Book Review: HKPA and Frederick Gibberd, ‘Building a Better World for All’

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Gibberd

Geraint Franklin, Howell Killick Partridge & Amis (Historic England Publishing, July 2017)

Christine Hui Lan Manley, Frederick Gibberd (Historic England Publishing, October 2017)

I’m not an architectural historian – you might have noticed – and what little I know, I’ve picked up from the experts as I’ve researched housing schemes up and down the country. For that reason alone, I’m enormously grateful for the scholarship and endeavour of these two fine books.  The subjects – the Howell Killick Partridge & Amis (HKPA) partnership, responsible individually, amidst much else, for the Alton West Estate, and Frederick Gibberd, famously the presiding genius of Harlow New Town, might seem to represent opposing sides in the architectural cultural wars of the second half of the twentieth century.  In this post, I’ll avoid alienating half my readership by celebrating both.

To begin with the basics, both these books – comprehensive, detailed, superbly illustrated – are essential to anyone with a serious interest in the architects concerned as well as the broader architectural movements of the later twentieth century.  And, as a non-architect, I’ll confess a powerful admiration for the skills and sensibilities on display from all concerned.  It’s a reminder of what architects, given projects that liberate their ideals with budgets to match, can do to improve the built environment and our lived experience of it.

From left to right, Howell, Killick, Partridge and Amis in their Fitzroy Square offices, 1962

I’m impressed too by the range of projects undertaken by each. A great many of HKPA’s signature schemes belong to the enormous expansion of higher education from the 1950s onward but there are performance spaces too, court buildings, even prisons. All, in their different ways, testify to the investment in and expansion of the public realm (though their Oxbridge schemes owed much to private benefaction) that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century – and they remind us too of its more recent systematic impoverishment.

Frederick Gibberd

This is even truer of Gibberd personally who almost uniquely combined expertise and qualifications in architecture, landscape architecture and town planning.  And while, of course, he worked with skilled partners and colleagues, he took care to initiate all of his major briefs so that each, as Christine Hui Lan Manley testifies, featured what he described as his ‘handwriting’.  So, for Gibberd, apart from Harlow and some celebrated housing schemes, apart from ‘Paddy’s Wigwam’ (aka the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool), you can read of projects ranging from reservoirs to power stations, airports to libraries.  (Both books provide a full List of Works with journal references in useful appendices.)

Given that housing is my main preoccupation, you’ll forgive me, nonetheless, for concentrating on that in this short post. It also happens to be the subject in which their apparently contrasting visions were played out most strongly.

Bill Howell, John Killick and Stan Amis met as students in the Architectural Association in 1948. They went on, two years later, to join the Housing Division of the London County Council’s Architect’s Department, then, without hyperbole, the largest and most important architectural practice in the world. Geraint Franklin describes Howell – ‘charismatic, engaging and enthusiastic’ – as ‘the natural leader and guiding spirit of HKPA’.

I’ll single out John Partridge, however – a grammar school boy who worked as an administrator in the LCC’s Public Health Department while, from 1943, enrolled in a part-time training scheme for architects and surveyors (devised by the LCC’s John Forshaw) at the Regent Street Polytechnic. He joined the Housing Division in 1951.

This background probably explains a commitment to municipal housing which contrasted with, in Franklin’s words, a ‘certain ambivalence’ felt toward it by Howell.  Howell, quoted by Reyner Banham, allegedly described public housing as ‘a charity shat upon the working classes from a great height!’  We’ll take that presumably off-the-record comment as a criticism of some heavy-handed paternalism and poor quality design rather than as a wholesale condemnation of the principle of public provision.

Alton West: maisonette blocks above Danebury Avenue

We should because Howell, alongside his future partners, worked on what one American commentator described as ‘probably the finest low-cost housing development in the world’ – the Roehampton Lane Estate, later known as Alton West.

If you’re reading this, I probably don’t need to say too much about Alton West. It represents probably the greatest expression, at scale, of a consciously Le Corbusian, monumentalist, Brutalist approach to housing in the country and I won’t try to replicate the thorough account provided by Franklin.  I’ll pick out this, though, from John Partridge.  Looking back, in 1980, at the 100 acre plot selected by the LCC in south-west London, he stated it ‘would be hard to imagine a more exciting, demanding and lovely site’.  But he spent some time perfecting it:

I was given a bulldozer and a driver, and I went up one of the point blocks onto the sixth floor and told this bulldozer bloke what to do for several days, and we remodelled that field.  And what we wanted to do was link up the two eighteenth-century villas with the certain same elements of an eighteenth-century landscape.

That’s a tribute to resourced architectural vision that shames the boxy, poxy, prissy private schemes which dominate today.

Partridge’s Weston Rise Estate (c) Steve Richards and made available though a Creative Commons licence

Partridge, who in 1959 joined the private architectural partnership established by Howell, Killick and Amis three years earlier, was also the architect of the Weston Rise Estate completed for the Greater London Council in 1968.  Its six- to ten-storey stepped design and scissor-section flats provided an ingenious and visually striking solution to a difficult site and the requirement for high-density though the design won few architectural plaudits at the time.

In fact, the tide was already turning against such more monumental and higher-rise schemes. Somerville Road, designed by Partridge for Lewisham Borough Council in 1973 – an intimate, low-rise, brick-built estate – shows how quickly that backlash occurred.  It has echoes, in fact, of Gibberd’s famous Somerford Grove Estate in Hackney of a quarter-century earlier.

HKPA ‘rejected the Brutalist label as a put-down’ but, as Franklin goes on, they certainly saw themselves as architectural radicals.  In the LCC, they sided with the ‘hard’, Le Corbusian Brutalists against the ‘softer’, New Humanists (or New Empiricists) who took their inspiration from Scandinavian social democracy. Howell himself expressed distaste for the ‘liquorice all-sorts’ architecture deployed at the Festival of Britain and New Towns.  Elsewhere, the Young Turk, Sandy Wilson (later the architect of the British Library) decried the ‘extraordinary effeminacy’ of the Lansbury Estate.

Elizabeth Close, the Lansbury Estate

This placed them at odds with Frederick Gibberd, the architect and planner of the Lansbury and the individual most associated with the architecture they scorned.  This, to some, was a fall from grace for Gibberd who, before the war, had been a member of the Modern Architecture Research (MARS) Group, the UK outpost of CIAM, the Congrès internationaux d’architecture modern.  A visit to Harlow by CIAM representatives showed how far he had fallen. The New Towns, according to JM Richards, one of the delegates, were ‘little more than housing estates’. Gordon Cullen condemned what he described as the ‘prairie planning’ of the New Towns, lacking all characteristics of ‘towniness’. (1)

A look at Gibberd’s post-war work in more detail, covered thoroughly by Manley and discussed in a number of past posts in the blog, enables an assessment of the broader thrust of this criticism.

Somerford Grove

Somerford Grove, designed for Hackney Metropolitan Borough Council and completed in 1949, was Gibberd’s first major project after the war. It conformed to the three-storey height maximum then set by the Council but took flight in the range of housing types and decorative forms applied by Gibberd to this seminal example of mixed development housing.  The latter was the coming idea – intended both to house a wider range of the population than the two- and three-bed family houses which dominated in the interwar period and to enable the expression of architectural variety and visual interest.  Somerford Grove was its low-rise archetype but the concept was central to most post-war estate design which followed, not least Alton West.

The Lansbury Estate, devised as the Live Architecture Exhibition for the Festival of Britain and opened in 1951, was resolutely modest, low-rise – its predominant yellow stock brick designed to fit better with the local terraced streetscape.

Hawkshead, Regent’s Park Estate: designed by Gibberd

In the same year, Gibberd was commissioned by St Pancras Metropolitan Borough Council to replace a regimented Zeilenbau design – uniform blocks of flats typically set in a parallel north-south axis – for the Regent’s Park Estate with something more picturesque.  The blocks designed by Gibberd himself in Zone A are patterned and coloured in New Humanist, Scandinavian style. (This is omitted in the book though that’s less a snarky reviewer’s criticism than a tribute to the bewildering range of Gibberd’s work.)

The Lawn, Harlow

And then there’s Harlow, of course. Gibberd was its architect-planner from 1946 to 1980, convinced from the outset that ‘the majority of the people want a two-storey house with a private garden’.   That, therefore, will be your predominant impression of the New Town but as an apostle of mixed development, he also advocated that 20 to 30 per cent of the homes should be flatted. Famously, he built the UK’s first point block, the Lawn – a modest affair at just nine storeys but a harbinger of things to come.

Across the town, Gibberd commissioned a number of architects to design more innovative and architecturally exciting housing schemes but overall Harlow stands, for good reason, as the chief exemplar of the supposedly desolate suburbanism that modernist critics condemned.

Lionel Brett, quoted by Manley, noted how a number of ‘impeccable modernist personalities of the thirties’ (he cites Maxwell Fry and Basil Spence as well as Gibberd) had ‘switched’ to New Empiricism after the War because, in his words, ‘the psychological need was manifest’. Perhaps the War had had this effect; perhaps Gibberd’s wartime study of English market towns, their forms and materials, was both cause and effect of at least an evolution in his thinking.

Against the criticisms of Harlow, Gibberd defended an English urbanism which preferred ‘segregation of home and work, which enjoys open-air exercise, which has an innate love of nature’. (2)  Goaded by further criticism, he expressed himself more astringently: (3)

It has been suggested that a correct aesthetic and architectural solution would, in the end, have been the correct social one – in other words, that people should have been given what they ought to have wanted.

That might seem, to many, the perfect riposte to the ‘megalomaniac’ architects and planners some hold responsible for the less successful and more ‘inhumane’ building schemes of the 1960s.  At any rate, Gibberd’s English empiricism and decorative palette placed him beyond the modernist pale. I’ll confess to being pleased that this book will play a big part in a deserved reappraisal of his work and legacy.

And I’ll point out that I don’t believe for a moment that HKPA are the bad guys here. Michael Hopkins’ foreword to Manley’s book states that Gibberd and his peers:

were contributing to the current social agenda and building a better world for all, bringing space and sunlight within the home and outside to the public realm.

That was undeniably true of Howell, Killick, Partridge and Amis too.  The aesthetic choices are yours.

Historic England, in collaboration with the Twentieth Century Society, and the authors are to be congratulated for publishing these books which are unlikely to be bettered as guides to the architects concerned.  Given my narrow focus, there’s an enormous amount of important stuff discussed that I haven’t touched on here. Quality production and extensive, full colour illustration don’t come cheap but, if this is your thing, buy them if you can.

Nuneaton Library to the left (c) Kevin Roe, and Roehampton Library (c) Diamond Geezer. Both made available through a Creative Commons licence

If you can’t, try to borrow them from a library.  If you’re in Nuneaton, you can go to the library there, designed by Gibberd in 1960.  If you’re near Alton West, visit Roehampton Library designed by John Partridge and completed in 1961 while you can – it is under threat of demolition. (4)

For further information on the books and purchase details, click the links below:

Geraint Franklin, Howell Killick Partridge & Amis  

Christine Hui Lan Manley, Frederick Gibberd  

Sources

All the quotations are drawn from the two books except the following:

(1) JM Richards, ‘Failure of the New Towns’ and Gordon Cullen, ‘Prairie Planning in the New Towns’, Architectural Review, vol. 114, no. 679, 1953

(2) Quoted in ‘Design Problems in New Towns. Result of Building “for all classes”’, The Times, 6 February 1962

(3) Frederick Gibberd, ‘The Architecture of New Towns’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 106, No. 5021, April 1958

(4) For more on the campaign to save the unlisted buildings at the entrance to Alton West, please read Elizabeth Hopkirk, ‘Historians warn of “grave effect” of Alton redevelopment‘, bdonline, 21 November 2017 (Subscription needed)

The Broadwater Estate, Tottenham, Part II: ‘a strong vibrant community’

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1980s, 1990s, Haringey, Multi-storey, Regeneration

We left Broadwater Farm last week, a much improved and increasingly popular estate, but police-community relations were in a state of simmering tension and exploded catastrophically on the night of Sunday 6 August 1985.

One day earlier, police had raided the home of Cynthia Jarrett.  This lay some way off the Estate but her son Floyd – the target of the raid – was a leading member of the Broadwater Farm Youth Association (BWFYA).  Mrs Jarrett died of heart failure. Another black woman, Cherry Groce, had been shot and seriously injured in a similar police raid in Brixton the previous week.  On the Sunday, protestors moving off to what was billed as a peaceful protest outside Tottenham Police Station, found their way blocked – and all other exits barred – by police in full riot gear. The confrontation escalated and, in the seven-hour riot which ensued, PC Keith Blakelock was brutally murdered.

A full-scale state of siege followed.  Four hundred police officers occupied the Estate over the following weeks and some 270 police raids took place over the next six months. Some 159 arrests were made.  In the longer-term, beyond the crude and sensationalist coverage of the tabloids (unsurprising perhaps in such a genuinely shocking event), serious investigation into the causes of the rioting began, most notably in the inquiry, commissioned by Haringey Council, led by Lord Gifford QC.

The overall verdict – supported by the fact that relatively little damage to property or looting occurred – was that: (1)

The riot…was not primarily about poverty, unemployment or bad housing…The protest by the youths was essentially about policing – police activity and police attitudes.

A demonstration from the late 1980s (c) Robert Croma and made available through a Creative Commons licence

In this sense, the unwise but unfairly misrepresented words of Haringey’s council leader Bernie Grant were accurate:

The youths around here believe the police were to blame for what happened on Sunday and what they got was a bloody good hiding.

In the aftermath, the local community, spearheaded by the BWFYA, and the Council laboured tirelessly – in fact, building on the good work done before the riots – to rescue the Estate from the nightmare which had befallen it.  A £33m grant in 1986 under the Government’s Estate Action programme provided much needed capital.

A large part of that finance went on modifications to what were held to be the design flaws of the original scheme.  A ‘Ground-Level Reinstatement Plan’ removed shops from the deck level of Tangmere to Willan Road and created new lobbies (with concierge services) at surface level for the larger blocks.  The walkways were removed in 1993.

The image from Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block, shows Broadwater Farm after refurbishment in 1990. The flagstaffs mark the Remembrance Garden.

There were other improvements too but much of the work improving the environment and ‘feel’ of the Estate was carried out under the aegis of the BWYFA.  A Remembrance Garden (a plaque commemorates ‘those who died and suffered’ in the 1985 riots) and a Nation’s Square celebrating the Estate’s diverse community, were created. (2)

Rochford block with Anthony Steele’s mural and the former first floor deck removed. Photograph 2016.

Murals – one on the end of the Rochford block painted by Anthony Steele, a local black youth depicting Martin Luther King, Gandhi, John Lennon and Bob Marley; another on Tangmere by a local Turkish resident with its own symbolic message of peace and harmony – were created to beautify the Estate.  A third – the Waterfall mural on the end of the Debden block painted by Bernette Hall – was added between 1990 and 1991.

Debden (with Bernette Hall’s Waterfall) and Hawkinge with Kenley to rear. photograph 2016

More tangibly, given a youth unemployment rate of 37 per cent on the Estate (the figure for London as a whole was 12 percent), there were serious attempts to create local jobs. Enterprise workshops and training initiatives, often local co-ops, were set up to provide skills to young people as well as necessary local services.

The effort to employ residents on the ongoing renovation works was aided by the multi-disciplinary, area-based design teams developed by John Murray in the Council’s Building Design Service from 1979 with the support of Jeremy Corbyn, then chair of Haringey’s Planning Committee.  Murray was a founder member of the New Architecture Movement founded in 1975 to democratise the profession and promote cooperative working with ‘users’, those who, too often, were merely the subject of architects’ grand designs.  Murray was elected head of the Building Design Service in 1985 and would go on to become Borough Architect.

Debden. Photograph 2016.

On Broadwater Farm, the local team worked closely with Estate residents and employed local labour. Part of the scheme involved appointing two local young people as trainee architects – an important attempt to open up an increasingly closed and elitist profession. At peak, the Building Design Service employed around 200 staff, 60 per cent of whom were black and ethnic minority – figures which reflected the Borough’s rich diversity. (3)

By 2003, the Estate was virtually fully occupied and forty residents had purchased their homes under Right to Buy.  An annual survey found only two per cent of residents felt unsafe in their homes (compared to a Haringey average of 15 per cent) and over half the residents had lived on the Estate for ten years.  It was, by all objective accounts, a stable and safe community.

Christian Wolmar concluded that – beyond the structural changes intended to ‘design out crime’ – much of the improvement lay with the strength of the local community: (4)

the very design of the estate, the fact that the lay-out is so different from the ordinary terraced housing around with a clear line that distinguishes Broadwater Farm from its surrounding area has been helpful in creating a sense of community.

Interestingly, this was a comment echoed in part last year by Victor Olisa, a Haringey police officer: ‘The crime level’s probably lower than other parts of the borough because it’s a contained estate’. (5)

Hawkinge with Kenley to rear. The first floor deck has been transformed into private ‘defensible space’ and a new ground floor entrance provided. Photograph 2016.

This suggests that either those walkways were doing a lot of heavy lifting in the bad old days or that much of what we believe about the Estate depends, not so much on any objective truth – good or bad – but on context, circumstance and perception.

An academic analysis by Dominic Severs makes an interesting comparison between (predominantly outsider and middle-class) attitudes towards the ‘rookeries’, the particularly notorious districts of slum housing of the Victorian era, and the ‘no-go’ estates of the modern era, ‘characteristically high-rise, modernist and “non-street”’.

Martlesham with Northolt tower to rear. Photograph 2016

What they share, he argues, is a defining set of characteristics: (6)

Separation from the mainstream of transit and economic activity; the complexity and ambiguity of constituent spaces; the difficulty of navigation by outsiders; enclosure; covered entrances creating symbolic barriers or markers of ownership; the indirect relationship of street to home; and the complex and potentially illegible relationship between public and private spaces…

It would be absurd to ignore the real problems suffered by Broadwater Farm over the years or gloss over the tragic events of 1985 but it is nonetheless vital to recognise just how much of the obloquy suffered by the Estate – and other similar schemes such as the Pepys Estate in Lewisham or Southwark’s ‘Five Estates’ – rests on their difference and separation, the class prejudices these promote, and the alarmist fears fanned by hostile commentary.

Some of that commentary was revived by the riots of 2011.  On 4 August, Mark Duggan – a young black man raised on Broadwater Farm with a record of criminal activity (though its seriousness was disputed) – was shot and killed by the police.  The death played into continuing tensions between the police and the black community and fed the belief that the latter was unfairly targeted and treated.

In disputed circumstances, on 7 August an initially peaceful protest outside Tottenham Police Station, led from Broadwater Farm but involving many not from the Estate, degenerated into violent disorder, looting and arson on Tottenham High Road.  Comparable events occurred across twelve other areas of the capital and a similar number of towns and cities across England.

This view of Northolt shows that parts of the estate still look poor and rundown. Photograph 2016.

One London study inferred a correlation between the location of rioting and the proximity of ‘large post-war housing estates’; Broadwater Farm, for example, was close to disturbances in Tottenham, Wood Green and the Tottenham Hale retail park to the north. (7)  But broader, national analysis showed an array of causal factors: sheer opportunism was one, the chance of ‘shopping for free’ as looting was described; an inchoate sense of grievance motivated by the disparities of affluence and poverty was another.  What stood out most, however, was a widespread resentment of police behaviour. (8)

Broadwater Farm has a history, a seemingly inescapable one, but – the ‘accident’ of its personal association with the victim of alleged police wrongdoing aside – it seems hard to blame the Estate itself for the riots of 2011 and appropriate to focus on wider societal causes.

This wasn’t the view of David Cameron. (9)

The riots of 2011 didn’t emerge from within terraced streets or low-rise apartment buildings. As spatial analysis of the riots has shown, the rioters came overwhelmingly from these post-war estates.

And accompanying off-the-record briefings suggested that Broadwater Farm was to be one of the ‘sink estates’ to benefit from his razing of the ‘high, brutal high-rise towers and dark alleyways’ which apparently fomented such disorder.

Croydon. Photograph 2016

Little of this made sense – its apparent ignorance or wilful disregard of estate regeneration occurring since the eighties, the paltry investment proposed, its evasion of so much more (not least Conservative policies since 1979) which might be blamed for the 2011 riots. As a piece of political grandstanding, it garnered the headlines Cameron presumably wanted but its substance was as evanescent as his own tenure of office.  He was gone six months later and Brexit critic Michael Heseltine, the ‘tsar’ appointed to oversee the proposals, ten months after that.

Broadwater Farm Community Centre

Clasford Stirling collecting his MBE, 2007 (c) Tottenham Journal

Meanwhile, lasting change has occurred on Broadwater Farm.  First-class facilities have been added to the Estate including a new community centre, children’s nursery and health centre. Contemporary media reports praise the highly sought-after ‘state-of-the-art primary school’ and children travel across London to attend the football academy run by Clasford Stirling MBE. (10)

It’s not perfect – senseless ‘postcode wars’ exist between young people from the Estate and others from neighbouring areas, police-community relations have improved but need work, class and racial inequalities and injustices persist – but it might be thought time to leave the Estate alone.

But Broadwater Farm is threatened – the word seems appropriate in this context – by further regeneration.  Though not directly a part of the Haringey’s controversial Development Vehicle, the Council nevertheless believes that the area ‘presents an opportunity for a large scale regeneration project’ which includes ‘steps to redress tenure imbalances and alter the currently negative perception of the area’. (11)

It’s a now conventional view which sees council estates as ‘improved’ by importing middle-class owner-occupiers and private renters.  As such, of course, it doesn’t challenge ‘negative perceptions’ but reinforces them.

I’ll leave the last word with the Estate’s Residents’ Association: (12)

Broadwater Farm provides decent quality housing for thousands of people. It is a strong, vibrant community. Huge amounts have been spent on providing concierge suites, new roofs and windows, providing a Community Centre and many other facilities. All residents want to look to the future on our estate, rather than having our lives needlessly disrupted by demolitions and decants.

Sources

(1) Tricia Zipfel quoted in Dominic Severs, ‘Rookeries and No-Go Estates: St Giles and Broadwater Farm, or middle-class fear of “non-street” housing’, Journal of Architecture, vol 15, no 4, August 2010

(2) BWF Youth Association Co-op Ltd, Cultivating the Farm (Broadwater Farm, 1988)

(3) See Haringey Building Design Service Involvement in Broadwater Farm after 1985 and Real Estates, ‘Hidden History: John Murray’s Letter to the Guardian’, 4 January 2014.

(4) Christian Wolmar, Broadwater Revisited (September 15 2003)

(5) Louise Riley, ‘Broadwater Farm Estate’s Youth Are Battling to Escape the “Folklore” of Mark Duggan’s Death and 1985 Riot’, Huffington Post, 6 August 2016.

(6) Severs, ‘Rookeries and No-Go Estates’

(7) Space Syntax, 2011 London Riots Location Analysis: Proximity to town centres and large post-war housing estates (2011)

(8) LSE and The Guardian, Reading the Riots: investigating England’s Summer of Disorder (December 2011)

(9) David Cameron, Estate Regeneration (10 January 2016)

(10) Louise Riley, ‘Broadwater Farm Estate’s Youth Are Battling to Escape the “Folklore” of Mark Duggan’s Death and 1985 Riot’

(11) Haringey Council, Haringey Development Vehicle Business Case (October 2015)

(12) Haringey Council’s Local Plan Consultation: Response by Broadwater Farm Residents’ Association (March 2015)

The Broadwater Farm Estate, Tottenham, Part I: from ‘holiday camp’ to ‘dumping ground’?

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1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Multi-storey, Regeneration

The Broadwater Farm Estate is – with apologies to its residents who know it differently and better – notorious: the scene of rioting in 1985, blamed by some for the disorder in Tottenham in 2011, and apparently one of the ‘sink estates’ to be transformed by David Cameron’s short-lived ‘blitz on poverty’ in 2016.   Let’s tell a different story.  We’ll look at ‘what went wrong’, of course, but offer an alternative perspective which questions the easy blame-game. And we’ll look at the high hopes and good intentions which created the Estate and at what, over the years, has gone right.

The Broadwater Farm Estate from the west, Kenley and Northold towers to left (c) Iridiscenti and made available through a Creative Commons licence

For a start, there was a context.  In 1961, according to Haringey’s Planning Officer, 90,000 households occupied 70,000 dwellings in the borough. Mr Frith estimated judiciously – since some single people preferred to share – that there was a shortfall of 14,000 homes in Haringey.  Around a third were over 70 years old and half of the housing was privately rented and of poor quality. (1)

Contemporary thinking and changed economics might tell another story here – of solid terraced housing and potential family homes which should have been rehabilitated but were, instead, sacrificed to the hubris of politicians and planners.  But that came later.  At the time, as Ernie Large (the chair of Haringey’s Housing Committee till 1968) made clear, the logic of demolition and new build was compelling: (2)

What we were doing was clearing slums in South Tottenham and other parts of the borough, so that people who actually went into the Broadwater flats originally found them palaces compared with what they were living in previously, i.e. back to back slums.

The 21 acre site for Broadwater Farm was found on land allocated to allotments to the side of the Lordship Recreation Ground.  The Moselle Brook which meandered through the area was culverted underground.  The high water table and alleged risk of flooding justified the use of piloti on all the estate’s principal blocks – stilts which raised them above an open ground floor.

Some later critics thought this an affectation – Jim Sneddon (an architect who lived on the Estate for two years) condemned the use of ‘inappropriate architectural forms to preserve the stylistic quality of [the architects’] modernist designs’.  But they unquestionably fulfilled another, uncontroversial, design goal of the time as the Council brochure to new tenants explained: (3)

Complete vehicle and pedestrian segregation has been aimed at, and all blocks are linked by pedestrian access deck below which car parking facilities are provided together with a network of service roads.

Those extensive below-block ground floors provided around 1.5 parking spaces per household for a newly-affluent working class.

Tangmere shopping centre as envisaged

In the original design, there were plans too for a significant local shopping centre – 24 shops including ‘a public house, supermarket, newsagents, etc.’ – in the Tangmere block. It was ‘intended to form a focal point of the scheme…a “ziggurat”, a building U-shaped in plan [with] shops on three sides around a central open space’. (4)

The artist’s impression also speaks to the relative working-class affluence that the Estate was intended both to reflect and foster.  The homes themselves reflected this progress – airy flats build to generous Parker Morris space standards with the mod cons now expected.

This 1988 image of the Tangmere shopping centre (after the 1985 riots from which it never recovered) shows a gritter reality. With thanks to Prof Miles Glendinning and Tower Block UK, University of Edinburgh.

The Council brochure pointed to other features and amenities of the new estate including the district heating system – ‘constant hot water for heating and domestic use…supplied to all homes from the central oil-fired boiler’.  It couldn’t be regulated in the individual flats but, as the Council pointed out, you could always turn a radiator off.

Most new residents had little cause to complain: (5)

We came from a house that was built in 1816, so when we first arrived here it was like a holiday camp. There were bathrooms, indoor loos, you didn’t have to go out in the freezing cold anymore.

Dolly Kiffin later recalled ‘a lot of peace’ on the Estate: (6)

The front room was quite big and it was so warm for the kids…It was all nice and clean. And especially at night when you sit over the patio and look all over, it’s a beautiful sight.

In all, 1063 new homes were provided, predominantly one-, two- and three-bed flats and maisonettes, in twelve blocks, housing around 3400. Aside from Tangmere, there were eight other six-storey blocks, adjoined by lower four-storey maisonette blocks. Two nineteen-storey towers, Northolt and Kenley, completed the ensemble.  (All the blocks were named after Second World War airfields.)

Kenley in 2016 after refurbishment

Taylor Woodrow Anglian won the £5.6m contract and began construction in 1967.  This was the heyday of industrialised building, then seen as essential to the effective delivery of the contemporary mass housing programme.  On Broadwater, the Larsen-Nielsen Large Panel System was employed.  The collapse of Ronan Point in May 1968 came as the point blocks were under construction and work halted for several months while a strengthened system was adopted.  Other blocks were also completed to a modified design.

The first families moved in in 1970; the last – into a small section of terraced housing – in 1973. All but 34 households – the local press described the exceptions as ‘the lucky 34 who will be given tenancy of brand new flats in the Broadwater Farm Estate’ – were people who had lost homes through slum clearance.  The Housing Committee looked forward to what they anticipated to be ‘an everlasting monument’ to their achievements. (7)

We might suppress the ready ironic snigger that comes with hindsight but it’s true enough that significant problems emerged early on the Estate.  The flat roofs seem to have created severe issues of water penetration and damp in many of the flats.  The heating system – now deemed inefficient – caused noise nuisance.   Cockroach infestation, lift breakdowns and frequent rubbish fires added to the litany of residents’ complaints.

This photograph shows the ground floor parking in 2016

If these could be judged construction flaws, another, larger, criticism was voiced of the Estate’s overall design.  Here the piloti and under-block spaces they created took centre-stage. Broadwater Farm’s fiercest critic was, again, Jim Sneddon:

This single element has possibly been the modern damaging, as it physically created a concrete ‘underworld’ for crime to thrive. Badly lit and overlooked by nothing, these ‘dark arches’ became a muggers’ paradise. Tenants became afraid to venture out after dark. Security began and ended at the tenants’ own front door.

The necessary counterpart to these surface level spaces and the goal of traffic-free access were the raised walkways which joined the various blocks of the Estate.

A 1988 image of Tangmere block with walkway to the right. With thanks to Prof Miles Glendinning and Tower Block UK, University of Edinburgh.

According to Paul Dennehy, a neighbourhood housing officer on the Estate in later years, the ‘streets in the sky’ provided rat-runs and escape routes for criminals: ‘If you’d done a crime elsewhere, you’d come to Broadwater Farm and that was it. The police couldn’t find you’. (8)  Decades later, as court cases revisited earlier violence, senior officers complained that Broadwater Farm was ‘impossible to police’. (9)

All this, of course, played firmly and persuasively into the ‘design disadvantagement’ thesis of Alice Coleman who argued that typical features of modernist housing estates – walkways and the concurrent lack of private ‘defensible space’ being the most salient – caused crime and antisocial behaviour.  Not for nothing was her major work, published in 1985, entitled Utopia on Trial.

The suggestive power of photography: the Estate not looking good in wet twilight in 1988. With thanks to Prof Miles Glendinning and Tower Block UK, University of Edinburgh.

Unsurprisingly, her critique was echoed by Jim Sneddon: ‘the architectural dreams of the 1930s [a reference to Le Corbuserian-inspired modernism] have become a nightmare in the ‘70s and ‘80s’. He criticised the confidence of the 1960s as ‘unbelievable arrogance on the part of the architectural profession’.

We’ll come back to this but it’s important from the outset to establish another and arguably determining outcome of these early problems.  The Estate became unpopular, ‘hard to let’ in the language of the day.

As early as 1973, a suppressed Council report had identified emerging difficulties.  Paraphrased here in a local press article, the report allegedly: (10)

added to the ammunition already available to those who believe as tower blocks reach skywards, they reach previously unscaled heights of human misery.  ‘Problem’ families – many of them single-parent families – were seen to be placed together, claimed the author.  The sight of unmarried West Indian mothers walking about the estate aggravated racial tension. Adolescent absentees from school frequent the blocks, terrorising the elderly.

In another reading, you might question the labelling of single-parent families and wonder why the ‘sight of unmarried West Indian mothers’ should cause such apparent grievance but racial tensions on the Estate were real.  The Tenants’ Association, established in 1970, initially excluded black members and its president was forced to resign in 1974 after a TV appearance speaking on behalf of the National Front. Still friction remained as black youths, even white youths seen to mix with their black peers, continued to be barred. (11)  These prejudices, more so as they were expressed by key actors beyond the Estate, came to play their own part in its stigmatisation.

By 1976, 55 percent of would-be Haringey tenants refused the offer of a home on Broadwater Farm and the turnover of tenancies was twice the Borough average. (12)  Clasford Stirling, who moved onto the Estate in 1978 and was a hero of its later revival, concluded Broadwater Farm had become a:

dumping ground…It was just a mass of graffiti, shit everywhere, people didn’t care, neighbour didn’t know neighbour, we had a lot of empty flats, people didn’t want to live over here, we had a lot of suicides, a lot of muggings and a lot of crime.

At this point, you might expect we’d move directly to the violent disorder of 1985 but the actual history of the Estate is more complicated.  Serious measures to address the undoubted problems of Broadwater Farm began in 1979 when it was designated part of the Priority Estates Project, a Government scheme promoting systems of local management and repair and tenant participation as means of improving what were judged the ‘worst’ of the country’s council estates.

Another 1988 image of Tangmere block shows the estate, with new landscaping, in more favourable light. With thanks to Prof Miles Glendinning and Tower Block UK, University of Edinburgh.

And improvement did occur.  A new neighbourhood housing office was set up and £1m spent on repairing and replacing windows, redecoration and improving security.  Caretaking and cleaning services were improved. The Council also made a concerted effort to recruit local staff to work on the Estate, particularly from its minority communities.

More importantly, the estate itself mobilised.  The Broadwater Farm Youth Association (BWFYA), founded by Dolly Kiffin, was set up in 1981, Clasford Stirling an early member.  Community leaders emerged, determined to revive the Estate and challenge its poor reputation.

All this appears to have made a significant impact.  By 1984, the Estate’s homes were no longer judged hard to let and crime rates had fallen markedly: burglaries by 62 percent, vehicle crime by 50 percent, for example. (13)

The estate map, photographed in 1988, captures work to do and continuing political tensions. With thanks to Prof Miles Glendinning and Tower Block UK, University of Edinburgh.

This was a success story but other realities were more intractable.  The Estate remained disproportionately home to Haringey’s disadvantaged ethnic minorities – 42 percent of its population came from New Commonwealth and Pakistan backgrounds compared to 32 percent of the Borough’s population as a whole.  More importantly, 60 percent of young people on the Estate were unemployed and around 75 per cent of its population said to be ‘dependent on some form of welfare support’. The Department of Environment classified the Estate as ‘extremely/severely depressed’.

One other factor, that which would loom largest in the period ahead, remained.  Many residents, particularly the younger ones and those from minority populations, resented what they saw – what they frequently experienced – as heavy-handed and oppressive policing. Efforts, led by Dolly Kiffin, to ease police-community relations foundered.  Next week’s post examines the tragic events of August 1985 and their more positive aftermath.

Sources

(1) DW Frith, London Borough of Haringey Department of Town Planning, Houses and Flats: a Social Study (May 1967).  The private rental figure comes from Anne Power, Estates on the Edge. The Social Consequences of Mass Housing in Northern Europe (Macmillan Press, 1997)

(2) Quoted in Lord Gifford, The Broadwater Farm Inquiry: report of the independent inquiry into disturbances of October 1985 at the Broadwater Farm Estate, Tottenham (1986), ch 2, p15. Lord Gifford’s Broadwater Farm Inquiry Report and its 1989 follow-up can be found, alongside much else, in the Bishopgate Institute’s online archive of the papers of Bernie Grant, Haringey Council leader and MP.

(3) The criticism is from Jim Sneddon, ‘My years of misery on Broadwater Farm’, Building Design, October 25, 1985, p12-13.  Later quotations from Sneddon are drawn from the same source. The quotation which follows is from Haringey Council, Broadwater Farm Tenants’ Information (ND)

(4) London Borough of Haringey, Proposed Local Shopping Centres at Broadwater Farm and Park Lane (ND) and Haringey Council, Broadwater Farm Tenants’ Information

(5) Bill Kemp quoted in Ben Willis, ‘Out of the darkness’, Inside Housing, 30 September 2005

(6) Quoted in Lord Gifford, The Broadwater Farm Inquiry, ch 2, pp15-16

(7) Quoted in Dominic Severs, ‘Rookeries and No-Go Estates: St Giles and Broadwater Farm, or middle-class fear of “non-street” housing’, Journal of Architecture, vol 15, no 4, August 2010

(8) Quoted in Ben Willis, ‘Out of the darkness’

(9) Chief Superintendent Colin Couch speaking in 2014 at the Old Bailey trial of Nicky Jacobs for the murder of PC Keith Blakelock (he was found not guilty) quoted in Elizabeth Hopkirk, ‘Design of Broadwater Farm Estate criticised at Old Bailey’, BD Online, 10 March 2014

(10) Quoted in Severs, ‘Rookeries and No-Go Estates’

(11) ‘Broadwater Farm: a “criminal estate”?  An interview with Dolly Kiffin’, Race and Class, vol 29, no 1, 1987

(12) Anne Power, Estates on the Edge

(13) Haringey Council, Evidence to the Broadwater Farm Public Inquiry (May 1986). The same source provides the figures on ethnic composition and social disadvantage which follow.