Robin Hood Gardens, Poplar: ‘presence, dignity and a bit grim’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Brutalism, GLC, LCC, Poplar, Regeneration, Tower Hamlets

We left Robin Hood Gardens in limbo last week. In 2008, Tower Hamlets Council had voted for its demolition.  Its supporters – primarily architects excited by its founding vision but also campaigners for social housing – mobilised to save it.

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

Much of the architectural case appears to me somewhat self-referential – an argument about the ‘iconic’ status of the buildings and ‘seminal’ role of the Smithsons with – in many, though not all, of the contributions – little regard for the lived reality of the estate for those who inhabited it.

It’s perhaps unfair to select the most egregious example of this approach but Stephen Bayley does, in my view, deserve special mention.  He wrote: (1)

Robin Hood Gardens suffered from the start with a singular lack of commodity and firmness.  Worse, the unintelligent housing policies of Tower Hamlets populated Robin Hood Gardens with the tenants the least likely to be able to make sensible use of the accommodation.  You have to whisper it but the Unité d’Habitation works because it is populated by teachers, psychologists, doctors, designers, not by single mothers struggling with buggies

Aaah, social housing made safe for the professional middle classes – what a vision!  In fact, to be fair to the Smithsons, they designed the estate very much with mothers in mind.  Perhaps it’s just single mothers Bayley objects to though they’re not that common on an estate with a significant Muslim community.

He continued, ‘As Marx asked, does consciousness determine existence or does existence determine consciousness?  Or, to put it less correctly, do the pigs make the sty or does the sty make the pigs?’.

This was not only insulting but stupid, given that Marx had concluded very firmly – it was the keystone of his philosophy – that being determined consciousness or, as Bayley might prefer, the sty made the pigs.  Not, therefore, a great encomium for Robin Hood Gardens.

Robin Hood Gardens, 2013

More serious commentators, headed by BDonline which has campaigned to save and renovate the estate, made a better case.   They pointed out that the poll of tenants was seriously flawed. Residents did want better housing conditions but their dissatisfaction focused on the poor upkeep of the estate and problems of overcrowding – neither of which problems can be blamed on its design.

Another resident conducted his own unofficial poll and concluded firmly that a majority of residents favoured refurbishment and most were wary of the alternatives on offer. Darren Pauling found that out of 140 households surveyed, 130 opposed demolition. (2)

At this point, I’d normally quote residents’ views as evidence – and plenty are available – but in this case, to be honest, they’re likely to offer little better than an anecdotal back-and-forth.  The reality is that responses tended to reflect the questions being asked and the choices being offered and often reflected the bias of the questioner.

I’m not claiming, therefore, to offer some definitive judgment but I hope these conclusions are balanced at least.

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

The residents do generally seem to think that the flats themselves, notwithstanding problems of overcrowding as families grew, are pleasant: (3)

You know what they call this place around here? They call it Alcatraz. At least the people who don’t live in it do. My friends ask ‘How can you live there?’ but they can’t believe how nice it is inside.

I don’t like the outside very much – but once you get inside your own flat it’s really very nice. You’ve got fresh air back and front – either on the street deck or on the balconies.

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

But the estate as a whole does suffer serious design flaws, agreed by their defenders and acknowledged even by the Smithsons. Those ‘streets in the sky’ never really worked – they were too narrow and placed inhospitably on the outside of the blocks.

© Christian Skovgaard and reproduced under the Creative Commons licence 2.0 Generic

The ‘pause places’ never offered even a simulacrum of personal space. Entrances and access points were unattractive. 

And then there’s the overall appearance.  As Rowan Moore concludes: (4)

Personally, I can see what they brought to make it stand apart from the average estate – presence, dignity, an integrity of concept and detail – but I can also see how, for almost everyone but architecture buffs, such concepts might seem vaporous next to the more obvious truth that it all feels a bit grim.

This has to matter, doesn’t it?  And Brutalism doesn’t really need to be quite so ‘brutal’.

Unlike many other much-criticised estates, Robin Hood Gardens never seems to have enjoyed a heyday.  It was born into bad times – a period of economic decline in the East End when racist thuggery and racial tensions were rife. This, of course, was not its fault.

Robin Hood Gardens, 2013

And, for all the superficial plausibility of the ‘defensible space’ thesis, the longer history of Robin Hood Gardens does not bear it out.  Antisocial behaviour has declined – even as the estate has been run down and its environment declined. Recent reports reveal much less graffiti and far less antisocial behaviour – these appear to have been a generational and social phenomenon rather than one rooted in the estate’s design.

Ironically, the estate’s problems may have reflected less its modernism and more a backward-looking design conception.  It was predicated on what had become – even when it opened – an old-fashioned view of working-class sociability.

The street-life it referenced and attempted to resurrect was finished – not killed by the Council or callous planners but superseded by working-class aspirations towards home and family and the relative economic affluence which fostered these.  Those that lament this shift should remember that streets and pubs loomed large when home circumstances were fundamentally inhospitable.

In fact, the estate received little architectural acclaim at the time of its construction.  It suffered the backlash against high-rise of the day – as did the World’s End Estate in Chelsea completed five years later.  When English Heritage controversially rejected the estate’s listing, they concluded that it was neither: (5)

innovative or influential. The case for historic interest is…lost precisely because the project came so late in this phase of modernist architecture in Britain, without however representing a glorious culmination.

If, as I think, the case for saving Robin Hood Garden is unproven, powerful questions remain about what will replace it.  For this, we have glossy brochures and slick websites in abundance to persuade us of the brave new world on offer.

Artist’s visions of the new Blackwall Reach development

What the £500m Blackwall Reach regeneration project offers is basically more – more housing, more commercial units, more open space and higher density.  Up to 1475 new homes will replace the 214 on the current low density estate.  In terms of design, however, as critics have argued, it all looks a bit generic.

But though we might feel some cynicism towards this developers’ dream, the context of housing need is Tower Hamlets is compelling. There are 23,400 households on the waiting list of which almost half are designated priority cases and two-fifths are suffering overcrowding.  The Council currently has 1500 families placed in temporary accommodation. (6)

In the new scheme, around half the dwellings will be privately-owned and some 35 per cent will remain social rented.  The remainder will be shared ownership.  

Those social rented homes will be transferred from Council control to the Swan Housing Association.  Current council tenants who want to be rehoused in the new scheme are concerned about being transferred to a new landlord.  They expect their rents to increase and rights to decrease.

The Council claims that 43 per cent of new homes will be ‘affordable’, of which 80 per cent will be socially rented. There is also improved provision of larger ‘family’ homes of three-bedrooms or more – 429 in all.

Of course, ‘affordability’ is a slippery concept.  The Government now defines ‘affordable’ rents as being up to 80 per cent of local market rents. According to Government figures, the average monthly rent for a two-bedroom property in Tower Hamlets in 2013 was £1777 which leaves a supposedly ‘affordable’ rent of £1422. (7)

Back in September 2012, before even the worst excesses of the London housing market, Tower Hamlets calculated that a four-person household would require an income of £48,464 to afford a so-called ‘affordable’ rent on a two-bed property. Median household income in the borough was estimated at £28,199. (8) 

Of course, housing benefit is available. As Colin Wiles has argued: (9)

the consequence of this policy is the creation of thousands of new benefit-dependent tenants while the £24bn housing benefit bill will continue to soar. The government has rendered the word affordable meaningless.

That is the reality of Benefits Street and the ‘welfare dependency’ suffered by millions of hard-working families in Britain today.

In conclusion, ‘affordability’ – as we noted in the case of the Aylesbury Estate – is a sorry, dishonest travesty of the term.  More homes are needed and there may be a case for social mix.  There seems – as things are currently organised – to be a necessity for private capital.

But it’s hard not to feel that all this is a long way away from those very practical municipal dreams which embraced our collective duty to house the least well-off and were driven by need not profit.

Tower Hamlets gave final approval for the demolition of Robin Hood Gardens in March 2012.  That demolition began in April 2013.  Architects, historians and – most importantly – residents will now have to comment on this modern vision of social housing and assess again how closely reality matches ideals.

Sources

(1) Stephen Bayley, ‘You want the brutal truth?  Concrete can be beautiful’, The Observer, 2 March 2008

(2) Darren Pauling, ‘I’m sick of concrete jungle creeping up on Robin Hood Gardens’, East London Advertiser, 6 December 2010.   See also, Chris Beanland, ‘Robin Hood Gardens: An estate worth saving?’, The Independent, 24 February, 2012

(3) John Furse, The Smithsons at Robin Hood

(4) Rowan Moore, ‘Robin Hood Gardens: don’t knock it…down’, The Observer, 5 December 2010

(5) John Allan, ‘Robin Hood Gardens, Poplar, London’ English Heritage, Conservation Bulletin 59, Autumn 2008

(6) The London Borough of Tower Hamlets (Blackwall Reach) Compulsory Purchase Order 2013. Statement of Reasons

(7) Valuation Office Agency, ‘Private Rental Market Statistics: England Only‘, December 2013

(8) London Borough of Tower Hamlets, ‘Response to Housing Issues‘. 11 September 2012

(9) Colin Wiles, ‘”Affordable housing” does not mean what you think it means‘, The Guardian, 3 February 2014

I’m very grateful to Soraya Smithson and the Smithson Family Collection for allowing me to reproduce Sandra Lousada’s evocative pictures of the estate.

Robin Hood Gardens, Poplar: ‘an exemplar – a demonstration of a more enjoyable way of living’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Brutalism, GLC, LCC, Poplar, Regeneration

What more is there to be said on Robin Hood Gardens?  Its architecture and its planned demolition have inspired voluminous and passionate writing on both sides of the debate – it’s become less a council estate, more a proxy in a cultural war.

© Will of Memory

This story begins in 1963 – though it stretches back further, of course, in terms of East End housing problems and the visions of politicians, planners and architects in solving them.  Still, in that year, three small areas of land became available to the then London County Council for redevelopment. Alison and Peter Smithson were commissioned to draw up designs for two separate buildings with plans for further which would form ‘one big linked dwelling group’.

Grosvenor Buildings in 1928

Two years later, the Greater London Council decided to demolish the adjacent Grosvenor Buildings – seven private tenement blocks opened in 1885, replacing slums cleared by the Metropolitan Board of Works.  The council acquired 1200 tenants in need of rehousing and an additional five acres of land.  The Smithsons acquired a new drawing board for their vision.

This, they hoped, would be: (1)

Alison and Peter Smithson

an exemplar – a demonstration of a more enjoyable way of living in an old industrial part of a city.  It is a model of a new mode of urban organisation which can show what life could be like.

They were influenced, of course, by le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation but had pioneered their own version of ‘the building as street’ in rejected plans for the City’s Golden Lane Estate in 1952.

Construction began in 1968, the first flats opened in 1971 and the scheme as a whole was completed in 1972 at a cost of £1,845,585.  It comprises two precast concrete-construction slab blocks – a ten-storey building adjacent to the Blackwall Tunnel approaches and a seven-storey running, more or less in parallel, along Cotton Street.  These are, visually, a fairly uncompromising example of Brutalist design.

There are 214 flats in all – 38 flats intended for old people at ground level and a mix of two- to six-bedroom maisonettes for the rest with a population of around 700 at a housing density of 142 persons per acre.  The flats are spacious and well-lit.

Aerial view from east: East India Dock Road to right and Blackwall Tunnel entrance below

The site was – and remains – problematic, sandwiched as it is between three busy roads.  The Smithsons countered this with a ‘stress-free central zone protected from the noise and pressures of the surrounding roads by the buildings themselves…a quiet green heart which all dwellings share and can look into’. (2)  They compared this open space – a little fancifully maybe – to a Georgian square.

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

The Smithsons also addressed the noise issue by placing bedrooms and kitchen-diners on the inner, quieter, side of the blocks and by the use of a number of other innovative design features.  It’s worth making this point to counter any simplistic view that this was design contemptuous of its residents: (3)

One of the men on site said that this, what we were trying to do, was too good for the people that were going to live in it.  We find this unacceptable to say that it is too good.

The Smithsons wanted the new Robin Hood Gardens to offer dignified, even – in their own terms – homely, accommodation for those who would live in the estate.

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

The other key design feature were the access decks to the dwellings, envisaged as ‘streets in the sky’ and intended to reference and encourage a traditional model of East End sociability:

The deck itself is wide enough for the milkman to bring his cart along or for two women with prams to stop for a talk and still let the postman by.

Additionally, although Robin Hood Gardens didn’t get the ‘yard gardens’ that the Smithsons had planned for Golden Lane, they did create small alcoves – they called them ‘pause places’ – off the decks which they hoped residents would personalise through the use, for example, of flower boxes.

So far, so good.  The GLC Householders’ Manual issued to the new tenants captures some of the anticipation and, perhaps, some of the trepidation that marked the moment: (4)

Although Robin Hood Gardens is of unusual design and has attracted much attention…only through the people who live here will it achieve any real life.  For it is how the place is used that finally decides the quality of life that a family can live here….It is now your turn to try and make it a place you will be proud to live in.

Just one year later, that pride seemed in short supply.  The American architectural critic Anthony Pangaro described the estate’s lifts as vandalised and defaced. He criticised those ‘pause places’ as allowing ‘no definition of private territory or any sense of belonging to individual occupants’. (5)

© Christian Skovgaard, Flikr. Reproduced under the Creative Commons licence 2.0 Generic

Here he echoed Oscar Newman’s critique in his book Defensible Space which had been published one year earlier.  Newman contended that public high-rise developments were particularly liable to crime and antisocial behaviour as their residents felt no sense of ownership or responsibility for them. Design flaws typically acted to facilitate such behaviour.

This was certainly the later conclusion of Alice Coleman, the UK’s guru of ‘defensible space’, and her team when it visited Robin Hood Gardens. The estate allegedly scored 14 out of 16 on the scale of features held to encourage crime. (6)

Another harsh critic of Robin Hood Gardens, Charles Jencks criticised those vaunted ‘streets in the sky’: (7)

They are under-used; the collective entries are paltry and a few have been vandalised.  Indeed they are dark, smelly, dank passage-ways, places where, as Oscar Newman has argued…, crime may occur more frequently than elsewhere.

We’ll come back to the validity of all this later.  What is undeniable is that Robin Hood Gardens quickly acquired a seemingly justified reputation as a very troubled estate, as confirmed in the descriptions and testimonies of John Furse’s 1982 doctoral thesis.  His verdict on the estate is damning: (8)

The access to the building is, to our mind, ill-conceived: the ‘stress-free’ zone is abused: the lack of common privacy is a constant worry: the vicious writing-on-the-wall is hard to ignore, and is undeniably related to much of the mindless vandalism that has broken down the communal facilities. The tenants do not make use of the decks and, consequently, the idea of ‘street’ does not have any factual validity…[Our] final assessment must be that, socially, the building does not work.  The lucidly argued Smithson aesthetic fails at Robin Hood.

Beyond the alleged design flaws and social issues, structural problems had also emerged.  A 2006 survey found the blocks to be ‘in poor condition’ with significant defects to the external envelope and roof coverings. It recommended the replacement of existing bathrooms and kitchens and identified problems with electrical wiring and other services.  A 2007 study concluded it would cost £70,000 per flat to bring them up to the Government’s Decent Homes Standard.

Tower Hamlets Council, the successor landlord to the GLC, voted for demolition in 2008 – a decision apparently supported by over 75 per cent of residents. We’ll come back to that too.

This, it turned out, was the beginning rather than the end of the debate about the future of Robin Hood Gardens.  At this point the Great and the Good of British architecture weighed in.  They argued passionately that the estate should be saved.

We’ll follow that debate and appraise its outcome next week.

Sources

(1) ‘The Smithsons on Housing’, BBC2 documentary, by BS Johnson, 1970, quoted in Alan Powers (ed), Robin Hood Gardens: Re-Visions, Twentieth Century Society, 2011.

(2) Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘Robin Hood Lane – A Housing Scheme for the GLC’ in Ordinariness and Light, 1970

(3) From ‘The Smithsons on Housing’ as is the quotation which follows.

(4) Quoted in ‘Robin Hood Gardens, London E14’, Architectural Design, September 1972

(5) Quoted in Hermione Hobhouse (General Editor), Survey of London: volumes 43 and 44: Poplar, Blackwall and Isle of Dogs, 1994

(6) Valerie Grove, Sunday Times, 7 June 1987, cited in Graham Stewart, Robin Hood Gardens  Blackwall Reach, ND

(7) Charles Jencks, The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Post-Modernism, 2002

(8) John Furse, The Smithsons at Robin Hood, University of Sussex PhD, 1982

I’m very grateful to Soraya Smithson and the Smithson Family Collection for allowing me to reproduce Sandra Lousada’s evocative pictures of the estate.

Canley Today: “Not a Reassuring Neighbourhood”

Tags

1990s, 2000s, Cottage suburbs

In this guest post, Dr Ruth Cherrington brings her story of the Canley Estate in Coventry up-to-date, following earlier posts on the origins of the Estate and the growth of its community.  Ruth runs the Club Historians website and is the author of Not Just Beer and Bingo: a Social History of Working Men’s Clubs. You can follow Ruth on Twitter at @CHistorians.

Introduction

At the end of the previous posting, we left Canley residents busy shaping their community and social spaces.

It’s hard to pinpoint when exactly it started but some streets began to look unsightly from the early 1960s. Rather than growing flowers in the front gardens some tenants instead piled up rubbish and discarded furniture. There were instances of anti-social behaviour, though that term was not used back then: ‘problem family’ was the expression used instead. Canley residents would have been quick to name the streets that were ‘rough’ as distinct from ‘respectable’.

As time went on, other factors contributed to a more general decline. Social divisions were exacerbated by developments experienced by council tenants across the country along with Canley-specific ones. The focus here will be how the estate fared as social, economic and political changes presented difficult challenges.

Changes and Challenges

The Right to Buy Act, which became law in the early years 80s, had far-reaching consequences as council tenants who met certain criteria could buy their homes at discounted prices. Not everyone agreed with selling off council housing, preferring to rent and looking critically at those who bought. The take-up of this offer started to change Canley, as it did elsewhere.

A street of steel houses in Canley, 2016

Some newly-purchased houses showed the tenant-turned-owner’s desire to distinguish themselves from their council neighbours. Doors, even whole houses, were painted different colours. Some built garages onto the side, added a conservatory at the back, changed the windows and put statues outside.

These were visible expressions of the differentiation amongst the Canley residents that were not previously possible. Some viewed these stamps of individuality as out of place and ‘showing off’. We will return to the implications of private ownership later on.

Another major challenge was the troubled state of British car manufacturing. The Standard Motor Company, part of British Leyland by the 1970s, had long been a major employer.

‘Standard Motor Company Canley Road Works and environs’, 1946 (c) Britain from Above, EAW0000142

Short-time working and lay-offs had become common along with strikes during which management and trade unions blamed each other for the problems. The Canley plant was affected by what happened at others such as Speke, Liverpool. Families suffered when strikes became protracted. Hard times affected local shops, pubs and the working men’s club. The days of the affluent car worker when everyone had a steady job and income looked numbered.

A monument to the works, unveiled in 2000

After Sir Michael Edwardes took control at British Leyland in 1977, rationalisation gathered pace, bringing job losses and the eventual closure of three plants, including Canley. This was a major disaster as Canley had to some extent been built to house car workers. Thousands were directly or indirectly affected as many local businesses relied on the ‘Standard’.

Several generations of Canley men had worked there. Boys leaving school would take up apprenticeships and expected a job for life. This all ended suddenly in 1980 when the factory closed. Existing jobs and those for future generations disappeared along with expectations, ambitions and self-respect on the part of those made redundant. The Canley estate was bound to suffer from then on.

Herald Lodge sheltered accommodation, standing on the site of the former Herald Pub next to the Standard Triumph Motor factory (Photo: Robin Booker)

The last major manufacturing plant to close was Massey Ferguson tractor factory in Banner Lane, Tile Hill. Unemployment in the Canley area increased and school leavers found little on offer in the 1980s. By the 1990s Canley had become an area of social deprivation. Younger residents left if they could. Those who stayed had too much time and not enough money on their hands, never a good combination.

An alternative source of employment, though often low-skilled and low paid work, came from nearby Warwick University, right on Canley’s border. Opened in 1965, originally just outside the City’s boundaries, the fact that it took the name Warwick not Coventry, was and still is seen as a slight by locals. Its proximity to Canley didn’t bring it any closer to the experience of most of the estate’s residents outside of offering work. Warwick University employed some of those made redundant but could not absorb the growing numbers thrown out of work.

An almost symbiotic relationship developed with this University, whose star had risen as manufacturing industry declined. The University sent in two different types of visitors: sociological researchers on the one hand and student tenants on the other. Canley became a convenient case study of industrial decline and social deprivation for the former and a convenient source of housing for the latter, as well as a supplier of local labour.

Shops on Prior Deram Walk and the playing fields (c) Wikimedia Commons

This is where we pick up on the impact of council house sales. Some residents who had bought went on to sell up once the statutory period was over and landlords were quick to seize the opportunities. The private rental sector grew alongside a diminishing council sector with fewer residential homes and more temporary accommodation. In one Warwick University study, Canley residents stated they felt pushed out by the foreign students.(1)

I’ve lived here for 34 years in the immediate area and there are a lot of students. I will leave as soon as I can.

It is pertinent that in the Wikipedia article about Canley, one of its key features is that ‘the area is home to a large number of students attending the nearby University of Warwick’. There are some signs outside several pre-war, redbrick homes along Charter Avenue only in Chinese, advertising accommodation. It’s obvious their market is for Chinese compatriots but such practices fuel dislike for foreign students in general among Canley residents:

Foreigners – loads of Chinese in the last five years buying houses and renting them to students.

The majority of Canley residents (around 90 per cent) are white. When former residential homes are sold and effectively turned into student dormitories, divisions widen.

Warwick University researchers have documented feelings of isolation with levels of community cohesion levels dipping sharply over the past few decades. Residents feel ignored, unheard by government representatives at local and national levels:(2)

Policy was seen in the context of political correctness, which had become a pejorative term meaning beneficial treatment to anyone who was not white working-class.

There was a growing separation between private owners, council tenants and student renters.

Anti-social behaviour also rose as well as the perception of it: drugs, burglaries and vandalism were part of this. Canley had moved from being a pleasant estate to ‘not a reassuring neighbourhood’. (3)

Regeneration: Plans and Reality

In the mid-2000s regeneration was put on the agenda and plans presented to Canley residents. Glossy pamphlets were distributed detailing the options, with the benefits to be derived from each such as the use of some land for new housing in return for better facilities and a community hub. In one option, the ends of several streets of steel houses were designated for ‘street realignment’.

The meaning of this was unclear until residents who would be affected made enquiries. Street alignment actually meant demolition of some houses, including the one I grew up in, in order to free up the space for denser housing. The generous gardens would be lost and built upon.

On finding this out, some residents were motivated into action with claims the council were trying to hoodwink them, that they were being treated as fools. Protests about this and other aspects of regeneration led to that option being removed.

The derelict Canley Primary School, 2006. Shortly after these photos were taken, it was burnt down in an arson attack

A master plan was agreed in 2007 that visualised new housing where the former Charter Primary school used to be on Charter Avenue. A new school had been built more on Mitchell Avenue, more central than the ‘old’ Charter Primary. More housing was planned elsewhere, a community building, and improved transport and retail facilities. Moreover, the money raised from selling land in Canley was intended to be reinvested in the area.

Current Situation

Some changes have resulted such as widened pavements along Charter Avenue, with an integrated cycle lane. Some locals see that as being more for the university students. Some new housing is being built, mostly in-fill. What was once a very large grass verge between steel houses on Howcotte Green and the railway line is now the nearly completed Cromwell Gardens. Forty-four homes have been crammed onto this one green space.

Cromwell Gardens: 44 new homes on a former piece of grass between Howcotte Green and the railway line

Another in-fill area is where a doctor’s surgery once stood on Kele Road. A dozen new homes stand nearly complete there now. More in-fill is planned around Canley.

Nearly complete new homes om Kele Road, where a doctor’s surgery used to be (and before that the old Charter Primary School)

New homes, however, have not so far brought plans for improved bus services and other facilities. Residents complain about the poor bus service, seen as the worst in the City, which adds to feelings of isolation. Whilst two bus services come up and down Charter Avenue, as they have done for decades, they do not both run all day, every day. The 18a via Cannon Park shopping centre finishes early evening and doesn’t run on Sunday.

Those wishing to shop outside those times have to walk. It’s over a mile from the steel houses to Cannon Park, the Phantom Coach pub and to the Cemetery where many locals have relatives buried.

Canley Cemetery, Charter: the final resting place for many Canley residents (Photo: Robin Booker)

There was discussion by residents in one study about the importance of pubs and clubs as places of community interaction. That was when Canley had three pubs and the Canley Social Club, but since then the Dolphin Pub in Sheriff Avenue has closed down: it is now a building site for housing. The Canley Social Club in Marler has also closed.

Even in 2003 these were not regarded as vibrant places but as failing institutions that illustrated Canley’s problems. The lack of money to spend was one reason for their decline along with the smoking ban but also the declining percentage of ‘Canley kids’ who had grown up there or moved in when they were younger. Student renters rarely used these once thriving social centres.

The loss of the Canley Social Club is a very visual representation of the decline of the ‘old’ Canley. Established in 1950 as a humble social centre by local residents, the Club expanded across the decades with no shortage of members and activities provided for them when employment was high and there was money to spare.

By the late 1980s, the once luxurious concert room and lounge were less than half empty and severely underused. It began to look shabby and unloved, just as did the estate more generally. There were attempts to revive it including lottery funding that transformed it into a Sports and Social club but its future was decided when no buyers could be found in 2013. One night, members were in there enjoying themselves. The next morning it was locked and boarded up.(4)

Canley Social Club burnt down, August 2013

After suffering several arson attacks, it was finally destroyed by fire in August 2013 and demolished in April 2015.

Canley Social Club being demolished, April 2015

The site will now be sold for housing with nothing to replace this former social venue with its bowling green, football pitch and five-a-side all-weather space along with its lounge, small bar and concert room. Locals complain about the lack of social facilities, just as the early residents did in the 1940s.

The ageing ‘Canley kids’ lament the loss of the Club, of the pride of former residents, the loss of the old sense of community when most people had a job and a salary. There will come a time when hardly anyone remembers the early days of the estate, with its model housing and green spaces. Many of the latter are now designated for in-fill housing and these will bring not only different types of residents but perhaps more divisions and less cohesion.

If it started out as an estate ‘in parts’ and it looks more patchy today than ever before. The future may well see the trend for putting a bit of new housing here, a bit there, increase. Canley may become an estate ‘in bits’.

Sources

(1) This and the quotation which follows are drawn from Harris Beider, Community Cohesion: the views of white working class communities, Joseph Rowntree Foundation/Coventry University (2011), p42

(2) Beider, p56

(3) Victoria Nash with Ian Christie, Making Sense of Community, IPPR, London (2003), p13

(4) See my YouTube video, Canley Social Club in Pictures

See also David Jarvis, Nigel Berkeley and Kevin Broughton, ‘Evidencing the impact of community engagement in neighbourhood regeneration: the case of Canley, Coventry’, Community Development Journal (2011)

 

London’s Modernist Maisonettes: ‘Going Upstairs to Bed’

Tags

1950s, 1960s, 1970s

I’m very pleased to feature this new guest post and some fine photography by Thaddeus Zupančič. Thaddeus is a Slovenian-born writer and translator. He has lived in London since 1991. For the first 14 years he worked as a radio producer with the BBC World Service. On his Instagram account @notreallyobsessive he is now about one third through his project, London Modernism 1946-1981, which documents modernist council estates in the capital. He is also a volunteer with The Twentieth Century Society and manages its Instagram account @c20society.

On Sunday, 23 January 1955, Margaret Willis, a sociologist in the Planning Division of the Architect’s Department of the London County Council, gave a broadcast on the BBC Home Service programme Home for the Day.

Her bosses thought the broadcast, in which she ‘would informally talk about her work at County Hall’, was ‘in the interest of the Council’ and therefore recommended that ‘under Staff Regulation 112’ she should be allowed to retain the fee (‘probably 8 guineas’).  

The eight-minute talk was titled My Job. Willis explained that a sociologist is a ‘sort of liaison officer between people like you, the housewives, and the Council’s technical men and women who make the plans in the drawing office’. She was, though, mostly talking about the scarcity of land in ‘the centre of our cities’ and how planners and architects ‘realise how important gardens are to many people and they are doing their best to provide them’. One of their ideas, she explained, was to build ‘a compromise between a house and a flat, it’s a four-storey building like a house on top of a house’. The main benefit of these buildings was the attached gardens, but there was also something else: ‘People prefer this type of building to a flat because they like going upstairs to bed.’ (1)

Such ‘houses on top of houses’ – known as maisonettes because of their split-level plan – were not a complete novelty. On the Devons Estate in Bromley-by-Bow, for instance, there are four low-rises which look like terrace houses with separate flats on the top of them, basically ‘flats on the top of houses’. It is an unexciting, but useful Neo-Georgian pastiche. Pevsner is more damning: the estate, opened in 1949, is ‘entirely in the LCC’s pre-war manner, but with all the drabness of post-war austerity’. (2)

Brett Manor, Hackney, by Edward Mills for the Manor Charitable Trustees, 1947-8

The first modernist maisonette block in London was Brett Manor in Brett Road, Hackney, built in 1947-8. It was designed by Edward Mills for the Manor Charitable Trustees (Mills used the same Arup box frame as Tecton did at Spa Green Estate, which was completed in 1950).

Brett Manor was swiftly followed by Powell & Moya’s Bauhausian low-rise blocks at Churchill Gardens in Pimlico (designed from 1946, built in 1947-51), which were the first modernist maisonettes built by any London council, in this case Westminster.  

Winchfield House, Alton West, Roehampton, by the LCC Architect’s Department; designed in 1952-3, built in 1955-8

Margaret Willis’s employer was not far behind. Already in the early 1950s, as Elain Harwood points out, a group at the LCC Architect’s Department, worked on ‘an efficient maisonette plan, which they then cast into ten-storey slabs, built at Bentham Road, Hackney, at Loughborough Junction, Lambeth, and, most impressively, the Alton West Estate, Roehampton.’ (3) (The Gascoyne Estate in Hackney was built in 1952-4; the Loughborough Estate in 1956-8; and the Alton West Estate in 1955-8.)

The LCC dotted various iterations of these Corbusian slabs on stilts all around the central London metropolitan boroughs, including Southwark (Symington House in 1957, and Prospect House in 1962); Bermondsey (Chilton Grove in 1959); Lambeth (Wimborne House in 1959, Waylett House and Duffell House in 1963); Bethnal Green (Westhope House and Kinsham House in 1956, Yates House and Johnson House in 1957, Orion House in 1962); Stepney (Raynham House and Gouldman House in 1958, Withy House in 1959, Troon House in 1961 and Butler House in 1962); Poplar (Storey House in 1958 and Thornfield House in 1960); Westminster (the towers of the Maida Vale Estate in 1961 and Torridon House, albeit designed in 1959 only completed in 1969); and Islington (Muriel Street in 1964).

Westhope House, Hereford Estate, Bethnal Green, by the LCC Architect’s Department, 1956

Private practices working for the LCC were also designing maisonette slabs and blocks for them, the most impressive being the Ricardo Street Scheme at the Lansbury Estate in Poplar by Geoffrey Jellicoe (for the Festival of Britain’s Exhibition of Architecture, 1951); the Cordelia Street Scheme on the same estate by Norman & Dawbarn (1963); and the Fulbourne Estate slab and block by Stillman & Eastwick-Field (1958-9) in Whitechapel.    

Maisonettes, regardless of the type of building in which they were incorporated, were an integral part of mixed developments, ‘the dominant ideology for housing i n the 1950s’ (4).

There was, though – as it is explained in the oddly self-flagellating GLC book Home Sweet Home – a problem with maisonette slabs: their ‘mass was too dominating, and problems of overshadowing and inflexibility of orientation led to planning difficulties which limited its use in high-density areas’. (5) A far greater potential, continues the book, was offered by the point block with its ‘non-directional shape and quick-moving shadow’.

After the success of Draper House on the Draper Estate in Elephant and Castle (completed 1962), the ‘tall blocks of maisonettes’ (6) became almost as ubiquitous as the slabs, most successfully in the case of the six 21-storey blocks on the Warwick Estate in Westminster (completed in 1966), though the medium-rise maisonettes on this estate are just as compelling.

Argosy House and, at back, Aragon Tower and Daubeney Tower, Pepys Estate, by the LCC Architect’s Department and, after 1965, GLC Department of Architecture and Civic Design; designed from 1963, opened in 1966, completed in 1973

Even taller, at 24 storeys, were the blocks of maisonettes of the cross-over ‘scissors’ type on the Pepys Estate (designed from 1963, completed in 1973) in Deptford and the 26-storey Maydew House on the Abbeyfield Estate (1965-8) in Southwark. The ‘scissors’ type was first tested for the LCC’s Lincoln Estate blocks in Poplar (1959-62), but ‘later discontinued owing to the high cost of its complex construction’. (7) The construction was indeed complex, with central corridors placed at a half level, ‘providing entrances to flats that ran the width of the block above or below, ‘crossing’ to give each other a dual aspect’. (8) They also provided a maximum of through light and ventilation. Even better than the 24-storey blocks on the Pepys Estate are the eight-storey ‘scissors’ maisonettes, a ‘strong, unifying element of the scheme’. (9)

‘Houses, flats and maisonettes’ was a mantra not only for the LCC, but also for London’s metropolitan boroughs and the City.

Golden Lane Estate, City of London, by Chamberlin, Powell & Bon for the Corporation of London; design won in competition in 1952, built to revised designs in 1954-6

The best examples of the latter are the Golden Lane Estate by Chamberlin, Powell & Bon for the City (which consists of various blocks of flats and six blocks of maisonettes plus a community centre, swimming pool and a tennis court, 1954-6); and Denys Lasdun’s part of the Greenways Estate for Bethnal Green Borough Council (the two inventive eight-storey cluster towers with 24 maisonettes each and the three low-rise blocks with another 50 maisonettes, 1955-8) as well as his Keeling House (for the same council, completed in 1959, originally comprising 56 maisonettes and eight studio flats).

Trevelyan House, Greenways Estate, by Denys Lasdun of Fry, Drew, Drake & Lasdun for Bethnal Green Metropolitan Borough Council; designed in 1952-3, built in 1955-8

Equally busy were Skinner, Bailey & Lubetkin (the post-Tecton maisonettes on the Dorset Estate, 1951-7, and the Cranbrook Estate, 1955-65, both for Bethnal Green, and the Tabard Garden Estate Extension in Southwark, 1964-5, for the LCC); Frederic Gibberd (Kingsgate Estate, 1958-61, for Hackney); George, Trew & Dunn (Winstanley Estate, 1964-6, for Battersea); Clifford Culpin & Partners (Edgecombe Hall Estate, 1957-63, for Wandsworth); and Co-operative Planning (St John’s Estate, 1963, for Poplar).  

Jim Griffiths House, Clem Attlee Court, by J. Pritchard Lovell; Fulham’s Borough Architect and Director of Housing; 1957

So too were the borough architects of those metropolitan and municipal councils that already had them – most notably Camberwell’s F.O. Hayes (Sceaux Gardens, 1957-60; and the Astley Estate, 1957-9); Fulham’s Borough Architect and Director of Housing J. Pritchard Lovell (Clem Attlee Court, 1957); Willesden’s T.N. l’Anson (the 1963 blocks in the South Kilburn Redevelopment Area with maisonettes on the top of flats); and T.A. Wilkinson at Edmonton (Cumberland House and Graham House on Goodwin Road, 1962). Only five out of the twenty-eight metropolitan boroughs had their own borough architects (of whom four were also directors of housing). Just as busy were the borough engineers and surveyors, for instance W.J. Rankin at Poplar (the first phase of the St John’s Estate, 1956; the Alfred Estate, 1959-60; and the Aberfeldy Estate, 1962-3).

Lakanal, Sceaux Gardens, by F.O. Hayes, Borough Architect, H.C. Connell, A.W. Butler and H.P. Trenton of the Camberwell Borough Architect’s Department, 1957-60

Graham House, Goodwin Road, by the Edmonton Architect’s Department under T.A. Wilkinson, 1962-3. On the right: Walbrook House by the Enfield Borough Architect and Planning Officer’s Department under Wilkinson, 1967-8

The reorganisation of London’s local government in 1965 saw the creation of the new Greater London Council and 32 new London borough councils (plus the City) which then became responsible for a substantially larger part of housing projects and planning than before.

More importantly, the London Government Act of 1963 introduced – in s.74(1) – the statutory post of ‘an architect for the borough’ (10) in each one of them and, ‘as the case may be’, the City.

The most celebrated of them was Sydney Cook, who established Camden’s architect’s department. Cook recruited some of the best young talent – including Peter Tábori, Bill Forrest, Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth – but the ‘first and foremost among those who joined Camden from the cutting edge of London’s architectural culture was Neave Brown’. (11)

Dunboyne Road Estate, Gospel Oak, by Neave Brown of the Camden Architect’s Department under Sydney Cook; designed in 1966-7, built in 1971-7

Brown designed two of the most remarkable post-1965 council estates in London: the Dunboyne Road Estate (a mixture of three- and two-bed maisonettes and one-bed flats; designed from 1966 and built in 1971-7); and the Rowley Way part of the Alexandra & Ainsworth Estate (block B, for instance, comprises four storeys of two- and three-bed maisonettes), built in 1972-8.

Tangmere, Broadwater Farm Estate, by C.E. Jacob, Borough Architect, and Alan Weitzel, Deputy Borough Architect of the Haringey Department of Architecture; designed from 1966, built in 1967-72

Cook’s competitor for Camden’s job was the housing architect of Hampstead, C.E. Jacob. He was later appointed borough architect of Haringey and as soon as his new Department of Architecture was set up, he designed, with his deputy Alan Weitzel, the Broadwater Farm Estate (1967-72) and its centrepiece, Tangmere, a maisonette ziggurat.

Henry Wise House, Lillington Gardens Estate, by Darbourne & Darke for Westminster City Council; design won in competition in 1961, detailed and built in 1964-7

Westminster balanced work of its own new Department of Architecture and Planning under F.G. West – such as the Brunel Estate in Westbourne Park, 1970-4 – with schemes by private practices, for instance Darbourne & Darke’s epochal Lillington Gardens Estate (designed in 1961, built in 1964-72, with some of the best maisonettes in town); the scheme won numerous awards, starting with an Award for Good Design in Housing in 1969.

Spring Gardens, Highbury New Park, by the Islington Architecture Department under Alf Head, Borough Architect, 1968-70

In the period of 1968-1980, the most Awards for Good Design in Housing – sponsored by the Secretary of State for the Environment in collaboration with the Royal Institute of British Architects – was received by Islington, ‘more than any other local authority in the country’. (12) Islington’s Architecture Department was run by Alf Head, who complemented its own projects – for example the Spring Gardens (1968-70) maisonettes and flats in Highbury – with commissions from private practices, very often Darbourne & Darke.

Borough architects in south London were just as active, particularly F.O. Hayes at Southwark, who continued his old Camberwell job, and Ted Hollamby at Lambeth.

Dawson Heights, Dulwich, by Kate Macintosh of the Southwark Department of Architecture & Planning under F.O. Hayes; 1966-72

Southwark’s largest projects were the stupendous Heygate Estate (now demolished) and the Aylesbury Estate (demolition underway), but the Department of Architecture and Planning designed other estates too, such as the Four Squares Estate in Bermondsey (most of its 691 homes are maisonettes). The most triumphant, though, was Kate Macintosh’s all-maisonette estate Dawson Heights (1966-72) in Dulwich. She described it as a ‘Chinese puzzle of differing types to be assembled in various combinations’ (13) and it still works perfectly well.

The building programme in the neighbouring Lambeth was very extensive too – and Hollamby was as good at recruiting talented architects as Cook given that one of his first appointments was George Finch, who already made his name at the LCC with the Chicksand Estate in Whitechapel.

Holland Rise House, Stockwell, by George Finch of the Lambeth Architect’s Department under Ted Hollamby; 1967

Finch’s eight almost identical 22-storey maisonette towers, system-built by Wates – the first completed was Holland Rise House in Stockwell in 1967 – are as intelligent as they are generous; and his stunning Lambeth Towers in Kennington Lane (designed in 1964-5, completed in 1971) are maisonettes, incorporated in a freestyle, sinuous brutalist block.

Binsey Walk, Thamesmead, by the GLC Department of Architecture and Civic Design; designed from 1966, built in 1968-9 (demolished)

The last great hurrah of mixed development was Thamesmead, ‘basically a working-class Barbican’ (14), the heroic estate by the GLC Department of Architecture and Civic Design, the successor to the LCC Architect’s Department. The two architecturally most intriguing structures – Coralline Walk and Binsey Walk, both now demolished – were linear maisonette blocks built in 1967-8; and more maisonettes were included in the later stages of the development, Parkview (1969-79) and The Moorings (1971-7).

The most seductive of all other GLC maisonette blocks remains Perronet House (1967-70) in Elephant and Castle, which won a commendation in the 1971 Awards for Good Design in Housing.

And it was not only the GLC Department of Architecture and Civic Design: pretty much all private practices commissioned by the GLC also designed maisonettes, including the Smithsons (their Robin Hood Gardens, 1968-72, mostly consisted of large maisonettes); Ernő Goldfinger (Trellick Tower, 1972, as well as Balfron Tower, 1967, Carradale House, 1967-8, and a 1972 Burcham Street block on the Brownfield Estate); Trevor Dannatt (Norwood House on the Galloway Estate, 1969); and Architects Co-Partnership (Ethelred Estate, Lambeth, 1964-75).

Benhill Grounds, Brunswick Road, Sutton, by the Sutton Architect’s Department under Peter Hirst, 1978-9

The last two estates featuring predominantly maisonettes were Benhill Grounds by the Sutton Architect’s Department under Peter Hirst (1978-9), and the GLC’s Ferry Lane Estate (1977-81) in Tottenham Hale. That these two schemes should have been the last – mostly because of the 1980 Housing Act and its consequences  – is a shame, because maisonettes are arguably the greatest housing gift that modernist architects bequeathed to London. They were – and rightfully remain – popular ‘because they gave greater privacy and the sensation of being in a house’. (15) Not to mention the fact that Londoners like going upstairs to bed …  

A version of this article was previously published in Issue 5 of Journal of Civic Architecture (2020).  

Sources

(1) Margaret Willis, ‘My Job’ transcript for a BBC broadcast, 23 January 1955; Report by the Clerk of the Council, 12 January 1955, London Metropolitan Archives

(2) Bridget Cherry, Charles O’Brien and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England – London 5: East, (Yale University Press, 2005)

(3) Elain Harwood, London County Council Architects, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

(4) Elain Harwood, Obituary of George Finch, The Guardian, 27 February 2013

(5) Judith Lever, Home Sweet Home (Academy Editions/GLC, 1976)

(6) GLC Architecture 1965/70 (GLC, 1971)

(7) Lever, Home Sweet Home

(8) Elain Harwood, Space Hope and Brutalism: English Architecture 1945-1975 (Yale University Press, 2015)

(9) GLC Architecture 1965/70

(10) London Government Act 1963, Part IX

(11) Mark Swenarton, Cook’s Camden (Lund Humphries, 2017)

(12) Awards for Good Design in Housing 1980, Report from the Housing Committee, Islington London Borough Council, 4 December 1980

(13) Kate Macintosh, Utopia London, directed by Tom Cordell, 2010

(14) Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010)

(15) Elain Harwood, Space Hope and Brutalism

Brutal London by Simon Phipps

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Brutalism

There’s been a spate of books on Brutalism recently but I’m happy to recommend Brutal London by Simon Phipps to the many enthusiasts out there. It’s a lavishly illustrated, 192-page guide to 93 of the major examples of the genre in the capital, organised in an accessible borough-by-borough form.

Thamesmead (1967-74), Greenwich

Phipps’ powerful images – the heart and soul of the book – are in the monochrome which is de rigueur for a certain type of architectural photography but it works particularly well in capturing the stark power of Brutalist buildings: in the author’s words, providing ‘a stripped down aesthetic for a barebones architecture’.

However, he adds a brief, thought-provoking foreword and a very useful end section of Building Information.  The latter includes details of when the buildings were built and their architects – this detail can be surprisingly onerous to track down so I’m grateful for his efforts – as well as some extended observations on selected examples. It’s good to see maps included too, not practical for navigation but a useful guide to location.

I’m not an enthusiast of Brutalism as such…before some of you stop reading just there, let me clarify. I do admire the bravura and sheer presence of many of the best examples but, as an historian, I’m more interested in a building’s social and political ‘story’, particularly that of the council housing which forms the mainstay of this blog.  Of course, architecture and design are very far from innocent of social purpose and ideology and, nowhere is this more true than of British Brutalism – ‘widely seen as the architectural style of the Welfare State’. (1)

Phipps himself notes how ‘certain design elements suggest the socially progressive politics of the post-war state made manifest in the minds of architects’.  In a particularly powerful phrase, he commends this ‘forceful, belligerent, conceptually considered and egalitarian architecture of social purpose that manifested itself across post-war London’.

Robin Hood Gardens (1969-72), Tower Hamlets

It’s interesting to note that a majority of the case-studies are of housing – a straightforward illustration of the argument – and salutary to note, as Phipps does, our loss of purpose in this regard with the demolition of the Heygate Estate and imminent destruction of the Robin Hood Estate.  (Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower and Lasdun’s Keeling House have been or will be sold to the private sector – a mark both of Brutalism’s now fashionably cherished status and our contemporary disregard for the high-quality working-class housing that was central to that post-war vision.)

Other flights of eloquence – reflecting his own arts and design background and a predominantly aesthetic appreciation of Brutalist architecture – leave me a little colder but I’m sure will speak powerfully to the movement’s fans.

Phipps adopts the seminal definition of Brutalism deployed by Reyner Banham in his path-breaking 1955 essay. (2)  The New Brutalism (as it was then) is characterised by:

formal legibility of plan, clear exhibition of structure and the valuing of materials for their inherent qualities “as found”.

It’s a broad definition and it allows Phipps to include a number of works that I wouldn’t personally have considered Brutalist. I’ve tended to assume that the use of concrete (particularly the béton brut often thought to have given the style its name) was a crucial component but I’m happy to leave this to be debated by the experts and enthusiasts and grateful that the wider perspective allows us to look anew at a number of significant schemes.

Paddington British Rail Maintenance Depot (1966-68), Westminster

You’ll find the expected showpieces here – the National Theatre, the Royal College of Physicians, the Institute of Education – and a few you may have overlooked – a fire station and British Rail Maintenance Depot, both in Paddington, for example.  In terms of housing, there’s the Barbican, of course, and in the genuinely social housing that interests me, Balfron and Trellick, a number of the wondrous Camden estates of the 1970s, and many others. (3)

Alexander Road Estate (1972-78), Camden

Alton West, Alton Estate (1955-58), Wandsworth

Alton West is included naturally – in Phipps’ words ‘a riposte to the tidy geometries and bland stylings of the Scandinavian-inspired modernists’ who had designed the earlier eastern phase.

Doddington and Rollo Estate (1969-71), Wandsworth

The Aylesbury Estate (1963-71), Southwark

Also in Wandsworth, it’s interesting to see the Doddington and Rollo and York Road Estates covered, built using the Laings Jespersen Large Panel System and generally considered (for good reason given early teething troubles) to be system-built disasters. Other system-built schemes covered include the first system-built housing estate constructed in the country, the Morris Walk Estate built by the London County Council in 1963-1966 using the Larsen-Nielsen system.  The troubled but maligned Aylesbury Estate in Southwark, another built using the Jespersen system and now subject to its own controversial regeneration, is also featured.  No poured, in situ, board-marked concrete here.

Lillington Gardens Estate (1964-72), Westminster

World’s End Estate (1969-77), Kensington and Chelsea

Nor in Westminster, where Darbourne and Darke’s Lillington Gardens was praised by some as an example of the ‘new vernacular’ – a point at which you might feel the definition of Brutalism stretched. Down the river in Chelsea, Eric Lyons’ World’s End Estate is also noted. Since both are concrete-built and only brick-clad and since both that possess the Brutalist ‘clear exhibition of structure’ that Phipps values their inclusion is probably justified.

Anyway, buy the book and make your choices – in inner London in particular, anyone interested in modern architecture will find much to pique their interest.  If you love Brutalism, you’ll love the book.  If you don’t, it might at least give you pause for thought. Brutalism may not have been pretty but it does look increasingly attractive – both as a monument to earlier ideals and as a rebuttal to what Phipps rightly describes as ‘the bright vinyl-clad Wendy houses that count for much of today’s banal and mediocre housing’.

Photography (c) Simon Phipps

Brutal London by Simon Phipps is published by September Publishing, £14.99. http://www.septemberpublishing.org/product/brutal-london/ 

You can follow Simon Phipps on Twitter at @new_brutalism

References

(1) Barnabas Calder, Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism (2016) – an excellent and engaging academic guide to the subject which I’ve previously reviewed.

(2) Reyner Banhan, ‘The New Brutalism’, Architectural Review December 1955

(3) Of those I’ve written about: Alexandra Road, the Branch Hill Estate and the Whittington Estate.

 

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

Tags

#OpenHouse2016

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

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

Housing crisis and protest

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

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

The Boundary Estate

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

The Progress Estate

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

The Progress Estate

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

The Becontree Estate

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

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

Chilcott Close, Lansbury Estate

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

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

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

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

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

Balfron Tower

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

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

Trellick Tower

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

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

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

Robin Hood Gardens, still occupied, July 2016

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

Trevelyan House

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

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

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

Keeling House

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

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

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

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

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Brutalism

Barnabas Calder, Raw Concrete

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

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

Trellick Tower (c) Barnabas Calder

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

As Calder argues:

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

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

Balfron Tower (c) Barnabas Calder

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

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

Balfron escape stair (c) Barnabas Calder

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

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

Balfron Tower entrance (c) Barnabas Calder

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

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

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

The Barbican (c) Barnabas Calder

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

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

The Barbican (c) Barnabas Calder

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

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

The Anderston Centre (c) Barnabas Calder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The National Theatre (c) Barnabas Calder

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

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

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

Christopher Beanland, Concrete Concept

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

You can find my posts featuring Brutalist buildings collected here.

 

Social Housing as Heritage: Thoughts on the National Trust and Balfron Tower

Following a recent post on Balfron Tower, I sent a slightly snarky tweet to National Trust London.

The National Trust were offering guided tours of Balfron, climaxing in a visit to Flat 130 – the temporary home of Ernő and Ursula Goldfinger for two months in 1968.  I’d visited the Tower during London Open House myself a couple of weeks earlier and had viewed the various studios and installations of artists temporarily resident in the block before its refurbishment and sell-off to the private sector.

It was hard not to see a total process here – nothing that could be viewed as ‘regeneration’ except in its most attenuated and twisted form, rather something more akin to burial: a long good-bye to social housing dreams and aspirations, sugar-coated as is the British way with that cost-nothing deference the ruling classes give to their vanquished foes.

To be fair to the National Trust, they responded:

And a dialogue and invitation ensued to attend the Balfron tour.  Last Friday, I went along.

We started at the Spotlight Café – not, in its own words, ‘a youth club, or a youth centre’ but ‘a multi-million pound creative youth space designed to inspire’.  It’s managed by local housing association Poplar HARCA and funded by LandAid (‘the property industry charity’), British Land and the Canary Wharf Group – a £7m project designed by Astudio ‘to provide users with opportunity for leisure and skills development, helping to empower and galvanise the local community’.

I forgot to take a picture. This is an architect’s image of the design which is actually pretty close to the reality.

It’s an interesting building and it has to be a good thing, doesn’t it?  It provides local youngsters with activities and facilities they want and, if that depends on a lot of ostentatious Corporate Social Responsibility and comes with all the market-driven jargon of ‘skills and opportunities’ and visual paraphernalia of post-modern design, so be it.  But it’s worth studying as a building of its time, perhaps as representative of a nexus of social and economic relationships as Toynbee Hall, say, in Whitechapel not far away.  Nowadays, we don’t ‘improve’ people, we ‘empower’ them but the more cynical among you might see a persistent and essential hierarchy in place.

Those observations were, not unreasonably, beyond the remit of our guide but he did mark the place – Poplar – and its place – Poplarism – in another history: a time when local councillors went to prison to defend working-class conditions and we believed change would come from below, through struggle, rather than through corporate benevolence or the generosity of the market.

Frederick Gibberd’s clock tower in Chrisp Street market with its backdrop, Canary Wharf. Fitzgerald House, a 1968 council block, is to the right.

We moved on to the Chrisp Street Market and the Lansbury Estate, the Festival of Britain’s 1951 model housing estate, named after the leader of that earlier revolt, George Lansbury, and built to meet the ‘needs of the people’.  All this was well-noted. The guide commented on the modesty of the architecture – rightly, of course, particularly with Balfron coming up as its antithesis – but I’d love people to appreciate the ambition of this moment and its drama.  We believed then in the possibility of collectively building a better world.  We no longer do. Even the language would embarrass most contemporary politicians.

The mini-courtyards at the front of the homes are in construction, part of a current refurbishment of the Estate

Next we walked through the Brownfield Estate: for Owen Hatherley ‘still remarkable as an example of a time when public housing could be valued as much, or rather more, than any other form of building’.  The low-rise, designed by the Goldfinger team, is unassuming but it’s carefully crafted and well-constructed.

We noted, as we walked past, Goldfinger’s Glenkerry House –a Brutalist building which can bear the adjective proudly though Goldfinger himself disliked the term.  Its 75 flats and four maisonettes have been owned and managed by residents through the Glenkerry Cooperative Housing Association since its construction.  It would be interesting to have learnt more about why the GLC chose this model here and what its wider lessons might be.

The east end of Carradale House and service tower

Next, after looking at Carradale House, the third of Goldfinger’s Brownfield designs, on to the main show – Balfron Tower itself, accessed through the basement and then up the surprisingly quick but disturbingly coffin-shaped lift to the twenty-third floor.

Flat 130 has been re-created by Hemingway Design in sixties’ style.  It’s great fun, certainly the most purely enjoyable part of the tour and a beautiful exercise in nostalgia.  But it felt to me too much like pastiche – a set of sixties’ clichés and probably not (as the guide pointed out) the décor or furnishings that most of the new residents would have possessed.

There’s a telling misstep here, I think.  The National Trust invites us to study an image of the sixties – a rather hip image of a hip sixties as contemporary hipsterdom might view it.  We are safely removed from the reality of Balfron’s actual residents at this time – we don’t need to engage with real people moving from the slums; we can forget it is (or rather was) a council flat in a council block.

And we are invited – at the very least, allowed – to forget that this particular bit of council housing is being sold off to rich people.  The resident artists, the Balfron Arts Season and National Trust tours are, at minimum, complicit in this; at worst, they are its agents.

The Smithsons’ – soon to be demolished – late sixties Robin Hood Gardens Estate seen from Balfron Tower

Now, to be fair to the National Trust, they come to this late in the day and they’re hardly to blame for Balfron’s demise. The guides were well-informed and interesting, good on the architecture  and sensitive to much of the local history.  The guidebook is generally excellent: well-written and illustrated with thoughtful coverage of major themes – Goldfinger himself, Brutalism and high-rise, some East End and social housing context.

But the section on ‘Balfron Now’ pulls its punches.  The ‘dynamic partnership’ of Poplar HARCA with the Bow Arts Trust is noted but its meaning is glossed over. Do middle-class artists (however much some were ‘harnessing local creativity into artistic interventions’) really contribute to the regeneration of social housing?  Isn’t this really a process of gentrification?  And the end-game of that process – the sell-off of the flats to those who can afford to buy them – isn’t mentioned.

Still, I wish I’d written these words of Joe Watson’s introduction myself:

Like it or loathe it, this was intended to be heroic architecture that offered the best of design to the masses, freed people from condemned slum housing, and elevated them – literally – to a better life.  Balfron Tower is the welfare state in concrete.  It deserves, nay demands, our attention.

But if you mark that politics you have to note our politics – the politics that has seen social housing progressively marginalised and demonised, the politics that has allowed the welfare state to be chipped away and sold off.

Glenkerry House from Balfron Tower

Let’s put this more moderately.  The National Trust doesn’t have to take sides but it should address the politics (or the social and economic context if you want to put it less scarily) – as it should address those of any of its properties.  If I’m looking at an eighteenth-century stately home, for instance, I want to hear about the Enclosure Acts that created the parkland, cleared the village, set up the ‘model farm’ in its place.  I’d like to learn about the draconian laws against poaching and the gentry and clergy which enforced them, or the investments in slavery which supported their life-styles…

In short, we need to be told what maintained all that high art and beautiful ostentation and how the building fits into the politics of the day.  When we come to the more recent history of Balfron Tower, and the more so when the Trust has to its credit chosen to celebrate mass housing rather than that of the upper classes, our duty to examine the lived reality of ordinary lives and the politics which shapes it becomes even stronger.

Who lived here?  What changed?  What’s happened to social housing, why is it being sold off? These are not incidentals to Balfron’s past and present but are central to them.  Ignore those and we’re left with a sanitised ‘heritage’ which will please the architectural aesthetes but tell us very little of its true story.

If you’d like to read more on the social history and current politics of Balfron Tower, please take a look at my two blog posts:

Balfron Tower: imparting ‘a delicate sense of terror’ and Balfron Tower: ‘They all said the flats were lovely’

Balfron Tower, Poplar: imparting ‘a delicate sense of terror’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Brutalism, Goldfinger, Regeneration, Tower Hamlets

Balfron Tower is now one of the stately homes of England – a National Trust attraction no less.  Recently it’s hosted an arts season, a Shakespeare play, and it’s provided live-work accommodation for twenty-five artists since 2008.  And all that, to be honest, makes me sad because once Balfron was simply housing for the local people who needed it – although its size and style and big name architect did always get it special attention.

Photograph taken in 1969 showing original concrete chimneys to service tower boilers (from LBTH, Brownfield Estate, Poplar Conservation Management Plan)

The site for what is currently the Brownfield Estate, in which Balfron is located, had been identified as early as 1951.  The now truncated St Leonard’s Road was one of Poplar’s principal streets; the area as a whole comprised a dense grid of old and substandard terraced housing.  The land was acquired in 1959 just as the new Blackwall Tunnel Northern Approach to the east was cutting its own brutal swathe through these old streets.  In 1963, the London County Council asked Ernő Goldfinger – one of the most celebrated modernist architects of the day – to design the first buildings of the new development.

Rowlett Street Phase I, as the Balfron Tower was originally known, was built – by the LCC’s successor body, the Greater London Council – between 1965 and 1967 and officially opened in February 1968 by Desmond Plummer, leader of the GLC.

It is 26 storeys and 276 feet high – in plain construction terms, ‘an in-situ reinforced concrete cross-wall structure linked to the service tower by precast concrete bridges at every third floor’. (1)  It contained 146 homes in all, 136 flats and 10 maisonettes.  The maisonettes were located at ground level and on the 15^th floor – the latter provides the distinct break which can be seen in the otherwise uniform façade of the Tower.

Service tower

The idea of a service tower had been pioneered by Denys Lasdun at Sulkin House and Keeling House in the 1950s.  Its advantage, as Goldfinger pointed out, was that ‘all noisy machines, including lift motors, water pumps, fire pumps, rubbish chutes, and the boiler house at the top, are completely insulated from the dwellings’.   Noise within the flats was also reduced ‘sideways by a 9 inch concrete wall and top and bottom by a 1 foot thick concrete floor’.  It wasn’t so easy to deal with the near-motorway just outside the block.

Service tower lobby

The service towers also contained two communal laundries and ‘hobby rooms’ for teenagers, one for table tennis or billiards and the other set aside – in language which must have been a little dated even for its time – as a ‘jazz/pop room’.  Decades later, in a rather more authentic demonstration of youth culture, the Tower was home to pirate radio stations which made good use of its commanding height.

Living room and access to balcony

Goldfinger hoped that the large balconies provided for each home would provide a play area for toddlers; ‘a sunken play area with slides, towers, water and a sandpit’ was located at ground level with a day nursery to follow.  He acknowledged that ‘common shopping and welfare facilities’ were lacking – as they were in so many estates in which councils understandably prioritised the immediate pressing need for roofs over heads.  This, he said, was a problem which needed to be solved on ‘a political plane’.

As for the height of the block, Goldfinger was sure this was a positive: ‘The whole object of building high is to free the ground for children and grown-ups to enjoy Mother Earth and not to cover every inch with bricks and mortar’.  (2)

Goldfinger was a larger-than-life character and this makes it easy to conflate the building and the man and see both as somehow ‘brutal’ – more concerned with a showpiece building than the lived experience of its residents.  In fact, he recognised clearly that:

the success of any scheme depends on the human factor – the relationship of people to each other and the frame of their daily life which the building provides.

‘These particular buildings,’ he continued, ‘have the great advantage of having families with deep roots in the immediate neighbourhood as tenants’.  Of the first 160 families in the estate, most were rehoused from the immediate neighbourhood and all but two from Tower Hamlets. They tried, where possible, to rehouse former neighbours together.

Goldfinger hoped, perhaps a little optimistically, that the access galleries – he counted the number of front doors on each, 18 on seven of the levels – would form ‘“pavements” on which the normal life of the neighbourhood’ might continue ‘very similar to a “traditional East End” street’.

Access corridor

Those corridors weren’t exactly ‘streets in the sky’ but he saw their design as far preferable to a traditional point block where only a few flats could be arranged around a single internal corridor.

Such were the good intentions and it’s worth recounting them to remind ourselves that these Brutalist blocks were designed – above all and for all their drama – to provide good homes for ordinary people.  (The same is true of the even more heavily criticised Robin Hood Gardens estate nearby, designed by the similarly controversial Smithsons.)

In fact, it’s often the acolytes rather than the architects themselves who most deserve criticism.  There’s an astonishing amount of writing about Balfron Tower which simply fails to register that it was housing at all.

Then there are the architectural descriptions which seem to celebrate the more dramatic but arguably inhuman features of its design, reaching their nadir in this account of Balfron by Goldfinger’s former collaborator, James Dunnett: (3)

It is as though Goldfinger, from among the Functionalist totems, had chosen as a source of inspiration the artifacts of war. The sheer concrete walls of the circulation tower are pierced only by slits; cascading down the facade like rain, they impart a delicate sense of terror.

Lynsey Hanley, perhaps unfairly critical of Balfron elsewhere, was very reasonably critical of this: ‘is living in a council flat supposed to be delicately terrifying?’ (4)

Internally, of course, the flats were spacious and airy with a quality of fixtures and fittings that very few of their residents would have enjoyed before.  And the views were wonderful.

The contemporary view to the west

Among the first to move in were an unusually affluent couple from Hampstead – Ernő and Ursula Goldfinger.  They moved in to flat 130 on the 25^th floor (now refurbished with sixties kitsch as part of the National Trust tour), paying as was proper the full rent of £11 10s rather than the subsidised figure of £4 15s 6d due from tenants.  They stayed two months.

Goldfinger wanted: (5)

to experience, at first hand, the size of the rooms, the amenities provided, the time it takes to obtain a lift, the amount of wind whirling around the tower and any problems which might arise so that I can correct them in future.

In next week’s post, we’ll see how that experiment went, we’ll assess how Balfron Tower succeeded as social housing for its more usual residents, and we’ll examine the twisted politics which have brought it to its current sad state.

Sources

(1) Ernő Goldfinger, ‘Balfron Tower’, East London Papers, vol. 12, no.1, Summer 1969

(2) Letter to the Guardian, 21 February 1968

(3) James Dunnett and Gavin Stamp (eds), Ernő Goldfinger: Works 1 (1983)

(4) Lynsey Hanley, Estates (2007)

(5) Quoted in Nigel Warburton, Ernő Goldfinger. The Life of an Architect (2004)

The Woodchurch Estate, Birkenhead II: ‘Not a mere assemblage of houses’

Tags

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1980s

Last week’s post looked at the controversy surrounding rival plans – one a more traditional cottage suburb submitted by Borough Engineer Bertie Robinson, the other an ostensibly more visionary re-imagining of community life proposed by the architect Sir Charles Reilly – for Birkenhead’s Woodchurch Estate.  The former had been preferred by the Conservative majority on the Council and they had appointed the Liverpool architect Herbert James Rowse to ‘to draw up designs for the houses to be erected on the estate’. (1)

This plaque is placed at the main entrance to the estate on the side wall of a house on Ackers Road

To general surprise, Rowse, perhaps unwilling to work within the confines of a scheme suggested by the Borough Engineer, perhaps seeking some third way compromise, returned to the drawing board and, in January 1945, submitted an entirely new scheme.  Labour pressed for reconsideration of Reilly’s plans but in March 1945, the Council – dividing again on party lines – endorsed those of Rowse. Building of the estate, after a twenty-year gestation, finally began in 1946.

Rowse’s 1945 plan from Architecture and Building News, 1950

Whilst he eschewed the social engineering proposed by Reilly, Rowse’s own proposals reflected the spirit and ambition of the time: (2)

The Woodchurch Estate is not a mere assemblage of houses placed on a plot ground in the maximum possible density and monotonous regularity of layout and pattern, after the manner of the vast unplanned and uncontrolled suburban development of the inter-war years: it is the architectural setting of a fully developed sociological conception of a community of people living within a defined neighbourhood, having a conscious identity of its own and equipped for the maximum possibilities of the full intercourse of such a community. The comprehensive character of this project makes it of outstanding interest.

For Rowse, the fulfilment of these promises lay in the layout, facilities and housing forms of his new estate.

The overall plan was ‘developed on the basis of the natural topographical features of the site’ with:

Every effort … made in the planning of the Estate to provide prospects of the attractive rural surroundings from every possible point and to allow the maximum amount of rural character to permeate the estate by means of planted green closes, forecourts, quadrangles, recreation spaces and allotment gardens.

Broad parkways divided the estate whilst a central square provided ‘for the social life of the community’ with shops, baths and assembly hall, community centre, cinema, library and clinic:

In contrast to the familiar monotony of streets or their suburban counterpart, the estate will present varied internal prospects of groupings of terraces and small blocks amidst trees and green spaces, having the general character of a contemporary version of the traditional English village scene.

For the 2500 houses of the estate, Rowse proposed brick of ‘good, common quality’ with ‘architectural interest … achieved by the application of lime-wash, pigmented in a range of quiet tones of yellow, blue, pink and grey, alternating with white’.  His interest extended to their interiors – those of the first homes completed being ‘decorated in warm ivory shade on the walls and a pale shade of blue on the ceilings’.  Criticism of this colour scheme led to a uniform white being applied externally by the early 1950s.

Rowse’s illustrations of Woodchurch housing from Architecture and Building News, 1950

The estate’s early housing reflects Rowse’s ambitions though, on a cold January day such as when I visited, those broad parkways can seem rather bleak.

Shops on Hoole Road © Rept0n1x and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Rowse’s supervision of the scheme was superseded by that of new Borough Architect TA Brittain in 1952 who, in Pevsner’s astringent words, ‘continued building to inferior standards of design’.  The volume dislikes the estate’s early neo-Georgian-style shopfronts but reserves its greatest disdain for the Hoole Road shops, once planned as a centrepiece of Rowse’s central parkway. (3)

This early image closely resembles the 1000th house on the estate, opened in 1953

The estate’s 1000^th home, no. 84 Common Field Road, was officially opened by local MP Percy Collick in 1953 – a gabled, tile-hung, arts and crafts-inspired design, clearly a legacy of Rowse’s tenure.

Early photographs of the estate

Later housing was plainer but the biggest departure from Rowse’s founding vision were the two 14-storey tower blocks – Grasswood Gardens and Ferny Brow Gardens – built in 1960 on New Hey Road; the architect, ironically was HJ Rowse. (4)  By the end of the decade, three 14-storey blocks were added, built by Wimpey – Leamington, Lynmouth and Lucerne Gardens, at the Upton end of the estate.

Leamington, Lynmouth and Lucerne Gardens, photographed in 1987 from the Tower Block website

Typically, for all the preceding rhetoric, even the most basic community facilities were slow to appear: the first shops in 1953, a health clinic in 1954, and the first local library (at first housed in the new secondary modern school) in 1959. A community centre followed in 1965.

St Michael and All Angels, January 2019

Church congregations met in private houses or local halls until the Methodist church opened in 1958 and the Roman Catholic St Michaels and All Angels in 1965. The latter was worth waiting for, at least with an impressive modernist design (by Richard O’Mahony), planned liturgically – in Vatican II style – to focus attention on the central altar and – in landscape terms – to provide a fitting climax to New Hey and Home Farm Roads.

 

Home Farm Road, January 2019

All this, however, was some way away from the promises of Rowse, let alone Reilly, and that post-war vision of planned community.  Later academic studies of the estate allow us to examine the community which did emerge. They present a mixed picture, both reflecting and challenging standard interpretations.

The new residents were predominantly young families. A points system determined priority, favouring ex-servicemen, established residency and size of family. Additional points were awarded to those living in unfit accommodation. They were also judged by their ability to pay the rent though this was often a struggle: an average rent for a three-bed home amounted to £1.40 whilst local wages ranged from £3.50 for an unskilled male worker to £5 and above for semi-skilled and skilled workers. In the struggle to make ends meets, cookers were often bought from the Gas Board and furniture from Sturla’s department store on the ‘never-never’ (hire purchase). (5)

Ganney Meadows Road, January 2019

In support of the Wilmott and Young narrative of ‘missing mum’ (or, more academically, missing inner-city matrilocal kinship networks), there were the many young women who trekked back on an almost daily basis from this peripheral estate to their parents. Some walked, some struggled with their Silver Cross prams (‘normally second-hand, mind’) on an inadequate bus service. One young mother with school-age children cycled to the Mount Estate – where her parents now lived – every day at 10am, having got up at 6am to clean the house and prepare evening meals. (5)

But there were others pleased to place some distance between themselves and family:

One male interviewee explained how he and his wife were glad to get away from his mother-in-law because ‘she was jealous of my wife’ and he described how the friction caused by the situation had put a strain on other family relationships.

As for community – or, more properly, neighbourliness – that was found informally, often in the revival of established friendships:

There was a knock at the door. When I went to the door there was [name] standin’ there with a tray an’ a pot of tea. We just couldn’t believe it when we saw each other’s faces. We’d lived in adjacent roads up near Bidston, had been good friends … childhood friends for many years … before the war an’ she was my next-door neighbour! I couldn’t believe it, it was like bein’ with family

Given that many people moved to Woodchurch at the same time from similar areas of central Birkenhead, these connections are not surprising, and, in due course, family links might also be resurrected as parents or siblings also moved to the estate.

Home Farm Road, January 2019

The much vaunted ‘spirit of a New Britain’ (discussed in last week’s post) seems absent but perhaps lived on in attenuated form:

It wasn’t just the fact that we were all from Birkenhead, we’d all been through more or less the same experiences … been in the same kind of housing … lost loved ones or our homes during the war. We were just glad to be alive an’ we weren’t goin’ to shut the door on a neighbour who needed a hand … where we came from it wasn’t the done thing.

But few came to look on the community centre as a centre of social life, still less civic engagement as had been hoped by post-war planners: a ‘number of the interviewees recalled that they only went there for Bingo “on a Tuesday night” or “when someone was havin’ a “do”.

In the end, ‘community’ developed very largely without the benign assistance of planners and politicians and, with hindsight, the would-be social engineering of the latter, however idealistic in motive, appears mechanistic in practice.  Real lives were led domestically, within the interstices of home, family and friendship, with little reference to formal institutions and with little desire to think or act more politically or civically.

New Hey Road, January 2019

Meanwhile, older traditions of heavy-handed council paternalism lived on – though typically enforced by women housing  officers raised on the Octavia Hill tradition.  Miss Crook was clearly the local exemplar:

I mean, everyone I’ve spoken to about it remembers the way she used to check the beds – the sheets, the blankets an’ that – she’d run her fingers over surfaces to check for dust, an’ the look on her face if she found any! It was like ‘Not dusted today then, dear?’ … Well, she did congratulate me on the standard of cleanliness, but by the time she’d finished doin’ her rounds I was ready to explode. But we just had to put up an’ shut up. Y’didn’t argue with authority at that time.

Respectability and responsible tenancy were thus rigorously policed in these early years.

For all that, Woodchurch, in some eyes, developed a bad reputation.  As early as 1952, a local newspaper article was headlined ‘Vandalism Sweeps Woodchurch Estate. £500 damage to bulldozer’. (The combination of many young children living on what were, in effect, huge building sites made such reports quite common across the country, in fact.)

Home Farm Road, January 2019

But as estates, such as Woodchurch, grew older, perceptions of them changed.  Press reports of crime on the estate in 1969 led the police to come to its defence: ‘The incidence of crime and disturbances on the estate is no more serious than in several other areas of the town … isolated incidents had been taken out of context’. (7)

By the 1980s, however, as unemployment and, in particular, youth unemployment rocketed, there were real problems.  Woodchurch (and even more notoriously, Birkenhead’s Ford Estate) became known as centres of heroin addiction: by 1983, it was claimed nine percent of 16-24 year-olds on the estates were taking the drug. ‘Woodyboy’ recalls the era: (8)

By the time my year finished our ‘O’ levels at Woody High in ’83 we well and truly knew what was going on around us. It seemed like everyone’s big brother or sister was a smackhead. They were the kids we remembered from primary school who were only a few years older. We knew kids in our year that had tried mushies or were into glue, but this was a whole different ball game.

The estate also became associated with wider problems of gang violence and antisocial behaviour.

Three ages of housing with Brackendale House to the rear, January 2019

From this time, there have been concerted efforts to raise the estate.  In Birkenhead, tower blocks were seen as one cause of this new social malaise and the new Borough of Wirral (formed in 1974) had been the first in Europe to demolish some of its blocks – beginning with the central Oak and Eldon Gardens towers in 1979. On the Woodchurch Estate, the two New Hey Road blocks were converted to housing for elderly people and renamed in 1984.  Now, only one – Brackendale – remains.  Leamington, Lynmouth and Lucerne Gardens have also been demolished.

Today, the worst social problems of Woodchurch are over and, to this outsider, the estate looked generally well-maintained and cared for, and attractive in its older parts where Rowse’s vision was more fully implemented.  It’s a council estate which means in modern Britain it houses disproportionately a poorer population and unemployment levels remain high. Four areas of the estate are among the ten percent most deprived in the country. (9)

There are some who would blame council housing for that. For me, it’s a manifestation of what has been done to council housing and its community.  Whilst the Woodchurch Estate itself was one small part of the ‘New Britain’ to emerge after 1945, a wider element of that promise was full employment and reduced inequality. That is a promise betrayed and we have asked council estates and their residents to carry the burden of that betrayal.

Ganney Meadows Road, January 2019

One early resident of the estate recalls it:

as being as good as any private housing … people didn’t realise it was a council estate … it was peaceful too in the early days. It was a good place to live and a good place to bring up the children.

That, I’m sure, remains true for many today.

Sources

Kenn Taylor, who was raised on the estate, has also written interestingly on its history and significance in The Memory of a Hope.

(1) Margaret H Taylor, ‘Creating a Municipal Gemeinschaft? Disputations of Community’, Manchester Metropolitan University MPhil, 2013.

(2) HJ Rowse, ‘Woodchurch estate, Birkenhead; Architect: H. J. Rowse’, Architect and Building News, October 14, 1950. The quotations which follow are drawn from this source.

(3) Nikolaus Pevsner, Edward Hubbard, Cheshire (1978)

(4) Tower Block (University of Edinburgh), Woodchurch: Contract 23

(5) Taylor, ‘Creating a Municipal Gemeinschaft’

(6) As argued in Young and Wilmott,  Family and Kinship in East London (1957). Woodchurch analysis drawn from Lilian Potter, ‘National Tensions in the Post War Planning of Local Authority Housing and ‘The Woodchurch Controversy’, University of Liverpool PhD, 1998. The quotations and later detail are drawn from Taylor, as is the following quotation.

(7) ‘Police Speak Up For Woodchurch Estate’, Liverpool Echo, 23 July 1969

(8) SevenStreets, ‘Smack City: Thirty Years of Hurt’ (ND, c2013). The statistic is drawn from the article; the testimony from comments below.

(9) Wirral Council Public Health Intelligence Team, Indices of Multiple Deprivation for Wirral 2015 (November 2015)