‘The plan might look well on paper but it would not be London’: How the London County Council used art and architecture to rebuild the communities of London

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1950s, 1960s

I’m delighted to feature another guest post this week, this by Rosamund West who is researching ‘London County Council housing schemes and public art, 1943-1965’ for a PhD at Kingston University.  She’d be pleased to hear from anyone with an interest in her work – further information and contact details are given at the end of the post. 

The London County Council’s post-war attitude to Londoners and the communities of London stems back to the 1943 County of London Plan. A rebuilding plan for London, written while the war was still being fought, and the outcome uncertain, the plan imagined the city improved. My research begins in 1943 with the County of London Plan and ends in 1965 with the demise of the London County Council and I am looking at how the London County Council expressed its intentions for London and Londoners through both architecture and the artworks installed within residential settings: (1)

To ignore or scrap these communities in favour of a new and theoretical sub-division of areas would be both academic and too drastic; the plan might look well on paper but it would not be London.

The post-war situation

After the Second World War, London faced a housing crisis that feels very familiar to us in 2016, though its cause may be different. There was a general sense that Londoners had endured the bombing and destruction of their homes and communities (as shown by the frontispiece image and quote from the Prime Minister below) and after the war they deserved something better. The solution was driven by optimism and a hope for the future, for a better standard of living for all: council housing was the answer. For the London County Council, re-housing Londoners ran conveniently alongside creating a new – and improved – London.

Lord Latham, the then leader of the LCC, describes in the 1943 County of London Plan the ambition to rebuild London: (2)

We can have the London we want; the London that people will come from the four corners of the world to see; if only we determine that we will have it; and that no weakness or indifference shall prevent it.

Frontispiece image from the County of London Plan (1943)

Winston Churchill, quoted in the Plan, had earlier expressed similar sentiments: (3)

Most painful is the number of small houses inhabited by working folk which has been destroyed…We will rebuild them, more to our credit than some of them were before. London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham may have much more to suffer, but they will rise from their ruins, more healthy and, I hope, more beautiful…In all my life I have never been treated with so much kindness as by the people who have suffered most.

The County of London Plan was commissioned by the LCC, written by Patrick Abercrombie and John Forshaw, and published in 1943. The plan is ambitious about the future of London. Emphasis is placed on the importance of communities within London, and communities are referred to throughout the plan. For the LCC, decent housing is central to a strong community: (4)

Housing is a matter which, whether considered as individual dwellings or in the broader, community sense, directly effects every citizen, young and old. A good house, with all the amenities necessary for a full and healthy life is a primary social need for everyone and must be the constant objective.

Recognising communities

The LCC was proud of its role as a paternalistic municipal body that knew London and Londoners well, meeting the needs of the communities it served. LCC publications express pride in the post-war rehousing schemes. The LCC publication of 1951, The Youngest County expresses this pride in improving the lives of Londoners. We are told of an imaginary London family, ‘The Citizens’ living in their council block, ‘Everyman House’: (5)

As she gets the tea ready for her husband, two sons and two daughters who will soon be home from their Saturday afternoon shopping or football match, she thinks – for the hundredth time that day – of her delight in this new home…

…Mrs Citizen is one of many thousands of mothers who are at last, thanks to the efforts of the London County Council, able to make a real home for their families after years of discomfort in cramped or miserable quarters.

Communities are defined in the County of London Plan as ‘neighbourhood units’ of 6,000-10,000 people, based on the amount of children it took to fill a primary school. These communities were planned to be self-sufficient centres in their own right, ideally containing their ‘own schools, local shops, community buildings and smaller amenity open spaces’. (6)  The communities of London were mapped and defined in the County of London Plan:

County of London Plan, ‘Communities and Open Space Survey, coloured plate 2, facing p28

This map shows the existing community structures within London: where town halls were, where shopping centres were, and where community boundaries lay.

Detail of Communities and Open Space Survey, coloured plate 2, facing p28

Detail of ‘Communities and Open Space Survey’ coloured plate 2, facing p28

The LCC faced the immense task of re-housing Londoners, alongside improving their living conditions. For the LCC, this meant decreasing the population density by relocating people further out of London. The County of London Plan aimed to displace between 500,000 and 600,000 people. The ideal density was 136 persons per acre. 1938 figures of population density in London go as high as 436 persons per acre. To achieve 136 persons per acre in the Stepney/Poplar area, one of the Reconstruction Areas identified in 1943, a 42 per cent thinning of the population needed to occur. (7)

For those that remained, new structures and perhaps new neighbours faced them. The LCC used artworks in residential settings to create a link for people from the past to their new architectural setting, re-establishing the community. By using artists that responded to the history and culture of a specific community, the LCC were signalling a continuation of that community, still established in its native environment.

County of London Plan, ‘A Social Framework for Reconstruction Areas’, ‘a proposed grouping of the existing communities of the East End and South Bank areas into separate and definite entities, with schools, public buildings, shops and open spaces allocated to each unit’, plate XXXVI, facing p104

The above map shows the proposed neighbourhood units for the East End and South Bank areas of London, both areas that were identified as in need of reconstruction in the County of London Plan. The map shows the neighbourhood units that would become the Lansbury Estate in Poplar and the Silwood Estate in Rotherhithe. Industrial areas are identified as areas coloured black, and the proximity of both of these estates to the docks and the river is clear: (8)

In need of radical reform are the depressed residential areas, particularly of the East End and other industrial boroughs, where there are large areas of dreary and monotonous streets. The invincible cheerfulness and neighbourliness of the Londoner makes the best of these areas…

…there is much to be learnt from the urban co-operation and sturdy individualism of these London communities, typical examples of which are the eastern boroughs. To try to remedy their obvious defects by a rigid formula of reconstruction which ignored their natural grouping would be to shirk the problem of meeting some of the essential human requirements.

The Lansbury Estate, Poplar

The Stepney/Poplar Reconstruction Area was identified early on by the LCC, and is explained in the County of London Plan. The area was divided up into 11 neighbourhood units, and the Lansbury Estate site was neighbourhood number 9. The Lansbury Estate was featured as the Live Architecture Exhibition in the Festival of Britain, and so would act as a showpiece community for the LCC in its rebuilding of London.

The LCC were keen to bind this new landscape to the local community. The first residents were Mr and Mrs Snoddy, Poplar people, who were rehoused from their older Victorian home. Many of the residents of the Lansbury Estate were local Poplar people. The LCC further tied the area to the people of Poplar by inviting Poplar and Stepney Borough Councils to pick a name for the new estate. The chosen name was in honour of Labour politician George Lansbury, a figure of great significance to the people of Poplar. (9)

As part of its patronage of the arts programme, the LCC, in consultation with the Arts Council, installed The Dockers by Sydney Harpley in 1962. It was located on the edge of the Lansbury Estate in Trinity Gardens next to the Trinity Methodist church, East India Dock Road, which had been completed in 1951.

Trinity Church, East India Dock Road (Photograph Rosamund West, August 2016)

Sydney Harpley, The Dockers, Trinity Gardens (c) London Metropolitan Archives (LMA/4218/01/025)

The proximity of the docks to the Lansbury Estate clearly informed the subject matter for this sculpture. Many of the people housed on the Lansbury Estate were employed either in the docks, or in the many associated industries reliant on the docks. At the time of planning, London was still a major port. The demise of the docks and subsequent collapse of industry in London, particularly focussed on the East End and river communities, was not yet known. As the County of London Plan explained in 1943: (10)

London is a great industrial town as well as a capital city and a governmental and administrative centre.

Sydney Harpley, The Dockers, Trinity Gardens (c) London Metropolitan Archives (LMA/4218/01/025)

The sculpture references the industrial culture of this part of London as well as suggesting a camaraderie between the figures. The two dockers bear a heavy load between them, their figures merging with their shared load and with each other. A depiction entirely fitting for an industry supported by a close-knit community where traditionally sons had often followed fathers into the docks.

Sydney Harpley, The Dockers, Trinity Gardens, with St Mary and St Joseph Roman Catholic Church in the background (c) London Metropolitan Archives (LMA/4218/01/025)

Empty plinth where The Dockers once stood, Trinity Gardens, East India Dock Road (Photograph Rosamund West, August 2016)

With the demise of industry on the river, a sculpture for a community familiar with the docks quickly lost its relevance. Sydney Harpley’s sculpture was badly vandalised until only the legs of the dockers remained. Today, only the plinth remains.

Silwood Estate, Rotherhithe

County of London Plan, ‘Aerial view of an area in Bermondsey’, coloured plate no. 5 (2)

This image from the County of London Plan depicts the area of Rotherhithe, which would become the Silwood Estate, as a perfect example of a site that could be developed at the ideal 136 persons per acre. (11)  Within this neighbourhood unit, or community, was planned a school, a nursery school, shops and businesses, and a community centre. As with the Lansbury Estate, the LCC used its patronage of the arts programme to install an artwork on this estate. Whereas the sculpture at the Lansbury Estate referenced the local industry, the sculpture chosen for the Silwood Estate referenced the location of the site.

Uli Nimptsch, Neighbourly Encounter, 1961 (c) London Metropolitan Archives (LMA/4218/01/046)

Neighbourly Encounter by Uli Nimptsch was installed on the Silwood Estate in 1964. The Silwood Estate straddled the borders of the Metropolitan Boroughs of Bermondsey and Deptford. The fence represented the boundary between the two boroughs and the two figures the neighbourliness that existed between the two communities (12). The piece further references the area with the artist’s use of two local children as the models, David Grist and his sister Doreen. Sadly, as with The Dockers, Neighbourly Encounter is missing.

The London County Council, in its enthusiastic tackling of the post-war housing crisis, put emphasis on communities and Londoners. By also installing artworks in residential settings, the LCC was introducing art into the environment of normal working people. Perhaps patriarchal and over-bearing to us today, the LCC wanted to be seen as a caring municipal body that re-housed Londoners, and re-housed them well. Installing artworks within housing schemes went above and beyond the basic urgent need for shelter. By selecting artists and artworks that referenced the local history or culture of an area, the LCC was investing in the less tangible, emotional crux of what community means and what makes that community thrive.

Sources

Further detail on Rosamund’s research can be found on this information page.  You can follow her on Twitter at @Rosamund_Lil.

(1) Abercrombie, P. & Forshaw, J. H. County of London Plan, (Macmillan & Co, 1943), p.8

(2) County of London Plan,iii

(3) Churchill, 8 October 1940: County of London Plan, frontispiece

(4) County of London Plan, p74

(5) London County Council, The Youngest County. A Description of London as a County and its Public Services, (London, 1951), p.166

(6) County of London Plan, p101

(7) County of London Plan, p83

(8) County of London Plan, p4

(9) ‘The Lansbury Estate: Introduction and the Festival of Britain exhibition’, in Survey of London: Volumes 43 and 44, Poplar, Blackwall and Isle of Dogs, ed. Hermione Hobhouse (London, 1994), pp. 212-223. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vols43-4/pp212-223

(10) County of London Plan, p84

(11) County of London Plan, p81

(12) Reverse of LCC photograph, LMA/4218/01/046

 

 

Open House London 2016: Town Halls – Civic Pride and Service

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#OpenHouse2016

This bonus post – the final post relating to Open House London on the 18-19 September – offers a whistle-stop tour of some of the other municipal buildings featured, some grand, some more humble.  We’ll begin with municipal seats of government: in chronological order, the town halls which manifested the civic pride of local government in its heyday.

City of London Guildhall (c) Prioryman and made available through Wikimedia Commons

It’s appropriate then to begin with the oldest and one of the most impressive of these, the City of London Guildhall and its present Grand Hall, begun in 1411 – the third largest surviving medieval hall in the country.  Externally, it’s probably the 1788 grand entrance by George Dance the Younger in – with apologies to contemporary sensibilities – what’s been called Hindoostani Gothic that is most eye-catching.  The adjacent Guildhall Library and Art Gallery are also open to view – great facilities along with others provided by the City but as the Corporation is hardly a triumph of democracy we’ll move on.

Vestry House Museum, Walthamstow

At the other end of the scale what is now the Vestry House Museum in Walthamstow is a modest affair.  It started life in the mid-18^th century as a workhouse but included a room set aside for meetings of the local vestry.  It was later adapted as a police station before becoming a very fine local museum in 1930. If you can’t make Open House, do visit it and Walthamstow Village at another time.

Shoreditch Town Hall

Shoreditch Town Hall, on the other hand, almost matches the Guildhall in its civic pretensions – chutzpah indeed for a building, designed by the impressively named Caesar Augustus Long and opened in 1866 as the headquarters of a mere vestry, the modest form of local government which preceded the Metropolitan Boroughs established in the capital in 1900. Shoreditch, however, was far from modest – it was one of the most ambitious and innovative such bodies in London, taking particular pride in its path-breaking municipal electricity undertaking.  The Vestry and later Borough’s motto ‘More Light, More Power’ had more than metaphorical meaning.  You might recognise the figure of ‘Progress’ enshrined in the Town Hall tower too.

After a long period of decline the Town Hall was reopened in 2005 and is now a thriving community venue operated by the Shoreditch Town Hall Trust.  Look out for a full programme of events celebrating the building’s 150^th anniversary later this year.

Limehouse Town Hall

Limehouse Town Hall, opened in 1881, is a humbler building despite the Italian palazzo styling adopted by local architects Arthur and Christopher Harston. It also started life as a Vestry Hall but one intended nevertheless as ‘a structure that…shall do honour to the parish of Limehouse’.  It went on to serve as offices for Stepney Metropolitan Borough Council – while its great hall hosted balls and concerts and even early ‘cinematograph’ shows.  It was well known to Clement Attlee, mayor of Stepney in 1919 and later the district’s MP.  It’s been run by the Limehouse Town Hall Consortium Trust as a community venue since 2004.

Battersea Arts Centre (former Town Hall)

Battersea Town Hall, begun in 1892 – an ‘Elizabethan Renaissance’ design by Edward Mountford – has had a similarly chequered history, most notably surviving a disastrous fire in 2015.  Fortunately, repairs and improvements have re-established the Battersea Arts Centre – in business again – as a wonderful local resource.  Its local government heritage survives, however – a worthy memorial to the time when Battersea’s radical politics earned it the title, the ‘Municipal Mecca’. (The Latchmere Estate, a fifteen minute walk to the north and the subject of my very first post, was the first council estate in Britain to be built by direct labour in 1903.)

Richmond Old Town Hall

Richmond, a municipal borough founded in 1890 in the County of Surrey, was a more conservative body although it can boast (since its incorporation in Greater London in 1965) the first council housing built in the capital.  Richmond Old Town Hall, also designed in Elizabethan Renaissance style by WJ Ancell, was opened in 1893 and now houses (since the creation of the London Borough of Richmond) a museum, gallery and local studies archives amongst other things.

Finsbury Town Hall

Finsbury Town Hall was opened in 1895, another Vestry Hall at that time, designed by C Evans Vaughan in ‘free Flemish Renaissance’ style according to Pevsner.  Look out for the Art Nouveau entrance canopy and internal fittings too.  It’s a beautiful building making good use of a tricky site, subsequently home to one of the most radical of London’s Metropolitan Borough Councils. If you visit, take time to look at Lubetkin’s Finsbury Health Centre five minutes to the south and the Spa Green Estate just to the north though neither feature in the Open House programme.  The headquarters of the Metropolitan Water Board, opened in 1920 just across the road, do, however.

Back to Finsbury Town Hall, it’s been the home of the Urdang Academy – a school of dance and musical theatre – since 2006 and, in its words, ‘an inspiring and fitting environment in which to train’.  The Town Hall is still a local registry office for weddings and, for that reason, close to my heart and that of the woman who puts the ‘dreams’ into ‘municipal’.

Croydon Town Hall and Clocktower

Croydon, created a County Borough within Surrey in 1889, didn’t amalgamate with London until 1965 but the Town Hall, to plans by local architect Charles Henman, was opened in 1896 to provide ‘Municipal Offices, Courts, a Police Station, Library and many other public purposes’. The Croydon Town Hall and Clocktower complex retains some local government functions – the Mayor’s Parlour and committee rooms – but also offers a museum, gallery, library and cinema.

Redbridge (formerly Ilford) Town Hall (c) Sunil060902 and made available through Wikimedia Commonsw

The first ‘free Classical’ phase of Redbridge Town Hall, by architect Ben Woollard, was opened in 1901 for Ilford Urban District Council. A new central library was built in the 1927 extension for the newly created Municipal Borough and further office space in the 1933 extension, contributing to the eclectic Renaissance of the overall ensemble. Since 1965 it’s served as the headquarters of the London Borough of Redbridge. The Council Chamber is one of the finest in London.

Tottenham Town Hall, fire station and public baths illustrated in 1903

Tottenham Town Hall today

A visit to the Tottenham Green Conservation Area gives you an opportunity view a whole slew of historically significant buildings.  With my municipal hat on, I’ll draw your attention to Tottenham Town Hall (HQ of Tottenham Urban District Council from 1904 to 1965) and the other examples of local government endeavour and service adjacent – the public baths next door (now just the façade remaining but, as the Bernie Grants Art Centre supported by Haringey Council, still serving a progressive purpose), the fire station (now an enterprise centre), and technical college (built by Middlesex County Council). Passing the new Marcus Garvie Library, you’ll come across Tottenham’s former public library built in 1896 just up the road.  It’s as fine an ensemble of civic purpose and social betterment as you could find in the country.

The Victoria Hall, Woolwich Town Hall

And without doubt, Woolwich Town Hall, an elaborate Baroque design by Alfred Brumwell Thomas, is one of the most impressive town halls in the capital.  Queen Victoria presides over the main stairway of the building’s staggeringly impressive central lobby but the building was opened, following Labour’s capture of the Metropolitan Borough Council in 1903 by local MP and dockers’ leader Will Crooks.  That take-over by one of the largest and most active Labour organisations in the country (don’t neglect the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society here) heralded a proud era of reform to raise the health and living standards of the local working class.

Deptford Town Hall

Another fine example of Baroque revival is Deptford Town Hall, designed by the noted team HV Lanchester, JA Steward and EA Rickards and completed in 1907.  Its exterior sculptures capture local pride in the area’s naval heritage. The guided tours focus on more controversial times – the Town Hall’s role as a court for trying conscientious objectors during the First World War.

The UK Supreme Court (formerly Middlesex Guildhall) (c) Pam Fray and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Moving to the immediate pre-war period, the Middlesex Guildhall in Westminster – originally housing, amongst other things, the offices of Middlesex County Council – was an unusual building for its time, designed by Scottish architect James Gibson in free Gothic style.  It was sympathetically adapted in 2009 to serve as the headquarters of the UK Supreme Court.

The interwar era featured a new wave and new style of municipal architecture.  Probably the most notable example, Hornsey Town Hall in Crouch End, doesn’t feature in Open House this year but, now a local arts centre, can be viewed at other times.

Havering (formerly Romford) Town Hall (c) MRSC and made available through Wikimedia Commons

Opened one year later in 1936, Romford Town Hall (now serving the London Borough of Havering) is a less elaborate building, designed by Herbert R Collins and Antoine Englebert O Geens in an architectural competition stressing the need for strict economy. It remains, however, a very fine example of the new International Moderne style in vogue at the time. Though its steel-framed construction is hidden here by brickwork and stone, rather than the white cement often favoured, this was a consciously forward-looking, more democratic architecture shedding the detritus of the past.

Waltham Forest (formerly Walthamstow) Town Hall

Walthamstow Town Hall (now belonging to the Borough of Waltham Forest) probably has the best setting of any town hall in London – a grand civic complex fronted by sweeping lawns and a grand central pool and fountain. The Town Hall itself was commissioned by the new Borough of Walthamstow created in 1929 and designed by Phillip Hepworth in a stripped down classical style with Art Deco touches owing something to Scandinavian contemporaries.

From the Walthamstow Town Hall Council Chamber

Begun in 1937 and completed in wartime, these straitened circumstances led to some economising in fixtures and fittings but it remains an impressive building. Walk round the back to see five figures by Irish sculptor John Francis Kavanagh, inspired by local hero William Morris, and note the Borough Coat of Arms mosaic at the entrance (and elsewhere) with its motto taken Morris – ‘Fellowship is Life’.  You’ll see this inscribed on the pediment of the Assembly Hall, contemporaneous, to the right.  The Magistrates’ Courts to the left weren’t built until the 1970s.

All these buildings, in different ways, reflect perhaps the proudest and most progressive era of local government – seen most practically in the health centres, washhouses and baths and housing which I’ve written of elsewhere but manifested too in administrative headquarters intended to represent and mobilise a civic patriotism.

Harrow Civic Centre (c) Nigel Cox and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Some of that shine had rubbed off by the 1970s – an era of civic centres in which function outweighed form in terms of design.  Harrow Civic Centre, despite a distinguished architectural pedigree – it was designed by Eric Broughton, the winner of an architectural competition judged by a panel including Sir Basil Spence and Sir Hugh Casson – is no exception in this respect.  Opened in 1973, it’s essentially a Brutalist, checkerboarded concrete box built around a large central courtyard.

Now it’s due for demolition.  According to Chief Executive, Michael Lockwood:

45 years ago, Harrow Council built this Civic Centre because local government was growing and workers needed a building to match. Today, with the cuts faced by every Council, local government is changing all around the country.

It’s proposed to relocate, in his words, ‘a smaller and more agile organisation’, in three new centres.  Presentations on the regeneration scheme will be presented in the Council Chamber during Open House.

Brent Civic Centre

All that could stand as an epitaph for local government but the new Brent Civic Centre, opened in 2013 near Wembley Stadium lets us end on a positive note.  Brent chose a different path; the centre unites Brent’s civic, public and administrative functions under a single roof – in the words of its designers Hopkins Architects, ‘a new hub and heart for the community where residents can meet, shop and eat’.  The latter, of course, is another reflection of changed times and priorities and an ethos in which public service is at best complemented by commercial imperatives and, at worst, subordinated to them.

I haven’t seen it but it looks, to be fair, a rather stunning building and, since it houses a community hall and library as well as a civic chamber and offices for the 2000 employees who keep the borough’s services going, let’s celebrate it as a worthy update to the civic heritage this post records.

Postscript

I could add much, much more.  I’m conscious that I’ve not included the many schools which feature in Open House, nor the libraries, old and new.  Those endeavours reflect the cultural ambitions and achievements of municipalism but I’ll conclude with a brief mention of examples of more prosaic but vital functions.

The former Shacklewell Road Baths

Two example of Hackney public baths feature, firstly the small but beautifully formed bath and washhouse on Shacklewell Road now the Bath House Children’s Community Centre, designed by Borough Architect Percival Holt in what’s described as Modernist Classical style, opened in 1931. It’s been converted as the name implies.

The former Gainsborough Road Baths, now the Cre8 Centre (c) Dr Neil Clifton and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Four years later, Holt designed a grander Art Deco scheme in Hackney Wick. The former Gainsborough Road Baths are now the Cre8 Centre, a busy cultural and event space.

The modernised Ironmonger Row Baths

These provided slipper baths and laundries.  Finsbury was again more ambitious. The Ironmonger Row Baths, designed by specialist architect AW Cross and opened in 1931, included those, two pools and then – unheard of luxury for working men and women – Turkish baths.

The Council believed ‘facilities for healthy recreation and personal cleanliness…essential for the health and well-being of our people’.  The words speak to the best of service to community which local government has embodied.

Open House London 2016: A Tour of the Capital’s Council Housing, Part Two

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Part One of our look at council housing featured in Open House London on the weekend of 17-18 September left us in the East End in Bethnal Green where a progressive Labour council had commissioned Denys Lasdun, one of the leading architects of the day, to design high-quality housing for its working people.

Lubetkin

Moving westwards, we’ll begin this week’s post in another radical Labour stronghold and with the architect who probably brought the greatest political commitment to that task.  Berthold Lubetkin famously declared – in relation to his celebrated design for the Finsbury Health Centre – that ‘nothing [was] too good for ordinary people’.  His Spa Green Estate nearby, completed in 1949 and described by the Survey of London, not prone to hyperbole, as ‘heroic’ and by Nikolaus Pevsner as ‘the most innovative public housing’ of its time, also reflected that ideal.

Bevin Court

Neither of these appear in Open House but two of Lubetkin’s schemes for the Finsbury Metropolitan Borough Council – one of the most progressive in the capital – are featured.  Bevin Court was opened in 1954; the Cold War having put paid to plans to name the building after Lenin (who had once lived on it site).  Its innovative seven-story Y-shape capitalised on its site and ensured none of the flats faced north but, visually, its crowning glory is its central staircase.  Visit to see that and the newly restored Peter Yates murals and bust of Bevin in the entrance lobby.

Bevin Court, Peter Yates mural (c) Steve Cadman and made available under a Creative Commons licence

Priory Green Estate

A few minutes’ walk to the north, you can also visit Lubetkin’s Priory Green Estate, completed three years later.  It’s a much larger estate – 288 homes in seven large blocks but with similar attention paid to lay-out and landscaping and more striking, sculptural staircases.  The Estate was transferred from Islington Borough Council, Finsbury’s successor after 1965, to Peabody in 1999 and, having fallen on hard times, has since been renovated with the aid of a £2m Heritage Lottery grant.

Cranbrook Estate showing the old people’s bungalows and Elizabeth Frink’s ‘Blind Beggar and Dog’ (1957)

Our final example of Lubetkin’s work takes us back to Bethnal Green. The Cranbrook Estate was built between 1955 and 1966.  With 529 homes in total – arranged in a geometric ensemble of six tower and five medium-rise blocks artfully diminishing in scale to the single-storey terrace of old people’s bungalows on the Roman Road – it is one and half times the size of le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation.  Lutbetkin’s biographer, John Allen, rightly describes it as a ‘stupendous tour de force’ and only detracts from that compliment by seeming to lament the ‘domestic intricacies of municipal housing’ which lie behind it.  I’ll take those – as Lubetkin would – as, in fact, its crowning achievement.

Dawson’s Heights

Dawson’s Heights, in East Dulwich, literally crowns its dramatic hill-top setting, so much so that English Heritage (in a listing proposal rejected by the Secretary of State) was moved to almost lyrical praise of the scheme’s ‘striking and original massing’ and its ‘evocative associations with ancient cities and Italian hill towns’.  The Estate, two large ziggurat-style blocks designed to offer views and sunlight to each of their 296 flats, was built between 1968 and 1972 – an in-house design for Southwark Borough Council by Kate Macintosh then aged just 26.  She’s alive and kicking and still a doughty defender of social housing and its social purpose.

The World’s End Estate

Another estate which capitalises on its superb setting is the World’s End Estate, completed in 1977, set on the banks of the Thames across London in the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.  Designed by Eric Lyons and HT (‘Jim’) Cadbury-Brown, in plain terms it comprises seven 18 to 21-storey tower blocks, joined in a figure of eight by nine four-storey walkway blocks but the whole, clad in warm-red brick, possesses a romantic, castellated appearance, providing  great views within and without.

Gascoigne Estate (c) barkingassemblage.wordpress.com

All this might seem a world away from the Gascoigne Estate in Barking, a sprawling 1960s estate with seventeen tower blocks, housing some 4000 people.  It’s been a troubled and unpopular estate in recent years whose design and history might stand as representative of many much-criticised estates built in an era of mass rehousing when scale sometimes outpaced finesse.  For all that, it’s been a home to many and it’s good to see – as a major regeneration scheme takes off – that history of community celebrated in the Open Estate Living Museum that features in this year’s Open House programme.  I’m looking forward to finding out more.

If the Gascoigne Estate – demonised and stereotyped like so many so-called ‘problem estates’ – might be taken by some to represent the worst of a flawed era of public housing, two London boroughs – learning from mistakes made elsewhere – built some of this country’s finest council housing.  The typically high-density but low- to medium-rise developments built after the collapse of the Ronan Point tower block in 1968 represent the best of what public housing might have achieved in the longer-term had it been supported.

Ted Hollamby

As Chief Architect for the new (post-65) Borough of Lambeth, Ted Hollamby had concluded that ‘people do not desperately desire to be housed in large estates, no matter how imaginative the design and convenient the dwellings’.  Hollamby believed that ‘most people like fairly small-scale and visually comprehensible environments.  They call them villages, even when they are manifestly not’.  His vision can be seen enacted in two very fine council estates on show during Open House.

 

Central Hill Estate

Central Hill in Upper Norwood, completed in 1973, is a stepped development designed to make best use of its attractive site but it reflects Lambeth and Hollamby’s signature style in its intimacy and human scale.  It’s worked; it’s a well-loved estate with a strong sense of community. Unfortunately, as part of Lambeth’s commendable pledge to build 1000 new homes at council rent in the borough, it has become another victim of ‘regeneration’; in actual fact, the threat of demolition.

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

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

Cressingham Gardens

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

Lulot Gardens, Whittington Estate

Across the capital, another progressive borough, Camden – under the enlightened leadership of Borough Architect Sydney Cook – had also developed its own striking house style.  This can be seen firstly in the Whittington Estate, begun in 1969, designed by Peter Tábori, another young architect then in his mid-twenties.

Stoneleigh Terrace, Whittington Estate

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

Dartmouth Park Hill

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

Dunboyne Road Estate

Aside from Cook, Camden’s superb council housing of this era is chiefly associated with Neave Brown, the only living architect to have had all his UK work officially listed. This year’s Open House features, the Dunboyne Road (formerly Fleet Road) Estate (no. 36 to be precise), designed by Brown in 1966 and finally completed in 1977.  Its three white, stepped parallel blocks and now mature gardens provide a striking ensemble, noted by English Heritage in their 2010 Grade II listing for its ‘strong modernist aesthetic’ and a ‘simple, bold overall composition’ belying the scheme’s complexity and sophistication.

Rowley Way, Alexandra Road Estate

The other Brown scheme in Open House is generally judged one of the most attractive and architecturally accomplished council estates in the country, the Alexandra Road Estate,  listed Grade II* in 1993.  It’s better seen than described but, in its scale and confidence, it marks (in the words of modernist architect John Winter), ‘a magical moment for English housing’.  Make sure to visit the recently renovated Alexandra Road Park and Tenants’ Hall (also featured in Open House), both integral to the design and original conception of the estate.

Alexandra Road was completed in 1979 – the year in which such high ambition would be consigned to the graveyard of history.  It’s a sad irony that some of the very best of our council housing was built just as its near-century long story of practical idealism and shared social purpose was drawing to a close.

I hadn’t intended this tour of some of London’s finest council estates to be so elegiac but the contemporary picture of social housing’s marginalisation and market-driven ‘regeneration’ creates a poignant counterpoint to the energy and aspirations of previous generations.  If you visit any of the estates on show during Open House London, my plea to you is to think of them not as monuments to a bygone era but as beacons of what we can and should achieve in a brighter future.

Note

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

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

Open House London 2016: A Tour of the Capital’s Council Housing, Part One

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The most important buildings in London – those with the greatest social significance for the mass of its people and those which have made the greatest visual impact on the capital – are council houses.  It’s partly their ubiquity and relative accessibility that means most council estates don’t make it into Open House London, the capital’s annual celebration of its built heritage taking place on the weekend of the 17-18 September this year. And, then – let’s be fair here – there’s the fact that not all municipal schemes have represented the very best of architecture and design.

But there’s another process in play – the marginalisation of social housing and its contribution to the lives of so many. We are asked to forget or even malign all that social housing has achieved.  And, by the supporters and beneficiaries of a boundless free market, we are asked to discount it as a solution to the present housing crisis.

Housing crisis and protest

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

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

The Boundary Estate

We’ll begin with the country’s first council estate, the Boundary Estate in Bethnal Green, opened in 1900.  It doesn’t feature in Open House this year but I want to publicise the Boundary Estate Fun Palace, taking place on October 1.  You’ll find Fun Palaces up and down the country that weekend, all dedicated to a belief in ‘the genius in everyone, in everyone an artist and everyone a scientist, and that creativity in community can change the world for the better’.  Check out the great programme of the Boundary Estate Fun Palace, including lots of significant social history for those of you who are interested.

The Progress Estate

I’ll cheat slightly with my next suggestion too.  The Progress Estate in Eltham was built by the Ministry of Works during the First World War and designed by the Ministry’s Chief Architect, Frank Baines; its role, to support the war effort by providing high-quality housing to the workers of the nearby Royal Arsenal Munitions Works. Almost 1300 homes were built in the single year of 1915, showing what can be done when housing needs are prioritised.  Originally named the Well Hall Estate, it was renamed in 1925 when the Government sold it to the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society.  Fifty-five years later, the 500 remaining social rented homes were sold on to the Hyde Housing Association.

The Progress Estate

The Estate represented the fullest flowering of the Arts and Crafts garden suburb ideals of its time, ideals enshrined in the 1918 Tudor Walters Report which shaped the massive growth of council housing in the interwar period – 89,049 council homes were built during the period by the London County Council alone.  The estate remains a tribute to the best of social housing and almost to the present a pastoral idyll, well worth a visit for its architecture and history.

The Becontree Estate

The Becontree Estate in Dagenham, first mooted in 1919 at the height of the ‘Homes for Heroes’ campaign, represents the other side to these ambitions – the desire to build at massive scale to meet the pressing housing needs of the day.  It was the largest of the LCC’s interwar estates, comprising by 1939 over 26,000 homes and housing a population of 120,000.  Such size (and an unpromising site) led some – despite the planners’ best efforts – to criticise the mass and uniformity of the Estate but to many, moving from inner-city slums, ‘it was heaven with the gates off.’

If you’re there, make sure to visit the Mobile Museum too which will based at Barking Town Square, in Clockhouse Avenue, a mobile library van converted by the artist Verity-Jane Keefe to collect the memories and artefacts of those who have lived in Becontree and the other council estates of the Borough of Barking and Dagenham.  Valence House, on the Estate, a 15^th century manor house purchased to serve local needs by the LCC in 1926, is a now a local museum recording the distant and more recent history of the area, including some interesting records and re-creations of Becontree.

Chilcott Close, Lansbury Estate

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

Chrisp Street Market from the clock tower (the canopies were added in the 1990s)

The Estate epitomises the ‘neighbourhood unit’, a key element of post-war planning envisaged as a means of preserving and enhancing an ideal of ‘community’ which some felt betrayed by larger, more anonymous council estates such as Becontree.

Its centrepiece was Frederick Gibberd’s Chrisp Street Market and clock tower – the first pedestrianised shopping centre in the country.  For Open House, you can visit the micro-museum on the Lansbury set up by the V and A in collaboration with the National Trust and Poplar HARCA and have a rare opportunity to climb the clock tower.

If you visit, go critically with eyes and ears open to the tensions and contradictions of the ‘regeneration’ which is being visited here as on so many of our council estates.  Poplar HARCA and developers have plans to make Chrisp Street a ‘new commercial and leisure destination’. Of course, all the right noises are being made about respecting local heritage and the interests of existing traders but some locals – campaigning for  ‘fruit and veg and social housing, not corporate brands and luxury flats’ – see an insidious process of gentrification underway, in part legitimised by what some see as the ‘art-washing’ of the V and A and National Trust.

Balfron Tower

With Canary Wharf just to the south and Balfron Tower a five-minute walk to the west, such fears are not groundless.  Designed by Ernő Goldfinger and opened by the Greater London Council in 1968, Balfron is famous (or infamous according to taste) as one of the most imposing Brutalist designs of its time but it was, first and foremost, housing for working-class people being moved from local slums.

According to Ursula Goldfinger (she and Ernő lived briefly in the block on its opening to gauge its successes and failures), its early residents ‘all said the flats were lovely’; she ‘never heard anybody express regret for the terrace houses they have mostly come from’.  Now the block’s council tenants have been ‘decanted’ and the flats are to be sold to those with the means to buy them on the open market

Trellick Tower

Balfron Tower doesn’t appear in Open House this year but its younger sister, also designed by Goldfinger, Trellick Tower in West London, opened in 1972, does and this, fortunately, despite Right to Buy, remains social housing owned by the Royal Borough Kensington and Chelsea.  I haven’t written on Trellick but I hope the posts on Balfron can provide some useful background.

Robin Hood Gardens. Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 (c) The Smithson Family Collection and used with permission

As we’ve skipped our chronological focus for a geographical one, I’ll continue here by taking you five minutes to the south to Robin Hood Gardens.   Balfron was Grade II listed in 1996, Trellick Grade II* two years later. Despite the best efforts of the architectural great and good, no such security has been granted to Alison and Peter Smithson’s path-breaking scheme, opened in 1972 and now due for demolition as part of the Blackwall Reach regeneration project.

Robin Hood Gardens, still occupied, July 2016

Run-down, largely cleared, Robin Hood Gardens presents a sorry picture now but visit it before it’s gone and savour something of its scale and grandeur.  While not all its aspirations were fulfilled, its ‘streets in the sky’ and overall design sensibilities represent some of the highest ideals of social housing.  The Estate’s subsequent real-world difficulties – understood sensitively – also have much to teach us.

Trevelyan House

And, finally today, back to Trevelyan House, built – I’ll labour the point – by a Labour council determined to rehouse a working-class population living in some of the worse slum housing in the capital, wrestling with the problem of limited land and awkwardly shaped plots, yet reluctant to build too high.

The Council commissioned Denys Lasdun to provide a solution and he devised (with the adjacent Sulkin House) a pioneering example of the cluster block – a central, free-standing tower containing lifts and services with separate towers containing accommodation.  The eight-storey block comprises 24 maisonettes arranged in a design which maximises their light and air whilst simultaneously providing greater privacy and quiet.

Lasdun was determined to build maisonettes, approximating more closely to the two-storey terraced housing from which most new residents had come.  Enjoy the ‘modern re-design’ on view this year but don’t forget its history.

Keeling House

A fifteen-minute walk away to the east off Bethnal Green Road, you can see a more fully worked-out and larger-scale version of the cluster block design by Lasdun in Keeling House (not in Open House), completed one year later.  Sixteen storeys-high, four blocks around the central service core containing 64 homes in all – 56 two-storey maisonettes and, on the fifth floor and deliberately visible in the building’s profile,  8 single-storey studio flats.

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

I’ll continue this look at the council housing heritage celebrated in Open House London in next week’s post.