war period gained much admiration as the largest architecture practice in the world and with the brightest of British talent.  Martin was deputy and then head of the department at this time.

Architects like Martin were celebrated in the exhibition A Place to Call Home at the Royal Institute of British Architecture where their role was highlighted as ‘crucial in framing a modern view of the world…they provided new and idealistic plans for housing and blueprints for living’.

(c) Flats series, Sharon O’Neill

The Fitzhugh Estate in Wandsworth, London, was part of this ‘blueprint’.  Martin and his team designed state-of-the-art social housing that was featured in The Architects’ Journal in November 1956 (written as the first residents moved in).  The building was lauded for its cutting-edge technology (using precast concrete and a 300ft tower crane to speed construction) and full central heating.

Originally the flats were built to provide homes for local working-class families, and were serviced by communal facilities to improve health, hygiene and provide a good quality of life.

Since their construction 60 years ago, the concept of the council estate has undergone a huge shift.  Originally perceived as a ‘step up’, since 1980, when the dismantling of the council housing system began, it is more generally regarded as undesirable.

(c) Flats series, Sharon O’Neill

The block in Wandsworth is currently populated by a mixture of council tenants, those who purchased their flat through the Right to Buy Scheme and professionals who have bought properties on the open market either to live in or rent out, demonstrating a significant shift from the original demographic.

This series is an exploration of how the idyll of a young architect has stood the test of time as society has changed and how his ideas of design for the living space, as demonstrated in The Flat Book, may have permeated into the modern sensibility.

Fitzhugh tiling (c) Flats series, Sharon O’Neill

The work acts as an interpretation of Martin’s blueprint for living, a visual letter from the future back to the young architect of 1939.

The Flats series is part of the Blueprint for Living group exhibition showing alongside a film installation by award winning film maker Marc Isaacs and archive photographs from the RIBA Collections at The Fitzhugh Estate, Fitzhugh Grove, Wandsworth SW18 3SA from Tuesday 31 May – Saturday 4 June 2016. 

Municipal Dreams will be in conversation with Owen Hatherley on Friday 3 June at 7.30 pm at the Blueprint for Living Exhibition. For more information on this and other events head to www.blueprintforliving.co.uk/events or http://architecturediary.org/london.

The exhibition is part of the London Festival of Architecture programme of events and the Wandsworth Heritage Festival. 

‘Somewhere Decent to Live: London County Council Estates in Photographs, 1895-1975’

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LCC

A brief bonus post this week to mark the exhibition at the London Metropolitan Archives celebrating the ‘housing designed and built for Londoners by the London County Council (LCC) and Greater London Council (GLC)’.  The exhibition runs till 26 May, full details at the bottom of the post.

It’s a small show – just the tiniest glimpse into the rich photographic and documentary record held by the Met Archives – but it offers a representative overview and some stunning images.  There is also a ten-minute film show featuring excerpts from three LCC/GLC films – ‘The Changing Face of London’ (1960), ‘Somewhere Decent to Live’ (1967) and Thamesmead 1970 (1970). These put the human face onto a proud housing record and remind you of the high hopes and ideals, not always fulfilled, which informed the work of the Councils and their architects.  Thamesmead looks wonderful, by the way, ‘a city of the 21st century’ as the commentary claims – and maybe it will be yet.

Tabard Street, Southwark (c) London Metropolitan Archives

The image of the slums of Tabard Street at the entrance to the exhibition reminds us why we built.  The LCC’s first estate was, famously, the Boundary Estate in Bethnal Green, opened in 1900.

The Boundary Estate in the 1890s (c) London Metropolitan Archives

Whilst tenements – designed with fine arts and craft sensibilities – were necessary in the inner city, the Council also built cottage suburbs such as the White Hart Lane Estate in Haringey which captured the Garden City ideals of the day.

The White Hart Lane Estate, 1908 (c) London Metropolitan Archives

This 1934 map of LCC estates shows just how much was achieved in a short period as council house building in London took off – the LCC built around 10,000 homes before 1914 and over 89,000 between the wars, over half of these located in the new cottage suburbs.

London County Council Housing Estates, 1934 (c) London Metropolitan Archives

Flats were still needed in inner London and by the 1930s there were attempts to make them more attractive to would-be tenants.  The Oaklands Estate in Clapham with its sweeping, moderne, ocean liner-style balconies is one of the finest examples.

The Oaklands Estate, 1936 (c) London Metropolitan Archives

Post-war construction saw some of most striking highs and lows – literally and metaphorically – of London’s council housing.  The Alton Estate built in two phases in the 1950s and early 1960s – Alton East reflecting the Scandinavian-influenced, ‘New Humanist’ wing of the LCC Architect’s Department; Alton West, the le Corbusier-inspired ‘Brutalists’ – represents the very best.

The Alton Estate (c) London Metropolitan Archives

In this period, the LCC  possessed the world’s largest architects’ office with, in 1952, a staff of over 1500 including 350 professional architects and trainees. This shot of an Alton home reminds us that equal care was given to designing comfortable, modern interiors.

Alton Estate, 1961 (c) London Metropolitan Archives

By the 1960s, much new council housing was high-rise – the collapse of the Ronan Point tower block in Newham in May 1968 is traditionally taken to mark the end of this fashion. The St George’s Estate, opened in Stepney in 1972, was among the last of the point blocks.

The St George’s Estate, Stepney, 1972 (c) London Metropolitan Archives

In 1981 there were 769,996 council homes in Greater London, many built by the boroughs. Forty-three per cent of London households lived in council homes.  All this was a stupendous achievement, sometimes imperfectly executed but the solid mark of a state and society which believed in its duty to decently house all its people.

This is just a brief selection of the images – and a whistle-stop tour of the history – included in the exhibition.  My thanks to the London Metropolitan Archives for supplying most of the images above (a couple of the lower-quality ones were taken by me at the exhibition).

The exhibition is running from the 24 to the 26 May between 9.30 and 19.30 at the London Metropolitan Archives, 40 Northampton Rd, London EC1R 0HB.  Full details are posted on their website. 

Martin Crookston, ‘Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow? A New Future for the Cottage Estates’

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Cottage suburbs

Martin Crookston, Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow?  A New Future for the Cottage Estates (Routledge, 2016)

I’ve used Martin Crookston’s book in the library so I’m delighted there’s now a cheaper paperback edition to make it available to a wider readership.  I’m even more pleased, truth be told, to have a free review copy but I can say honestly that hasn’t affected my judgment of what I think is a very good, useful and important book on the future of council housing.

Crookston’s endeavour is to make sure it has a future and he focuses especially on the cottage estates or ‘Corporation suburbia’.  These are a neglected, frequently disdained, component of a proud council housing record – lacking the glamour and ‘iconicity’ of some architect-designed estates and blocks perhaps but representing in his opening words ‘a mammoth achievement’.

‘Mammoth’ is uncontroversial.  By Crookston’s reckoning they account for around one sixth of England’s homes and around 40 per cent of the country’s socially-owned housing stock.  The pre-1945 estates – when Garden City ideals were in vogue – are generally the more celebrated and form over a quarter of such estates but half were built in the post-war period to 1964 and one fifth later.  Taking Leicester (we’ve looked at the Saffron Lane Estate as an example), the Corporation’s twenty-three cottage estates formed about a third of the city’s suburban land and, at peak, some 43 per cent of its suburban housing.

Copinger Road on the Saffron Estate pictured in the 1930s

‘Achievement’ is contested and the book casts an unsparing but always sympathetic and humane eye on why that has come to be.  In this, Crookston avoids caricature and appreciates nuance (unlike much of what passes as commentary on council housing).

He begins with a useful typology of estates. His Type One estates are set in more prosperous regions – his two case-studies are both predominantly interwar estates covered by this blog: Tower Gardens in Haringey and the Becontree Estate in Dagenham.

The Tower Gardens Estate

The Becontree Estate

Type Two are estates located in less prosperous areas – Deckham and Carr Hill in Gateshead (interwar) and Hylton Castle in Sunderland (post-war) are discussed in detail in the book.

Hendon Road, Deckham Hall Estate, shown under construction in 1936 and in 2015 (c) www.gatesheadhistory.com

Type Three, he designates ‘Radburnland’ – built in the post-war era when (drawing from the example of Radburn, New Jersey, founded in 1929 as ‘a town for the motor age’) planners were determined to create neighbourly enclaves and to separate cars and pedestrians by a system of cul de sacs, feeder roads and walkways.  Bromford in Birmingham and Orchard Park in Hull form the case-studies.

The Bromford Estate, Birmingham (c) Smileyface http://www.skyscrapercity.com

Gildane, Orchard Park (c) Ian S and made available through a Creative Commons licence

It’s fair to say – though many variables intervene and their relative poverty certainly doesn’t help  – that Crookston thinks these latter are generally the least successful and shares the consensus view that Radburn principles failed. Orchard Park is described with uncharacteristic sharpness as ‘unattractive housing in an unattractive environment’.  The North Hull Estate, adjacent to it, is a reminder of the finer design sensibilities of the interwar period.

But the cottage suburbs as a whole have problems and it is Crookston’s mission to understand and remedy these.  They are, perhaps, neatly if unwittingly captured by the pronoun confusion of Sir Peter Hall’s foreword. Hall points out, ‘some three million, one in six of us’ live on these estates and yet, he continues, these are ‘”council houses” on “council estates” – the places where none of us would ever dream of living’.

That unintended condescension speaks to a wider, largely reputational, issue that the cottage suburbs are unfashionable.  Some – though media misrepresentation is to blame for the sweeping stereotype many accept – have broader problems.

This is not a static picture, of course.  The estates themselves have changed significantly in recent decades, most obviously through Right to Buy.  Now around half their homes are owner-occupied but, if this (as Thatcher’s vision of a property-owning democracy presumably imagined) was intended to stabilise the estates it has, as Crookston makes clear, had the opposite effect.

This three-bed, ex-council house in Becontree is currently available for rent at £1500 a month

Becontree offers a strong illustration: social renting declined from 38 per cent to 35 per cent between 2001 and 2011 while owner occupation declined from 56 per cent to 50.  Meanwhile, private rental rose from 6 to 16 per cent.  The growth of the private rental sector on council estates is problematic in many ways; the loss of genuinely affordable housing it represents is only the most obvious. Often privately rented homes are more poorly maintained and less well equipped; almost invariably their tenants are transient.

Yet Right to Buy (predating Thatcher as Crookston reminds us – over 250,000 council homes were sold before 1979) and the growth of working-class owner occupation from the 1950s have been crucial in shaping the declining image of council housing.  Once, without doubt, an aspirational step-up, it has increasingly become seen – I know that many proud council tenants and huge numbers on council housing waiting lists will rightly baulk at the generalisation – as housing for those who can’t afford to buy ‘something better’.

The stigma – obviously far stronger in relation to some so-called ‘problem estates’ than to the many far more ‘ordinary’ council estates up and down the country – attached to council housing is something that we who defend it must address and Crookston tackles the issue head-on.

Denny Avenue on the Ryelands Estate in Lancaster

To begin with some historical perspective is vital, not as an exercise in nostalgia but as a corrective to those who would condemn the whole project and deny it any future.  Crookston’s memory of growing up in 1950s Lancashire is telling here:

What stigma there was probably attached itself to the visibly poorer and scruffier little terraced streets and – especially – back courts as yet untouched by ‘slum clearance’.  And mums on the estate were just as insistent on hankies and proper shoes (not tatty plimsolls) as any in the private semis.

There were separations, typically defined from around 16 when choices regarding employment and education and staying put or moving away were made:

However, the label of council tenant was not the key to that, or to our attitudes and experience in general.  The estate was different, but it wasn’t that different, and it wasn’t stigmatized.

As Ruth Lupton, quoted in the book, argues, ‘Four generations ago, families in social housing included almost the full social range’. (1)

Council housing in Beddau

Crookston captures a later shift in a powerful chapter on ‘Attitudes’.  Take Beddau in South Wales. As one interviewee recounts:

There is more stigma than before…The growth of cheap home ownership around Beddau drained the council housing of its mixed community. And increasing worklessness amongst an unskilled population, when the mining went, has brought a divide within the working class…Now the area is split between a public-sector-employed ‘middle class, a few industrial workers, and a swathe of workless benefit recipients without skills or cars to access the jobs which exist.

Another interviewee, raised on a Manchester estate but now an academic in the US, recalls gradations within and between estates but says of his own more ‘respectable’ estate, ‘after the Right-to-Buy period, the estate came to be occupied by what seemed to me to be more marginal families’. Crookston notes this too of Norris Green in Liverpool, a case discussed in this blog.

An aerial view of the Norris Green Estate taken in 1939

These are subjective views and from, specifically, those who ‘moved on’ and moved away, but they speak to the undeniable fact of residualisation, that council housing became increasingly confined to a poorer working class.  Crookston reports that between 1981 and 2006, the nationwide proportion of owner-occupying households in employment fell by two per cent whilst in social housing the proportion fell by 15 per cent (and 21 per cent for full-time employment).

Council housing tenants have been hit massively by the deindustrialisation of Britain overseen or engineered (take your pick) by the Conservative governments of the 1980s.

There was another factor too of which Crookston is well aware but seems to me to underplay: that the concomitant decline in council housing stock and shift to needs-based allocations – instigated by Labour’s 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act but made wholesale by that decline in stock – did progressively reduce council housing to a safety net role.  Its new tenants, particularly on the less desirable estates, were typically ‘more marginal’ – those whose needs gave them priority to this increasingly scarce resource.

‘Messages from Meadow Well’, North Shields, Northern Architecture, 2014

In this context, Crookston is right to treat the prevalent reports of anti-social behaviour on estates – always dominant in outsiders’ criticisms and, to be fair, prominent in the disillusion of many residents too – with some caution as often isolated and always minority.  Now’s not the time to take on that issue – though I would add that I have yet to see a comprehensive explanation of why anti-social behaviour became such a problem from the 1970s and I’d be grateful if any readers could point me to one.  What is the case is that anti-social behaviour has dropped very markedly in recent years as each of Crookston’s case studies makes clear.

Why this is so is less clear. Perhaps the various design measures and estate management initiatives – some sensible and necessary – have had their effect.  Either way, the CCTV cameras on the Deckham Hall Estate have been switched off and the problem has declined overall.  That the perception remains owes far more, as Annette Hastings (also cited in the book) argues to the ‘pathologising’ of estates, most often by those who know them least well. (2)

Cranleigh Road, Hylton Castle (c) David Dixon and made available through a Creative Commons licence

So the task, as Crookston sees it, is to overcome this stigma and stop the cottage suburbs being a ‘lazy asset’, one which is underperforming and failing to realise its full potential.  He examines a range of options to do just this, discarding some and endorsing others.

I’m pleased that he broadly rejects the idea that estates are failing as communities. This has been a long-running charge, principally from middle-class planners and sociologists who have felt, paradoxically, that estates have either failed to replicate the supposed neighbourly intimacies of the old slum terraces or to fulfil their own middle-class notions of improving self-organisation. Generally, estate communities work in their own terms – they are not, in Crookston’s words, ‘notably socially isolated or short of the “asset” of community resources and effort’.

He does recommend – though many councils, ALMOs and housing associations already have a good record on this – a series of case-by-case measures to raise the ‘feel’ of some of these estates, many falling within the broad category of urban management.  Many local shopping centres need ‘lifting’ and the estates’ public realm can be better cared for. ‘Problem’ tenants – they certainly exist – need to be better supervised.  ‘Soft’ measures such as re-branding (too often crudely applied) can be appropriate.  You can read the book for a better and fuller understanding of his balanced appraisal of such ideas.

Who gets to do this?:

The estate communities could very likely be much more involved, and on many of them that potential may be there.  But they need the ‘Corpo’ to be there alongside them, and to be resourced accordingly.

The role of the local authority, he argues and, of course, I agree:

needs stressing in Britain in particular: a country where the democratically-elected and properly-funded municipality has been regarded, it seems, as a luxury a poor struggling nation cannot afford.

The reality is – or should be – that this is investment we cannot afford to neglect.

Playing fields, Orchard Park (c) Paul Harrop and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Finally, he takes on more controversial issues of densification and social mix.  I think he makes a plausible case that a lot of the open space in many cottage suburbs – created well-meaningly in the low density idealism of Tudor Walters (the 1918 report which established the interwar conception of the cottage estates) and beyond – is poorly managed and under-used. There is a case for building good quality housing on some of this open space and using more intelligently that which remains.

New homes for sale on the Norris Green Estate

In terms of social mix, he favours the current mantra, tenure diversity.  That, in itself, should hardly be controversial as it reflects, as we’ve seen, a fact on the ground. It’s also worth pointing out that quite a few estates were built with homes for sale or, in some cases, larger homes for middle-class rental.  If Nye Bevan himself wanted ‘the living tapestry of a mixed community’, it shouldn’t frighten us.

What this doesn’t or shouldn’t mean, as Crookston argues, is ‘gentrification’.  It is really, I would suggest, about returning estates to an earlier condition in which a broad mix of the population were proud to call them home.

That, of course, would be best achieved by a fairer and more equal society and one in which, in particular, working-class people enjoyed better-paid and more secure employment – ironically the world we thought we were winning after 1945 and have so cruelly betrayed since 1979.

Pending that meta-economic shift, Crookston’s ameliorative measures are to be welcomed and embraced and the book itself deserves to be widely read by anyone with an interest in council housing and the future it deserves.

Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow? can be purchased in good bookshops and online or directly at reduced price from Routledge. Enter the code FLR40 at checkout to secure your discount.

Sources

(1) Quoted from Ruth Lupton et al, Growing Up in Social Housing in Britain: A Profile of Four Generations from 1946 to the Present Day (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2009)

(2) Annette Hastings, ‘Stigma and social housing estates: Beyond pathological explanations’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2003

Clink on the link to see the many cottage suburbs featured in this blog over the years.

Lion Farm Estate: a Photo-Essay by Robert Clayton

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1990s, Oldbury

I’m delighted to feature this guest post by Rob Clayton and some of his powerful and evocative photographs. I’ve seen Rob’s work for myself and the new film, based on his images, narrated by Jonathan Meades and highly recommend them.  Full details are posted at the end of the post where you’ll also find further information on the project, current exhibitions and Rob’s book.

Shot over 25 years ago on the Lion Farm Estate, in Oldbury, in the West Midlands, Robert Clayton’s images capture life on a housing estate in the early 1990s. The work on display masterfully exhibits the real lives of those living there during this time coupled with an appreciation of the architecture which surrounds them.

Rooftop Study Three (c) Robert Clayton courtesy of LA Noble Gallery, London

My work is social documentary; drawn to the aesthetic of place, Lion Farm Estate (LFE) presented itself to me. With its sense of dystopian dislocation, I explored, seeking a reason for this other place on the hinterland of Britain’s second largest conurbation. This imposing, faded, typical manifestation, of the utopian post-war housing consensus offered a feast of visual opportunity in its powerful topography; the challenge was to go deeper to capture its daily life, its humanity.

House clearance (c) Robert Clayton courtesy of LA Noble Gallery, London

This was 1990 and I wanted to communicate the hidden – what life was like on an estate for many people at this time. Housing was an issue then and evidence, over twenty years later, suggests there is no solution to the housing crisis. But how can this be? What evidence is there?

My work captures the estate at the point of transition, and over time, has taken on a new life with age. It captures provision of housing on a large scale – evidence of a national duty to provide – yet hints at its imminent destruction. Lack of maintenance then condemnation was a precursor to change of ownership models – social anthropological evidence that leads us to ask, has the state abandoned its duty of care?

Moving, One (c) Robert Clayton courtesy of LA Noble Gallery, London

My photography attempts to get into the heart and fabric of 1990’s Britain, when the new order was well underway, promising ‘trickle down’ benefits for all. The broken promise remains and the evidence of failure mounts; 25 years on can we hold our breath any longer for the ‘market’ to provide? In my lifetime so far, we have moved from state mass provision to state-sanctioned asset stripping and housing, and by its very nature therefore the vast majority of us, are all victims in this new global order.

Resident discussing accommodation problem (c) Robert Clayton courtesy LA Noble Gallery, London

During the 1980s, British culture was changing: the collective, the ‘consensus’ was being abandoned in a shift towards the self. The images catch moments of dystopia as the utopian-inspired modernist landscape and all the hope it contained, fades. The images capture more than a topographical transformation; Lion Farm Estate is caught in a moment of multi-agency, politically-driven change. The images offer the topography with the humanity, the provision and the provided for. The loss of provision to follow.

Playground (c) Robert Clayton courtesy LA Noble Gallery, London

Housing today is far more a political issue than a pragmatic one. The images in LFE espouse a watershed in post-war Britain; the move from consensus, modernity to fragmentation, post-modernity. The grand post-war housing utopian ambitions of both the Left and Right were over. Social housing was to move to a new era of social engineering and become a battleground of fragmented political ideologies. A new political era had already been forged under Thatcher and ten years later the aim to house UK citizens was no longer a common political cause.

Hometime, teatime (c) Robert Clayton courtesy LA Noble Gallery

A new industry, the ‘Third Sector’ had been born, ‘Right to Buy’ was very popular and the social housing stock had been vastly diminished. Housing was sold at a fraction of its market value and gave the new owners a new land-owning status and wealth beyond their normal means and expectations. Property was effectively given away in pursuit of short-term political gain, under the guise of an unfulfilled human need to own land to satisfy a vested political interest.

LFE carefully exposes the visual fabric of this transition, yet the location and its inhabitants were more gentle and passive than the harsh environment may suggest. Despite the ever present influence of low income, lack of opportunity and their associated social problems, a strong sense of cohesiveness and belonging existed.

Crusader Close (c) Robert Clayton courtesy of LA Noble Gallery, London

This sense of community was threatened and struggled to retain its existence in the face of ‘beneficial redevelopment’. This is a cycle we know all too well today and one that dominates our urban transformations; perhaps the main difference being today that private developers’ interests trump all and the lack of political will to help the least empowered culminating in processes labelled ‘social cleansing’.

Shopping Five (c) Robert Clayton courtesy of LA Noble Gallery, London

A new era of ideology, a new industry employing a middle class of bureaucrats has grown in the last twenty-five years, supplying all sorts of exotic non-fixes to the housing issue: part-buy, part-rent, housing associations, incentive schemes, social housing quotas on private developments, help to buy…the list goes on.

Aeroplane Playground, Chiltern House (c) Robert Clayton courtesy of LA Noble Gallery, London

Nothing has solved the housing problems in the UK. The grand housing schemes of post-war Britain have alarmingly been consigned to the dustbin at a particular point in our history when a new central government-funded grand housing plan could provide many solutions to today’s economic woes. The commitment and ideological ambition to do this, however, is a distant dream; as distant as the rubble and memories of the tower blocks of the modern, utopian-conceived, spacious, light filled, plentiful and once cherished homes of the Lion Farm Estate.

Yet, is it a dream we have abandoned? Perhaps, like this body of work, it will materialize again.

There are current and forthcoming shows of Rob’s Lion Farm Estate images in London.  Details as follows or click on the link:

• Until May 29 at the Four Corners Gallery, 121 Roman Road, London, E2 0QN, Tuesday to Saturday, 11.00-18.00
• From Friday 13 May to Sunday 22 May  at FIX Photo 2016, The Barge House, OXO Tower, South Bank, London SE1 9PH, every day, 11.00-20.30 (Monday 16 to 19.00)

You can view the film of Rob’s images with commentary by Jonathan Meades at both shows and catch a preview here on YouTube. 

You can buy the book at both shows. It is also available from online retailers or directly from Stay Free Publishing. 

For more on Rob’s work, see his website, Lion Farm Estate.  For prints, contact the LA Noble Gallery. 

Winter sun (c) Robert Clayton courtesy of the LA Noble Gallery, London