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.

 

Martin Crookston, ‘Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow? A New Future for the Cottage Estates’

Tags

Cottage suburbs

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

I’ve used Martin Crookston’s book in the library so I’m delighted there’s now a cheaper paperback edition to make it available to a wider readership.  I’m even more pleased, truth be told, to have a free review copy but I can say honestly that hasn’t affected my judgment of what I think is a very good, useful and important book on the future of council housing.

Crookston’s endeavour is to make sure it has a future and he focuses especially on the cottage estates or ‘Corporation suburbia’.  These are a neglected, frequently disdained, component of a proud council housing record – lacking the glamour and ‘iconicity’ of some architect-designed estates and blocks perhaps but representing in his opening words ‘a mammoth achievement’.

‘Mammoth’ is uncontroversial.  By Crookston’s reckoning they account for around one sixth of England’s homes and around 40 per cent of the country’s socially-owned housing stock.  The pre-1945 estates – when Garden City ideals were in vogue – are generally the more celebrated and form over a quarter of such estates but half were built in the post-war period to 1964 and one fifth later.  Taking Leicester (we’ve looked at the Saffron Lane Estate as an example), the Corporation’s twenty-three cottage estates formed about a third of the city’s suburban land and, at peak, some 43 per cent of its suburban housing.

Copinger Road on the Saffron Estate pictured in the 1930s

‘Achievement’ is contested and the book casts an unsparing but always sympathetic and humane eye on why that has come to be.  In this, Crookston avoids caricature and appreciates nuance (unlike much of what passes as commentary on council housing).

He begins with a useful typology of estates. His Type One estates are set in more prosperous regions – his two case-studies are both predominantly interwar estates covered by this blog: Tower Gardens in Haringey and the Becontree Estate in Dagenham.

The Tower Gardens Estate

The Becontree Estate

Type Two are estates located in less prosperous areas – Deckham and Carr Hill in Gateshead (interwar) and Hylton Castle in Sunderland (post-war) are discussed in detail in the book.

Hendon Road, Deckham Hall Estate, shown under construction in 1936 and in 2015 (c) www.gatesheadhistory.com

Type Three, he designates ‘Radburnland’ – built in the post-war era when (drawing from the example of Radburn, New Jersey, founded in 1929 as ‘a town for the motor age’) planners were determined to create neighbourly enclaves and to separate cars and pedestrians by a system of cul de sacs, feeder roads and walkways.  Bromford in Birmingham and Orchard Park in Hull form the case-studies.

The Bromford Estate, Birmingham (c) Smileyface http://www.skyscrapercity.com

Gildane, Orchard Park (c) Ian S and made available through a Creative Commons licence

It’s fair to say – though many variables intervene and their relative poverty certainly doesn’t help  – that Crookston thinks these latter are generally the least successful and shares the consensus view that Radburn principles failed. Orchard Park is described with uncharacteristic sharpness as ‘unattractive housing in an unattractive environment’.  The North Hull Estate, adjacent to it, is a reminder of the finer design sensibilities of the interwar period.

But the cottage suburbs as a whole have problems and it is Crookston’s mission to understand and remedy these.  They are, perhaps, neatly if unwittingly captured by the pronoun confusion of Sir Peter Hall’s foreword. Hall points out, ‘some three million, one in six of us’ live on these estates and yet, he continues, these are ‘”council houses” on “council estates” – the places where none of us would ever dream of living’.

That unintended condescension speaks to a wider, largely reputational, issue that the cottage suburbs are unfashionable.  Some – though media misrepresentation is to blame for the sweeping stereotype many accept – have broader problems.

This is not a static picture, of course.  The estates themselves have changed significantly in recent decades, most obviously through Right to Buy.  Now around half their homes are owner-occupied but, if this (as Thatcher’s vision of a property-owning democracy presumably imagined) was intended to stabilise the estates it has, as Crookston makes clear, had the opposite effect.

This three-bed, ex-council house in Becontree is currently available for rent at £1500 a month

Becontree offers a strong illustration: social renting declined from 38 per cent to 35 per cent between 2001 and 2011 while owner occupation declined from 56 per cent to 50.  Meanwhile, private rental rose from 6 to 16 per cent.  The growth of the private rental sector on council estates is problematic in many ways; the loss of genuinely affordable housing it represents is only the most obvious. Often privately rented homes are more poorly maintained and less well equipped; almost invariably their tenants are transient.

Yet Right to Buy (predating Thatcher as Crookston reminds us – over 250,000 council homes were sold before 1979) and the growth of working-class owner occupation from the 1950s have been crucial in shaping the declining image of council housing.  Once, without doubt, an aspirational step-up, it has increasingly become seen – I know that many proud council tenants and huge numbers on council housing waiting lists will rightly baulk at the generalisation – as housing for those who can’t afford to buy ‘something better’.

The stigma – obviously far stronger in relation to some so-called ‘problem estates’ than to the many far more ‘ordinary’ council estates up and down the country – attached to council housing is something that we who defend it must address and Crookston tackles the issue head-on.

Denny Avenue on the Ryelands Estate in Lancaster

To begin with some historical perspective is vital, not as an exercise in nostalgia but as a corrective to those who would condemn the whole project and deny it any future.  Crookston’s memory of growing up in 1950s Lancashire is telling here:

What stigma there was probably attached itself to the visibly poorer and scruffier little terraced streets and – especially – back courts as yet untouched by ‘slum clearance’.  And mums on the estate were just as insistent on hankies and proper shoes (not tatty plimsolls) as any in the private semis.

There were separations, typically defined from around 16 when choices regarding employment and education and staying put or moving away were made:

However, the label of council tenant was not the key to that, or to our attitudes and experience in general.  The estate was different, but it wasn’t that different, and it wasn’t stigmatized.

As Ruth Lupton, quoted in the book, argues, ‘Four generations ago, families in social housing included almost the full social range’. (1)

Council housing in Beddau

Crookston captures a later shift in a powerful chapter on ‘Attitudes’.  Take Beddau in South Wales. As one interviewee recounts:

There is more stigma than before…The growth of cheap home ownership around Beddau drained the council housing of its mixed community. And increasing worklessness amongst an unskilled population, when the mining went, has brought a divide within the working class…Now the area is split between a public-sector-employed ‘middle class, a few industrial workers, and a swathe of workless benefit recipients without skills or cars to access the jobs which exist.

Another interviewee, raised on a Manchester estate but now an academic in the US, recalls gradations within and between estates but says of his own more ‘respectable’ estate, ‘after the Right-to-Buy period, the estate came to be occupied by what seemed to me to be more marginal families’. Crookston notes this too of Norris Green in Liverpool, a case discussed in this blog.

An aerial view of the Norris Green Estate taken in 1939

These are subjective views and from, specifically, those who ‘moved on’ and moved away, but they speak to the undeniable fact of residualisation, that council housing became increasingly confined to a poorer working class.  Crookston reports that between 1981 and 2006, the nationwide proportion of owner-occupying households in employment fell by two per cent whilst in social housing the proportion fell by 15 per cent (and 21 per cent for full-time employment).

Council housing tenants have been hit massively by the deindustrialisation of Britain overseen or engineered (take your pick) by the Conservative governments of the 1980s.

There was another factor too of which Crookston is well aware but seems to me to underplay: that the concomitant decline in council housing stock and shift to needs-based allocations – instigated by Labour’s 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act but made wholesale by that decline in stock – did progressively reduce council housing to a safety net role.  Its new tenants, particularly on the less desirable estates, were typically ‘more marginal’ – those whose needs gave them priority to this increasingly scarce resource.

‘Messages from Meadow Well’, North Shields, Northern Architecture, 2014

In this context, Crookston is right to treat the prevalent reports of anti-social behaviour on estates – always dominant in outsiders’ criticisms and, to be fair, prominent in the disillusion of many residents too – with some caution as often isolated and always minority.  Now’s not the time to take on that issue – though I would add that I have yet to see a comprehensive explanation of why anti-social behaviour became such a problem from the 1970s and I’d be grateful if any readers could point me to one.  What is the case is that anti-social behaviour has dropped very markedly in recent years as each of Crookston’s case studies makes clear.

Why this is so is less clear. Perhaps the various design measures and estate management initiatives – some sensible and necessary – have had their effect.  Either way, the CCTV cameras on the Deckham Hall Estate have been switched off and the problem has declined overall.  That the perception remains owes far more, as Annette Hastings (also cited in the book) argues to the ‘pathologising’ of estates, most often by those who know them least well. (2)

Cranleigh Road, Hylton Castle (c) David Dixon and made available through a Creative Commons licence

So the task, as Crookston sees it, is to overcome this stigma and stop the cottage suburbs being a ‘lazy asset’, one which is underperforming and failing to realise its full potential.  He examines a range of options to do just this, discarding some and endorsing others.

I’m pleased that he broadly rejects the idea that estates are failing as communities. This has been a long-running charge, principally from middle-class planners and sociologists who have felt, paradoxically, that estates have either failed to replicate the supposed neighbourly intimacies of the old slum terraces or to fulfil their own middle-class notions of improving self-organisation. Generally, estate communities work in their own terms – they are not, in Crookston’s words, ‘notably socially isolated or short of the “asset” of community resources and effort’.

He does recommend – though many councils, ALMOs and housing associations already have a good record on this – a series of case-by-case measures to raise the ‘feel’ of some of these estates, many falling within the broad category of urban management.  Many local shopping centres need ‘lifting’ and the estates’ public realm can be better cared for. ‘Problem’ tenants – they certainly exist – need to be better supervised.  ‘Soft’ measures such as re-branding (too often crudely applied) can be appropriate.  You can read the book for a better and fuller understanding of his balanced appraisal of such ideas.

Who gets to do this?:

The estate communities could very likely be much more involved, and on many of them that potential may be there.  But they need the ‘Corpo’ to be there alongside them, and to be resourced accordingly.

The role of the local authority, he argues and, of course, I agree:

needs stressing in Britain in particular: a country where the democratically-elected and properly-funded municipality has been regarded, it seems, as a luxury a poor struggling nation cannot afford.

The reality is – or should be – that this is investment we cannot afford to neglect.

Playing fields, Orchard Park (c) Paul Harrop and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Finally, he takes on more controversial issues of densification and social mix.  I think he makes a plausible case that a lot of the open space in many cottage suburbs – created well-meaningly in the low density idealism of Tudor Walters (the 1918 report which established the interwar conception of the cottage estates) and beyond – is poorly managed and under-used. There is a case for building good quality housing on some of this open space and using more intelligently that which remains.

New homes for sale on the Norris Green Estate

In terms of social mix, he favours the current mantra, tenure diversity.  That, in itself, should hardly be controversial as it reflects, as we’ve seen, a fact on the ground. It’s also worth pointing out that quite a few estates were built with homes for sale or, in some cases, larger homes for middle-class rental.  If Nye Bevan himself wanted ‘the living tapestry of a mixed community’, it shouldn’t frighten us.

What this doesn’t or shouldn’t mean, as Crookston argues, is ‘gentrification’.  It is really, I would suggest, about returning estates to an earlier condition in which a broad mix of the population were proud to call them home.

That, of course, would be best achieved by a fairer and more equal society and one in which, in particular, working-class people enjoyed better-paid and more secure employment – ironically the world we thought we were winning after 1945 and have so cruelly betrayed since 1979.

Pending that meta-economic shift, Crookston’s ameliorative measures are to be welcomed and embraced and the book itself deserves to be widely read by anyone with an interest in council housing and the future it deserves.

Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow? can be purchased in good bookshops and online or directly at reduced price from Routledge. Enter the code FLR40 at checkout to secure your discount.

Sources

(1) Quoted from Ruth Lupton et al, Growing Up in Social Housing in Britain: A Profile of Four Generations from 1946 to the Present Day (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2009)

(2) Annette Hastings, ‘Stigma and social housing estates: Beyond pathological explanations’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2003

Clink on the link to see the many cottage suburbs featured in this blog over the years.

Lion Farm Estate: a Photo-Essay by Robert Clayton

Tags

1990s, Oldbury

I’m delighted to feature this guest post by Rob Clayton and some of his powerful and evocative photographs. I’ve seen Rob’s work for myself and the new film, based on his images, narrated by Jonathan Meades and highly recommend them.  Full details are posted at the end of the post where you’ll also find further information on the project, current exhibitions and Rob’s book.

Shot over 25 years ago on the Lion Farm Estate, in Oldbury, in the West Midlands, Robert Clayton’s images capture life on a housing estate in the early 1990s. The work on display masterfully exhibits the real lives of those living there during this time coupled with an appreciation of the architecture which surrounds them.

Rooftop Study Three (c) Robert Clayton courtesy of LA Noble Gallery, London

My work is social documentary; drawn to the aesthetic of place, Lion Farm Estate (LFE) presented itself to me. With its sense of dystopian dislocation, I explored, seeking a reason for this other place on the hinterland of Britain’s second largest conurbation. This imposing, faded, typical manifestation, of the utopian post-war housing consensus offered a feast of visual opportunity in its powerful topography; the challenge was to go deeper to capture its daily life, its humanity.

House clearance (c) Robert Clayton courtesy of LA Noble Gallery, London

This was 1990 and I wanted to communicate the hidden – what life was like on an estate for many people at this time. Housing was an issue then and evidence, over twenty years later, suggests there is no solution to the housing crisis. But how can this be? What evidence is there?

My work captures the estate at the point of transition, and over time, has taken on a new life with age. It captures provision of housing on a large scale – evidence of a national duty to provide – yet hints at its imminent destruction. Lack of maintenance then condemnation was a precursor to change of ownership models – social anthropological evidence that leads us to ask, has the state abandoned its duty of care?

Moving, One (c) Robert Clayton courtesy of LA Noble Gallery, London

My photography attempts to get into the heart and fabric of 1990’s Britain, when the new order was well underway, promising ‘trickle down’ benefits for all. The broken promise remains and the evidence of failure mounts; 25 years on can we hold our breath any longer for the ‘market’ to provide? In my lifetime so far, we have moved from state mass provision to state-sanctioned asset stripping and housing, and by its very nature therefore the vast majority of us, are all victims in this new global order.

Resident discussing accommodation problem (c) Robert Clayton courtesy LA Noble Gallery, London

During the 1980s, British culture was changing: the collective, the ‘consensus’ was being abandoned in a shift towards the self. The images catch moments of dystopia as the utopian-inspired modernist landscape and all the hope it contained, fades. The images capture more than a topographical transformation; Lion Farm Estate is caught in a moment of multi-agency, politically-driven change. The images offer the topography with the humanity, the provision and the provided for. The loss of provision to follow.

Playground (c) Robert Clayton courtesy LA Noble Gallery, London

Housing today is far more a political issue than a pragmatic one. The images in LFE espouse a watershed in post-war Britain; the move from consensus, modernity to fragmentation, post-modernity. The grand post-war housing utopian ambitions of both the Left and Right were over. Social housing was to move to a new era of social engineering and become a battleground of fragmented political ideologies. A new political era had already been forged under Thatcher and ten years later the aim to house UK citizens was no longer a common political cause.

Hometime, teatime (c) Robert Clayton courtesy LA Noble Gallery

A new industry, the ‘Third Sector’ had been born, ‘Right to Buy’ was very popular and the social housing stock had been vastly diminished. Housing was sold at a fraction of its market value and gave the new owners a new land-owning status and wealth beyond their normal means and expectations. Property was effectively given away in pursuit of short-term political gain, under the guise of an unfulfilled human need to own land to satisfy a vested political interest.

LFE carefully exposes the visual fabric of this transition, yet the location and its inhabitants were more gentle and passive than the harsh environment may suggest. Despite the ever present influence of low income, lack of opportunity and their associated social problems, a strong sense of cohesiveness and belonging existed.

Crusader Close (c) Robert Clayton courtesy of LA Noble Gallery, London

This sense of community was threatened and struggled to retain its existence in the face of ‘beneficial redevelopment’. This is a cycle we know all too well today and one that dominates our urban transformations; perhaps the main difference being today that private developers’ interests trump all and the lack of political will to help the least empowered culminating in processes labelled ‘social cleansing’.

Shopping Five (c) Robert Clayton courtesy of LA Noble Gallery, London

A new era of ideology, a new industry employing a middle class of bureaucrats has grown in the last twenty-five years, supplying all sorts of exotic non-fixes to the housing issue: part-buy, part-rent, housing associations, incentive schemes, social housing quotas on private developments, help to buy…the list goes on.

Aeroplane Playground, Chiltern House (c) Robert Clayton courtesy of LA Noble Gallery, London

Nothing has solved the housing problems in the UK. The grand housing schemes of post-war Britain have alarmingly been consigned to the dustbin at a particular point in our history when a new central government-funded grand housing plan could provide many solutions to today’s economic woes. The commitment and ideological ambition to do this, however, is a distant dream; as distant as the rubble and memories of the tower blocks of the modern, utopian-conceived, spacious, light filled, plentiful and once cherished homes of the Lion Farm Estate.

Yet, is it a dream we have abandoned? Perhaps, like this body of work, it will materialize again.

There are current and forthcoming shows of Rob’s Lion Farm Estate images in London.  Details as follows or click on the link:

• Until May 29 at the Four Corners Gallery, 121 Roman Road, London, E2 0QN, Tuesday to Saturday, 11.00-18.00
• From Friday 13 May to Sunday 22 May  at FIX Photo 2016, The Barge House, OXO Tower, South Bank, London SE1 9PH, every day, 11.00-20.30 (Monday 16 to 19.00)

You can view the film of Rob’s images with commentary by Jonathan Meades at both shows and catch a preview here on YouTube. 

You can buy the book at both shows. It is also available from online retailers or directly from Stay Free Publishing. 

For more on Rob’s work, see his website, Lion Farm Estate.  For prints, contact the LA Noble Gallery. 

Winter sun (c) Robert Clayton courtesy of the LA Noble Gallery, London

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

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Brutalism

Barnabas Calder, Raw Concrete

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

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

Trellick Tower (c) Barnabas Calder

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

As Calder argues:

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

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

Balfron Tower (c) Barnabas Calder

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

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

Balfron escape stair (c) Barnabas Calder

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

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

Balfron Tower entrance (c) Barnabas Calder

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

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

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

The Barbican (c) Barnabas Calder

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

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

The Barbican (c) Barnabas Calder

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

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

The Anderston Centre (c) Barnabas Calder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The National Theatre (c) Barnabas Calder

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

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

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

Christopher Beanland, Concrete Concept

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

You can find my posts featuring Brutalist buildings collected here.

 

Book Review: Stephen Willats, Vision and Reality

Stephen Willats, Vision and Reality (Uniformbooks, 2016)

Stephen Willats has been one of the most interesting and innovative artists in Britain for many decades.  To those who see the significance of art as existing beyond the academy and to those of us, in particular, with an interest in social housing, he is one of our most important artists.  Uniformbooks, are to be congratulated, therefore, for publishing this new book as a permanent record of his many community-based artworks on council estates up and down the country.

As Willats states in the introduction to this book, ‘it is the audience of a work of art which gives it meaning’ but, rather than hope for a public better-educated in the language and mores of the art world, he was clear that it was the ‘wall-mounted, object-based tendency of art galleries’ which had come to seem ‘archaic’.  To Willats:

a work of art exists between people, and only has meaning when it in some way addresses their society.

He wanted ‘a new function and meaning for art, and that the artwork could then become an agency for transformation’.

Display boards, Harvey House, 1985, p102 (c) Stephen Willats [Brentford Towers, Hayes]

Here lies the credo and the mission. The form he chose was the creation of what he called a ‘Symbolic World’ – a series of installations, of text and images, made collaboratively with estate residents and placed in the key meeting places of those estates, representing and articulating the residents’ life and experience and the meanings placed on them.

If all this sounds somewhat hifalutin (and I’ll confess it does to me), the finished product is something rare – a view of estate life largely created by (not for and, for once, not against) estate residents in all its (and their) diversity, complexity and contradictoriness.

Willats is clear that the outcome is not mere ‘descriptive documentation’ but I hope he’ll forgive me as a social historian if I do treat it as a record, a significant record of time and place and people usually neglected and often denigrated.  As such, it defies easy summary – you’ll need to read the book to appreciate its richness – but I’ll pick out a few of the themes I found most compelling. It’s a testimony to the interest of his work that I’ll be questioning too of some of its approaches and assumptions.

Linacre Court, Hammersmith, West London, p20 (c) Stephen Willats

Willats captures an important moment in the history of council housing – an incremental turn from its being aspirational housing, a site and symbol of upward mobility, to being something lesser and something troubled and, to many, troubling.  With hindsight, from what might come to seem (if the present government has its way) the end of this proud and complex story, we see the beginnings of a process by which social housing has been designated (though not, of course, by its residents or those who know its essential role and purpose) housing of last resort, a safety net for the poorest and most vulnerable incapable of either aspiring to or achieving something ‘better’.

As Willats notes:

When I first started, people on the whole seemed quite optimistic about their ‘modern’ surroundings, which were often new to them, but gradually as the 1970s progressed, with the media’s stigmatisation of social housing, and the withdrawal of essential services such as maintenance, the mood in most of these recordings turned more negative with a critical, sometimes even depressed, tone prevailing.

Ben Johnson Road, Ocean Estate. Photo by Sharon Irish and made available through this Creative Commons licence.

By 2001, a BBC report described the Ocean Estate in Stepney as ‘one of the most deprived in Britain, ravaged by poverty, crime and drug use’. (1)  In 1978, Willats talked to an elderly couple, long-term residents (to those who dwell in stereotypes, his photographs of their home capture a world of utmost ‘bourgeois’ respectability) who recalled a different time:

These flats, when they were originally opened, were a showpiece for all over the world and they used to come to these flats…Then you could walk into the lift and the lift would be spotlessly clean because we had a porter there. He was fantastic.

We’ve seen the same stated of the Brandon Estate in Southwark (which Willats also covers) and of high-rise blocks in Birmingham.  The truth was that the removal of on-site caretakers was often as much the result of rising antisocial behaviour as its cause but the reality of the latter was undeniable.

So the trajectory – from ‘showpiece’ to ‘problem estate’ – is a familiar one.  Willats captures it well and it was not his task to fully explain it but the deep dynamics underlying the shift are worth a brief mention.  The rise of working-class owner occupation from the 1960s and needs-based assessment (which gave priority to our poorest and most vulnerable citizens in allocations) in the 1970s played their part. Right to buy and the halt on council housing new build in the 1980s – and the unforgiving media coverage which Willats identifies – did much to complete the process by which council housing became ‘residual’.

As the least desirable council housing became hard to let, Willats also captures another moment which might be familiar to some readers – that time when (either officially or unofficially) some of its flats became home to young people – Willats focuses on the most countercultural of them here – willing to take on accommodation that by now traditional council house residents were refusing. (We’ve seen this too, most melodramatically in Manchester’s Hulme Crescents.)  Again, there is reciprocal cause and consequence here to explain the changing perceptions and realities of council housing.

Dobson Point, Newham, East London, p17 (c) Stephen Willats

What I haven’t mentioned yet is the most common explanation of council housing’s decline, that of ‘design disadvantage’ or, to put it as crudely as it was more usually understood, the trouble with tower blocks.  This is an agenda which Willats shares to some extent.  He asks a lot of questions about the ‘isolation’ of high-rise living, about its lack of neighbourliness.

Skeffington Court and the Grand Union Canal, Hayes. Photo by Sharon Irish and made available under this Creative Commons licence.

Much in the book could be taken to taken to confirm the worst stereotypes – the residents of the fifteen-storey Skeffington Court block for example:

I am not as friendly since I have been here, once you get into your flats, you shut your door and you don’t see anybody…You feel so enclosed.

You should never have to suffer living in a tower block all your life…It can become a prison.

Charville Lane Estate, Hayes, Middlesex, p14 (c) Stephen Willats

But although Willats asks the leading questions, the residents speak for themselves and actually give very varied responses.  Charville Lane is another Hayes estate, a low-rise interwar cottage suburb. Unexpectedly, maybe, one its residents tells a very different story:

I’ve got used to it now but I missed the company at first, ‘cos being in a flat we always had a sort of open house and everybody in the block would pop in and have a cup of coffee.  Once we got here most of the neighbours are out.

Marlborough Towers, Leeds.

Another resident, living in the seventeen-storey Marlborough Towers in central Leeds, also turns the ‘common-sense’ assumptions around:

You do get to know quite a lot of people living in the block. We have lived in a street, and if you live in as street you may know your neighbour at that side and your neighbour at the side, but further down the street you don’t get to know them, but here, moving in and out of the lifts and using the buses, and coming into the block you get to know everybody.

You can see similar views of life in a multi-storey estate expressed in my post on the Pepys Estate in Deptford in its heyday. And for very resident who decries the isolation of their high-rise flat, there is another for whom it is a window on the world.

Kelson House and Topmast Point, Isle of Dogs, East London, p21 (c) Stephen Willats

None of this should be taken as a denial of the problems of the tower blocks. At the very least, you needed the lifts to work reliably and you wanted their shared spaces properly respected.  All too often neither was the case at their lowest point when maintenance and security were shamefully neglected.

But it gives, I hope, a more rounded picture – one reflecting the very varied real-world experience of residents as opposed to the commentators’ caricatures.  I think it raises another issue too – what is the metric here? What is the implied alternative?

Homecourt, Feltham, Middlesex, p19 (c) Stephen Willats. [Demolished in 2005]

It feels too often – I am speaking generally here rather than in relation to Willats’ work – that the experience of estate living is juxtaposed to some lost world or some form of notional community which ought to exist.  Sometimes this is explicit, expressed in an idealisation of the close-knit life of the slum terraces – the life that so many generations of working-class people were desperate to escape, of course.  Sometimes it seems based on a simple but surely questionable assumption that streets are always friendlier, more neighbourly – that closing the front door of a suburban semi is somehow less isolating than the same action in a high-rise flat.

What’s missing in all this discussion is class. What’s common is that it is invariably the working class who are the object of this discussion.  Working-class lives are dissected and held to standards that are never applied to the middle-class.  Who bothers about middle-class community?  Who even uses the phrase?

That, in a sense, is the great paradox of Willats’ work.  He does allow – it is his purpose – council house residents to speak for themselves, to tell their own stories, but the exercise as a whole is an artistic intervention of a form that would never be applied to middle-class owner-occupiers because they are never – to use the jargon – problematised.   Of course, you could make the same criticism of this blog and I raise it, not as condemnation of Willats’ work – far from it – but as an issue we might all want to consider.

Friar’s Wharf Estate, Oxford. Photo by Sharon Irish and made available by this Creative Commons licence.

Snow Hill Estate, Bath. Photo by Sharon Irish and made available under this Creative Commons licence.

To return to the book and the body of work it represents, its great strength is the variety of estates it covers – twenty-two in all, most in London but including estates in Bath, Leeds, Oxford and Milton Keynes, illustrated in over 500 black and white images across 288 pages.  Many of these are the tower blocks that sprang up in the sixties but it includes interwar cottage estates, more recent low-rise developments as well as traditional five-storey flatted schemes.  And within those, a complete range of their residents – a range which completely belies the lazy stereotypes that much contemporary commentary and much of what passes for policy seem to rely on.

The interviews and images capture and celebrate this variety. Opinions are expressed forcibly on one side or another but the overall effect is one of nuance.  If there’s a constant, it’s only the individuality and care that residents applied to making council housing – that bland generic term – their home.  As a resident of the Friar’s Wharf Estate in Oxford expressed it, they were all people ‘trying to make their own lives in their own way, which is what we’re here for’.

This is a rich, though-provoking book, perhaps unique in both its specificity and breadth.  If it has one great revelation, perhaps it is only that there is no great revelation; it simply portrays decent people in, overwhelmingly, decent homes.  For that reason alone, it should be widely read.

Vision and Reality is available direct from Uniformbooks or from online booksellers and independent bookshops.

Notes

As noted, all black and white images here are the copyright of Stephen Willats. My thanks to him for making them available and to Colin Sackett of Uniformbooks for his assistance.

Stephen Willats’ website has much more detail and illustration on the full range of his creative work.

Sharon Irish has a website detailing her work and interests. My thanks to her for sharing the fruits of some of her own research.

Sources

1. Dan Coles, ‘The Ocean Estate: Sink or Swim?’, BBC News Online, 15 January 2001. It should be noted that the Estate was about to become a key site of New Labour’s New Deal for Communities programme and much has happened since. In 2015, major reconstruction saw the refurbished Estate nominated for two design awards. (See Mike Brooke, ‘East End’s “deprived” Ocean Estate is shortlisted for top UK design award’, Inside Housing, 11 July 2015.)

Book Review – ‘Homes and Places: A History of Nottingham’s Council Houses’

Chris Matthews, Homes and Places: A History of Nottingham’s Council Houses (Nottingham City Homes, 2015)

It’s a pleasure to see this fine account of Nottingham’s council housing history.  It’s a story well worth telling and one – in Nottingham and elsewhere – that this blog has sought to share.  Above all, it is a people’s history, a history of homes and communities but it encompasses high (and low) politics too, architecture and planning and much, much else: a history of concern to anyone interested in the fabric – in the broadest sense – of our society.

If all that reads like a shameless plug for this blog, it is also a very definite recommendation for Chris Matthews’ new book.  It’s a warts and all history, recording the highs and lows of Nottingham’s council housing and Nottingham City Homes is to be congratulated for commissioning a serious and well-researched account.  There’s a place – a very proper place at a time when social housing’s past is traduced and its future near written off – for a more straightforwardly celebratory history but this is a book which anyone interested in a nuanced understanding of our housing history should read.

Chris Matthews provides a thorough chronological account which I won’t attempt to replicate in this brief review – the illustrations alone (over 120 carefully selected and well reproduced black and white and colour images) tell a compelling story.  But I will pull out a few of the themes which struck me in my reading of it.

Victoria Dwellings, now the Victoria Park View Flats under private ownership

We’ll begin with the need for – the absolute necessity of – council housing.  In this, Nottingham was a comparatively slow starter despite a problem of slum housing which was – as a result of the Corporation’s failure to expand into the open land enclosing the city’s historic core – amongst the worst in the country.  Early efforts, notably the Victoria Buildings on Bath Street completed in 1876 (and second only to Liverpool), were not followed through and it was the large peripheral cottage suburbs built in the 1930s which constituted the city’s first serious attempt to rehouse its slum dwellers.

Narrow Marsh, 1919

Council plans for the redevelopment of the Red Lion Street area of Narrow March, 1920s (with thanks to Dan Lucas)

What is more easily forgotten is the persistence of unfit housing.  As late as 1951, 43 per cent of Nottingham homes lacked a bathroom.  Into the 1960s, in the long neglected St Ann’s area most houses lacked an inside toilet and bath; 53 per cent had no proper hot water supply.  All this provides a context for the mass housing programmes of this later period which we are quick to condemn – for their undoubted deficiencies – but so little understand.

St Ann’s, an image taken from the City Council’s 1970 redevelopment brochure ‘St Ann’s: Renewal in Progress’ (with thanks to Dan Lucas)

New housing in St Ann’s © John Sutton and made available through a Creative Commons licence

It follows, therefore, that these new homes were embraced by their residents: ‘the sheer luxury of four bedroomed houses with an inside flush toilet…a really big bath’ as a tenant of the interwar Broxtowe estate recalls.  But even high-rise dwellings, later condemned (literally so and demolished in many cases), were welcomed.   One new tenant of the maligned Hyson Green flats describes ‘an indoor bathroom, beautiful kitchen. It was paradise, absolutely paradise’.  Marcia Watson, a young black woman (now a city councillor) remembers:

High rise was popular then. People weren’t fussy back then. The view was beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.  I loved it…for me, moving in and living there, it was the first home of my own.

Council homes were important for providing a disadvantaged minority community with their first decent homes and a step up, as they did for so many others.  Matthews argues, rightly, that council housing provided the ‘biggest collective leap in living standards in British history’.

This looks like a 1950s development but the privet hedges and greenery are in keeping with Howitt’s ideals © SK53 and made available through a Creative Commons licence

We might take those sanitary essentials for granted now (though too many can’t) but the quality of much council housing is striking too, how much could be done ‘by the steady and consistent exercise of careful thought and skilled imagination’.  That was Raymond Unwin, no less, praising Nottingham’s interwar council housing, recognised – thanks to the visionary leadership of City Architect TC Howitt – as some of the best in the country.

In fact, most Nottingham council homes – even in the 1960s – were solid, well-built terraced and semi-detached two-storey houses which, though sometimes lacking the aesthetic of Howitt’s work, continued to provide decent family homes for many who could not afford or did not wish to buy.  It’s an irony that some of the very best council housing up and down the country was built in the 1970s when, with lessons learnt from recent mistakes, low- and medium-rise, predominantly brick-built estates were erected.  Nottingham built more council housing in the 1970s than in any previous decade.

Osier Road, the Meadows

The Meadows scheme was built with such intent, its Radburn-style cul-de-sacs and greens incorporating the planning ideals of the day by their separation of cars and people.  Those ideals are now held to have ‘failed’ and there are proposals to restore a more traditional streetscape to the estate.  You can take this as an emblem of planning hubris or, more properly in my view, as a reminder of how transitory the ‘common sense’ of one age can seem to another.  Posterity should perhaps be a little more humble and not quite so condescending.

This brings us, inescapably, to the politics of council housing.  There has in the past been – these seem now like halcyon days – a broad consensus on the topic.  William Crane, a Conservative and building trades businessman, was chair of the Housing Committee from 1919 to 1957, surviving several changes of administration and building over 17,000 council homes in the interwar period when Nottingham was among the most prolific builders of council housing in the country.

Edenhall Gardens, Clifton Estate © Alan Murray-Rust and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Then there is the politics of the post-war period when Labour and Conservative governments vied to build the most houses with council housing as a central element of the mix. The Clifton Estate, a scheme of over 6000 homes housing 30,000 built to the south of the city between 1951 and 1958, encapsulates some of these ideals, not least in its focus on neighbourhood.  Planning ideals are not always fulfilled, particularly in local authority building where they nearly always conflict with budgetary constraints, but still the Estate’s early isolation, expense and lack of facilities probably didn’t merit its description (in a 1958 ITV documentary) as ‘Hell on Earth’ and certainly didn’t do so in the longer term.

The house-building ‘arms race’ came to a head in the 1960s when high-rise and system building were seen as the modern means to build on a mass scale and rid the country, once and for all, of the scourge of its slums.

The refurbished Woodlands group of high-rise blocks in Radford © John Sutton and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Here Nottingham provides some salutary lessons.  The city embraced these methods, these ambitions and, yes, these ideals.  High-rise and deck access developments were adopted; major contractors, notably Wimpey and Taylor Woodrow, employed to build their off-the-peg schemes across the city.  Matthews is candid in acknowledging the defects of these estates whilst rightly noting the legislative and economic changes which were also afflicting disproportionately the communities which lived in council homes. Equally honestly, he addresses the dissatisfaction with the council as landlord in this period, particularly in relation to repairs. The combination was stigmatising – ‘no longer was renting a council house aspirational’.

A part of the Hyson Green scheme prior to demolition

Beginning with the deck-access Balloon Woods Estate (a Yorkshire Development Scheme completed in 1969) in 1984, with point blocks at Basford and deck-access at Hyson Green following shortly after, many of the troubled developments of the later 60s and early 70s have been demolished.  Low-rise traditional housing has mostly taken its place.  Others have been thoroughly refurbished through Estate Action programmes and suchlike.  One hundred per cent of current stock now meets Decent Homes standards.

Tony Crosland as Sec of State opening Nottingham’s 50,000th council house in The Meadows with Chair of Housing, Cllr Bert Littlewood, 1976 (with thanks to Dan Lucas)

By 1981, almost half of Nottingham’s people lived in council homes; some 50,000 had been built in preceding years.  But the bomb had dropped. In fact, a Conservative-led administration in Nottingham had sold off 1635 homes to existing tenants by 1977 (for more detail on this, do read the comment by Dan Lucas below) but the Right to Buy enacted by Mrs Thatcher’s government in 1981 would see 20,761 homes lost to the Council in the next quarter-century. The Labour chair of the Housing Committee in the 1990s describes its role as simply ‘trying to hold the fort’.  There was as the title to chapter 6 declares a ‘Right to Buy but no Right to Build’.

Nevertheless, a lot – in terms of the demolitions and rebuilding noted above – was achieved.  The Decent Homes programme was a positive ‘Blairite’ achievement though marked by an unwonted antipathy towards local government.  The latter led – a necessity if central funding for improvements was to be secured – to the creation of a new arm’s-length management organisation in 2005.

An impression of some of the new council housing to be built, in Radford

Nottingham City Homes would be one of the largest ALMOs in the country, managing 28,000 homes.  After a troubled start, it seems justifiably proud of its recent achievements, not least a building programme of 400 new homes to be completed by 2017.  Indeed, as Matthews argues, the commissioning of this history itself marks a ‘renewed confidence in Nottingham’s council housing’.

It’s desperately sad that this – in broader terms – is not a confidence shared by the current government, driven by an ideological hatred of social housing and a fantasy of owner occupation for all – though even that, perhaps, is to give it too much credit. The reality is that this government is willing to consign our less affluent citizens to an increasingly marginalised and diminished social housing sector and the tender mercies of private landlordism.

That makes this honest, intelligent and informative account of Nottingham’s council housing all the more important.  As Chris Matthews concludes:

The history shows that, alongside other tenures, council housing can and does transform lives, providing a solution to a wide range of housing problems.

Buy the book, spread that message.

Notes

This webpage provides full details on how and where to purchase the book.

My thanks to Dan Lucas, Strategy and Research Manager for Nottingham City Homes and a key contributor to the book, for providing some of the images used in this post.

Alex Ball, a Labour Councillor for Nottingham City Council with responsibilities for Housing and Regeneration in the city, contributed an earlier guest post to the blog: Nottingham’s Early Council Housing: ‘Nothing like this had been seen before in the city’

Octavia Hill: ‘a life more noble’

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Pre-1914

When I was asked to write on the newly published celebration of the life, work and legacy of Victorian social reformer Octavia Hill (full disclosure: I received a free review copy), I felt – as a chronicler and advocate of what I’ll insist on calling old-fashionedly municipal housing – that I was possibly not the best person for the task.

Octavia Hill (1838-1912): a portrait of c1882

Hill hated municipal housing. She had many objections – it was unfair that property owners paying rates should, in effect, subsidise their competitors; it was corrupting that local councillors should solicit votes from their own tenants.  But primarily – and she was speaking here as the London County Council began its own massive rehousing efforts – she believed that ‘rate-supported dwellings paralysed individual effort’. (1)

Market Court, Kensington, c1865 © Historic England

This emphasis on self-help would be the key-note of her own reforming role.  Her housing work began in 1865 when she purchased, with the help of John Ruskin (a friend and ally), three run-down houses in Paradise Place (now Garbutt Place), Marylebone.  He insisted on a five per cent return, not to safeguard his own investment but as an incentive for others to follow.

She was a good landlord – ensuring that the properties were well-maintained and kept in good order – but a firm one.  Any non-payment of rent led to rapid eviction; her goal for tenants was a ‘dignified independence…in the sense that they are really paying for their own home’.

Paradise (now Garbutt) Place, Kensington

At best, this was a form of ‘tough love’.  She collected rents personally each week and used these visits as an early form of social work, though one very much predicated on her own Victorian values of gentility and respectability.  As she stated: (2)

You cannot deal with the people and their houses separately.  The principle on which the whole work rests is that the inhabitants and their surroundings must be improved together.

The success of this early venture led, again with Ruskin’s financial aid, to the purchase of a court of five court cottages and a larger house in nearby Freshwater Place in the following year.  Its extension, as her portfolio expanded, led to what became recognised and lauded as the Octavia Hill system – her housing managers collected rents weekly, personally supervised tenants, ensured proper maintenance of properties and, where financially feasible, improved them.

These managers were female and, by employing women, Hill had created a new profession, almost the only one open to capable middle- and upper-class women of the day, albeit one rooted in the domestic sphere that was their allotted role. (With the kind of conservatism that enrages her critics, Hill opposed female suffrage and – despite her own increasingly public role and status – a wider political role for women.)

One contributor to the book, Rita Powell, a resident of 49 years’ standing in Gable Cottages in Sudrey Street, Southwark (an attractive purpose-built block of homes designed for Hill by Elijah Hoole in 1889) remembers ‘the ladies’ as ‘quite strict’, insisting – in that quintessential display of middle-class respectability – on net curtains in the windows, for example.  But she remembers also their kindness, buying saving stamps for the children and bringing food around when illness had struck. You can negotiate the complexities of that relationship – the mix of control, patronage and compassion – yourself.

Gable Cottages

The book itself is a ragbag or, to put it more generously, a compendium of contributions from the great and the good, employees and volunteers of what is now known as Octavia Housing, and its residents.  It is pegged on the contributors’ varied understanding of what is taken to be Hill’s mission statement – her ambition:

to make individual life noble, homes happy and family life good.

The most meaningful responses come, to my mind, from Octavia Housing’s volunteers and residents.  The great and the good (whose names feature on the cover) tend to project their own causes and values on Hill, sometimes in apparent ignorance of just how strongly those might differ from Hill’s.  Her rich and varied and essential generous life does, to be fair, give them ample scope.  Hill was, amongst other things, a founder member of the Charity Organisation Society (founded to assist the ‘deserving’ poor) and the National Trust.

Both represented a natural extension to her work in housing.  She added playgrounds and gardens to her housing schemes as resources allowed and believed, as Simon Jenkins reminds us, that ‘we all want beauty for the refreshment of our souls’. (This reminds me of two other committed Christians, Alfred and Ada Salter, who also sought – albeit by means of the municipal socialism that Hill abhorred – to bring the ‘chiefest means of natural grace’ to the poor of London by their beautification of Bermondsey.)

An early view of Octavia Hill’s Red Cross Cottages, opened in 1887

Red Cross Garden today, Southwark

There are plenty of people who will point very plausibly to the limitations and contradictions of Hill’s philosophy (although that is a term which she herself would have abjured – she saw herself as a pragmatist, concerned with practicalities rather than grand theory).  She was absolutely a person of her class, time and place and it is easy – though perhaps less easy now – to see how far her individualistic and self-help values have been superseded by both a better understanding of the structural causes of disadvantage and their assumed remedy in collective and state action.

It is more interesting to take a look at what she got right (when some others didn’t) and to see what has persisted and remains relevant in her labours.

For one thing, she was adamant that her homes should be affordable to the poorest.  Writing of Barrett’s Court (which Hill renamed St Christopher’s Place) off Oxford Street, she argued ‘if we had rebuilt, we must have turned [the existing tenants] out in favour of a higher class, thus compelling them to crowd in courts as bad as Barrett’s Court itself was when we bought it’. This had been precisely the deficiency of contemporary model dwelling schemes and would be the fault of the Boundary Estate, the LCC’s first housing scheme. It remained the case that council housing into the interwar period was beyond the reach of many of the lowest paid workers.

Sarsden Buildings, an Octavia Hill property in St Christopher Place © Christine Matthews and made available through a Creative Commons licence

To this end, Hill was prepared to rehabilitate older properties and accept the continuing necessity of single-room dwellings.  That’s a position that most would find unacceptable today and it’s one which became obsolete as municipal building and systems of rent allowances and rebates (which Hill would presumably have decried as promoting dependency) developed.

Whitehill Houses, Southwark: originally 24 three-roomed tenements opened in 1899.

But her overall stance would acquire a surprising later resonance.  Hill opposed the utilitarian (though ‘model’) tenement schemes of her day, the block dwellings, but also rejected their supposed alternative, working-class suburban cottage estates.  In that regard, the unfashionable Octavia Hill comes close to the criticisms made after her death of many later municipal developments. Her support for affordable inner-city living for the poor and the street life in which it rested is a cause which echoes to the present.

The ‘lady collectors’ are ripe for gentle – or not so gentle – criticism too: they were ‘an altogether superficial thing’ according to Beatrice Webb in the face of the ‘collective brutality’ and squalor of endemic poverty. (3)  But, in fact, their role and legacy persisted.  Ironically, for all Hill’s antagonism to municipal housing, a number of councils were to follow her model, including in her own day Kensington (whose approach for collaboration Hill rejected) and Camberwell.

The Association of Women Property Managers was formed in 1916 and one of its members (who had worked for Octavia Hill from 1910) would go on to become the first female municipal property manager in the country – for Chesterfield Town Council in 1927. Miss Upcott (surely only her family ever called her Janet) was insistent on applying Hill’s methods: (4)

the careful management of the houses by persons thoroughly acquainted with the social needs of an area and able to deal with each individual case according to its requirements. Managers trained on Octavia Hill lines are accustomed to deal with difficult tenants without rejecting them instantly as undesirable; to regenerate slum areas without undue dispossession of the tenants there.

Another graduate of Hill’s, Miss Evelyn Perry, went on to work for the St Pancras House Improvement Society and, in 1928, St Pancras Metropolitan Borough Council where she managed a municipal estate in Somers Town.

In changed times and in different ways, in Octavia Housing (as the book makes clear) and in other housing associations and departments across the country, this work continues.

James Hill House, North Kensington: a new Octavia housing scheme for elderly people

Ultimately, what the book highlights is the enduring need and value of social housing.  Something as simple as a fixed address – to register for health services and schooling – can make all the difference.  The willingness of recent governments to tolerate the rise of homelessness we see on our streets is nothing less than shocking.

More profoundly, a proper home provides security.  Alan Johnson MP writes movingly of his own experience as an Octavia Hill resident as the child of a single mother.  In difficult times, she made sure the rent was paid regularly:

Battered by ill fortune and dogged by poor health, my mother’s basic human need for shelter had at last been met and she wasn’t going to let that slip away. Octavia was our source of security –a ‘trust’ in more ways than one.

That is a sentiment echoed by a number of current Octavia Housing residents whose testimonies are included in the volume. It’s ironic that there are right-wing ideologues who criticise social housing for promoting dependence when, in fact, it enables its opposite.

That these homes should be affordable goes – or should go – without saying except that in our current housing Wonderland we live in a world where ‘affordable’ rents are defined as being 80 per cent of current inflated market rates.  Octavia Hill understood that rents – particularly in inner London where her work was concentrated – had to be within the means of its poorest citizens.  A number of the contributions remind us that social housing remains the best – perhaps the only – means of ensuring truly affordable rents for all our people.

Ian Hislop describes Hill as ‘both brilliant and brittle, inspiring and infuriating, dogmatic and yet an undeniable force for good’.  Hill herself wrote of what she hoped would be an evolving legacy:

When I am gone I hope my friends will not try to carry out any special system, or to follow blindly in the track which I have trodden. New circumstances require various efforts; and it is the spirit, not the dead form which should be perpetuated.

Rather, as Gillian Darley reminds us, Hill wished to bequeath ‘greater ideals, greater hope and patience to realise both’.  In that spirit, this book is a worthy memorial to her life and labour.

A Life More Noble is published by Octavia and can be purchased for £9.99.  You can find out more on the book from its dedicated website.

Sources

(1) Enid Moberley Bell and Reginald Rowe, Octavia Hill (1942) and Gillian Darley, Octavia Hill (1990). A revised and updated edition, still in print, of Gillian Darley’s biography of Hill was published in 2010.

(2) Quoted in Caroline Morrell, Housing and the Woman’s Movement, PhD thesis, Oxford Brookes University (1999)

(3) Quoted in Marion Brion, Women in the Housing Service (1995)

(4) JM Upcott, ‘The Management of Municipal Housing Estates on Octavia Hill Lines’. Paper read in Section D, Personal and Domestic Hygiene, of the Congress of the Royal Sanitary Institute, Plymouth, July 14 to 21, 1928.

Upcott (1888-1985) founded the Conference of Women Municipal Managers in 1928 and went on to play a key role in the National Trust as a member, amongst other things, of its Estates Committee for 56 years.

My thanks to the Bishopsgate Institute for the unexpected discovery of Miss Upcott’s pamphlet.