Book Review: ‘The Town of Tomorrow: 50 Years of Thamesmead’

The Town of Tomorrow: 50 Years of Thamesmead (Here Press, 2019)

At times, Thamesmead must have seemed less like the ‘Town of Tomorrow’ than the ‘Land that Time Forgot’.  It’s been a chequered story to say the least and it’s one that’s lent itself easily to the usual tropes of planner overreach and misplaced architectural ambition. But Thamesmead, in its latest iteration since 2014 under the stewardship of Peabody, lives on. Perhaps, with Crossrail looming and a DLR connection mooted, some of those earlier promises will be more fully fulfilled though typically, as is now the way, in less visionary form.

So it’s time to celebrate Thamesmead and we’re fortunate to have a newly published book which does that in a positive though clear-eyed way. The Town of Tomorrow: 50 Years of Thamesmead is, above all, a superb pictorial record of its past and present – of the ideals and plans which formed it, the buildings and landscapes which shaped it, and the people who have lived it.

John Grindrod’s introduction lays out the broad outline of its history with typical panache.  The eyes of the London County Council first looked eastwards towards the Erith Marshes in the early 1960s after their ambitious plans for a New Town at Hook in rural Hampshire were thwarted. Ted Hollamby’s vision of a series of ‘platform villages’ was abandoned as too costly and impracticable but the new Greater London Council (GLC) formed in 1965, seeking to fulfil its strategic housing mandate and aided by Government plans to redevelop abandoned Ministry of Defence land such as the Woolwich Arsenal site, returned to the concept.

Images from ‘Woolwich-Erith: A Riverside Project’, (GLC, 1966) © London Metropolitan Archives

‘Woolwich-Erith: a Riverside Project’ was born in 1966 – a plan, in conjunction with the Boroughs of Greenwich and Bexley, to create a new town of some 60,000 people on 1300 acres of largely unused land lying on the southern back of the Thames.  Water was one of its defining features – Robert Rigg, the GLC planner, had been influenced by Scandinavian schemes built around the presence of water and how, in Grindrod’s words, that ‘helped create an atmosphere of calm and wellbeing’.

Construction of towers on Southmere Lake, 1970 © London Metropolitan Archives

More practically, the risk of flooding demanded unusual means to keep people safe and dry – towers raised on stilts, deck-access homes and high-level walkways dotted around the artificial lakes which would ensure proper drainage. But the conceptual genius of the scheme was to make virtue of necessity. If separation of cars and people was a contemporary planning mantra, there was in Thamesmead, as Grindrod describes:

a more Venetian approach, with bridges and paths floating above what might at any moment become canals and overspill from the river.

The architects’ impressions featured in the book capture a ‘Cool Britannia’ in its first, sixties’, iteration and with a heavily Continental slant:

It was pure south of France, white concrete buildings shining in the warm blue waters, reflected alongside yachts, bikinis and polo necks.  The ambition for Thamesmead would bring the lifestyle of the European jetset – the kind of world portrayed in art house movies and racy novels – and combine it with the more functional aims of creating much needed council housing.

The prosaic minutes of the GLC’s Thamesmead Committee in 1967 record the latter – the ‘central objective of the development [was] to provide housing, and in so doing, create a reservoir of housing for decanting population from the hard-pressed inner area’ in an era when slum clearance was in full spate.

Detail of model showing Coralline Walk (front) and Yarnton Way (left), 1967 © London Metropolitan Archives

The long spinal terraced ziggurats of Coralline Walk and Binsey Walk and adjacent thirteen-storey tower blocks were the first fruits of this approach; system-built and ‘as modular and groovy as any Habitat stackable moulded plastic furniture of the day’.

The southern end of Coralline Walk, viewed from Lensbury Way, 1969 © London Metropolitan Archives

The first residents, Joan and Terence Gooch and their two children, moved into 64 Coralline Walk in July 1968 – the sole residents for six months at a time when the new ‘stark white modernist homes were marooned in a wasteland of mud, puddles, concrete and construction equipment’.

Children’s playground and the Lakeside Health Centre, Tavy Bridge, 1973  © Bexley Local Studies & Archive Centre

The first school opened in 1968. The health centre – a wonderful modernist building built at Tavy Bridge over one of the artificial lakes and sadly demolished in 2008 – opened in 1970; the first shops amazingly not till 1971.  By 1974, the population stood at around 12,000.

Crossing Eastern Way (A2016), via the ‘A’ Bridge, built 1973, c1979. Photography © George Plemper

Philip Samuel – one of a number of residents who tell of their own experience in the book – moved to Thamesmead in 1975 with his family at the age of eight:

We lived on Maran Way. I could ride my bike for miles without ever touching the ground. I felt like I was in a Judge Dredd futuristic paradise. It was a good place to be a kid. There was so much nature and wide-open space. In the spring, there would be grass fights, in the summer there’d be water fights, autumn would be mud bombs and winter would be snow balls.

Thamesmead: A Place in London’s Future. Fold-out leaflet, published by the GLC, 1982. © London Metropolitan Archives

Salianne Heaton, who arrived the following year, has similar memories:

Thamesmead was like a giant playground. You never had to cross any roads, everywhere had flyovers. We used to play knock and run in the squares in the middle of the housing estate.

Generally, looking back as adults, people remember a close-knit community – as Robert Dyer recalls ‘everybody knew everybody back then so, if you did anything bad, someone would tell your mum’.

Of course, nostalgia and selection plays its own part in these perhaps unusually affectionate remembrances but it’s vitally important to allow people to tell their own stories which, all too often are at odds with dominant media narratives.

Aerial photograph of Area 1 looking north with Southmere Lake (top), 1971
© Bexley Local Studies & Archive Centre

One unwitting element in the latter was Stanley Kubrick’s filming of Clockwork Orange in Thamesmead in 1971. Grindrod points out that Kubrick had intended its ‘formal beauty, lakes and crisp white architecture’ to serve as counterpoint to the film’s scenes of sudden violence, making them ‘even more shocking and incongruous’.  In practice, it was the myth of Thamesmead as some kind of futuristic dystopia which became dominant. (1)

Still, there’s no doubt there were real hardships and difficulties for these early pioneers. The great failing, apart from that slow development of infrastructure which is all too common in major schemes, was the failure to provide the new township with the quick and efficient transport links its population required.

And then it was failed by a changed politics and faltering ambition. Thamesmead’s projected population was downgraded from 60,000 to 45,000; by the end of the 1970s no more than 400 new homes were being completed annually and by 1982, the population stood at 20,000, around half the initially projected figure.

Manordene Road, off Crossway, Area 5, looking north-east along the waterway that runs from Moat Gardens to Tump 39 and the Thamesmead Ecology Study Area, 1982
© London Metropolitan Archives

System-building and modernist design were abandoned and conventional brick build – admittedly the new vernacular was often more to popular taste – became pre-eminent. This also, no doubt, sat more comfortably with a desire to promote ‘mixed communities’ and owner occupation – a 40 percent target was set for the latter in 1978 and 96 tenants had bought their formerly council-rented homes by 1979, well before Margaret Thatcher’s implantation of Right to Buy.  (At present, around 40 percent of homes are social rented.)

The aesthetic shift was facilitated by the raising of the Thames riverbank in 1974 which alleviated flood risks and enabled ground floor construction but it spoke more broadly to a loss of the more audacious hopes which had initially inspired the project.

Hill View Drive, Area 7, viewed from Gallions Hill, 2018.
Photography © Tara Darby

Thatcher’s politically-motivated abolition of the GLC in 1986 seemed merely confirmation of the retreat of social democracy. Thamesmead Town Ltd, a not-for-profit private company, took over the project from the GLC until it split in the later 1990s into three components – the Gallions Housing Association managing housing stock, Trust Thamesmead supporting community development, and Tilfen Land, a commercial property developer.

The demolition of some of the original town’s signature landmarks (including the health centre) and the unimaginative replacements and newbuild which followed resulted, according to a typically caustic Owen Hatherley, in a ‘straggling half-demolished mess of crap spec housing, wasteland and forlorn Brutalist fragments’. (2)

Vision for Silvermere Lake, Thamesmead Waterfront, 2018
© LDS Architects

Now, since all three of those bodies were absorbed by Peabody in January 2014, a new and more exciting vision is being proclaimed once more: ‘20,000 new homes, thousands of new jobs, plus new leisure, cultural and commercial facilities’ alongside ‘immediate improvements needed in areas such as pedestrian routes, play facilities, lighting and local amenities’. Ultimately, Peabody say, ‘our plan for Thamesmead is simple – to create an amazing place that people love to work in, to visit, and of course, call home.’ (3)

Well, you can’t argue with that, can you?  It will, however, be important to see how the promised mix of ‘affordable’ (80 percent market rate) and genuinely affordable social rented homes works out and here we may be less optimistic.

Sheniz Bayraktar (née Mehmet) with her brothers at a celebration of The Queen’s Silver Jubilee in South Thamesmead, 1977
Photography © George Plemper

The book, edited by Peter Chadwick and Ben Weaver with contemporary photography and interviews by Tara Darby, is a great introduction to Thamesmead, and John Grindrod provides a sensitive and eloquent account of its planning and architectural evolution. It’s good to see residents’ memories and experiences also featured strongly. For many people, the 193 colour and black and white illustrations (I’ve included a small representative selection of these in this post), which tell so much of its story so powerfully, will suffice to capture both the bold vision of its inception and more troubled maturity.

Further information on the book and purchase details are available here on the Here Press website. 

Notes

(1) The article by Inez de Coo for Failed Architecture, ‘Ultraviolence in Representation: The Enduring Myth of the Thamesmead Estate’, offers an excellent account of how Kubrick’s film and later depictions have adversely shaped attitudes towards Thamesmead.

(2) Owen Hatherley, ‘Don’t repeat the mistakes of the past at Thamesmead’, Architects’ Journal, 8 April 2015 (subscription required)

(3) Quoted from the Thamesmead Now website, Thamesmead: the Plan.

 

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Book Review: Catherine Flinn, Rebuilding Britain’s Blitzed Cities. Hopeful Dreams, Stark Realities

Catherine Flinn, Rebuilding Britain’s Blitzed Cities: Hopeful Dreams and Stark Realities (Bloomsbury, 2018)

I looked at post-Second World War planning in my book, Municipal Dreams: the Rise and Fall of Council Housing, mainly in the context of housing in which much was achieved.  But there was another side to that idealism which lay in the ambition to rebuild and redesign the centres of Britain’s blitzed cities.  There, as Catherine Flinn painstakingly describes in her important new book, the picture is far less positive.

The worst phase of German bombing in 1940 and 1941 was reckoned to have destroyed 75,000 shops, 42,000 commercial premises and 25,000 factories. By the end of the war the total cost of destruction was estimated at £1,150m. And the practical, and what some saw as the moral, commitment to rebuild the worst-affected towns and cities in particular began early – as early as 1940 when a Cabinet committee on reconstruction was established.

The impact of the Blitz is shown dramatically in this photograph of Exeter

In December 1940, Sir John Reith, then Minister of Works and Buildings, presented a paper on the ‘Reconstruction of Town and Country’ to Cabinet. His memo referred to the public attention already directed to the issue:

not just because of opportunities in restoration of damaged property but in the hope of a fresh start in a new spirit of cooperation and with the high objective of a better Britain.

Flinn expertly charts the complex iterations of committees and ministries and legislation that followed but, throughout, the expectation remained that the blitzed cities would receive priority in the post-war era and that their reconstruction would indeed foreshadow and exemplify the new and better Britain to emerge.

Reith’s language was measured when compared to the extravagant heights reached by Thomas Sharp, one of the foremost planners of the day, quoted by Flinn.  In ‘Building Britain: 1941’ (which he billed as ‘Words for Pictures Perhaps A Film Script’ and not published – in the Town Planning Review – till 1952), Sharp proclaimed:

There is so much now to plan for, to prepare for,
A whole shining world is possible.
Is there for the asking if we choose to make it:
Is ours if we will.
We are the shapers of our environment.
We are the makes of our own destiny.
We are the creators of our own happiness.
If truly we desire it we can build
A new and noble world for generous living…

If that was a rhetorical outlier, it was only partly so. When We Build Again, a film commissioned by the Cadburys in Birmingham in 1943 and scripted by Dylan Thomas, declared ‘Nothing is too good for the people’.  And it’s interesting to note that in Britain, a country so often mired in tradition, that such plans were uniformly, in Flinn’s words, ‘modern, optimistic and forward-looking’ – an interesting contrast to Germany and Poland, say, where reconstruction often meant restoration.

Thomas Sharp and his book Town Planning, published in 1940. It sold 250,000 copies – a clear sign of the public interest in post-war reconstruction.

This range of promises of post-war betterment in a variety of forms and media is outlined in Flinn’s second chapter.  It’s hard to disagree with William Holford, another planner and architect, quoted later in the book, that ‘it is true that not only the planners but the Government itself had promised, if not a new heaven, at least a new earth at the end of the war’.

So, if you’re looking at the contemporary British city, you are probably wondering what became of this brave new world. With the significant exceptions of Plymouth (which I’ve written about in previous blog posts) and Coventry, the transformative impact of post-war reconstruction was paltry and often lamented. The rest of the book explains why.

Corner  of Royal Way and Armada Way, Plymouth city centre – a product of 1943 Plan for the city. © John Boughton

The simple and established answer is that post-war priorities rapidly shifted from physical to economic reconstruction.  The great value of the book is not only to detail the processes by which this occurred but to delineate the myriad other obstacles to post-war rebuilding that facilitated this shift.

Taking that economic focus first, the little-known Investment Programmes Committee established by the Attlee government in 1947 takes centre-stage and, in particular and almost the villain of the piece, its chair, the civil servant FF Turnbull.  Turnbull repeatedly vetoed the building licence allocations that city centre reconstruction required; his widely-accepted rationale (in Flinn’s words) was that:

Resources going to the blitzed cities would necessarily draw on precious needs for industry and other business relating to exports and economic recovery.

Flinn also notes how a governmental ‘insistence on the maintenance of Britain’s world role’ and a ‘tendency to focus on global status diminished some of the discussions on the domestic agenda’.

The Abercrombie Plan’s zonal reimagining of central Hull

On the ground, the ‘overwhelming complexity in preparing and implementing reconstruction in the blitzed cities’ is amply illustrated by her three representative case studies of Hull, Exeter and Liverpool. Both Hull and Exeter had commissioned grand plans for post-war rebuilding, from Sir Patrick Abercrombie and Thomas Sharp respectively.  Liverpool, by contrast, pursued a more in-house process in closer collaboration with interested parties.

For all the differences between the three cities (in terms of history, local economy and political control), common themes stand out. The first and most crucial is the lack of central government support already noted, reflected not only in the issue of allocations (or lack of them) but in the sometimes obstructive, often critical attitude of Ministry officials who believed they knew better than councillors and planners on the ground.

The proposals for a new shopping centre envisaged here by Abercrombie around Osbourne Street were scuppered by trader resistance.

Beyond that, issues of existing property ownership and the competing financial interests they represented were uppermost.  In Hull, for example, the Council’s vision was challenged by a rival plan put forward by the city’s Chamber of Trade in 1947. In the end, Flinn concludes ‘the Abercrombie plans were not only controversial but, in practical terms, impossible to implement’.  Her forensic examination of the complex conditions operating in all three cities not only explains why so little was achieved but leaves you a little surprised that anything was built at all.

The final irony is that such reconstruction as did occur was often critically received.  D Rigby Childs, the editor of the Architects’ Journal, writing in 1954, thought that:

With the new permanent buildings one gets the impression that only too frequently the architects have been overwhelmed with frustrations of all kinds, allied with problems of finance, leading to a building which is, at best, humdrum and lifeless.

Rebuilding in Exeter, an historic city and victim of the Baedeker raids in April-May 1942, was described as ‘insipid’ and criticised by local residents.

A contemporary image of Exeter city centre © John Boughton

For all the subsequent disparagement of post-war rebuilding, it was decidedly not, in John Gold’s words, ‘the product of imposing utopia visions’.  While council officials were able to some extent influence the overall look of new developments, practical issues around finance and rationing played a greater role in what went up. It’s true, however, that the sparse, clean lines of modernist design also sat somewhat uncomfortably with popular taste.

Jameson Street and Paragon Place are fruits of Hull’s post-war reconstruction © John Boughton

Flinn sets out, in a broader sense, to examine ‘why cities look the way they do’.  A large part of the answer in this instance, as explained in a later chapter which raises interesting questions for further research, lies in the role of private property developers. Here Ravenseft stands out; a company which began by building a small terrace of shops on a Bristol council estate and then expanded to develop large city centre schemes in Exeter, Hull and other blitzed cities. The firm was initially backed by Harold Samuel of the Land Securities Trust and acquired by that company in 1955. Landsec in its new incarnation is now the largest commercial property development and investment company in the UK.

The lack of financial support from government and the pressing need to replace rates income lost to wartime destruction left local authorities dependent on such economic muscle. The developers themselves, of course, were more interested in lettable space than aesthetics.

‘Exeter Phoenix’. The sculpture was placed on the original Princesshay shopping centre opened by the then Princess Elizabeth in 1949, subsequently demolished. It’s now on the exterior of the new precinct opened in 2007. © John Boughton

Flinn’s close empirical study provides much more detail, not only with regard to central government policy but also in relation to the local personalities, politics and issues in her three case studies. It is complemented by a range of relevant images – of plans, proposals as well as pre-existing and completed realities.  As such, it is essential reading to anyone interested in post-war reconstruction as well as that larger question as to why our ‘cities look the way they do’.

It’s an academic book and scholars in the field will be grateful for its apparatus of data and references. That means, of course, that it comes at an academic price and is probably out of reach to the general reader.  But it repays study at your local library –  or perhaps we can persuade the publishers to issue a cheaper edition for a wider readership.

Catherine Flinn, Rebuilding Britain’s Blitzed Cities: Hopeful Dreams and Stark Realities was published by Bloomsbury on 27 December 2018. (Hardback, ISBN – 9781350067622).  Follow the link for further information. 

Elisabeth Blanchet and Sonia Zhuravlyova, ‘Prefabs’ Book Review

Elisabeth Blanchet and Sonia Zhuravlyova, Prefabs (Historic England, 2018)

We thought we’d reached paradise.  The bathroom, indoor toilet, central heating, kitchen fitted with an oven, refrigerator and folding table were miracles of luxury. The spacious bedrooms and living room, the integral drawers and cupboards, the huge windows, the large garden and Anderson coal shelter were, to us, more palace than prefab.

Those are the words of Neil Kinnock, describing the South Wales prefab he lived in from the age of six till he went on to university (‘the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university’ if you remember his speech when elected Labour leader) at the age of 18.

They capture much of the vital story of these prefabricated homes so finely and fully captured in this new book from Historic England. It reminds us these were, predominantly, working-class homes for generations of people moving from the slums. It tells us that, contrary to the cute, folksy image that understandably prevails, these were modern – indeed modernistic – homes, embodying a cutting-edge technology and providing unheralded amenity and convenience for their new residents.

We’re talking here of the post-war prefabs, part of a £150m programme inaugurated by the 1944 Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act under which some 156,623 prefab homes were erected across the country by 1949.  An appendix provides full details of the range of forms and technology applied.

Wake Green listed Phoenix Prefab, Birmingham © Elisabeth Blanchet

Designed to last around ten years, there were still 67,353 in use in 1964 and in London some 10,000 were occupied into the 1970s. A few survive to the present and some are now listed: six on the Excalibur Estate in south London, 16 on Wake Green Road in Moseley, Birmingham (the latter can be viewed on open days on the 6 and 7 September this year).  Others have been adapted and preserved, notably in Redditch and around Inverness Road in Ipswich where the 142 prefabs form the largest surviving estate of their type.

Tarran prefabs in Ipswich, 2016 © Elisabeth Blanchet

For all that longevity, these post-war prefabs were temporary homes. The wider value of the book lies in its full coverage of prefabricated homes planned as permanent. This longer history and the range of non-traditional forms devised and constructed will surprise many – it surprised me and I like to think of myself as a bit of an expert.

In this, private enterprise has played its part.  Henry Munnings ‘portable colonial cottage’ from 1833 will be new to most; the Sears Roebuck mail order homes in the US are better known with over 100,000 sold between 1908 and 1940.  It’s interesting to learn – and somehow entirely appropriate – that IKEA are currently pioneering a form of emergency flatpack home in conjunction with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

But true to form, I’ll focus on the role of the national and local state and here the recurring motif is the desire to meet pressing housing needs as rapidly and economically as possible when traditional brick-built housing was proving both too slow and expensive to build

‘Labourers’ Concrete Dwellings’, Eldon Street, Liverpool, 1905

Liverpool City Engineer John Brodie built the prefabricated ‘Labourers’ Concrete Dwellings’ in Eldon Street as early as 1905. A version was featured in the Cheap Cottage Exhibition in Letchworth Garden City the same year and it survives (Grade II* listed) at 158 Wilbury Road.  The exhibition brochure expressed an intent and context which would persist in different forms across the years.  This, it said, was a ‘system of building’:

designed … with the special objective of providing a thoroughly sanitary and economical building, suitable in every way for the housing of the poorest classes displaced owing to the demolition of insanitary areas in Liverpool.

Eleven years later, in the midst of the First World War, Lieutenant Colonel Peter Nissen of the Royal Engineers devised the hut that bore his name. One-hundred thousand Nissen huts were erected to serve military needs by 1918. It’s pleasing that a few were built for peacetime housing purposes in the 1920s, though sadly – as this recent blog post records – not with any great success.

Nissen-Petren houses in Ryme Intrinseca, Dorset © John Boughton

This was part of a broader wave of experimentation in non-traditional construction methods, promoted by the 1919 Housing Act and the newly-established Standardisation and New Methods of Construction Committee. The Committee received 90 proposals of which 75 were approved. The steel-framed Dorlonco homes of the Dorman Long Company, Airey’s Duo-Slab system combining precast and in situ concrete, and Lord Weir’s steel-clad, timber-framed homes were among the more widely built. In total, some 50,000 prefabricated homes had been erected by the end of the 1920s.

Dorlonco housing, King’s Road, Aylesham, Kent © Aylesham Heritage Centre

A second world war – and, with it, the same urgent need to provide decent housing for the many who needed it – provided a new impetus to prefabricated housebuilding.  (A 1945 White Paper estimated that 750,000 new homes were required immediately and a further 500,000 to replace existing slums.)  The wartime government anticipated a repeat of the shortages of skilled labour and traditional materials that had hit construction in the early 1920s and set up the Interdepartmental Committee on House Construction (the Burt Committee) in 1943.

To the Architects’ Journal in June 1943, as to many others, there was:

one solution only to the problem of post-war housing. It can be expressed in three words – use the machine

The book again provides an invaluable guide to the range of new prefabricated homes constructed. There were steel-framed BISF (British Iron and Steel Federation) houses, for example, designed by Sir Frederick Gibberd, of which 40,000 were built.

Airey Houses © Historic England

Other designs utilised precast reinforced concrete (PRC).  Here the Wates (60,000 built), Airey (26,000), and Orlit houses (17,000) stand out. The so-called Cornish Units, developed by the English China Clay Company using concrete in which aggregate was a fine sand by-product from their mines, are an interesting variant; around 10,000 were built principally in the south-west.

Cornish Units, Hoo Street, Werburgh, Kent © Historic England

They and the 17,000 aluminium-framed AIROH homes, developed by the Aircraft Industries Research Organisation on Housing illustrate another aspect of the prefabrication drive – the desire to maintain wartime industries in full production in peacetime conditions.  Conversely, some 5000 timber-framed houses – the so-called Swedish houses – were imported in flatpack sections from (you guessed it) Sweden.

Swedish Houses © Historic England

Generally, these homes have stood the test of time though construction and materials flaws emerged in some (nearly all the Orlit homes have been demolished due to a defective concrete mix) and others have required substantial renovation in recent years. Some were disliked due to their unconventional appearance. Generally, cost savings were small if any. Traditional brick-built houses remained more popular and, but for a small spike of prefabricated construction during Macmillan’s housing drive in the 1950s, took centre-stage once more as shortages eased.

This was not, however, the end of ‘the machine’.  An era of mass public housing, rooted in the determination to end slum living forever, took off in the sixties and, in the confident modernity represented by what Harold Wilson had called the ‘white heat’ of the ‘scientific revolution’, system-building emerged as the seemingly obvious solution to the need to build at pace and at scale.

Building the Aylesbury Estate: the LPS method in operation

The Aylesbury Estate in Southwark, currently suffering a slow demolition against residents’ protests, and the Hulme Crescents in Manchester are among the best known, both variants of the very widely employed Large Panel System of construction (LPS).  Due to what was in too many cases very poor build quality and the problems which followed, such estates were rapidly dubbed ‘notorious, none more so than Ronan Point, a Newham LPS tower block which partially collapsed after a small gas explosion in May 1968, killing four.

Ronan Point seemed to mark the end of the apparently hubristic hopes placed in system-building though – suitably modified – system-built schemes continued to be built into the early seventies. A closing chapter of the book, however, tells of a small-scale revival of prefabricated construction in the present housing crisis, both in the UK and globally, and suggests – lessons learned, rigorous standards ensured – that prefabrication remains a plausible and perhaps necessary means of building the affordable homes many millions need.

Catherine Bazell’s family in front of their prefab in North London, 1950s © The Prefab Museum

This brief summary – focusing as it does on numbers and forms – might suggest a dry history but a huge quality of Elisabeth Blanchet and Sonia Zhuravlyova’s work is its focus on the lived experience of those that have lived – and continue to live – in prefab homes over the years.  This is a rich social history, full of colour and detail, beautifully illustrated, replete with resident memories and testimonies – a powerful and humane telling of a story in which technology was mobilised to serve human need and societal necessity.

A ceremony marking the completion of the 100,000th, Wandsworth, 1947 © Historic England

Though the authors’ closing words take us back to those seemingly quaint post-war prefabs, they might stand for the broader enterprise this fine book describes:

Although modest to the modern eye and by no means perfect, these temporary prefabs really did change people’s lives by giving them the opportunity to be masters of their very own detached homes – their ‘little castles’. The tenants considered themselves lucky, and the prefabs were a testament to the will to make life better for people after the trials of the Second World War.

You can sample the book via this link. You’ll find publication and purchase details here. 

The Prefab Museum is an online archive containing further information, images and testimonies illustrating the history of the temporary post-war prefabs and an interactive map of their past and present locations.

Glyn Robbins, ‘There’s No Place: the American Housing Crisis and What It Means for the UK’ Book Review

Glyn Robbins, There’s No Place: the American Housing Crisis and What It Means for the UK (Red Roof, 2017)

I’m no expert on US housing – far from it – and before I started reading Glyn Robbins’ new book, I wasn’t sure what relevance American housing struggles and controversies could hold for us in the UK.  Having read this informative, wide-ranging and engaging work, I sadly conclude they are only too relevant.  His core argument – ‘trans-Atlantic housing policy is converging around a pro-business consensus that intensifies housing need and inequality’ – is powerfully justified in the pages which follow.

There are, of course, obvious differences between the US and the UK housing experience. In the US, public housing has never accommodated more than 5 percent of the population; in the UK, at peak in the early 1980s, that figure exceeded one-third. Whereas in the UK, public housing history essentially begins with the 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act, in the US it starts in 1935 with the aptly-named First Houses on East 3^rd Street, New York City.

As Robbins concludes, these first houses have ‘stood the test of time’ – home, for example, to 94 year old Mary Hladek since 1944 and credited by her son Jim as ‘providing a settled, secure environment to grow up in and “make me the person I am”’.  When President Roosevelt’s close adviser Harry Hopkins opened the homes, he declared that ‘private capital never spent a dime to build a house for a poor person’. That judgment seems as plausible now as it did then.

Mary and Jim Hladek, First Houses. The sculpture was produced by artists associated with the New Deal Work Progress Administration. © Glyn Robbins

Two years later, as much a New Deal job creation programme as a housing one, the Wagner-Steagall Housing Act set the framework for the creation of public housing authorities in cities across the country. Some 3000 were established; they built around 1.2m homes.

The need to house returning ex-servicemen gave public housing a further boost after the Second World War; a 1949 Housing Act projected 810,000 new homes though, in the event, only 84,000 were built by 1951.  In a decentralised, federal system, there were significant local initiatives too such as New York State’s 1955 Mitchell-Lama programme which provided low-cost public finance for affordable housing and led to the building of 100,000 homes for people on modest incomes.

In overall terms, however, by the 1950s, ‘a far more embedded feature of US housing policy’ had kicked in – the provision of government mortgage subsidies promoting owner occupation.  Between 1940 and 1960 owner occupation in the States rose from 44 percent to 60 percent – a full ten points above comparable figures for the UK.  But where America leads, Britain often follows.

This history is covered by Robbins not merely as history but as a reminder of rival traditions and alternative policies as relevant today as they were in the past.  His book, however, is not a conventional chronological narrative; nor, intentionally, is it an academic tome.  The form is ‘to some extent … a travelogue’, organised around meetings with ‘US housing activists, advocates and experts’ and taking in many of the most important housing schemes and struggles in America. These are mostly – such is the nature of US public housing – in or around the major cities of eastern and western seaboards with Atlanta and New Orleans in the South thrown in for good measure.

Radburn, New Jersey © The International Garden City Institute

What is lost in overall cohesion by this format is easily offset by breadth and colour.  For a newcomer to the history of US public housing and policy, it offers an accessible introduction to some of the country’s most noteworthy housing schemes. Some will be familiar: Radburn, New Jersey, for example, designed by Clarence Stein in 1929 as ‘a town for the motor age’ and inspired by Ebenezer Howard’s vision of the Garden City. Stein envisaged, in Robbins’ words, ‘a suburban arcadia with communitarian ideals’; the reality was more privatised and less socially diverse than he had hoped.

Van Corlandt Park in the Bronx, New York City, offers another significant case-study. Founded in 1927 by Abraham Kazan and Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, it remains a successful and attractive non-profit cooperative of some 2500 homes.  A successor, Rochdale Village (named after Lancashire’s pioneering co-operators), was founded in Queens in 1965 under the Mitchell-Lama programme.

Rochdale Village © Glyn Robbins

There’s Levittown too – a mass-production, white picket-fence icon of American suburbia, created by William Levitt for returning veterans (the first on Long Island, New York, in 1947) and subsidised by a state-funded mortgage programme.  It’s a potent symbol of America’s inescapably racialised housing and politics that mortgages were granted only to White Americans.

Levittown, Pennsylvania (1957) © Wikimedia Commons

Public housing as such is owned and managed overwhelmingly by those city Housing Authorities founded under Wagner-Steagall.  Robbins visits a range of these – Boston, which still houses around ten percent of the city’s population; New York City, the largest with 178,000 homes (15 percent of the national total) and 400,000 residents; Jersey City (for whom he briefly interned in the 1992); Chicago and so on.  Most are massively in debt; with repairs backlogs to match.  The ‘solutions’ to this crisis – of public-private partnership and ‘mixed income’ redevelopment, rent hikes, speculative private sector development, and so on – will be wearingly familiar to many in the UK.

A public housing scheme in Boston, Massachusetts

South Side, Chicago – famous this side of the Atlantic as the childhood home of Michelle Obama and the area her husband worked for three years as a community organiser in the 1980s – offers one, conventionally ‘notorious’, vision of US urban public housing, epitomised in the Robert Taylor Homes, completed in 1962: 4415 dwellings located in 26 gaunt 16-storey blocks stretching two miles along the State Street Corridor.

This, through the ethnic profiling applied, was ‘housing for black people’, as were many other such ‘projects’ (the term generally applied to US public housing estates).  As that community’s traditional economic and social underpinnings declined, it became very troubled.  In 2000, a Plan for Transformation was announced based on the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 1992 HOPE VI (‘Homeownership Opportunities for People Everywhere’) programme.  This aimed at replacing rented public housing with mixed tenure homes.

The last of the Robert Taylor Homes blocks, photographed in 2005. © Kaffeeringe.de and made available through Wikimedia Commons

The last of the Robert Taylor Homes blocks was demolished in 2007.  It’s a measure of the programme’s impact that of 16,500 Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) households tracked in this ‘transformation’, only 56 percent have remained in the CHA system and, of those, some 44 percent are in receipt of housing vouchers placing them in the private rental sector.  Only one in five former CHA tenants were accepted for new mixed income housing.

The book covers a range of similar ‘regeneration’ schemes, such as Columbia Point in Boston and the A Harry Moore scheme in Jersey City alongside campaigns to defend rent controls and secure genuinely affordable homes in major private sector redevelopments across the country.  Most demonstrate similar dynamics and outcomes.

There’s no denying the problems South Side and other similar public housing schemes suffered.  In architectural and design terms, they were sometimes bleak. Even as many cried out for the genuinely affordable and secure homes they offered, they were seen by others as ‘housing of last resort’ and they were home, disproportionately, to those in severe economic or social hardship.

Critics will accuse Robbins of downplaying these problems but he is rightly, in my view, more concerned to challenge the negative stereotypes that dominate conventional wisdom and media portrayals in the US as in the UK.  As he argues:

The Projects or Estates are used to establish a narrative of political justification for their destruction. Clichés depicting ‘disaster’, ‘dependency’ and ‘delinquency’ are trailed through the media and become the stuff of common-sense understandings. A host of so-called experts are summoned to prescribe solutions to problems that are, at most, symptomatic rather than causally related. Invariably the resulting polices are informed by commercial vested interests. They rarely reflect the views of tenants themselves who are seen as incapable of making their own decisions…

He goes on to tackle the ‘mixed income’ goals also unquestioningly adopted by regeneration advocates.  He acknowledges that polarised communities are damaging to their residents – and reminds us of Aneurin Bevan’s own criticism of such ‘castrated communities’ – but he forces us too to re-examine the dynamics of such polarisation and where blame lies: with the politics that has created such division, not, as too frequently and readily assumed, with the poor themselves.

The quest for mixed income neighbourhoods, he suggests (quoting DeFilippis and Fraser) is: (1)

based on the (hegemonic) mantra that low income people are themselves the problem, and that a benevolent gentry needs to colonise their home space in order to create the conditions necessary to help the poor ‘bootstrap’ themselves into a better socioeconomic position.

This is radical, challenging stuff but anyone concerned with housing reform – either in the US or here in the UK – should take these criticisms and the questions they raise seriously.  The claims of ‘state-led gentrification’ and ‘social cleansing’ made by regeneration critics will seem overheated to some but they contain uncomfortable truths.

This returns us to the central thrust of Robbins’ analysis – that there are powerful and troubling convergences within US and UK housing policy.  The author lays these out clearly in his introductory chapter:

1. Relentless government attacks on municipally owned rented housing as part of wider assault on public services
2. The unchecked rise of private landlordism as part of broader advancement of private sector, profit-seeking interests
3. Growing corporate links between US and UK housing in context of global speculative property investment
4. Socially divided cities characterised by displacement and denigration of poor and working class people and communities
5. The ideological promotion of housing as a commodity, not a home

US housing protest. Image from Right to the City and Homes for All

If all that sounds depressing the book remains an important handbook for activists fighting for, in the evocative American slogan, a ‘Right to the City’.  Robbins’ portraits of some redoubtable housing campaigners in the US – Mel King in Boston, the late Charlotte Delgado in San Francisco to name but two – are among the most powerful features of the book. His analysis of a vibrant tradition of American housing protest – stronger and more inventive than its UK counterpart in many ways – reminds us that America has more to offer than Trump and the Blackstone Group.

And, if all this sounds too radical, Glyn Robbins concludes with the conservative truism that public housing is not the enemy of owner occupation but its complement in a properly balanced housing market:

The aspiration for private home ownership need not be the enemy of non-market renting, but it will for so long as tenants are portrayed as second-class citizens, thus allowing public spending to be heavily biased in favour of the reputed moral superiority of a mortgage. A truly sustainable, balanced housing policy would recognise that we all need different types of housing at different stages in our lives.

In an era where four times as much US government funding is spent on subsidies to ‘wealthy and middle-class home owners’ and when, in the UK, of £44bn investment in housing to 2020, only £2bn is going to affordable rented social housing, this timely plea to defend working-class communities, their homes and the future of public housing is a powerful and necessary one.

To purchase the book – £10 in the UK $12 in the US – email the publishers at redroofpublishing1@gmail.com. All proceeds, after costs, will go to housing campaigns in the UK and US. 

Sources

(1) James DeFilippis and Jim Fraser, ‘Why Do We Want Mixed-Income Housing Neighbourhoods?’, Critical Urban Studies (2010)

Duncan Bowie, ‘The Radical and Socialist Tradition in British Planning’ Book Review: ‘the State, the Municipality … doing what men cannot do, or do so well’

Tags

Pre-1914

Duncan Bowie, The Radical and Socialist Tradition in British Planning: From Puritan Colonies to Garden Cities (Routledge, 2017)

Duncan Bowie is an esteemed figure in housing and planning circles, both until recently as an academic at the University of Westminster and, over the years and in a variety of roles, as a hands-on practitioner in London local government.  As a politically engaged figure with an unusually profound historical knowledge of his subject, he is the ideal person to write this important account of what he describes as planning’s prehistory.

Bowie sets out his stall clearly in the book’s introduction. He laments the fact that ‘we have largely lost any concept of social purpose for planning’. His book, by contrast, seeks:

to use the historical record as a basis for challenging the dominance of neo-liberal perspectives within contemporary discourse [and] to reassert the positive role of planning as understood in previous historical periods.

He asserts a Benthamite perspective ‘that planning should be about achieving the greatest good in terms of benefit to the greatest number of people’. To this, he adds an explicitly socialist goal – that it also be used:

for redistributive purposes – to advance the interests of households with less wealth and income and access to the market, to mitigate the negative impact of the free market in land, property and development and to seek a more egalitarian society.

At first glance, the book’s earlier chapters might seem of more antiquarian interest.  Early settlement planning in the British Isles and colonies was heavily inspired by religious principles. John Winthrop, the Puritan governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, famously proclaimed in 1630 that the new community would be considered as ‘a city upon a hill’ and its prosperity dependent on fealty to the one true God. But it’s suggested that even Christopher Wren’s proposed remodelling of London after the Great Fire was influenced by contemporary ideas of the form and nature of the biblical Jerusalem.

A strength of the book is Bowie’s comprehensive excavation of earlier, often neglected, texts and, for all that their language and beliefs may sometimes seem archaic, it’s striking how many echo later concerns and foreshadow more recent ideas.  For James Stuart, in his 1771 pamphlet Critical Observations on the Buildings and Improvements of London, it was clear that ‘people accustomed to behold order, decency and elegance in public, soon acquire that urbanity in private, which forms at once the excellence and bond of society’.  As a critique, suitably modified, of later criticisms of the slums and a defence of their rational replacement, that would be hard to beat.

Attempts to limit London’s growth (a key element of Patrick Abercrombie’s 1943 County of London Plan) were anticipated under Queen Elizabeth I and Cromwell. James Claudius Loudon, in Hints for Breathing Places (1829), provided the first explicit proposal for a Green Belt; a few years later, he called for a ‘representative municipal government’ for London.  Sidney Smirke, in Suggestions for the Architectural Improvement of the Western Part of London (1834), advocated that land ‘be purchased by public money and appropriated for the use of the labouring classes’ to build subsidised working-class housing.

The new settlement of Victoria, as envisaged by James Silk Buckingham

A following chapter discusses Utilitarian thinkers, concerned with both, in the title of the Radical MP John Silk Buckingham’s 1849 work, National Evils and Practical Remedies.  Buckingham proposed a new settlement (he called it Victoria in honour of the monarch; we might call it a New Town or Garden City) with sanitary and spacious working-class housing, free education and healthcare, careful zoning of its separate functions, all owned and managed by (in modern terms) a development corporation which reinvested profits.  Ebenezer Howard acknowledged his influence.

Robert Owen and the French Utopian Socialists are treated in succeeding chapters. The weakness of these communitarian theorists, as Bowie suggests, was their:

failure to challenge in any practical sense the contemporary domestic political and economic structures. The focus of the communitarians was on transcendence rather than reform – there was no attempt to take power within the existing society and state, only to escape from it.

He points out, however, that their followers and foot soldiers often played more practical and influential roles.

This brings us to a central thrust of Bowie’s analysis, the importance of pressure from below: reform has too often been seen as ‘something gifted by altruistic businessmen or reform politicians in parliament and in government’.  The conventional narrative, for example, focuses on the apparently humiliating failure of Chartism’s last big push in 1848; Bowie reminds us that its influence lived on in the plethora of organisations populated by former Chartists in the years which followed.

Martin James Boon and the title page of his pamphlet Home Colonization

Here land nationalisation and home colonisation emerged as key ideas.  In 1869, for example, Martin James Boon, a secretary of the Land and Labour League, published a detailed schema for the latter – a £120m investment to buy up 20m acres of wasteland, creating 310,000 new farms and providing, in total, employment for 1,920,000.  We might, in these jaded times, see that as fanciful but it is also an anticipation of the now unfashionable Keynesianism which did once promise full employment and a reminder of what even a more moderately interventionist state with will and vision might achieve.

The London Trades Council meeting the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII), a member of the 1884 Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes

Towards the end of the century, Christian socialism, positivism, the emerging social sciences provided new sources of middle-class reformism but, again, it was labour activists and organisations that concentrated attention on slum housing and its remedy. George Shipman, secretary of the London Trades Council, giving evidence to the 1884 Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, was clear that:

It is totally impossible that private enterprise, philanthropy, and charity can ever keep pace with the present demands…What the individual cannot do, the State municipality must seek to accomplish.

Fred Knee

That view became increasingly accepted, advocated for example by the much neglected Workman’s National Housing Council headed by the tireless activist and propagandist Fred Knee. Others accepted a greater role for private enterprise and non-state agents. Ebenezer Howard, despite socialistic influences, needed the sympathies of landowners and liberals to implement his Garden City vision.

The archetypal statists of the Fabian Society responded that they did ‘not believe in the establishment of socialism by private enterprise’. And Sidney Webb asserted that the Cooperative Commonwealth would ultimately be achieved through ‘such pettifogging work as slowly and with infinite difficulty building up a Municipal Works Department under the London County Council’.

That might seem the very definition of ‘municipal dreaming’ but, significantly, radicals and socialists, Lib-Labs and trades unionists were increasingly engaging with a state which, for a variety of reasons, was belatedly showing an interest in tackling slum conditions.

Much more could be said about the range of ideas, individuals and organisations arguing for a spectrum of housing and planning reform in the years leading up to the First World War. Bowie covers them fully and judiciously and I won’t attempt any summary in a brief review.  There’s also an interesting discussion in the book of the currents and cross-currents around land value taxation, long advocated as a fairer and more progressive tax, supported by most reformers before the 1914 war and interestingly revived in Labour’s 2017 General Election manifesto.

I’ll put in a word too for William Thompson, councillor and alderman and later chair of the National Housing and Town Planning Council – the man who masterminded London’s first completed council homes, in Richmond, in the mid-1890s.

The book throws up some surprising gems.  William Morris is known as a central figure in the Arts and Crafts movement and less celebrated as a revolutionary socialist but few have seen him as an early proponent of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse. Here he is writing in 1884 on ‘Homes for the Poor’ in the Social Democratic Federation journal, Justice:

It might be advisable, granting the existence of huge towns for the present, that houses for workers should be built in tall blocks in what might be called vertical streets…This gathering of many small houses into a big tall one would give opportunity for what is also necessary for a decent life, that is garden space round each block.

From the 1890s, two key and lasting shifts in the housing and town planning field were taking place.  One was the central role increasingly advocated for local government, first significantly formalised in the 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act.  Even Howard’s Garden Cities Association recognised this when it organised a conference on local authorities and town planning in 1907 – over 100 councils participated. Howard’s eventual successor and later chair of the Town and Country Planning Association, Fredric Osborne, acknowledged this more forcefully.

Sir Albert Rollit in an image by Spy captioned ‘Municipal Corporations’ from Vanity Fair, 1886

To some this was Socialism but, in essence, it was, in the words of Sir Albert Rollit (Conservative MP and sometime chair of Association of Municipal Corporations) in an 1889 speech to the revolutionaries of the National Union of Conservative Associations, a simple acknowledgement that:

Men must meet Socialism itself. It stalks abroad and we must look in its face. Not shirk from it as a spectre only to be avoided. In its one sense of the State, the Municipality or public bodies, doing what men cannot do, or do so well, for themselves, the principle has been adopted in many of those statutes which are our own work…

We would wish that present-day Conservatives in the face of the current housing crisis would forsake their current free market dogma for this practical truth understood better by their predecessors.

The second shift was the professionalisation of the field as RIBA and the Institution of Municipal and County Engineers took up the gauntlet, as various practitioner organisations were formed, as the subject became the focus of university teaching.

This copy of Thompson’s pamphlet on municipal housing, signed by John Burns and presumably from his personal library (now held by UCLA), illustrates the cross-play of ideas and personnel in the pre-1914 era

The pivotal moment, for Bowie, was the 1909 Housing and Town Planning Act; legislation championed by John Burns, former trades unionist and socialist firebrand, as President of the Local Government Board in Asquith’s Liberal government. It further extended the planning role of local government and ensured that new settlements were no longer the preserve of philanthropy or private initiative.  (The legislation’s role in relation to council estate layout and design is discussed in my earlier post on the London County Council’s Old Oak Estate in Hammersmith.)

When it comes to public housing, the political and social impact of the First World War is usually taken as decisive.  Bowie’s analysis offers an important corrective by showing how widely accepted core principles of state support and local government agency in housing and planning had become before 1914.

In doing so, he rescues the role and ideas of these early pioneers. Though, as he acknowledges, much of their work comprised polemic and campaigning, by the turn of the century, radical and socialist ideas had become influential and increasingly accepted as both necessary and practical.

For Duncan Bowie:

the lesson of history is that arguments for change can sometimes actually lead to the change taking place. Such positive outcomes are not achieved without passion, belief and hard work. Change does not come quickly – nor is it inevitable.  That would be a lesson well learnt.

It’s a lesson well taught in his book too and it should be an inspiration for the current generation of housing and planning activists and practitioners fighting to ‘reassert the core Benthamite principle of planning for the public good against the practice of planning to enable private gain’.

Publication and purchase details of the book are available on the Routledge website. 

Notes

Duncan has created an invaluable website containing links to a podcast, images and many of the primary sources related to the book.

Anyone concerned with our current housing crisis and a progressive response to it will also be interested in another of his books, Radical Solutions to the Housing Supply Crisis, on sale from Policy Press for £7.99.

Mark Swenarton, ‘Cook’s Camden’ Book Review: ‘to take forward the project of the welfare state – but to do it better’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Brutalism, Camden, Neave Brown

Mark Swenarton, Cook’s Camden: the Making of Modern Housing (Lund Humphries, 2017)

To Mark Swenarton, the work of Sydney Cook (Camden Borough Architect from 1965 to 1973) and his talented team represents ‘an architectural resolution unsurpassed not just in social housing in the UK but in urban housing anywhere in the world’.  Usually that kind of comment might be dismissed as hype but here I think huge numbers would agree. This fine book makes the case comprehensively and convincingly.

Cook’s big idea, shared and executed brilliantly by the architects he recruited to Camden, was for housing which was low-rise and high-density.  It directly challenged the architectural fashions of the day – the tower blocks which (in perceptual terms at least) dominated new council housing from the mid-1960s and the mixed development ideas which licensed them.  Equally, he rejected ‘off-the-peg’ system-building.

The new direction pioneered in Camden offered, in the words of Neave Brown, Cook’s best known recruit, an opportunity not only to re-engage with the ‘traditional social and physical form and virtues of the city’ but, crucially, ‘to try and improve on them’.  This wasn’t some pastiche revival of the old terraces but rather, as Swenarton claims, a ‘modern urbanism’; one that ‘could be generated without creating a rupture with either the existing grain of the city or the prevailing way of life’.

And then, essentially, there was the politics; unlike some historians of architecture Swenarton is good on the politics.  Camden was, by some way (excepting the Cities of London and Westminster), the richest borough in London, with a rateable value of £3,994,000.  Moreover, it was from inception a left-wing borough (despite a significant Tory interregnum from 1968 to 1971), determined, as one its leading members Enid Wistrich stated, ‘to be the tops’.  Housing was to be the chief expression of its progressive and innovative politics.

Fleet Road, image by Tim Crocker

Neave Brown, recently awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal for lifetime achievement, takes centre stage. His first Camden project, Fleet Road designed in 1966-67, established the philosophical keynote of Camden’s new housing. In Brown’s words, the ‘primary decision’ was taken:

to build low, to fill the site, to geometrically define open space, to integrate.  And to return to housing the traditional quality of continuous background stuff, anonymous, cellular, repetitive, that has always been its virtue.

Alexandra Road, image by Tim Crocker

This was followed through on majestic scale at Alexandra Road.  Here there would be terraces, not the voguish streets in the sky which excited many architects of the day.  They would form, Swenarton says, ‘a continuous fabric…interspersed with public or semi-public squares’; ‘rather than the buildings being objects surrounded by space’, as was the case in the prevailing mixed development schemes, ‘the buildings should define the space’.

Much more could be said and it is covered in great detail in the book but Swenarton also gives due space and credit to other Camden architects.  Peter Tábori, though barely 27 when appointed by Cook to design the Highgate New Town development in 1967, brought an impressive architectural pedigree, having been tutored by Ernő Goldfinger (remembered by him as ‘a born educator’), Richard Rogers and Denys Lasdun no less.

Tábori was firmly opposed to the estate concept which dominated public housing at the time, taking his ideas of ‘through routes and visual connection’, self-policing public space and clearly defined private space from the newly influential writings of Jane Jacobs.

It’s a necessary – though sad – reminder of the limitations of architectural good intentions to learn that by 1983 the estate (because it was in essence an estate) was deemed ‘a haven for hoodlums…a warren of lonely walkways and blind spots’.  Fourteen years later, another journalist concluded ‘as an experiment in social housing, the Highgate New Town development has failed’. It hadn’t, of course, but it had gone through (and has since recovered from) troubled times. The simple fact – though complex reality – is that wider societal dynamics often influence our residential experience far more than design itself.

Branch Hill, image by Tim Crocker

However, it was the Branch Hill Estate in Hampstead, designed by Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth, begun in 1971 and finally completed in 1978, which best captures both the increasingly fraught housing politics of Camden and the design brilliance.  Chapter 6 ‘Class War in Hampstead: the battle of Branch Hill’ describes the former – ‘it was a classic tale of privilege versus the people’ in Swenarton’s words.  Chapter 7 ‘The Poetics of Housing: Benson and Forsyth at Branch Hill’ powerfully evokes the latter.

Branch Hill, image by Tim Crocker

The Labour Group was determined to build council housing in leafy, affluent Hampstead; the Conservative Group (though internal differences existed) mostly opposed.  The cost of the project with respect to the initial purchase price of the land and the design and constructional fixes that a difficult site and restrictive covenant required, brought this conflict into sharper focus.  In the end, Labour – back in power in Camden in 1973 and nationally from 1974 – won out and the housing was built.

It was quite probably, as hostile commentary claimed, ‘the most expensive council housing in the world’ – 21 pairs of two-storey houses in three rows, costing in total some £2.8m.  But it is also, according to Derek Abbott and Kimball Pollit, ‘the most sophisticated semi-detached housing in the world’.  The covenant on the land insisted upon a two-storey maximum height and semi-detached homes. That Benson and Forsyth achieved a resolution in signature Camden style – stepped terraces, external walls of board marked and smooth white concrete, and dark-stained timber joinery – yet unique and distinctive is a tribute both to the architects and the political will and vision of the Council.

Underlying this, for Benson and Forsyth, was:

the fundamental belief that, while buildings must satisfy practical requirements empirically, they must also embody those abstract properties which arouse the senses and satisfy the mind.

Branch Hill, and Camden’s other architect-designed estates, fulfil this dictum with style and panache.

The tide, however, was turning.  The Conservatives’ 1972 Housing Finance Act stipulated so-called ‘fair rents’ closer to the market rents of the private sector (albeit offset by a comprehensive national scheme of rent rebates). Camden, alongside other Labour authorities, initially pledged to resist the legislation but capitulated. (Famously, only Clay Cross Council in Derbyshire fought the Act to the bitter end.)  The ensuing high rents were another problem for the Branch Hill scheme.

Mansfield Road, Gospel Oak – an example of ‘urban dentistry’, image by Tim Crocker

By 1975, it was Anthony Crosland, Labour’s Secretary of State for the Environment, declaring ‘the party’s over’. Economic hard times and financial crisis called time on the public sector expansion which had marked much of the post-war period. In Camden, there were other straws in the wind.  A middle-class, owner-occupier revolt had scuppered earlier plans for the comprehensive redevelopment of Gospel Oak back in 1966.  It anticipated a broader sea-change – a move against large-scale slum clearance (indeed, a questioning of what constituted a ‘slum’) and a drive towards rehabilitation of what were now called ‘twilight areas’.

In the 1970s, this change was reflected in an expanded policy of municipalisation – the Council’s acquisition and management of formerly private rental properties.   Its counterpart was what Swenarton calls ‘urban dentistry’ – selective demolition of housing deemed beyond repair and small-scale infill, often designed (though to typically high Camden standards) by private practices.

Maiden Lane, image by Tim Crocker

As noted by Swenarton, Labour’s 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act represented another shift – though its longer-term consequences were poorly understood – in the nature of council housing with its codification of needs-based allocation.  Another Benson and Forsyth scheme (though their original designs were significantly modified), Maiden Lane caught the brunt of this:

The result was that many of the tenancies…were channelled by social services straight to homeless families and others with greatest need. This was a social composition very different from most of the Camden estates.

Maiden Lane became notorious, one of those estates demonised by the media as dysfunctional and crime-ridden. The architects insist that its ‘architecture, quality of place internally and externally….was elegant, humane and economic’ and blame ‘ineffectual management, social conflict, and banal architectural intervention’ for the estate’s later woes.  There’s some truth in this for sure but it’s another reminder that architecture – whether deemed good or bad – is far from solely determining the lived experience of residents.

Maiden Lane has been substantially redesigned since and, if you’re seeking a symbol of just how far we’ve come from the heady idealism of Cook’s Camden, the Council has recently built 273 flats on the estate: 149 for sale on the open market, 53 for shared ownership and 71 new council flats. Those for sale reflect the new wisdom that private capital must be harnessed to finance the regeneration and expansion of social housing.  But, unusually, the development as a whole increased council housing stock and Camden Council continues to own and management most of its social housing. (1)

Alexandra Road, image by Tim Crocker

Alexandra Road, Grade II* listed in 1994, had its problems too though these related to the complex saga of its drawn-out construction and escalating cost. ‘Conceived in 1968, in the period of optimism generated by the post-war boom, but constructed during the crisis decade that followed’, the finished estate of 520 homes took twice as long to build as projected and cost, on completion in 1979, some £18.9m.  At the same time, it became a pawn in Labour’s internal politics as a ‘hard left’ faction (some may dislike Swenarton’s use of the term) led by Ken Livingstone wrestled for control against what had now become Labour’s old guard.

Livingstone, elected a Camden councillor in 1978, became chair of housing and used a Council-instigated public inquiry into what was now widely seen as the Alexandra Road debacle as a means of discrediting the former leadership.  In truth, the inquiry found no blame attached to the Architect’s Department (though it noted staff shortages, for which it was blameless, were a factor) and there were myriad problems – relating to the site, changing specifications and, above all, contemporary troubles in the building trades – which did account for the scheme’s financial difficulties.

However, at the last minute, the Council itself inserted a clause suggesting that some of the increasing costs might have been avoided ‘if the Architect himself had exercised more foresight with regards to the demands of the project’.  Livingstone moved on to the bigger stage of the Greater London Council. Incredibly, Neave Brown, so unfairly impugned, would not work in Britain again.

A sad end to what John Winter has called a ‘a magical moment for English housing’.  At the outset, for Sydney Cook and his team:

the challenge was to address the deficiencies of the housing that had been, and was still being, produced by local authorities across the country: to take forward the project of the welfare state – but to do it better.

By 1979, and decisively under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, it was, as Swenarton notes, ‘no longer the deficiencies of the form of housing produced by the welfare state, but the welfare state itself that was under attack’.  In the end, in this brave new world, Camden’s path-breaking housing programme had minimal domestic impact though it was influential on the Continent.  Alexandra Road, and the Borough’s other pioneering schemes, suffered ‘from having been released into a different world to that in which it was conceived…set on the very cusp of the change from socialism to the me-generation’. (2)

You’ll find all this discussed more fully in the book and much, much more – in particular a rich analysis of architectural influences and forms which I’ve barely touched on here. I’m sorry to gush but it’s hard to imagine a better book on its topic.  OK, I’ll earn my reviewer’s credentials by wishing for a bit more on the buildings’ after-lives (discussed a little more fully in some of my blog posts) but the book does what it sets out to do superbly.

Lamble Street interior, Gospel Oak, image by Tim Crocker

The photography stands out – Martin Charles’ earlier images and Tim Crocker’s wonderful contemporary photographs of which I include a selection.  The schemes themselves are pretty photogenic in skilled hands but Crocker’s shots of lived-in interiors and real live people inside and out bring out their qualities in a more humane and personal way than is common in architectural photography. These are complemented by a profusion of maps, plans and architectural drawings.

Congratulations to Stefi Orazi for the book design, to the publishers Lund Humphries for their commitment to the highest production values, and, above all, to Mark Swenarton. His scholarship and hard work have surely produced what is and will remain the definitive account of Cook’s Camden.

Cook’s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing, by Mark Swenarton, is published by Lund Humphries (HB £45) The book is for sale on the publisher’s website with free UK postage. If you insert the code CAMDEN10 on check-out, single copies will receive a £10 discount.   

References

(1) David Spittles, ‘It’s a game changer: Camden is first council to build homes to sell’, Evening Standard Homes and Property, 19 November 2014. The article incorrectly states that the whole of the scheme was built for private sale.

(2) Martin Pawley, ‘Living on the Edge of Time’, The Guardian, 2 April 1990

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

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Gibberd

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frederick Gibberd

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

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

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

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

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

Alton West: maisonette blocks above Danebury Avenue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth Close, the Lansbury Estate

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

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

Somerford Grove

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

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

Hawkshead, Regent’s Park Estate: designed by Gibberd

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

The Lawn, Harlow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Geraint Franklin, Howell Killick Partridge & Amis  

Christine Hui Lan Manley, Frederick Gibberd  

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

Ian Waites, ‘Middlefield: A postwar council estate in time’

Tags

1960s, Gainsborough

Ian Waites, Middlefield: A postwar council estate in time (Uniformbooks, July 2017)

This is a modest, gentle, elegiac evocation of an ordinary council estate of its time.  If that sounds as if I’m damning it with faint praise, it shouldn’t.  I think this is an important little book – a corrective to our focus on the grand projects and architectural showpieces (for good or ill) and a reminder of the unassuming decency of the vast bulk of council housing.  Between 1945 and 1979, almost two-thirds of new council homes were located on so-called cottage estates.Ian Waites moved with his parents to the Middlefield Lane Estate in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, in 1964.  He brings that child’s experience, as well as the eye of his later incarnation as a lecturer in art and design at the University of Lincoln, to this account of Middlefield.

This ‘New Gainsborough’ (as the local press described it) was defined, as Waites tells us:

by the clean architectural lines of postwar modernism and by experimental ideas in planning which aimed to separate the car from the family.

This was an unfussy, humanist modernism – ‘the front of the house is plain, asymmetrical and rectilinear’ (though a parabolic concrete canopy over the front door adds a small high-tech touch). Wimpey were responsible for most of the estate’s design and build but the local council architect – ‘keen to keep Wimpey at bay’ – designed the maisonettes which made local children think they were living in Marineville (a Stingray reference to the uninitiated).

Waites points out too the small and easily overlooked detail: the Phosco P107 lampposts (‘the local authority lamppost of choice during the 1960s’); the large cobbles on some street corners designed to prevent cars and pedestrians from cutting across; the privet hedges, an earlier council favourite, delineating back gardens.  His photographs capture this detail and make us look at it anew.

A ‘cut-through’ and privet hedges

That separation of traffic and people – recommended in the 1944 Dudley Report on housing design and layout and re-emphasised in the Government’s 1953 housing manual – was a more ubiquitous fashion of the age.  This was the Radburn style (named after the New Jersey town founded in 1929 as ‘a town for the motor age’) now generally excoriated for its loss of the ‘permeability’ and ‘natural surveillance’ of the street.  But in Middlefield it seemed to work: according to Waites, ‘the pedestrianised nature of the estate…gave its children an enormous space to play in’.

Another, more contemporarily, criticised feature of Middlefield and many like estates was its peripheral location – on the ‘distant rim’ of the town, in Waites’ words. This, in combination with the expansive, low-density nature of the estate, was the ‘prairie planning’ that architectural critics so despised in the new towns such as Harlow.  But early residents seemed to ‘have few complaints’ according to a 1964 press report, and most, apparently, liked the ‘fresh-air feeling’ of the estate.

The ‘distant rim’

The detritus of out-of-town suburbia has grown around the estate since then but a field remains, no longer growing wheat but providing grazing for a horse which nearby residents keep a solicitous eye on.  That space, that little bit of nature, remains valued.

In all, Middlefield epitomises what Waites calls the ‘paternalistic modernism’ of the post-war era.  And he cites, as a small but telling example of this, the communal aerial erected in 1965 intended to keep the estate tidy, free of the visual litter of individual TV aerials.  There’s no snobbery in pointing out that it is the individualism of Right to Buy which has done most damage to the ‘look’ and feel of estates since 1980.

And there, in essence, is the clash of values which has seen our council estates so scorned in recent years.  This ‘paternalism’ is often portrayed as heavy-handed, statist – a constraint on personal enterprise and freedom.  Waites should encourage us to rethink this lazy characterisation.

For one, ‘modernism’ had a personal meaning and value to those who experienced it first-hand on the new estates: ‘a bathroom and inside toilet, kitchen “tops”, hot and cold running water, a TV aerial socket, and a “picture-window”’. This was a new world to embrace; there was no romance in the slums.

And, furthermore, the residents:

were taking new decisions; they moved to the front.  In the old slum terraces, the front door was never used.  Everyone used the back door.  Now it was different. The residents began to live in the living room, rather than existing in the kitchen.

The ‘baby park’

Much else, in Waites’ telling, is personal – the well-remembered and half-remembered friends, the playgrounds and dens of childhood.  And ‘open doors’:

People sat out in the sun on their doorstep while kids bombed up and down the footpaths on their bikes.

Maybe I’m being starry-eyed but this sounds like ‘community’ to me – paradoxically both the Holy Grail of post-war planning and allegedly its greatest victim.  Decent homes, salubrious surrounds, healthy play – everything the paternalistic social democratic state prescribed and, surely, what most of its citizens wanted.

I’ve provided a personal response to Ian Waites’ book. Do read it for more of Ian’s own recollections and insights and for the many well-chosen photographs which illustrate it.

Middlefield: a postwar council estate in time is available direct from Uniformbooks or from online booksellers and independent bookshops.

You can also follow Ian’s blog, Instances of a changed society.

Mobilising Housing Histories: Learning from London’s Past: a Review

Peter Guillerry and David Kroll (eds), Mobilising Housing Histories: Learning from London’s Past (RIBA Publishing, 2017)

Back in July 2013, in the very early days of this blog, I attended an invaluable conference hosted by the Institute of Historical Research entitled ‘Mobilising London Housing Histories: the Provision of Homes since 1850’.  I’m pleased to see some of the fine contributions to that conference collected and revised for publication in this new book.  It’s a diverse volume, though pleasingly designed and well-illustrated throughout, with no central theme other than that we can and should learn from our housing history.  As David Kroll’s Introduction suggests:

The book does not provide solutions, but rather affords glimpses into aspects of how similar problems to those faced now were dealt with in the past.

To get the most from the book, accept that simple premise and, in the meantime, enjoy some well-researched and well-written chapters covering a wide range of London’s housing history.

Given the prevalence and continuing and evolving significance of later Victorian and Edwardian speculative housing in the capital – predominantly those terraced homes whose popularity has ebbed and flowed over the years but which now, in London’s overheated housing market, often provide very desirable residences indeed – it’s right and proper that these feature heavily.

The Minet Estate in Lambeth, the ‘miles of silly little dirty houses’ (as they were described by Eric Gill) in south Battersea, gentrified Canonbury, each get informative and detailed coverage as exemplars, both representative and distinctive, of their type.  A later chapter on the ‘sustainable retrofit’ of Victorian houses is highly relevant to contemporary concerns – of high-minded environmentalism at best and middle-class doing-up more cynically.

I’m off-piste here – this is a blog about council housing and we’ll come to that later – but these chapters are important when there’s an almost universal consensus that we must build more homes and, in particular, more genuinely affordable homes.  Today the top ten building companies control around 47 per cent of the new build market (as late as 1980 there were over 10,000 small and medium sized housebuilders; by 2014 that number stood at just 2800) and their primary purpose is to make profits rather than homes.  Together the top ten own sufficient land on which to build well over 600,000 homes but landbanking, restricted supply and higher house prices suit their margins better. (1)

The Minet Estate, Lambeth: Cormont Road gates, Myatts Field Park  (c) Robin Stott and made available through a Creative Commons licence

In Lambeth, the land-owning Minet family promoted large-scale construction by a number of smaller building enterprises.  Design and quality were overseen by their active surveyor; contractor profits were realised by a leasehold arrangement enabling builders to pay a manageable annual ground rent which cut out the capital costs of land purchase.  At a time when inflated land values and corporate capitalism both in their different ways conspire to reduce housing supply, perhaps this is something, as David Kroll suggests, we can learn from.

A plan of the Shaftesbury Park Estate, Battersea, built by the Artizans, Labourers and General Dwelling Company from 1872

Colin Thom’s contribution on Battersea makes a similar point about the role of small builders whilst arguing, in the present-day, that local government and the social housing sector should play a more interventionist role in ensuring that rehabilitated terraced housing remains affordable to other than the well-heeled middle-class who dominate this sector of the London housing market.  The general argument that such housing now provides a popular and adaptable housing form is now widely accepted.

Peter Guillery’s chapter on South Acton (he also provides a useful Historical Overview of housebuilding trends and housing fashions since 1850) reminds us this wasn’t always the perception.  South Acton was a rather isolated and largely working-class community; by the 1890s, its 200 laundries had earned it the soubriquet ‘Soapsud Island’.  By the interwar period and with the later assistance of Hitler’s bombs, the need for the replacement of these terraces – at first piecemeal and then by large-scale redevelopment – became pressing though some questioned the loss of community which might result.

South Acton, 1962

Guillery takes us expertly through the various phases of the area’s public housing history: mixed development to high-rise to the problems and backlash which followed to the comprehensive regeneration of recent years – from a broadly ‘liberal and democratising capitalism’ through post-war socialism to present-day neoliberalism. It’s an empathetic account which understands the unintended consequences of well-meant actions.  Several tower blocks have been demolished; the most recent masterplan envisages the ‘complete replacement of post-war housing’ with the new low-rise, high-density, mixed-tenure developments now preferred.

That might send alarm bells ringing as we look at how similar plans have already affected or threaten to impact the homes of established communities across the capital.  Simon Pepper provides a useful outline of how and why high-rise developments took off in London from the 1960s and why that trend reversed.  The collapse of Ronan Point in May 1968 offers only a partial explanation.

Balfron Tower

Ernő Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower, Grade II listed in 1996, survives and it won’t be demolished but it is being sold off to the private sector and its social housing residents evicted.  David Roberts campaigned to have this social housing heritage honoured, not as ‘exemplar’ but as the essential element of its future use.  Sadly, as he would be the first to acknowledge, Historic England’s Grade II* listing of the building in 2015, made only a token reference to Balfron’s social purpose.

Roberts’s excellent chapter also invites us to re-think how we approach such buildings.  Residents’ participation was central to his campaign, a belated contribution coming long after the media and architectural academics had pronounced their own judgments, positive and negative.  He reminds us too how freighted the term ‘failure’ is and how readily it rests (or is rebutted) on perceptions narrowly grounded in aesthetics or intent rather than lived experience.

Broadwater Farm, Tottenham – allegedly one of the ‘sink estates’ targeted by David Cameron.  Its residents are fighting back against plans to demolish and redevelop parts of the estate.

Issues of perception and labelling are also central, once you get through its rather abstruse academic style, to Ben Campkin’s contribution on ‘sink estates’.  He examines how the label, once applied sociologically to estates in decline, morphed into something cruder and pejorative and how it became the political pretext for an attack on those estates and their communities.  He points too to how resistance from these communities can be rooted in part in the very marginalisation and insult they have suffered.

Peabody Avenue (1895)

The new extension to the estate

There’s plenty more.  Irina Davidovici’s article gamely seeks to rescue the reputation of some of the early Peabody Estates, widely condemned by housing reformers as well as the working class for their austere ‘barracks-like’ appearance. She suggests that recent Peabody buildings and refurbishments do offer a viable and attractive solution to the question of housing density that we are now wrestling with.  Richard Dennis addresses this directly in his chapter on the mansion blocks built mainly but not wholly for the middle class from the 1850s.

It would have been nice to see somewhere a straightforward advocacy of new council housing.  We know the mistakes – many corrected in what turned out to be the swansong of council housing in the 1970s – and we know the traductions, many now being questioned.  There’s no secret that policies which confined council housing to the poorest whilst catastrophically reducing overall stock in the context of an economic maelstrom which robbed so many of decent employment have hurt estate communities.  These are to a far larger extent than we are allowed to think political choices and a brave politics might yet reverse them.

Depending on their politics and professional and personal perspectives, readers will emerge with different take-aways from this volume.  For what it’s worth, mine is how susceptible to changing fashion our views on housing are. One lesson we might draw from the volume overall therefore is that we might be more humble in our judgments and more willing to learn from its best practice.

Mobilising Housing Histories is available now from RIBA Bookshops or from their online store.  

References

(1) Market shares from Tom Archer and Ian Cole, Profits before Volume? Major Housebuilders and the Crisis of Housing Supply (Sheffield Hallam University Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, October 2016); landbanking figures from  Graham Ruddick, ‘Revealed: housebuilders sitting on 600,000 plots of land’, The Guardian, 30 December 2015

 

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.