Open House London 2019: Town Halls – Civic Pride and Service

My second post marking Open House London 2019 offers a broadly chronological, whistle-stop tour of the municipal seats of government featured, in various forms – some grand, some humble – on the weekend of 21-22 September. (Open House venues are picked out in bold with links to their web page; the links in bold blue relate to previous blog posts.)

City of London Guildhall © 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.

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.

Old Vestry Offices, Enfield © Philafrenzy and made available through Wikimedia Commons

The Old Vestry Offices in Enfield, a small polygonal building built in 1829, originally housed the local beadle – responsible for local enforcement of the Poor Law – and then, until the 1930s, a police station.

This was an era of minimal – so-called night-watchman – local government when ad hoc, largely unrepresentative bodies administered basic services principally related to public health and safety.  London’s first city-wide administration was created in 1855 in the Metropolitan Board of Works.  This was initially a body of 45 members, elected indirectly by 43 London districts: the Vestry in 29 of the larger parishes and 12 District Boards of Works in which smaller parishes were combined (plus special bodies in the City and Woolwich if you’re counting).

Limehouse District Board of Works, now the Half Moon Theatre

The Limehouse District Board of Works built headquarters on White Horse Road in Ratcliff.  The building, erected between 1862 and 1864, was designed by the Board’s surveyor, CR Dunch – a ‘liberal interpretation of Italian Renaissance’ according to Pevsner.

Within four years the Board was grappling with one of the latest and largest of the cholera outbreaks to afflict London in this period – its sound advice to locals to avoid drinking potentially unsafe water availing little against the terrible sanitary conditions of the area.

Appropriately, after 1900 the building would house the Borough of Stepney’s Public Health Department.  In 1994, it became the home of the Half Moon Theatre, committed to giving ‘young people an opportunity to experience the best in young people’s theatre’.

Shoreditch Town Hall

Shoreditch Town Hall 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 for a vestry. But Shoreditch Vestry took particular pride in its path-breaking municipal electricity undertaking and here its motto, and that of the later Borough, ‘More Light, More Power’ took on more than merely 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.

Old Hampstead Town Hall

Old Hampstead Town Hall was, in inception, another vestry hall – designed by HE Kendall and Frederick Mew in Italianate style and claimed as ‘a decided ornament to that part of Haverstock Hill’ by the local press when opened in 1878. The Metropolitan Board of Works was abolished in 1889 and replaced by the London County Council. London Metropolitan Boroughs were established in 1900.  The building became the headquarters of the new Metropolitan Borough of Hampstead and was extended in 1910.

Limehouse Town Hall

Another building to undergo this transformation was Limehouse Town Hall, opened in 1881 and designed in Italian palazzo style by local architects Arthur and Christopher Harston as  ‘a structure that…shall do honour to the parish of Limehouse’.  The vestry hall  became the offices of 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 area’s MP.  It’s been run by the Limehouse Town Hall Consortium Trust as a community venue since 2004.

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 into 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.

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, built 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.

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. Some further images here.

Lambeth Town Hall

Lambeth Town Hall can’t compete with that but it’s a fine building, also Edwardian Baroque, whose redbrick and Portland stone facades are capped by an imposing corner tower. It was the work of Septimus Warwick and Austen Hall, and was opened on 29 April 1908 by the then Prince and Princess of Wales. Its dignified council chamber and some lavish interior rooms remain impressive.

Bethnal Green Town Hall, now the Town Hall Hotel and Apartments

Bethnal Green Town Hall, now a hotel, was opened in 1910 to Edwardian Baroque designs by Percy Robinson and W Alban Jones.  Sculptures by Henry Poole adorn the exterior.  The growth of local government responsibilities in the interwar period compelled the opening of a large extension to the rear, designed by ECP Monson – restrained neo-classical outside, sumptuous and modern inside – in 1939.  (Monson was also a significant architect of the era’s council housing such as the briefly notorious Lenin Estate built in the 1920s when the Council was briefly under joint Labour-Communist control.)

The UK Supreme Court, formerly Middlesex Guildhall © 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 and opened in 1913.  It was sympathetically adapted in 2009 to serve as the headquarters of the UK Supreme Court.

Islington Town Hall © Alan Ford and made available through Wikimedia Commons

Islington Town Hall, opened in 1925, takes us into the heyday of local government as councils assumed ever greater powers and purpose. It was designed by ECP Monson again. Its neo-classical style has been described as old-fashioned for its time but it’s finely executed.

Kingston Guildhall, 1935 © Kingston History Centre

Kingston Guildhall was opened in 1935, designed for the Royal Borough of Kingsto-upon-Thames by Maurice Webb in contemporary neo-Georgian style though, more unusually in red brick with dressings in Portland stone. Two extensions were added in the 1970s and 1980s after the creation of the new London Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames and its incorporation into the area of the Greater London Council.

Hackney Town Hall

Hackney Town Hall, designed by Henry Lanchester and Thomas Lodge, is also formally neo-classical but its lines and styling are sleeker, more modern and, internally it’s a masterpiece of Art Deco.  The Town Hall was formally opened in 1937 by Lord Snell, Labour Leader of the House of the Lords, he described it as a building:

devoted to the business of living one with another to the benefit of all…It represented something more than mere stone and wood put together; it embodied the ideal of social living…a symbol of their idealism and a focal point for the services of their great borough, and he hoped they would find in it an atmosphere of quiet dignity, purity of administration and of love for the purpose to which it was devoted.

London City Hall © Garry Knight and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Finally, we can bring the story up to date by referring to the latest iteration of London local government.  Mrs Thatcher abolished the Greater London Council in 1985; the The new Greater London Authority  was established in 2000. City Hall, the home of the Mayor of London and Greater London Assembly, was opened two years later – a high-tech building created by Norman Foster and Partners. Not everybody likes its appearance but the building is notable for reflecting current imperatives of sustainable design.

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Open House London, 2019: A Tour of the Capital’s Council Housing

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. In 1981, at peak, there were 769,996 council homes in the capital and they housed near 31 percent of its population.

It’s partly this ubiquity and familiarity – and the fact, of course, that most council housing is happily ‘ordinary’ – that explains why few council estates make it into Open House London, the annual celebration of built heritage taking place this year on the weekend of the 21-22 September.

Open House itself has, to put it kindly, an ambivalent relationship to social housing. It features, as we will see, genuine celebrations of council housing’s past and present but too often controversial regeneration schemes are showcased with no reference to the disruption of established communities and the loss of social rent homes they entail.

This post offers a chronological tour of the Open House London venues which do mark council housing’s progressive history and present necessity.  This year, the Open House locations will be picked out in bold with the relevant link to the venue’s webpage and I’ll add links (in bold blue), where possible, to past blog posts which provide further information.

We’ll begin, however, with a brief reference to some of the early garden suburbs which, while overwhelmingly middle-class in character, did provide a model for later council schemes.

Brentham Garden Suburb

The bohemian Bedford Park Estate, begun in 1875, might be described as the first cottage suburb.  Gidea Park, promoted by several Liberal MPs (including Sir Tudor Walters of the famous wartime report on post-war housing) from 1897, is notable for the architectural contribution of a number of architects who would go on to design council schemes including Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin.  The latter were the chief architects of the Brentham Garden Suburb in 1910 – important as a co-partnership scheme intended to cater for at least the more affluent of the working class.

Hampstead Garden Suburb, founded in 1906 by Henrietta Barnett, was intended as a mixed community though it rapidly – given the quality of its design and build and relatively high rents – became a rather select middle-class enclave. Unwin and Parker were again key figures and the guided walk offered focuses on the Suburb’s ‘Artisan Quarter’.

Tower Gardens Estate

Turning to council housing proper, it’s good to see Tower Gardens (or the White Hart Lane Estate) featured – designed and built by the London County Council (LCC) before the First World War: a cottage estate for working people inspired by the Garden City and Arts and Crafts movements of the day.  Just under 1000 homes were built on the Estate before the war halted construction; a further 1266 houses and flats were added – in plainer style but in keeping with Garden City ideals – in a northwards extension to the Estate between the wars.

Roe Green Village

Roe Green Village wasn’t a council scheme – it was designed by Frank Baines in 1916, chief architect of the Office of Works, as housing for workers engaged in First World War armaments production.  He had earlier designed the exemplary Well Hall Estate in Eltham for the same purpose. Both provided important inspiration for the ‘Homes for Heroes’ and council estates which emerged at the end of the war.

The Becontree Estate

In terms of size and ambition, there was no more important such estate than Becontree in east London.  The LCC built 89,049 council homes in the capital between the wars; some 26,000 of these in the Becontree Estate in Dagenham, first mooted in 1919. It was the largest of the LCC’s interwar estates, housing by 1939 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.’  Take the opportunity, if you go, to visit the Valence House Museum which contains interesting exhibits on the estate.

An early photograph of the Fellowship Inn

The Bellingham Estate in south London was another large interwar LCC estate with over 2000 homes and a population of 12,000, largely complete by 1923.  The Fellowship Inn, now repurposed as a community venue including bar, cinema and café by Phoenix Community Housing, is an interesting example of the ‘improved public house’ that the Council hoped would ‘improve’ council house tenants.

Eastbury Manor and estate

It’s a stretch to include 16^th century Eastbury Manor House in this listing but I’m fond of it and it has a rich municipal history amongst other things. It’s incongruously but delightfully situated plumb in the middle of another interwar council estate.

Cass House, the Gascoyne Estate

The guided walk I’m leading which starts at the 1948 Gascoyne Estate (yet another LCC scheme in inception) takes in other similar interwar tenement blocks as well as some representative modernist high-rise. Vaine House and Granard House on Gascoyne II were inspired by Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation and would provide a model for the more famous Alton West scheme.  It’s an eclectic mix and the walk sets out to illustrate a tapestry of London’s council housing over the years rather than present any of its better-know showpieces. (Please note numbers are strictly limited.)

Acton Gardens Estate

The Acton Gardens Estate was formerly known as the South Acton Estate or even (as a reference to a local laundry industry) ‘Soapsud Island’.  Begun under a post-war slum clearance and redevelopment programme in 1949 and built over 30 years, South Acton became, with almost 2100 homes, one of the largest council estates in west London and it reflected that history in its range of housing and, in particular, the high-rise blocks that emerged from the later 1950s. It became a ‘problem estate’ and comprehensive regeneration was planned from 1996; the 21-storey Barrie Tower was demolished in 2001. You’re invited to admire the very significant changes that have taken place in the design and form of the estate since then and perhaps rightly so but it’s worth noting that the new estate contains 900 fewer affordable homes than its predecessor. (1)

Golden Lane Estate

The Golden Lane Estate, inaugurated in 1950 and designed for the City of London by Powell, Chamberlin and Bon (who went on to design the neighbouring Barbican), is rightly celebrated for the innovative thinking and architecture which provided a model for the best of post-war council housing, particularly in the facilities intended to sustain ‘community’ and create ‘neighbourhood’ in an urban setting.  Note that current plans to ‘densify’ the estate are opposed by many residents.

Balfron Tower

The fight to save Balfron Tower is already lost. Designed by Ernő Goldfinger for 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. Now the Grade II-listed block’s flats are in the hands of property developers Londonewcastle and being marketed to the affluent and hip middle classes. Visit Balfron Tower by all means but please don’t disregard this betrayal of the social purpose that built it.

Trellick Tower

Fortunately, Balfron’s younger sister, Trellick Tower, opened in 1972, remains – despite the depredations of Right to Buy – in council ownership.

The World’s End Estate

Another landmark estate, this one created by the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in happier times is the World’s End Estate. It’s an estate set on the banks of the Thames, completed in 1977 when the working class were still permitted river views.  Designed by Eric Lyons and HT (‘Jim’) Cadbury-Brown, in plain terms World’s End 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.

Cressingham Gardens

In some respects, World’s End marked the end of an era of large, high-rise construction. 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 the Cressingham Gardens Estate.

Cressingham Gardens was described in 1981 by Lord Esher, president of RIBA, as ‘warm and informal…one of the nicest small schemes in England’. 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 a well-loved estate with a strong sense of community. Unfortunately, as part of Lambeth’s commendable pledge to build new homes at council rent in the borough, it has become another victim of ‘regeneration’; in actual fact, the threat of demolition.

The principal driver of this policy in London 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.  A second is ‘densification’ – a belief that working-class homes must be built at greater density to accommodate the capital’s growing population.  Not all regeneration is bad but where it means the destruction of good homes and the wiping out of existing communities it should be opposed.

Central Hill

A second signature Hollamby estate, also featured in Open House this year, is Central Hill in Upper Norwood, completed in 1973. It’s 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 too is threatened with demolition. The residents of both estates 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.

West Kensington and Gibbs Green

West Ken and Gibbs Green are two neighbouring estates of 760 homes in total in Hammersmith (built in 1974 and 1961 respectively) which have been fighting against demolition as part of a massive commercially-led redevelopment scheme since 2009. Residents are now campaigning to form a community-owned housing association which can protect their homes and community. As importantly, their ‘People’s Plan’ (created in collaboration with Architects for Social Housing) shows that necessary regeneration can be achieved not only without the loss of social housing but with its expansion – in this case, with 250 new homes built for sale on the open market to pay for the estate upgrades and seventy new social rented homes.  Visit the residents’ website West Ken and Gibbs Green – the People’s Estates for further information.

An early photograph of Thamesmead

Thamesmead on the south bank of the Thames Estuary represented planning and construction in an earlier era of high ambition. A gleam in the eye of the LCC from the fifties and then, from 1966, the Greater London Council’s ‘Woolwich-Erith Project’, it was envisaged as a ‘town of the 21st Century’ with a population of between 60- to 100,000 people. Only 12,000 had settled by 1974 and the estate – with its difficult location, poor transport links and lack of facilities – was considered by many a failure. Taken over by Peabody in 2015, benefiting from new investment and the now delayed arrival of Crossrail in 2019, it’s on the up now and worth visiting for both its past and future promise. The tour, led by the Twentieth Century Society, will allow you to visit some of the highlights of the original architecture of the GLC 1968 masterplan, some of which sadly are now under threat.

The Brunswick Centre

From the late 1960s, a new era began in council housing design as discredited tower blocks were replaced by new forms of low-rise, high density housing.  The Brunswick Centre, completed in 1972, was originally planned as a private development. Due to financial difficulties, the residential section was leased to the London Borough of Camden for use as council housing while the developer retained ownership of the structure and shopping areas.

Stoneleigh Terrace, the Whittington Estate

Though not a Camden scheme as such, the Centre fits well with what became the celebrated signature style of Camden Borough Council into the 1970s. This can be seen firstly in the Whittington Estate, begun in 1969, designed by Peter Tábori, a young architect then in his mid-twenties. It’s a scheme in typical 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.

Alexandra Road

Another Camden scheme is widely judged to be one of the most attractive and architecturally accomplished council estates in the country, Alexandra Road, listed Grade II* in 1993.  The Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate was the work of Neave Brown, awarded the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in October 2017. He sadly died three months later. The estate is 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’.

The Page High Estate

Despite knowing the area pretty well, I have to confess the Page High Estate in Wood Green was new to me.  It’s social housing, designed for a consortium consisting of Haringey Council, Sainsbury, Woolworth’s and World of Housing Property Trust (later Sanctuary Housing) by the Dry Halasz Dixon Partnership in 1975.  To be fair, the estate is easy to miss – built six and seven storeys above the ground on top of a car park and store. The Tenants’ Association offering the tour was set up in 2017 to improve repairs and maintenance and campaign for the improvement of the estate. Please support them.

Dujardin Mews with the Alma Estate to the read

Finally, we come to post-1979 schemes and all of you reading this will understand the changed world that council housing – social housing as we must now call it – has inhabited since that date.  Dujardin Mews in Ponders End is an Enfield Council scheme designed by Karakusevic Carson Architects. The first phase, completed in 2018 is lovely and multiple award-winning while the scheme as a whole is part of the larger Alma Estate regeneration.  Despite researching assiduously, I’ve not discovered the tenure details of Dujardin Mews (I will amend or add to this if anyone can tell me) but the larger scheme offers the usual mix of ‘affordable’, shared ownership and properties for sale – an increase in homes and a net loss of social rent homes.

The Kings Crescent Estate

The Kings Crescent Estate was originally built by Hackney Council in 1969. The estate’s two nineteen-storey tower blocks were demolished in 2000 and 2002 alongside some of the lower blocks, around 357 homes in all.  The current regeneration scheme creates 273 new homes overall but of these only 76 are social rented; a further 101 social rent homes will be refurbished. It is a further reminder of the twisted economics of current social housing finance.

I’m sorry not to be more positive. There is a small uptick in council housebuilding. Councils are being allowed to borrow and many new schemes are underway but, almost invariably, they are small-scale and financed – through both necessity and choice – through public-private partnerships which too frequently prioritise non-social rented homes. 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 exemplars of what we can and should achieve in a brighter future.

Notes

(1) For further detail on the South Acton Estate, read the excellent chapter by Peter Guillery in Guillerry and Kroll (eds), Mobilising Housing Histories: Learning from London’s Past (RIBA Publishing, 2017)

Council Housing in Gateshead, part II post-1945: ‘The world has moved on’

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1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, Multi-storey

Last week’s post examined the huge growth of council housing that took place in Gateshead in the aftermath of World War One. Although some 10,500 children were evacuated at the beginning of the Second World War in September 1939, the town – despite being a major industrial centre – suffered very little from the wartime bombing anticipated.

The war, however, exacerbated an existing housing crisis and in 1942 it was estimated that 5620 people in the town were living in homes scheduled for demolition.  One early response to that crisis was the temporary prefab programme though only a relatively small number of the 156,623 erected nationally were allocated to the Gateshead area – 25 on Sunderland Road and 55 at The Drive in what was then part of Felling Urban District Council. (1)  The Borough of Gateshead itself had declared against temporary housing.

Orlit flats, Saltwell Road

Permanent prefabricated housing was another attempt to solve the housing crisis and deal with the shortages of materials and skilled labour which persisted into the 1950s. A precast reinforced concrete Orlit block of 18 flats survives on Saltwell Road; 150 semi-detached Dorran houses, formed of concrete panel walls, were built on Rose Street and Carr Hill Lane at Black Hill and elsewhere in the early part of the decade. Most of the latter, still in council ownership, were refurbished and reclad in the 1990s and more thoroughly renovated in 2014.

Dorran houses on Carr Hill Road, the one on the left presumably in private ownership and unrenovated

A longer-term product of war and the politics of post-war reconstruction was the planning movement, exemplified in the formation of the Ministry of Town and Country Planning and the New Town movement.  However, proposals in the Pepler-MacFarlane, North‐East Area Development Plan of 1949 to develop a New Town of 80,000 population in Barlow, eight miles to the west of Gateshead, were stymied by its distance.

Meanwhile the Council had announced ambitious plans in 1945 to build 1000 permanent homes within two years.  In practice, in unprecedentedly difficult post-war circumstances, only 171 new homes were completed by 1947 and a further 387 by the end of the following year in new estates at Highfield and Blue Quarries.

Hawkshead Place, Beacon Lough Estate

Another 1300 homes were built at the Lobley Hill and Beacon Lough Estates by 1950.  The latter was ‘a large and sprawling low-density estate’ according to Simon Taylor and David Lovie: (2)

typical of the large brick-built cottage estates constructed in many parts of the country in the years immediately after the war. With its numerous winding side roads and culs-de-sac, it was recognised by the Minister of Health as one of the best laid out housing estates in the country.

The ‘Wrekenton Neighbourhood Unit’, just south of Beacon Lough, of 1372 homes was another large-scale project. The Cedars Green Estate, on the other hand, was a deliberate contrast – small and secluded, comprising just 59 homes and regarded locally as a prestige development.

Slum clearance and the new Barn Close flats in 1955

By 1956, the Council had built 5482 new homes since the end of the war but pressure on land and new opposition to urban sprawl was forcing consideration of new approaches as the drive to finally clear the slums intensified.  This huge rebuilding drive was overseen by Labour Alderman Ben Nicholson Young who served as chair of the Housing Committee from 1945 to 1974. Leslie Berry was appointed Chief Architect in 1958 and the Borough Architect’s Department gained a national reputation for the novelty and quality of its designs.

Brisbane Court, Sydney Court, Adelaide Court and Melbourne Court , Barn Close, from the south, 1987 (http://www.towerblock.eca.ed.ac.uk)

A contemporary image of Regent Court

The Council’s first high-rise blocks – four ten-storey slab blocks – were completed at Barn Close in the centre of town in 1955. Three eight-storey blocks – Priory, Peareth and Park Courts – were completed on East Street and the ten-storey Regent Court two years later as a further element in central area redevelopment. (3)

Chandless clearance, 1956

Chandless Estate, St. Mary’s Court in foreground, 1987 (http://www.towerblock.eca.ed.ac.uk)

The Chandless Redevelopment Area nearby was approved in 1960. The three 16-storey towers, providing 384 flats, built in Phase I of the scheme were designed by the Architect’s Department and built by Stanley Miller Ltd – a major local contractor – using an innovative in situ concrete system.

A contemporary image of Bensham Court

Berry also oversaw the design of the 16-storey tower, Bensham Court, completed in 1963 and the four 12-storey towers at Beacon Lough in 1967.  Redheugh and Eslington Courts, completed in the Teams Redevelopment Area in 1966 were the tallest Gateshead blocks at 21 storeys.  Further high-rise continued across the borough.

A contemporary image of Redheugh and Eslington Courts

In sheer numbers, the results were undeniably impressive.  Gateshead built over 1000 new homes in 1965 and, in that same year, its 10,000^th council home.  By 1970, as the municipal borough’s historian recounts with some civic pride, 10,686 homes had been built since the war, at a rate of almost two each working day and three times the national average. (4)

‘Gunnel houses’ Beacon Lough East Estate

Beacon Lough East Estate, 1970 (Photographer, The Studio; Gateshead Libraries, GL002509)

And, amidst the drive to build big, were attempts to create innovative mixed development schemes.  One such was the extension to the Beacon Lough Estate, built in the mid-sixties in which four 12-storey blocks in a parkland setting were accompanied by 165 flat-roofed ‘gunnel houses’ (named after the passageways connecting the semi-detached homes), patio bungalows for older people as well as some conventional brick-built terraced housing. A primary school, pub and shops completed the ensemble. The Estate won a Government award for ‘Good Design in Housing’ in 1968.

Prime minister Harold Wilson opening St Cuthbert’s Village, 1970 (Gateshead Libraries, LS000214)

The most novel was St Cuthbert’s Village, completed in 1969, comprising: (2)

a maze of low- and medium-rise linking ‘scissor blocks’ with roof gardens, on either side of Askew Road and, radiating from the centre and linked by various communal walkways and steps around open communal areas.

St Cuthbert’s Village, 1987 (http://www.towerblock.eca.ed.ac.uk)

It was planned as a self-contained community of 3500 people, largely young single people and couples, and opened, to much fanfare, by prime minister Harold Wilson in April 1970. But facilities followed slowly and residents felt isolated.  The estate’s high-density living, far from promoting the neighbourliness intended, seems to have created dispute and ill-feeling. By 1992, a local press report was describing St Cuthbert’s Village as ‘as estate plagued by soaring crime and poor design’. Gateshead Metropolitan Borough Council reckoned each flat cost £1000 a year to maintain compared to the borough average of £424.  A survey of residents concluded that fully 85 percent wanted to move out. (5)  By 1995, all but the 18-storey point block had been demolished.

Clasper Village plan

A general disenchantment from high-rise was manifest from the late 1960s, reflecting – practically – its failure to deliver promised cost-savings and problems with construction and design, notably on system-built estates.  One early local response to this was the construction of Clasper Village in 1970 though the choice to build low-rise cluster blocks also reflected the existence of underground mine workings in the Teams area which precluded high-rise construction.

Clasper Village, c1975

In 2004, observers commented on the popularity of its ‘intimate scale’ – ‘accommodation there has always been in high demand; it remains an attractive and well-maintained residential unit’. (2)  Seven years later, the Gateshead Housing Company found little to praise, complaining of its lack of housing mix (the estate comprised only two-bed flats), a void rate of 21 percent, an annual turnover of lettings of near 15 percent, and problems of condensation and water penetration affecting most of its homes. Levels of anti-social behaviour were said to be about average but perceptions were as significant: ‘the stigma and reputation has significantly affected demand for properties on the estate’. (6)

All that goes to remind us that all judgements are necessarily temporary and that reputational damage can be as harmful to estates as design flaws as real as the latter were in the case of Clasper Village.  Demolition of the estate commenced in 2014. In May,. this year, as part of a £1.8 million funding deal with Homes England, the Council committed to a £30 million regeneration of the 12 acre site. (7)

A contemporary image of Priory Court

Other high-rise estates suffered less dramatic problems – the lack of play areas at Barn Close was said to have caused problems of antisocial behaviour, Priory Court was apparently plagued by beetles breeding in heating ducts – but the shift from high-rise was now complete. (2)

Nursery Lane demolitions (http://www.towerblock.eca.ed.ac.uk)

System building was part of the problem. Four ‘Ronan Point-type’ tower blocks at Nursery Lane, built using the Larsen Nielsen system and designed by John Poulson for Felling Urban District Council in 1968, were demolished by the new metropolitan authority in 1987. (8)

In 2004, Gateshead Council transferred its entire housing stock of some 20,000 homes to the Gateshead Housing Company, an arms-length management organisation (ALMO).  The promise was to improve housing services; the practical necessity was to secure funding needed to carry out the Decent Homes Programme announced by the Labour government four years earlier.  The ALMO’s initial ten-year life-span was extended by a further five in 2015.

Demolition of Chandless Estate, 2015 (photograph by Sharon Bailey, courtesy of the Spirit of Chandless website)

The decision to demolish the Chandless Estate, a system-built estate suffering structural issues said to prevent economic repair, was taken in 2010.  As the 16-storey Monk Court block in Chandless was being prepared for demolition in 2013, Councillor Catherine Donovan (Gateshead Council’s Cabinet member for Housing) concluded ‘the world has moved on and families expect different things of their homes’. (9)  Demolition was complete by 2015.

Two years later, Gateshead Council committed to building its first new council homes for thirty years – seven homes in Dunston and 14 in Winlaton and Blaydon. The Council also announced plans to 36 homes through its wholly-owned business, the Gateshead Trading Company though just 15 percent of the latter were categorised as ‘affordable’. (10)

All these were a modest component of a larger plan to build 11,000 new homes across the Gateshead area by 2030. The larger target would be met principally through cooperation with so-called ‘volume providers’ (including a joint venture between the Council and developers Galliford Try and housing association Home Group) as well as by support given to small and medium-enterprise building companies. (11)

Amidst ongoing policy changes and recent modest moves giving local authorities greater powers and financial freedoms to build, all this is – to say the least – shifting terrain.  It’s also well beyond my comfort zone, both practically and ideologically.  Suffice to say, that a relatively straightforward and highly cost-effective model which built what we must now call social-rent homes in huge numbers in Gateshead and across the country has been replaced by a system of complex public-private partnerships, opaque finances, and ‘mixed developments’ which all too often fails to deliver the genuinely affordable homes most required.

Central Gateshead, 1971

As we’ve seen, local government didn’t get everything right but it’s hard not to applaud the ambition or admire the scale of what was achieved. That ambition and scale could be a little intimidating, perhaps overreaching, at times as the above image suggests. Nevertheless, it’s entirely proper, in my view at least, to envy an era when the local and national state invested heavily to secure decent homes for all whilst, of course, we learn its lessons, both positive and negative.

Sources

My thanks to Gateshead Libraries for providing several of the images used in this post.

(1) According to the invaluable and comprehensive Prefab Museum website.

(2) Simon Taylor and David B Lovie, Gateshead. Architecture on a Changing English Urban Landscape (English Heritage, 2004)

(3) For further detail, see the incredibly useful and informative database provided by Tower Block UK.

(4) FWD Manders, A History of Gateshead (Gateshead Corporation, 1973)

(5) Andrew Smith, ‘Estate to be Demolished’, The Journal, 3 September 1992

(6) Minutes of The Gateshead Housing Company Asset Management Committee, 30 June 2011

(7) Gateshead Council, ‘£1.8 million to boost development of new homes in Gateshead‘, 22 May 2019

(8) ‘Gateshead to demolish four towers’, Building Design, no. 832, 17 April 1987, p44

(9) Katie Davies, ‘Gateshead’s Chandless Estate is demolished bit by bit’, Chronicle Live, 12 September 2013

(10) Peter Apps, ‘Gateshead Council to build first homes for 30 years’, Inside Housing, 24 November 2017

(11) Gateshead Council, Housing Delivery Test Action Plan (ND, c2017)

Council Housing in Gateshead, part I to 1939: ‘The liberty of the subject’

Tags

1920s, 1930s

JB Priestley visited Gateshead in 1933. It’s fair to say he wasn’t impressed: (1)

If there is any town of like size in Europe that can show a similar lack of civic dignity and all the evidences of an urban civilisation, I should like to know its name … No true civilisation could have produced such a town.

I’ll annoy some locals today by harking back to that pejorative view and, unsurprisingly, at the time the town’s politicians and press were outraged. The Journal noted that Priestley ‘was accompanied by vile weather and a severe cold in his head’ and lamented that the latter hadn’t ‘kept Mr Priestley confined to his hotel’.  Others, more objectively, pointed to the contemporary impact of the Great Depression. (2)

Of course, in defence of Priestley, his English Journey was intended to highlight exactly the inequality he described so damningly; the poverty of parts of England which might already have been described as ‘left behind’.  And his social commentary would play its own part in the project to build a better Britain in the aftermath of World War Two.

Nineteenth-century Gateshead slums: Bankwell Stairs leading to Pipewellgate in 1886 (to the left), and Friars Dene Road, Old Ford, not dated

There had, in any case, already been attempts to improve local conditions, seen in the Borough’s slum clearance schemes and grand new housing estates. These would continue and Gateshead, both in terms of scale and innovation, would be among the leaders in efforts to better house the working class. It was not, however, among the pioneers and, naturally, as we shall see, it didn’t get everything right in its own journey.

Gateshead was another of the boom towns of the Britain’s nineteenth-century industrial revolution, growing from a population of 8597 in 1801 to 85,692 just ninety years later: a municipal borough in 1835 and a county borough in 1889.  That breakneck growth created the slum conditions one might expect but the regular appeals of the borough’s Medical Officer of Health to use the building powers granted by the 1890 Housing Act went unheeded. A committee of the Council convened to consider the issue in 1899 concluded: (3)

They saw no reason for the building of workingmen’s dwellings by the Corporation as there was always plenty of that class of house to be procured within reasonable distance.

If that were an apparently practical objection to state intervention, personal and ideological opposition were perhaps stronger. The Liberal alderman William Henry Dunn believed ‘dirty people made dirty houses’; he ‘would not interfere with their pleasure in filth’.  A few years later, Alderman Robert Affleck, whose family were among Gateshead’s major private developers, opposing a later housing bill suggested that it would:

filch away the liberty of the subject. Occupants of lodging houses, people who often would make no effort to better their environment, were by this Bill to be given the same privileges as ordinary citizens.

In fact, the Council did close almost 390 tenements as unfit for human habitation under sanitary legislation prior to the First World War. But the hostility to outside intervention was extended even to private philanthropy when, in 1911, it rejected a proposal by the Sutton Trust to build its own ‘model dwellings’ for the working class. They were built in Newcastle instead.

Ellison Square, central Gateshead, built c1851

In a similar fashion as late as 1917, the Council peremptorily rejected the offer made by the Local Government Board promising ‘substantial financial assistance from public funds’ to local councils prepared to implement approved programmes of working-class housing.

Yet, just two years later, the Council acknowledged the need to build 1950 houses in three years.  The explanation lay, firstly, in the changed politics of the post-war era and the commitment made by prime minister Lloyd George – but seemingly accepted across the political spectrum – ‘to make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in’.  Secondly, the Council was now subject to the legislative mandate of the 1919 Housing Act which required all authorities not only to undertake a survey of local housing needs but prepare concrete plans to meet them. In Gateshead, one in three working-class families was found to be living in overcrowded conditions.

Gainsborough Crescent, Carr Hill Estate

The changed times were obvious well before the new Housing Act received the Royal Assent in July 1919.  The Council had established a Housing Committee in February. A town hall meeting, convened by local churchmen in April and addressed by housing reformer Seebohm Rowntree, added pressure from below. The Council purchased 65 acres of land at Carr Hill and Sheriff Hill for building purposes and appointed local architect Richard Wylie to design the new schemes.

Then the Council faltered before initial plans for just 360 new homes were revised upwards to match the more ambitious proposals of other local councils.  A revised plan for 650 was then accepted by the Ministry of Health and Housing but only as a first instalment of a larger scheme.

The first homes were completed at Sheriff Hill, those at Carr Hill to the north-east a little later. Some 232 had been built by 1923. If the numbers were smaller than anticipated, the quality generally was not. These were the garden suburbs of the early post-war era when finance and politics briefly meshed to deliver the promise of ‘Homes for Heroes’.

The Avenue, Sheriff Hill

Broadway on Sheriff Hill and its cross-streets best capture the ambition of the moment with their mix of parlour and non-parlour semi-detached houses and short terraces, the end houses treated as ‘pavilions’ and marked by steep gables and hips. The second phase which formed the Carr Hill Estate – a further 342 houses – used a harder red brick and sometimes render on the upper floor. (4)

Broadway, Sheriff Hill

The generous programme of the 1919 Act had been halted by spending cuts in July 1921 and later estates characterise the more economical construction of later legislation. But the drive to build remained; at the end of 1923, the Borough reckoned 2839 new homes were needed to rehouse its population decently.

Rawling Road, Field House Estate

The Field House estate in the Saltwell district was completed by the late 1920s and in the early thirties Gateshead was developing new estates at Old Ford, Victoria Road, Wrekenton, Deckham Hall and Lobley Hill. By 1936, the Borough had built around 2360 council homes.

But the 1930s introduced something which was surprisingly new in the sector – a determined attempt, spearheaded by national legislation, to rehouse those living in the worst conditions.  Generally, the relatively high rents of council housing and council expectations of ‘good tenants’ who could be expected to reliably pay them had excluded the poorest from council housing. Labour’s 1930 Housing Act targeted slum clearance and incentivised the rehousing of slum-dwellers.

The ‘National’ Government’s 1935 Housing Act added overcrowding to existing definitions of unfit housing. The survey it required that all councils take of local housing conditions revealed Gateshead as having the second worst housing of county boroughs in England and Wales (Sunderland came first) – almost 16 percent pf the population were living in overcrowded homes.  The continued prevalence of ‘Tyneside flats’ – single-storey flats upstairs and down in two-storey terraces estimated to form 60 percent of Gateshead’s housing stock in 1911 – was part of the explanation.

Demolition of the Pipewellgate area, 1935

In the early 1930s, a major slum clearance drive in Gateshead cleared some of its worst housing in the Barn Close, Pipewellgate, Hilgate, Bridge Street, Church Street and Old Fold area. By 1939, some 1654 families had been rehoused.

Estates built in the 1930s specifically to rehouse the slum population were often built more cheaply in the attempt to makes their rents more affordable. More intangibly, some would retain a certain stigma marking this origin, not least among better-off and longer-term council tenants who considered themselves more ‘respectable’.

Aerial view of the Deckham Hall Estate

In the case of the Deckham Hall Estate, the former at least was certainly true.  Begun in 1936 by the North-Eastern Housing Association created for the purpose, it’s an estate of generally semi-detached two-bedroomed housing: (5)

The houses were of very uniform appearance compared with those built at Carr Hill and Bensham. Orange brick was used throughout and less attention given to landscaping, with only a few green spaces and evidently no tree planting, producing an austere effect overall.

The estate’s layout of irregular concentric rings earned it the nickname among locals of the ‘Frying Pan’ or, less politically correctly, the ‘African Village’.

Chiswick Gardens, Deckham Hall Estate

The estate is still seen by some as a ‘bad estate’, undeservedly according to Martin Crookston and I’m sure to the resentment of many of its current residents. In 2006, the estate still suffered, in the Council’s words – the exclamation mark is in the original – from a: (6)

poor environment … caused by low grade boundaries and public realm materials, under-investment in upkeep and a lack of attractive landscaping in both public (!) areas and private gardens.

Low take-up of Right to Buy seemed to confirm its unpopular reputation. More to the point perhaps and certainly illustrating that interplay of negatives that characterises what used to be called ‘hard to let’ estates, the unemployment rate stood at 12 percent, compared to a local average of seven. (7)

Hendon Road, Deckham Hall Estate

The photographs from my visit to the estate (now owned and managed by the Home Housing Association and Gateshead Housing Company) earlier this year show the environmental upgrades that have taken place since, part of a package intended also to address what was euphemistically described as ‘tenure imbalance’, in other words a perceived lack of owner-occupiers.  The estate looks neat and generally well-cared for, though still (to be honest) a little austere.

Goodwood Avenue, Racecourse Estate, begun in the late 1930s

But we’re moving ahead of ourselves.  Back in 1939, Gateshead had built 3104 council homes. After a second world war with renewed demands to clear the slums, Gateshead would build on an even larger scale.  Some of the newbuild would replicate the ‘cottage suburbs’ of the interwar period but there was also a significant shift to high-rise.  We’ll follow that story in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) JB Priestley, English Journey (1934)

(2) Tony Henderson, ‘JB Priestley’s Views on the North East Examined Again’, The Journal, 26 October 2009

(3) This and the quotations which follow are drawn from FWD Manders, A History of Gateshead (Gateshead Corporation, 1973)

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

(5) Simon Taylor and David B Lovie, Gateshead. Architecture on a Changing English Urban Landscape (English Heritage, 2004)

(6) Gateshead Council, Urban Design, Heritage & Character Analysis Report: Deckham, March 2006. The Right to Buy data is drawn from Nathaniel Lichfield and Partners, Deckham Neighbourhood Housing Analysis (ND but c2006)

(7) Martin Crookston, Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow?