Open House London, 2018: A Tour of the Capital’s Council Housing

The most important buildings in London – those with the greatest social significance for the mass of its people and those which have made the greatest visual impact on the capital – are council houses. In 1981, at peak, there were 769,996 council homes in the capital and they housed near 31 percent of its population.

It’s partly this ubiquity and familiarity that means most council estates don’t make it into Open House London, the capital’s annual celebration of its built heritage taking place this year on the weekend of the 16-17 September. In fact, there are rather fewer this year than previously.

Housing crisis and protest

Let’s be fair here, not all municipal schemes have represented the very best of architecture and design.But there’s another process in play – the marginalisation of social housing and its contribution to the lives of so many. We are asked to forget all that social housing has achieved, just as we are asked by some supporters of a boundless free market to discount it as a solution to the present housing crisis.

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

Houses on the Risley Avenue and Awlfield Avenue junction, Tower Gardens Estate: a ‘butterfly junction’ of the type pioneered in Letchworth Garden City

We’ll begin, appropriately, with the Tower Gardens Estate in Tottenham – designed and built by the London County Council (LCC) before the First World War: a cottage estate for working people inspired by the Garden City and Arts and Crafts movements of the day.  Just under 1000 homes were built on the Estate before the war halted construction; a further 1266 houses and flats were added – in plainer style but in keeping with Garden City ideals – in a northwards extension to the Estate between the wars.

Dickson Road, Progress Estate

The Progress Estate in Eltham wasn’t a municipal scheme.  It was built by the Ministry of Works during the First World War and designed by the Ministry’s Chief Architect, Frank Baines; its role, to support the war effort by providing high-quality housing to the workers of the nearby Royal Arsenal Munitions Works.  Almost 1300 homes were built in the single year of 1915, showing what can be done when housing needs are prioritised. Originally named the Well Hall Estate, it was renamed in 1925 when the Government sold it to the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society.  Fifty-five years later, the 500 remaining social rented homes were sold on to the Hyde Housing Association.

26 Chittys Lane, Becontree, with a plaque marking it as the first house completed on the estate

The Estate was a crucial influence on the 1918 Tudor Walters Report which in turn did much to shape the form and nature of council housing in the interwar period when the LCC alone built 89,049 council homes in the capital.  Some 26,000 of these were built on the Becontree Estate in Dagenham, first mooted in 1919 at the height of the ‘Homes for Heroes’ campaign.   It was the largest of the LCC’s interwar estates, housing by 1939 a population of 120,000.  Such size (and an unpromising site) led some – despite the planners’ best efforts – to criticise the mass and uniformity of the Estate but to many, moving from inner-city slums, ‘it was heaven with the gates off.’

Berthold Lubetkin

Becontree was born in the (brief) era of ‘Homes for Heroes’ which marked the end of the First World War. A second world war and a landslide Labour general election victory in 1945 inaugurated a  social democratic vision of Britain’s future and for no-one was this truer than Berthold Lubetkin, the architect of the Finsbury Health Centre, who famously declared that ‘Nothing is too good for ordinary people’.  He fulfilled this vision in the Spa Green Estate, to the north, opened in 1949 and described by the Survey of London, not prone to hyperbole, as ‘heroic’ and by Nikolaus Pevsner as ‘the most innovative public housing’ of its time.

Bevin Court

Neither of these appear in Open House but two of Lubetkin’s schemes for the Finsbury Metropolitan Borough Council – one of the most progressive in the capital – are featured.  Bevin Court was opened in 1954; the Cold War having put paid to plans to name the building after Lenin (who had once lived on it site).  Its innovative seven-story Y-shape capitalised on its site and ensured none of the flats faced north but, visually, its crowning glory is its central staircase.  Visit to see that and the newly restored Peter Yates murals and bust of Bevin in the entrance lobby.

Kendal House and Reddington House, Priory Green Estate

A few minutes’ walk to the north, you can also visit Lubetkin’s Priory Green Estate, completed three years later.  It’s a much larger estate – 288 homes in seven large blocks but with similar attention paid to lay-out and landscaping and more striking, sculptural staircases.  The Estate was transferred from Islington Borough Council, Finsbury’s successor after 1965, to Peabody in 1999 and, having fallen on hard times, has since been renovated with the aid of a £2m Heritage Lottery grant.

Goldfinger at Balfron

Another leading architect of the day was Ernő Goldfinger who designed  Balfron Tower for the Greater London Council in 1968. Balfron is famous (or infamous according to taste) as one of the most imposing Brutalist designs of its time but it was, first and foremost, housing for working-class people being moved from local slums. Now the block’s council tenants have been ‘decanted’ and the flats are to be sold to those with the means to buy them on the open market. With a history of ‘art washing’ intended to sanitise this loss of social role and purpose, it’s perhaps a good thing that Balfron doesn’t feature in Open House this year.

Trellick Tower without the heavy scaffolding currently in place for a major renovation

Fortunately, Balfron’s younger sister designed by Goldfinger, Trellick Tower and opened in 1972, does, despite Right to Buy, remain social housing built by the Greater London Council but owned and managed by the now infamous Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.  You can visit a social enterprise, comprising furniture workshops and showroom and café on the lower floors.  I’ve not written on Trellick but the posts on Balfron will give you some background.

The World’s End Estate

Another landmark estate, this one created by the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in happier times is the World’s End Estate. It’s an estate set on the banks of the Thames  completed in 1977 when the working class were still permitted river views.  Designed by Eric Lyons and HT (‘Jim’) Cadbury-Brown, in plain terms it comprises seven 18 to 21-storey tower blocks, joined in a figure of eight by nine four-storey walkway blocks but the whole, clad in warm-red brick, possesses a romantic, castellated appearance, providing  great views within and without.

Ted Hollamby

In some respects, World’s End marked the end of an era of large, high-rise construction. As Chief Architect for the new (post-65) Borough of Lambeth, Ted Hollamby had concluded that ‘people do not desperately desire to be housed in large estates, no matter how imaginative the design and convenient the dwellings’.  Hollamby believed that ‘most people like fairly small-scale and visually comprehensible environments.  They call them villages, even when they are manifestly not’.  His vision can be seen enacted in the Cressingham Gardens Estate.

Cressingham Gardens was described in 1981 by Lord Esher, president of RIBA, as ‘warm and informal…one of the nicest small schemes in England’. It’s a beautiful estate nestling on the edge of Brockwell Park which manages superbly, in Hollamby’s words again, to ‘create a sense of smallness inside the bigness…and to get the kind of atmosphere in which people did not feel all herded together’.

It’s a well-loved estate with a strong sense of community. Unfortunately, as part of Lambeth’s commendable pledge to build new homes at council rent in the borough, it has become another victim of ‘regeneration’; in actual fact, once more the threat of demolition.

Cressingham Gardens

The principal driver of this policy in London is money or the lack of it – the pressure to sell council real estate and build private housing for sale in order to raise capital for social housing at best or so-called ‘affordable’ housing at worst.  A second is ‘densification’ – a belief that working-class homes must be built at greater density to accommodate the capital’s growing population.  Not all regeneration is bad but where it means the destruction of good homes and the wiping out of existing communities it should be opposed.

A second signature Hollamby estate, not featured in Open House this year, Central Hill, is also threatened with demolition. The residents of both estatea have active campaigns fighting to preserve their homes and communities.  See Save Central Hill and Save Cressingham Gardens to find out more and lend your support.

Thamesmead as envisaged in the mid-1960s

Thamesmead on the southern bank of the Thames Estuary represented planning and construction on a much grander scale. A gleam in the eye of the LCC from the fifties and then, from 1966, the Greater London Council’s ‘Woolwich-Erith Project’, it was envisaged as a ‘town of the 21st Century’ with a population of between 60- to 100,000 people.

Thamesmead south and central, 2017 © Kleon3 and made available through Wikimedia Commons

Only 12,000 had settled by 1974 and the estate – with its difficult location, poor transport links and lack of facilities – was considered by many a failure. Taken over by Peabody in 2015, benefiting from new investment and the now delayed arrival of Crossrail in 2019, it’s on the up now and worth visiting for both its past and future promise.

Ferry Lane

New to Open House is the Ferry Lane Estate in Tottenham Hale, Haringey, designed by Jack Lambert for the GLC.  Completed in 1981, it’s another low- to medium-rise estate which marks the changed sensibilities of its era.  There’s an unusually full and detailed description of the design and history of the estate on the Open House website which will provide much fuller information.

The low-rise, high-density housing revolution of the later sixties and seventies was pioneered and most stunningly executed by the progressive borough of Camden under the enlightened leadership of Borough Architect Sydney Cook. Cook rejected the system-building then in vogue as the means to build as much as cheaply as possible – ‘I’ll use standardised plans if you can find me a standardised site,’ he said.

Stoneleigh Terrace, Whitington Estate

This can be seen firstly in the Whittington Estate, begun in 1969, designed by Peter Tábori, a young architect then in his mid-twenties. It’s a larger, grander scheme than those of Lambeth – in signature Camden style, six parallel linear stepped-section blocks of light pre-cast concrete construction and dark-stained timber.  It was designed to be a ‘form of housing…which related more closely to the existing urban fabric than the slab and tower blocks, and which brought more dwellings close to the ground’. Each home had its own front door and a walk through the front door of 8 Stoneleigh Terrace during Open House will allow you to glimpse the innovative interior design of the housing too, chiefly the work of Ken Adie of the Council’s Department of Technical Services.

Neave Brown

We’ll conclude fittingly with another Camden scheme which is widely judged to be one of the most attractive and architecturally accomplished council estates in the country, Alexandra Road, listed Grade II* in 1993.  It was the work of Neave Brown, awarded the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects  in October 2017. He sadly died three months later.

The estate is better seen than described but, in its scale and confidence, it marks (in the words of modernist architect John Winter), ‘a magical moment for English housing’.  Make sure to visit the recently renovated Alexandra Road Park and Tenants’ Hall (also featured in Open House), both integral to the design and original conception of the estate.

Rowley Way, the Alexandra Road Estate

Alexandra Road was completed in 1979 – the year in which such high ambition would be consigned to the graveyard of history.  It’s a sad irony that some of the very best of our council housing was built just as its near-century long story of practical idealism and shared social purpose was drawing to a close.

I hadn’t intended this tour of some of London’s finest council estates to be so elegiac but the contemporary picture of social housing’s marginalisation and market-driven ‘regeneration’ creates a poignant counterpoint to the energy and aspirations of previous generations.  If you visit any of the estates on show during Open House London, my plea to you is to think of them not as monuments to a bygone era but as beacons of what we can and should achieve in a brighter future.

 

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Open House London 2018: Town Halls – Civic Pride and Service

My first post marking Open House London 2018 offers a broadly chronological, whistle-stop tour of the municipal seats of government featured, in various forms – some grand, some humble – on the weekend of 22-23 September. (Open House venues are picked out in bold; the links relate to previous blog posts.)

City of London Guildhall © Prioryman and made available through Wikimedia Commons

It’s appropriate then to begin with the oldest and one of the most impressive of these, the City of London Guildhall and its present Grand Hall, begun in 1411 – the third largest surviving medieval hall in the country.  Externally, it’s probably the 1788 grand entrance by George Dance the Younger in – with apologies to contemporary sensibilities – what’s been called Hindoostani Gothic that is most eye-catching.  The adjacent Guildhall Library and Art Gallery are also open to view – great facilities along with others provided the City but, as the Corporation is hardly a triumph of democracy, we’ll move on.

Vestry House Museum, Walthamstow

At the other end of the scale what is now the Vestry House Museum in Walthamstow is a modest affair.  It started life in the mid-18^th century as a workhouse but included a room set aside for meetings of the local vestry.  It was later adapted as a police station before becoming a very fine local museum in 1930. If you can’t make Open House, do visit it and Walthamstow Village at another time.

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

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

This was an era of minimal – so-called night-watchman – local government when ad hoc, largely unrepresentative bodies administered basic services largely related to public safety.  As towns grew and expectations – initially focused on health and, increasingly, on housing – increased, the more ambitious vestries took on enhanced roles and garnered greater prestige.  One such was Shoreditch.

Shoreditch Town Hall

Shoreditch Town Hall almost matches the Guildhall in its civic pretensions – chutzpah indeed for a building, designed by the impressively named Caesar Augustus Long and opened in 1866 for a vestry. But Shoreditch Vestry took particular pride in its path-breaking municipal electricity undertaking and here its motto, and that of the later Borough, ‘More Light, More Power’ took on more than merely metaphorical meaning.  You might recognise the figure of ‘Progress’ enshrined in the Town Hall tower too. After a long period of decline, the Town Hall was reopened in 2005 and is now a thriving community venue operated by the Shoreditch Town Hall Trust.

Limehouse Town Hall

Limehouse Town Hall, opened in 1881, is a humbler building despite the Italian palazzo styling adopted by local architects Arthur and Christopher Harston. It also started life as a Vestry Hall but one intended nevertheless as ‘a structure that…shall do honour to the parish of Limehouse’.  It went on to serve as offices for Stepney Metropolitan Borough Council – while its great hall hosted balls and concerts and even early ‘cinematograph’ shows.  It was well known to Clement Attlee, mayor of Stepney in 1919 and later the area’s MP.  It’s been run by the Limehouse Town Hall Consortium Trust as a community venue since 2004.

Ealing Town Hall © PG Chamion and made available through Wikimedia Commons

Ealing had a local board of health from 1863 and didn’t become an urban district until 1894 under the Local Government Act of that year.  Ealing Town Hall, a grand neo-Gothic building, designed by Charles Jones and opened in 1888, replaced a smaller town hall (still standing, now a bank on The Mall) built just fourteen years earlier but now deemed too small for purpose.  The newer town hall was itself extended in the 1930s and includes an impressive double-height council chamber.

Battersea Arts Centre

Battersea Town Hall, begun in 1892 – an ‘Elizabethan Renaissance’ design by Edward Mountford – survived a disastrous fire in 2015.  Fortunately, repairs and renovations have re-established what is now the Battersea Arts Centre as a wonderful local resource.  In fact, the grand scheme – building but adapting innovatively and excitingly  on its past – has been just been completed and is well worth a visit.

Its local government heritage survives, however – a worthy memorial to the time when Battersea’s radical politics earned it the title, the ‘Municipal Mecca’. For more images of the town hall, visit my Tumblr post here. (The Latchmere Estate, a fifteen minute walk to the north and the subject of my very first post, was the first council estate in Britain to be built by direct labour in 1903.)

Richmond Old Town Hall

Richmond, a municipal borough founded in 1890 in the County of Surrey, was a more conservative body although it can boast (since its incorporation into Greater London in 1965) the first council housing built in the capital. Richmond Old Town Hall, also designed in Elizabethan Renaissance style by WJ Ancell, was opened in 1893 and now houses (since the creation of the London Borough of Richmond) a museum, gallery and local studies archives amongst other things.

Finsbury Town Hall

Finsbury Town Hall was opened in 1895, another Vestry Hall at that time, designed by C Evans Vaughan in ‘free Flemish Renaissance’ style according to Pevsner.  Look out for the Art Nouveau entrance canopy and internal fittings too.  It’s a beautiful building making good use of a tricky site, subsequently home to one of the most radical of London’s Metropolitan Borough Councils.  Nearby, you can visit the headquarters of the Metropolitan Water Board, opened in 1920, just up the road at New River Head.

Back to Finsbury Town Hall, it’s been the home of the Urdang Academy – a school of dance and musical theatre – since 2006 and, in its words, ‘an inspiring and fitting environment in which to train’.  The Town Hall is still a local registry office for weddings and, for that reason, close to my heart and that of the woman who puts the ‘dreams’ into ‘municipal’.

Croydon Town Hall and Clocktower

Croydon, created a County Borough within Surrey in 1889, didn’t amalgamate with London until 1965 but the Town Hall, built to plans by local architect Charles Henman, was opened in 1896 to provide ‘Municipal Offices, Courts, a Police Station, Library and many other public purposes’. The Croydon Town Hall and Clocktower complex retains some local government functions – the Mayor’s Parlour and committee rooms – but also offers a museum, gallery, library and cinema.

Tottenham Town Hall, fire station and public baths illustrated in 1903

Tottenham Town Hall today

A visit to the Tottenham Green Conservation Area gives you an opportunity view a whole slew of historically significant buildings.  With my municipal hat on, I’ll draw your attention to Tottenham Town Hall (HQ of Tottenham Urban District Council from 1904 to 1965) and the other examples of local government endeavour and service adjacent – the public baths next door (now just the façade remaining but, as the Bernie Grants Art Centre supported by Haringey Council, still serving a progressive purpose), the fire station (now an enterprise centre), and technical college (built by Middlesex County Council). Passing the new Marcus Garvie Library, you’ll come across Tottenham’s former public library built in 1896 just up the road.  It’s as fine an ensemble of civic purpose and social betterment as you could find in the country. Some further images here.

The Victoria Hall, Woolwich Town Hall

And without doubt, Woolwich Town Hall, an elaborate Baroque design by Alfred Brumwell Thomas, is one of the most impressive town halls in the capital.  You’ll find more images of the town hall in this Tumblr post. Queen Victoria presides over the main stairway of the building’s staggeringly impressive central lobby but the building was opened, following Labour’s capture of the Metropolitan Borough Council in 1903 by local MP and dockers’ leader Will Crooks.  That take-over by one of the largest and most active Labour organisations in the country (don’t neglect the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society here) heralded a proud era of reform to raise the health and living standards of the local working class.

Lambeth Town Hall

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

The UK Supreme Court, formerly Middlesex Guildhall © Pam Fray and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Moving to the immediate pre-war period, the Middlesex Guildhall in Westminster – originally housing, amongst other things, the offices of Middlesex County Council – was an unusual building for its time, designed by Scottish architect James Gibson in free Gothic style.  It was sympathetically adapted in 2009 to serve as the headquarters of the UK Supreme Court.

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

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

Hornsey Town Hall

Conversely, Hornsey Town Hall, completed a decade later, captures stylish modernity in full flow and has been dubbed ‘the quintessential English modern public building of the decade’. It was designed by the 27-year old New Zealander Reginald Uren but owes much to the Dutch and Swedish influences of Willem Marinus Dudok’s Hilversum Town Hall and  Ragnar Östberg’s Stockholm Town Hall. (Dudok was also a direct influence of Clifford Culpin’s Greenwich Town Hall opened in 1938.)

The Town Hall lost its principal role when Hornsey was absorbed into the new London Borough of Haringey in 1965 and from 2004 was in a moribund state.  It’s in the process of being revived as an arts centre and hotel with some swish apartments thrown in.  That’s been controversial to some locally but it’s good to see the Grade II* building and its sumptuous interiors restored and put to use.  (You’ll find some images of the interior prior to restoration on my Tumblr post here.)

Hackney Town Hall

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

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

That’s an ideal of local governance that we would do well to remember and revive in these straitened times.

Hammersmith Town Hall

Over in West London, the new Hammersmith Town Hall (since 1965, the HQ of the Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham)was begun the following year and largely complete by 1939. It’s been described as ‘Swedish Georgian’; another fusion of Scandinavian,  Dutch with English Regency motifs added.  It was the work of Ernest Berry Webber, a specialist in municipal architecture who also designed town halls in Southampton and Dagenham (see below).

Walthamstow Town Hall

The consummation of this ambitious era of municipal construction is found in Walthamstow Town Hall (now belonging to the Borough of Waltham Forest) and the adjacent Assembly Hall – a magnificent civic complex fronted by sweeping lawns and a grand central pool and fountain.

The Town Hall, begun in 1937, was designed by Phillip Hepworth, after a competition attracting 70 entries, in a stripped down classical style owing something to Scandinavian contemporaries.  It was completed in 1942 under straitened wartime circumstances which curtailed the initially more sumptuous plans for its interior but its Art Deco touches remain impressive.

Do walk around the back of the building to see the five sculptures by John F Cavanagh, representing Education, Motherhood, Work, Recreation and Fellowship – the latter modelled appropriately on local son William Morris. There are further images in this Tumblr post.

Walthamstow Assembly Hall

The Assembly Hall, also designed by Phillip Hepworth in similar style, is famed for its acoustics and has become a favourite recording venue. The front of the Hall,  is inscribed with the words of William Morris (which also provide the Borough motto), “Fellowship is Life; Lack of Fellowship is Death’.

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

Finally, we can bring the story up to date by referring to some 21^st century examples of new civic architecture. City Hall, the home of the Mayor of London and Greater London Assembly, was opened in 2002 – a high-tech building created by Norman Foster and Partners. Not everybody likes its appearance but the building is notable for reflecting current imperatives of sustainable design.

Brent Civic Centre

The new Brent Civic Centre, opened in 2013 near Wembley Stadium lets us end on a positive note.  The building unites Brent’s civic, public and administrative functions under a single roof – in the words of its designers Hopkins Architects, ‘a new hub and heart for the community where residents can meet, shop and eat’.  The latter, of course, is another reflection of changed times and priorities and an ethos in which public service is at best complemented by commercial imperatives and, at worst, subordinated to them.

I haven’t seen it but it looks, to be fair, a rather stunning building and, since it houses a community hall and library as well as a civic chamber and offices for the 2000 employees who keep the borough’s services going, let’s celebrate it as a worthy update to the civic heritage this post records.

Next week’s post takes a look at the council housing featured in this year’s Open House London.

The Edward Woods Estate, Hammersmith, II: ‘High Rise Hope’?

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1970s, Hammersmith, Multi-storey, Regeneration

Last week’s post left the Edward Woods Estate, just a decade into its existence, in a parlous state – criticised by the Borough which built it, unloved apparently by its residents, and with the range of problems coming to seem typical of such high-rise modernist schemes.  Hammersmith and Fulham’s Director of Housing, Tony Babbage, had concluded that tenants had ‘started to reject the estate as a good place to live’. (1)

An undated photograph taken by Bernard Selwyn © Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Archives

All pretty damning on the face of it but a reading of a tenants’ survey undertaken by the Council at this time allows more nuanced judgment. In practical terms, it shows some 66 pensioner households and around 50 with children living, contrary to declared policy, above the tenth floor in the three tower blocks. Surprisingly, however, ‘elderly people were the most satisfied with living on the estate’. They were also ‘the most likely to be happy living off the ground’ which people with families disliked because ‘they felt it was dangerous for the children’. (2)

Beyond that, ‘the main dislikes of the estate were the unreliable lifts, dirtiness, refuse chutes and the vandalism’.  But, contrary to what you may have been led to believe, people liked ‘the homes themselves, the general location and the neighbours’.

Poynter House, 1981 © London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham Archives

What they wanted was simple. A quarter wanted improved security patrols (in other words they wanted to be and to feel safe), 14 percent wanted better cleaning, and 12 percent wanted an improved repairs service.  The latter might seem a surprisingly low figure given that 40 percent of households had repairs outstanding and some 46 households had been waiting over six months for repair work to be carried out. You can draw your own conclusions but two things seem clear to me.

One, as we’ve seen in a diverse range of estates across the country, this was a period – for reasons I’ve never seen convincingly explained – when antisocial behaviour spiked. (Football hooliganism was another manifestation of the same malaise.)  In housing terms, the obvious target of blame to many seemed to be the design of the new multi-storey, modernist estates – their lack of ‘defensible space’ and ‘natural surveillance’ in the jargon of the time and the design features – decks and stairways – held to facilitate crime.  The simple fact that similar problems existed across a variety range of estates should lead us to question this widely-accepted conventional wisdom.

Stebbing House and play area in foreground, 2017

Two, residents were not in fact railing against the design of their homes but, for the most part, against poor maintenance and upkeep. Perhaps a 1979 Daily Telegraph report exaggerated but it concluded ‘that no stair cleaning had been done for weeks’ and on the lower floors, residents were ‘forced to negotiate rubble, broken glass and kitchen rubbish’. (3)

A further look of the Director of Housing’s report allows a different reading of the Estate’s problems, rooted far less in the systemic failure of an entire model of housing provision and far more in contemporary, specific and remediable deficiencies:

The tenants at large view with dismay what has happened to the estate. They feel very strongly about the estate itself. They take the view that the estate has been allowed to deteriorate rapidly.

Public housing budgets are always constrained and were to become catastrophically so in the 1980s but it’s also clear in this earlier period that some councils were failing to invest in basic upkeep and services.

If it took a crisis for that to become obvious, it’s only fair to report that at this point the Council began to act quite radically and systematically to put things right. By the end of the year, a local management team had been set up and £350,000 committed to replacing failing rubbish chutes, upgrading lifts and a range of other remedial work.

Two years later, the Estate was included in a new central government initiative, the Priority Estates Project, intended to promote local management and tenant participation in some of the most troubled estates across the country.  In Edward Woods, this led to 528 flats being equipped with an entryphone system.  A purpose-built Neighbourhood Office was opened in Boxmoor House five years later. (4)

Boxmoor House, 2017

The tide was turning.  Elsewhere, there was already talk of the demolition of ‘failing’ tower blocks, particularly those with structural defects.  But that for Peter Fox, Director of Housing, was a ‘sort of defeatism [he] could never contemplate’.  Ideally, he would have liked ‘to do as they do in private blocks and install concierges, carpets and potted palms’ but he had, he said, to be realistic. (5)

That was a realism perhaps imposed by class attitudes as much as those financial pressures touched on but, in fact, a concierge scheme was introduced in Stebbing House in 1989 and they’ve since become common in social housing schemes. (6)

Such innovations were largely funded by the variety of area-based initiatives promoted by central government in the era.  Finance – both Conservative governments to 1997 and the New Labour administrations subsequently cut local authority housing budgets – continued to limit what could be done and to dictate the form that regeneration took.

By 1998, it was estimated that the Estate required about ‘£7m worth of essential repairs and improvements’. Under the new financial regime and given what Stephen Burke, Hammersmith and Fulham’s deputy chair of Housing, described as ‘the prohibitively high costs of renovating Saunders House’, these could only be paid for by working with housing associations (whose funding was being boosted) and in partnership with private developers (7)

The current estate signs shows new layout and park

By 2003, the 58 homes of Saunders House and two garage podiums were demolished in order to allow the Notting Hill Housing Trust and Copthorn Homes (a subsidiary of Countryside Properties) to build 122 new homes for rent and sale. A new public park, Norland North, financed by Section 106 money (financial support for community infrastructure paid by developers as part of the planning permission process), was opened in 2009.

In the meantime, Labour’s Decent Homes Programme had been launched in 2000 – an initiative to improve estates and catch up with an estimated £19 billion backlog of needed repairs and refurbishments nationwide.  It did not, however, provide the necessary funding to councils as such.  Hammersmith and Fulham was forced – as were many similarly placed authorities – to establish an ALMO (an arms-length management organisation) which was permitted access to necessary funds.

Stebbing House with Boxmoor House in foreground, 2017

New kitchens and bathrooms in the tower blocks, extensive landscaping, redecoration, renewals and repairs across the Estate followed.  The ALMO was wound up in 2010, having served its purpose, and management brought back in-house.  New central heating systems were installed in tower block studio flats in 2011. The detail might seem trivial in itself (unless you were a beneficiary, of course) but it reminds us that continued investment maintains and fulfils the promise of decent and affordable housing which has lain at the heart of council housing since its inception.

So we’ve travelled some distance – from the promise of modernity to its dysfunctional fulfilment or, if you wish to employ some of the more colourful narrative language of the time, from dream to nightmare, utopia to dystopia.  And we’ve come through that to something far better. Perhaps the conclusions we draw on the modernist council estates of the 1960s depend more at which stop we get off (to stretch the metaphor) and whether we are prepared to continue our journey forward.

A 3D Revit model of the estate © Terrain Surveys

The Edward Woods Estate continued that journey. The installation of new central heating in 2011 was part of a larger £16.13m low carbon refurbishment of the Estate headed by the Hammersmith and Fulham working with ECD Architects, the Breyer Group and insulation specialists Rockwool.  The scheme was closely monitored and allows us to draw much broader conclusions about the Estate in the present.

It falls within the 12 per cent of most deprived areas in the country; the proportion of people on benefits is double the national average.  It is home, disproportionately, to people from minority communities, almost one third are Black or Black British.  Some 83 percent of homes are still council rented. When asked about the Estate, almost all residents felt safe in their homes and in the area; two thirds knew and got on with their neighbours. (8) With the refurbishment complete, the proportion of residents saying their quality of life was ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ rose from 68 percent in 2011 to 78 percent in 2015. (9)

The image of damage to Poynter House, prior to the installation of cladding, in December 2006 suggests how fire should be contained in high-rise blocks when systems are working effectively  © Nico Hogg

The refurb included the addition of thermal cladding to the tower block exteriors.  The tragedy of Grenfell Tower, which lies barely half a mile to the north, has cast a terrible shadow over such ‘improvement’ and caused Edward Woods residents severe alarm.  Fortunately, in this case, the Council could report that the cladding used – fire-resilient stone wool insulation rather than the flammable panels used at Grenfell – passed all subsequent safety tests. (10)

I think this allows us to leave the final word with the redoubtable Anne Power: (11)

Established council estates can offer decent conditions, satisfied tenants, community stability, well-maintained buildings, high density, additional infill buildings and community facilities. Edward Woods estate in Hammersmith and Fulham meets all these conditions, while housing nearly 2000 almost entirely low-income council tenants.

The refurbishment, she concluded, had provided ‘High-Rise Hope!’  Perhaps that’s a story we can tell about the longer history of the Edward Woods Estate.

Sources

My thanks to the Archives and Local Studies service of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham for many of the sources used to inform this post and for permission to use the images credited. They can be contacted at archives@lbhf.gov.uk.

My thanks also to Dave Walker at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Local Studies and Archives  for permission to use images in their holdings

(1) Hammersmith and Fulham Borough Council, Report of the Director of Housing, Edward Woods Estate W11: Initial Assessment (December 1979)

(2) Hammersmith and Fulham Borough Council, Edward Woods Estate Residents Survey (1979) [Edward Woods box file, Hammersmith and Fulham Archives and Local Studies]

(3) ‘Lift breakdown turn flat blocks into prisons’, Daily Telegraph, 31 August 1979

(4) The Centre – Oct ‘85’ [Edward Woods box file, Hammersmith and Fulham Archives and Local Studies]

(5) John Young, ‘Locking the Tower Block Door’, The Times, 30 April 1981

(6) Governing London, August 10 1989 [Edward Woods box file, Hammersmith and Fulham Archives and Local Studies]

(7) Michael Gerrard, ‘Bulldozers to demolish blocks for £7m facelift’, The Gazette, 31 July 1998

(8) Anne Power, ‘High Rise Hope’, LSE Housing and Communities, 19 October 2012

(9) Sustainable Homes, ‘Research on impact of large estate renewal in London revealed’, Blog, 28 July, 2015

(10) The H&F response to the Grenfell Tower fire, 20 July 2017

(11) Anne Power, ‘Council estates: why demolition is anything but the solution’, LSE British Politics and Policy, 4 March 2016

The Edward Woods Estate, Hammersmith, I: ‘the problem areas of today’

Tags

1960s, Hammersmith, Multi-storey

It is generally accepted that many of the model dwellings of yesterday have become the problem areas of today. Multi-storey developments were encouraged through subsidies for dwellings over a certain height. This was followed quickly by industrialised building with little or no research into tenant satisfaction and cost-in-use. Whole communities were uprooted in the process of providing the largest number of dwellings in the shortest possible time. These economies in building forms together with the basic group errors in judgment have left a huge legacy of problems for council services in the ‘80s.

That was the verdict of Tony Babbage, Director of Housing for the Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, on the Edward Woods Estate in December 1979. (1)  Many, perhaps most, would endorse that view and see little to revise in it subsequently.

An image of the estate, probably taken in the late 70s/early 80s from Frinstead House on the Silchester Estate © Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Archives

What we know – or think we know – about high-rise housing depends heavily on what we read and when we read it. Beyond that, confirmation bias – the tendency to interpret new evidence as corroboration of our existing beliefs – kicks in. An examination of the longer story of Edward Woods, the shifting perceptions surrounding it, and, above all, the lived experience and views of its residents allows us to tell a more complex and, in many ways, more positive story.  That said, I’d prefer you to read this not as a ‘defence’ of high-rise housing but as a reminder of the competing ‘truths’ which define it.

Nowadays, the Edward Woods Estate lies east of the Westfield shopping complex, just across the dual carriageway A3320.  Formerly, this was an area of railway lines and sidings and dense late-Victorian terraces. The latter were structurally sound for the most part but overcrowded, poorly maintained and lacking basic facilities.  By the late 1950s, as the national drive to clear Britain’s unfit housing took off, they were considered slums. The site was compulsorily purchased by the Metropolitan Borough of Hammersmith and largely cleared by 1961.

A decade later, policy had shifted towards the rehabilitation of such so-called ‘twilight’ areas.  Central government increasingly questioned the expense and efficacy of clearance and new build programmes; others, as we saw, had grown critical of the multi-storey estates which often replaced the inner-city terraces. The 1969 Housing Act, replacing redevelopment areas with General Improvement Areas and Housing Action Areas, confirmed this policy reversal.

Back in the early sixties, however, there were other modernising pressures in play locally. That elevated section of dual carriageway separating Westfield and the Edward Woods Estate is the West Cross Route leading to Westway, a completed fragment of the London Motorway Box planned in the 1960s.  These plans, first mooted in Abercrombie’s 1943 County of London Plan, were intended to adapt the capital’s creaking infrastructure to the modern age of motor transport.  As public opinion turned against the cost and blight of the new urban motorways, the scheme was abandoned in 1973 but it had, in Hammersmith, provided another reason for clearance and redevelopment.

Norland House and Stebbing House, 1977. The towers of the Silchester Estate lie to the far left and, in the centre (behind the road sign), Grenfell Tower © London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham Archives

In the meantime, the drive towards high-rise housing was in full swing.  For Hammersmith in the early 1960s, the ‘greatest obstacle to the Slum Clearance programme [was] the difficulty experienced in finding acceptable accommodation for the families to be displaced’.  The same report spoke hopefully of new multi-storey blocks to be built in the Latimer Road (South) Clearance Area that might help solve this problem. (2)

Half a mile to the north, in the neighbouring borough of Kensington, the London County Council began the construction of the predominantly high-rise Silchester Estate in 1963 and, just to the east, the  borough itself was planning the Lancaster West Estate and Grenfell Tower.

This was the era of high-rise (even as most council housing continued to be traditional two-storey housing).  The seemingly common sense view that high-rise blocks provided greater housing density held sway and there was little appetite to re-create the congested, airless terraces. In fact, the surrounding open terrain tall blocks needed – to offset problems of shadowing and overlooking – ensured, by the prevalent people per acre metric, they offered little in the way of greater density.

Hammersmith initially proposed, at 31 storeys, two towers which would then have been the tallest residential blocks in London.  Those plans was knocked back by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government which suggested a limit of twenty storeys.  In May 1962 Hammersmith’s compromise suggestion of three 24-storey blocks and five 5-storey maisonette blocks was accepted.

Edward Woods studies the brochure marking the estate’s official opening, 1966 © London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham Archives

Construction of the lower-rise Mortimer and Swanscombe Houses began in 1964 and the first part of the estate was officially opened in December 1966 by Edward Woods, OBE, JP.  Woods had been a Hammersmith councillor for 40 years and leader of the Council from 1951. He had retired in 1964 and the naming of the Estate was taken as a fitting tribute to his many years of service. The council he had represented was itself replaced by the new Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham in the following year.

The first of the three tower blocks, Poynter House (Stebbing and Norland followed), was officially opened, again by Edward Woods, in March 1968. At 72m, these were among the tallest residential blocks in the capital. Comprising reinforced concrete frames and solid brickwork flank walls, these were not system-built and were erected by the Council’s own direct labour organisation.

Under construction © London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham Archives

The opening brochure speaks of plans for eight shops, a doctor’s surgery and a housing office also located on or around the estate and six covered car parks with space for 584 cars and children’s play areas on their top decks.  Some 814 homes were provided at an overall density of 136 people per acre which represented the London County Council’s maximum for such inner-city developments.

There’s an air of bright modernity around the whole project; the estate had: (3)

been designed to create as much space as possible and when complete the land between the blocks will be landscaped and groups of semi-mature trees planted. Between two of the twenty-four storey blocks, Poynter House and Stebbing House, an open ‘piazza’ will be provided.

Even the new flat-roofed Watneys’ pub, the Duke of Sussex opened in 1965 – ‘designed to blend architecturally with the Borough Council’s development’ – was a symbol of this optimistic futurism. (4)

The Duke of Sussex in the foreground; the estate under construction to the rear © London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham Archives

Ten years later, the mood was very different.  We’ll look at the big picture – previewed in the opening paragraph – in a second but let’s begin with some practical issues.  Firstly, crucially, the lifts didn’t work properly. Two per block, they were criticised as too small, too prone to breakdown and too susceptible to tampering. (5)

There were some structural issues – water leakage into flats from podium slabs, falling tiles and so on – and there seems to have been considerable cost-cutting in relation to the promised landscaping and play areas.  One critical observer noted only one ‘small tarmacked fenced-in area with 12 swings’ for some 500 children. The planned community centre was axed due to Council cut-backs; the top floor space of Norland House an inadequate replacement.

The estate from the south, 1977. Note what still appears to be a temporary shop in the right foreground © London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham Archives

In design terms, the dark and insecure car parking spaces had been abandoned by tenants as ‘vandalism had run rife’ and ‘badly lit areas on stairways’ were ‘inviting to muggers’.  Oscar Newman had published his critique of the larger public housing schemes in the US, Defensible Space – his concern was the lack of it – in 1972. Those criticisms were already crossing the Atlantic.

By 1979, a critical article in the Municipal Journal could conclude: (6)

By the Borough’s own admission the ‘Edward Woods Estate is monotonous to look at and its scale is oppressive’. Levels of vandalism on the estate are high. Deck access, for example, has produced the general problems of lack of security. All the underground communal garages are unused and bricked up.

The estate had ‘an air of hopelessness and decay’.

In this context, the damning verdict of the Director of Housing quoted above hardly looks misplaced.  He continued in like manner that Edward Woods was ‘not a natural community but rather a polarised population – people don’t feel part of the estate and tend to be rather suspicious of their neighbours’.  Some households, who might once found support in the ‘village atmosphere’ of less dense communities, were labelled as ‘problem families’. ‘Tenants generally’, he concluded, ‘have started to reject the estate as a good place to live’. (7)

That might seem the end of the story, and it will be for those who condemn high-rise housing in all its forms. In fact, even at the time, an opposing story-line was possible and the longer picture allows a very different narrative.  We’ll follow all this in next week’s post.

Sources

My thanks to the Archives and Local Studies service of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham for many of the sources used to inform this post and for permission to use the images credited. They can be contacted at archives@lbhf.gov.uk.

My thanks also to Dave Walker at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Local Studies and Archives  for permission to use images in their holdings

(1) Hammersmith and Fulham Borough Council, Report of the Director of Housing, Edward Woods Estate W11: Initial Assessment (December 1979)

(2) Report of the Medical Officer of Health for the Metropolitan Borough of Hammersmith, 1961 (Wellcome Library, London’s Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports 1848-1972)

(3) Hammersmith Housing Committee, ‘Poynter House, Edward Woods Estate’ (March 1968)

(4) ‘The Duke of Sussex, St Ann’s Road’, Watney’s Red Barrel, October 1965 (My thanks to Jessica Boak and Ray Bailey, authors of 20th Century Pub for this source.) Later renamed The Favourite, the pub was demolished in 2012 and replaced by a block of private studio flats.

(5) Kevin Withers, ‘A Comparison Made between the Lancaster West and Edward Woods Estates in West London’ (ND typescript, Kensington and Chelsea Archives). Detail in the succeeding paragraphs is drawn from the same source.

(6) ‘Vandalism: Municipal Journal Special Feature’, Municipal and Public Service Journal, 14 December 1979

(7) Hammersmith and Fulham Borough Council, Report of the Director of Housing, Edward Woods Estate W11: Initial Assessment (December 1979)

Municipal Greenwich, Part II

We began our municipal trail in Greenwich last week although we halted at some pre-municipal social provision, the alms-houses of Queen Elizabeth College on Greenwich High Road.  Walk on a little further along the High Road and look to your right.

West Greenwich House

Here is West Greenwich House, now a local community centre but formerly, until 1939, the Metropolitan Borough’s Town Hall. It started life, in 1877, as offices for the District Board of Works – what passed for local government in the capital until the establishment of the LCC in 1889 and the 28 metropolitan boroughs in 1900. It was designed by local architect William Wallen and, although only ‘thinly Italianate’, once looked a little grander with a clock tower, dome and portico. The photograph below captures some of that shattered glory after a V1 bombing raid on 12 July 1944. (1)

West Greenwich House, July 1944. With thanks to Blitzwalkers.

Maitland Close Estate

It faces the Maitland Close Estate which I can’t tell you much about.  It’s a post-war Greenwich estate, I think – with earlier and plainer three-storey blocks around Maitland Close itself and higher, more stylish blocks lined along the High Road.  But if anyone knows more, do let me know.

The former Greenwich Police Station

To finish off, we’ll cut through the estate, heading back to Greenwich South Street. Head north on the latter before taking a right-hand turn along predominantly Georgian Circus Street.  At the end you reach Royal Hill and, facing you, the rear of Swanne House, a 1960s’ block of flats formerly owned by the Metropolitan Police.  It was linked to Greenwich Police Station next door fronting Burney Street, a solid modernist building of the same era now emptied and on the market.   Borough Hall and the former Town Hall lie directly opposite.

Royal Hill: Swanne House (to left) and the Royal Hill School

Looking the other way, at the top of the hill you’ll see the imposing bulk of the Royal Hill School, designed for the London School Board by its chief architect TJ Bailey and completed in 1899. (2) It’s representative of around 400 built by the Board between its foundation in 1870 and 1904 when its functions were taken over by, who else?, the LCC.  To Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle (in the person of Sherlock Holmes) they were ‘Lighthouses…Beacons of the future!’, presaging ‘the wiser, better England of the future’.  It’s served a range of educational roles over the years but it’s currently a campus of the James Woolf Primary School.

Gloucester Circus, south (c) Chris Whippett and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Cross over into Gloucester Circus to see, on its southern side, one of Greenwich’s showpieces – the Georgian terrace, built between 1791 and 1807 and designed by Michael Searles. It’s a shallow three-storey terrace with mansard roof, intended as one half of a grand ensemble encompassing the private gardens in the centre which remain. Searles never got to complete his grand design though plainer, though large Victorian middle-class homes were added to the north around 1840. (3)

The homes themselves, intended for large families with household staff, had declined in status by the end of the century, divided by then into tenements for poorer working-class families.  In 1975, a Borough of Greenwich housing survey designated it as Category B housing; ‘an area of continuing improvement’.  Conversely, the Council’s Meridian Estate (discussed last week) – a solid five-storey,walk-up, balcony-access tenement block – was Category A.  The survey noted that 16 of the occupants of the Circus’s self-contained flats were on the waiting list for council accommodation.  (4)

Gloucester Circus: private gardens and the Maribor Estate

We can assume that ‘improvement’ did indeed continue.  A recent agent’s listing describes it as ‘one of the most exclusive and prime locations of west Greenwich’ and a six-bed property was sold as long ago as 2012 for £2.75m.  Evidence of the area’s harder times is provided by the fact that a short terrace of the later Victorian homes is owned and managed by the Beaver Housing Society, a housing association formerly part-funded by the Borough now absorbed by the behemoth London & Quadrant.

The Maribor Estate

But all this, for us at least, is just the appetiser for the main item on our municipal menu – the Maribor Estate which occupies the north-western corner of the Circus – a Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich scheme completed in 1960.  Greenwich had built 1486 council homes between the wars, of which 1115 were houses.  By 1958, when post-war building was in full swing, the Borough had added 1576 new homes.  It’s a sign of the times and evidence of diminishing open land that of these only 133 were traditional two-storey houses. It’s another sign of the times – the priority given to the pressing need to accommodate those without homes – that into the late 1950s, some 1086 families were living in housing requisitioned by the Borough under emergency wartime and post-war legislation. (5)

Such land as was available for new build now required clearance but, in some cases, that had been achieved earlier by Nazi bombing.  The photograph below shows Burney Street after a V1 attack in June 1944. The Victorian County Court building (since demolished) stands front and centre; behind it lies the heavily damaged northern terrace of Gloucester Circus. (6)

Burney Street, June 1944, with thanks to Blitzwalkers

As redevelopment options came to be considered, it was concluded that it was ‘too costly and an extravagant use of space’ to rebuild the housing in its prior form: (7)

Proposals were discussed with the Royal Fine Arts Commission, and it was agreed that by keeping to the same scale as the existing buildings, and by carefully detailing the elevations, the new building could be brought into harmony with its neighbours.

The outcome was the attractive (to my eyes) six-storey block of flats and maisonettes you see today – yellow stock brick for the most part, with striking glazed stairways at each end and balcony access to the rear.

Maribor Estate, Burney Street frontage

‘Generous open space’ (in the words of the Council brochure) separates this block from its visually dissimilar partner on Burney Street. This is a starker block, grey rendered, intended to harmonise with the police station and planned comprehensive redevelopment of the Central Area.  The damaged or destroyed homes it replaced were ‘tall, narrow-fronted buildings of the later Victorian period with few pretensions to architectural merit’.

In all, the new estate, designed by the Borough Architect’s Department, comprised 16 bed-sitter flats, 37 two-bed maisonettes and one three-bed maisonette and they came with the mod cons now expected – ‘each kitchen has a ventilated larder, a dresser unit and a porcelain enamelled sink with drainer’, all flats were centrally heated, and a drying room with tumble dryer was provided in each block.  A Maternity and Child Welfare Centre was located in the Burney Street building.

If you’re wondering about ‘Maribor’, the estate was named after the Borough’s twin town in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (this part now Slovenia) and, in fact, it was officially opened by in June 1960 by Mr Stane Knez, President of Maribor Town Council. (I found the image above of the commemorative plaque on Twitter but couldn’t locate it when I visited the estate personally.)  A few months later, Greenwich’s mayor, Cllr HA Tatman, ‘at a gay, colourful and musical ceremony, opened a new housing estate in Maribor which has been named Greenwich’.  That estate survives and, courtesy of Google Streetview, you can see it below.

Greenwiška cesta, Maribor

And we’ll conclude things there.  You can find you way home in London by privatised Southeastern railways from nearby Greenwich station if you have to or take the DLR or one of the many buses run by Transport for London in the vicinity.

It had been an informal Sunday morning ramble and the mix of monuments to municipalism it threw up was diverse but each, in their way, was a testimony to the incalculable contribution local government has made to the betterment of our lives and community.

Sidney Webb commented satirically of another perambulation taken by an ‘Individualist City Councillor…along the municipal pavement, lit by municipal gas and cleansed by municipal brooms with municipal water’ (in those halcyon days at least). That councillor concluded thus: (8)

‘Socialism, sir,’ he will say, ‘don’t waste the time of a practical man by your fantastic absurdities. Self-help, sir, individual self-help, that’s what made our city what it is.’

We, better informed, might disagree.

Sources

(1) English Heritage, London’s Town Halls. The Architecture of Local Government from 1840 to the Present (1999) and Blitzwalkers, Wartime Greenwich & Woolwich (31 January 2014)

(2) Victorian Schools in London, 1870-1914, Royal Hill School, Greenwich (2011)

(3) The Greenwich Phantom, ‘Gloucester Circus’, 17 February 2017

(4) London Borough of Greenwich, Housing in West Greenwich: London Borough of Greenwich house condition survey. Report no. 3 (1975)

(5) Borough of Greenwich, The Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich Official Guide (1958)

(6) Blitzwalkers, ‘Out of the Ruins’, 12 December 2016

(7) Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich, Maribor Greenwich (ND but c1960). The following quotations and detail are also drawn from this source.

(8) Sidney Webb, Socialism in England (1899)

Municipal Greenwich and a bit of the Isle of Dogs, Part I

This blog began with a walk – just a ramble through some local streets and, with it, a realisation of just how much we owed to local government.   This post marks another walk. It wasn’t planned as an excavation of municipal heritage – the route’s a bit random and its ‘sights’ are eclectic to say the least – but, as a reminder of the breadth and depth of municipalism’s contribution to our lives, it’s probably hard to beat.

We start at the Island Gardens DLR station at the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs.  Turn to your left on exit and you’ll see Millwall Park.  Poorly drained and unattractive to speculative builders, the area remained predominantly pasture land into the late nineteenth century though Millwall FC occupied a couple of sites from 1885 till their move south of the river in 1910. In 1919 the London County Council (LCC) bought the land and created a playground and park.  In 1925, they added an open-air swimming pool but that was destroyed in the Blitz and not rebuilt. (1)

‘Woman and Fish’ by Antonio Lopez Reche after Frank Dobson

At the edge of the park there’s a statue of a woman holding a fish. An adjacent plaque tells you it’s by Antonio Lopez Reche and was placed there in 2007 but it has a back-story.  It’s a replica of an artwork – ‘Woman with Fish’ – by the sculptor Frank Dobson, bought by the LCC in 1963 in the year of his death.  It was originally located on the Carpenter Estate in Stepney, part of the Council’s ‘Patronage of the Arts’ scheme which saw over 70 works of art placed in estates and schools across the capital for the pleasure and edification of working-class Londoners.  Here it is in its original setting.

‘Cleveland Estate: “Woman with Fish” sculpture by Frank Dobson’ (1962) (c) London Collage

The original provided drinking water too but it was badly vandalised in the late 1970s and removed, originally for restoration, in 1983.  Then it was destroyed.  Fortunately, we have this replica to remind us of that progressive past though its present rather isolated position and backdrop seem to speak to different values. (2)

Greenwich Power Station (to left) and the Old Royal Naval College

Wandering over to Island Gardens themselves, you get your first grand vista of the River Thames. A few of you might first notice the impressive buildings of the Old Royal Naval College immediately across the river but true municipal dreamers will be more taken by the powerful bulk of Greenwich Power Station lying just to the east.  It was designed and built by the LCC between 1902 and 1910 – an early example of a steel-frame building with a stone-clad brick cover – to provide power to the Council’s tramways.  Coal, oil and gas-fired over the years, it’s now one of the oldest operational power stations in the world and recently converted to generate low carbon power for the Tube and local homes and businesses. (3)

Greenwich Foot Tunnel

Naturally, we’ll use the Greenwich Foot Tunnel to cross the river, designed by the civil engineer Sir Alexander Binnie and constructed by John Cochrane and Co. but commissioned by the seemingly ubiquitous LCC. The 370 metre-long tunnel was opened in 1902, after a campaign by Will Crooks (docker, trade unionist, councillor and Labour MP), to provide reliable access from south of the river to workers employed on the Isle of Dogs.

Meridian Estate and Cutty Sark

Meridian Estate

As you emerge on the south bank, the first thing you’ll notice (apart from the Cutty Sark) is the Meridian Estate, a traditional LCC estate of five-storey, walk-up, balcony-access tenement blocks, begun by in 1933 with its westernmost buildings completed after the end of the Second World War.  It must now be among the best-sited estates, commanding some of the finest views, of any in the capital.   Today, riverside locations are the prerogative of the well-heeled. Back in the day, when first acquired by the Council, this was unattractive industrial land – a mix of docks and allied trades and humble terraced homes – and it was deemed good enough for working people. (4)

Greenwich Town Hall

We’ll ignore the tourist hustle and bustle of central Greenwich and walk on up along Greenwich High Road.  As you turn the corner past Hawksmoor’s St Alfrege Church, completed in 1718, you catch a first glimpse of Greenwich Town Hall or rather, initially, its 50 metre tower and look-out platform.  This was a complex designed by the architectural practice, Culpin & Son. The father Ewart was a Labour alderman and vice-chair of the LCC in the interwar period and, together with his son Clifford (chiefly responsible for the Greenwich building), he had also designed Poplar New Town Hall opened in 1938. Greenwich followed one year later.

Entrance and commemorative tablet. The mosaic is almost certainly by David Evans.

It’s a building whose form and style consciously reflects local government with a progressive agenda – the Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich came under Labour control in 1934 as did in the same year the LCC itself: (5)

Avowedly modernist in its uncluttered and irregular elevations, juxtaposing verticality, through a clock tower, with the horizontality of flat-roofed, low-rise office blocks. For Pevsner in 1951, this was ‘the only town hall of any London borough to represent the style of our time adequately’

Clifford Culpin was clear on his inspiration, Willem Dudok whose Hilversum Town Hall in the Netherlands (1931) provided a model:

I was a devoted admirer of Dudok, and when I had the Greenwich building to design, I went to Hilversum and though the great man had a house full of guests, he devoted a very long day to showing me his best buildings.

The Borough Hall

Aside from the council offices and Council Chamber, the complex contains two public halls, including the principal Borough Hall, originally with seating for 534 (and 259 on the balcony) on its sprung maple dance floor.  The Council ‘hoped that the new Civic Centre will become the focus of the social life of the Borough’.  Older residents can tell me if that were ever the case. As of now, sold off in the early 1970s, the Borough Hall is occupied by registered charity Greenwich Dance (‘the home of dance in South East London’) whilst the former civic buildings (now Meridian House) house the Greenwich School of Management and some private flats.

West Greenwich Library

Immediately adjacent to the south is West Greenwich Library, built in 1905-7 and designed by HW Willis and J Anderson according to Pevsner and Sir AB Thomas by Historic England.  We’ll go with the latter’s detailed description of ‘the three-bay building, of modest baroque appearance’.  It was – as a central tablet records – ‘The gift of Andrew Carnegie Esq’; one of 660 libraries in the UK (there are 2509 worldwide) paid for by Carnegie, a Scots-born US steel magnate who dedicated $350m – some 90 per cent of his personal fortune – to philanthropic causes in the closing years of his life.

Follow the road south as it branches east on Greenwich South Street and look up above number 23.  Here there’s a plaque marking the birthplace in 1873 of Alfred Salter – doctor, Bermondsey councillor and MP and (with his wife and fellow councillor, Ada) one of the leading and most idealistic municipal reformers of his generation. (The work of the Salters and Bermondsey’s Labour council in the interwar period are extensively recorded in my earlier series of posts on Bermondsey.)

Queen Elizabeth College

Across the road is something which isn’t municipal but it worthy of note for both its architecture and social purpose.  Queen Elizabeth College is (despite its name) an example of the earliest form of social housing – alms-houses originally endowed by landowner and antiquarian William Lambarde in 1576 who entrusted their management to the Drapers Company which still runs them.  The buildings you see now fronting Greenwich High Road were built in 1818 and provide 40 self-contained one-bedroom cottages.

Lambard House, Queen Elizabeth College

Lambard House (William seems to have lost an ‘e’ somewhere along the line) on Langdale Road is an attractive extension, maintaining that mission by providing 28 further flats in 1967. (6)

We’ll walk on in next week’s post to follow this municipal trail further.

Sources

(1) For this and much more on Millwall Park, see Isle of Dogs – Past Life, Past Lives, Millwall Park (10 August 2015)

(2) Sally Williams, London Park and Gardens Trust, ‘Looking out for Art – LCC’s Patronage of the Arts’

(3) BBC News, ‘Low Carbon Plans Announced for Greenwich Power Station’, 8 January 2015

(4) Greenwich Industrial History, ‘The Old Loyal Britons, 62 Thames Street, Greenwich, SE10’ (20 August 2014)

(5) English Heritage, London’s Town Halls. The Architecture of Local Government from 1840 to the Present (1999)

(6) The Greenwich Phantom, Almshouses (3) Queen Elizabeth’s College (3 July 2008)

 

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

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

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debden. Photograph 2016.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martlesham with Northolt tower to rear. Photograph 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Croydon. Photograph 2016

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

Broadwater Farm Community Centre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tangmere shopping centre as envisaged

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kenley in 2016 after refurbishment

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

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

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

This photograph shows the ground floor parking in 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(12) Anne Power, Estates on the Edge

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

Open House London 2017: Town Halls – Civic Pride and Service

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Town Halls

This second post marking Open House London on 16-17 September offers a broadly chronological, whistle-stop tour of the municipal seats of government featured, in various forms – some grand, some humble – this weekend. (Open House venues are picked out in bold; the links relate to previous blog posts.)

City of London Guildhall (c) Prioryman and made available through Wikimedia Commons

It’s appropriate then to begin with the oldest and one of the most impressive of these, the City of London Guildhall and its present Grand Hall, begun in 1411 – the third largest surviving medieval hall in the country.  Externally, it’s probably the 1788 grand entrance by George Dance the Younger in – with apologies to contemporary sensibilities – what’s been called Hindoostani Gothic that is most eye-catching.  The adjacent Guildhall Library and Art Gallery are also open to view – great facilities along with others provided the City but, as the Corporation is hardly a triumph of democracy, we’ll move on.

Vestry House Museum, Walthamstow

At the other end of the scale what is now the Vestry House Museum in Walthamstow is a modest affair.  It started life in the mid-18^th century as a workhouse but included a room set aside for meetings of the local vestry.  It was later adapted as a police station before becoming a very fine local museum in 1930. If you can’t make Open House, do visit it and Walthamstow Village at another time.

Old Vestry Offices, Enfield (c) Philafrenzy and made available through Wikimedia Commons

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

This was an era of minimal – so-called night-watchman – local government when ad hoc, largely unrepresentative bodies administered basic services largely related to public safety.  As towns grew and expectations – initially focused on health and, increasingly, on housing – increased, the more ambitious vestries took on enhanced roles and garnered greater prestige.  One such was Shoreditch.

Shoreditch Town Hall

Shoreditch Town Hall almost matches the Guildhall in its civic pretensions – chutzpah indeed for a building, designed by the impressively named Caesar Augustus Long and opened in 1866 for a vestry. But Shoreditch Vestry took particular pride in its path-breaking municipal electricity undertaking and here its motto, and that of the later Borough, ‘More Light, More Power’ took on more than merely metaphorical meaning.  You might recognise the figure of ‘Progress’ enshrined in the Town Hall tower too. After a long period of decline, the Town Hall was reopened in 2005 and is now a thriving community venue operated by the Shoreditch Town Hall Trust.

Limehouse Town Hall

Limehouse Town Hall, opened in 1881, is a humbler building despite the Italian palazzo styling adopted by local architects Arthur and Christopher Harston. It also started life as a Vestry Hall but one intended nevertheless as ‘a structure that…shall do honour to the parish of Limehouse’.  It went on to serve as offices for Stepney Metropolitan Borough Council – while its great hall hosted balls and concerts and even early ‘cinematograph’ shows.  It was well known to Clement Attlee, mayor of Stepney in 1919 and later the area’s MP.  It’s been run by the Limehouse Town Hall Consortium Trust as a community venue since 2004.

Ealing Town Hall (c) PG Chamion and made available through Wikimedia Commons

Ealing had a local board of health from 1863 and didn’t become an urban district until 1894 under the Local Government Act of that year.  Ealing Town Hall, a grand neo-Gothic building, designed by Charles Jones and opened in 1888 replaced a smaller town hall (still standing, now a bank on The Mall) built just fourteen years earlier but now deemed too small for purpose.  The newer town hall was itself extended in the 1930s and includes an impressive double-height council chamber.

Battersea Arts Centre (former town hall)

Battersea Town Hall, begun in 1892 – an ‘Elizabethan Renaissance’ design by Edward Mountford – survived a disastrous fire in 2015.  Fortunately, repairs and improvements have re-established what is now the Battersea Arts Centre as a wonderful local resource.  Its local government heritage survives, however – a worthy memorial to the time when Battersea’s radical politics earned it the title, the ‘Municipal Mecca’. (The Latchmere Estate, a fifteen minute walk to the north and the subject of my very first post, was the first council estate in Britain to be built by direct labour in 1903.)

Richmond Old Town Hall

Richmond, a municipal borough founded in 1890 in the County of Surrey, was a more conservative body although it can boast (since its incorporation in Greater London in 1965) the first council housing built in the capital. Richmond Old Town Hall, also designed in Elizabethan Renaissance style by WJ Ancell, was opened in 1893 and now houses (since the creation of the London Borough of Richmond) a museum, gallery and local studies archives amongst other things.

Finsbury Town Hall

Finsbury Town Hall was opened in 1895, another Vestry Hall at that time, designed by C Evans Vaughan in ‘free Flemish Renaissance’ style according to Pevsner.  Look out for the Art Nouveau entrance canopy and internal fittings too.  It’s a beautiful building making good use of a tricky site, subsequently home to one of the most radical of London’s Metropolitan Borough Councils.  Nearby, you can visit the headquarters of the Metropolitan Water Board, opened in 1920, just up the road at New River Head.

Back to Finsbury Town Hall, it’s been the home of the Urdang Academy – a school of dance and musical theatre – since 2006 and, in its words, ‘an inspiring and fitting environment in which to train’.  The Town Hall is still a local registry office for weddings and, for that reason, close to my heart and that of the woman who puts the ‘dreams’ into ‘municipal’.

Croydon Town Hall and Clocktower

Croydon, created a County Borough within Surrey in 1889, didn’t amalgamate with London until 1965 but the Town Hall, built to plans by local architect Charles Henman, was opened in 1896 to provide ‘Municipal Offices, Courts, a Police Station, Library and many other public purposes’. The Croydon Town Hall and Clocktower complex retains some local government functions – the Mayor’s Parlour and committee rooms – but also offers a museum, gallery, library and cinema.

Redbridge (formerly Ilford) Town Hall (c) Sunil 060902 and made available through Wikimedia Commons

The first ‘free Classical’ phase of Redbridge Town Hall, by architect Ben Woollard, was opened in 1901 for Ilford Urban District Council. A new central library was built in the 1927 extension for the newly created Municipal Borough and further office space in the 1933 extension, contributing to the eclectic Renaissance of the overall ensemble. Since 1965 it’s served as the headquarters of the London Borough of Redbridge. The Council Chamber is one of the finest in London.

Tottenham Town Hall, fire station and public baths illustrated in 1903

Tottenham Town Hall today

A visit to the Tottenham Green Conservation Area gives you an opportunity view a whole slew of historically significant buildings.  With my municipal hat on, I’ll draw your attention to Tottenham Town Hall (HQ of Tottenham Urban District Council from 1904 to 1965) and the other examples of local government endeavour and service adjacent – the public baths next door (now just the façade remaining but, as the Bernie Grants Art Centre supported by Haringey Council, still serving a progressive purpose), the fire station (now an enterprise centre), and technical college (built by Middlesex County Council). Passing the new Marcus Garvie Library, you’ll come across Tottenham’s former public library built in 1896 just up the road.  It’s as fine an ensemble of civic purpose and social betterment as you could find in the country.

The Victoria Hall, Woolwich Town Hall

And without doubt, Woolwich Town Hall, an elaborate Baroque design by Alfred Brumwell Thomas, is one of the most impressive town halls in the capital.  Queen Victoria presides over the main stairway of the building’s staggeringly impressive central lobby but the building was opened, following Labour’s capture of the Metropolitan Borough Council in 1903 by local MP and dockers’ leader Will Crooks.  That take-over by one of the largest and most active Labour organisations in the country (don’t neglect the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society here) heralded a proud era of reform to raise the health and living standards of the local working class.

Town Hall Hotel, Bethnal Green

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

The UK Supreme Court, formerly Middlesex Guildhall (c) Pam Fray and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Moving to the immediate pre-war period, the Middlesex Guildhall in Westminster – originally housing, amongst other things, the offices of Middlesex County Council – was an unusual building for its time, designed by Scottish architect James Gibson in free Gothic style.  It was sympathetically adapted in 2009 to serve as the headquarters of the UK Supreme Court.

Islington Town Hall (c) Alan Ford and made available through Wikimedia Commons

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

Kingston Guildhall (c) Steve Keiretsu and made available through Wikimedia Commons

Kingston Town Hall, built ten years later for the then Municipal Borough of Kingston-on Thames and designed by Maurice Webb, displays another of the more traditional forms still favoured in the era – redbrick, neo-Georgian.  The Magistrates Courts, incorporated into the building, are now the offices of the Borough’s History Centre.

Hackney Town Hall

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

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

That’s an ideal of local governance that we would do well to remember and revive in these straitened times.

Havering (formerly Romford) Town Hall (c) MRSC and made available through Wikimedia Commons

Opened one year earlier, Romford Town Hall (now serving the London Borough of Havering) is a less elaborate building, designed by Herbert R Collins and Antoine Englebert O Geens in an architectural competition stressing the need for strict economy. But it’s an important representative of the International Moderne style increasingly in vogue at this time. Though its steel-framed construction is hidden here by brickwork and stone, rather than the white cement often favoured, this was a consciously forward-looking, more democratic architecture shedding the detritus of the past.

Dagenham Town Hall

The former Dagenham Town Hall (now the Coventry University London Campus) was designed by E Berry Webber in 1937 for what was then Dagenham Urban District Council, undergoing massive growth as a result of the LCC’s nearby Becontree Estate.  It’s a modernist design of steel-framed construction – a quintessential civic building of the era. The full height, marbled ceremonial stairway in the building’s main hall is on of the most impressive in the capital.

Waltham Forest Assembly Hall

The consummation of this ambitious era of municipal construction is found in Walthamstow Town Hall (now belonging to the Borough of Waltham Forest) and the adjacent Assembly Hall – a magnificent civic complex fronted by sweeping lawns and a grand central pool and fountain. Both the Town Hall, not open this year, and Assembly Hall were designed by Phillip Hepworth in a stripped down classical style with Art Deco touches owing something to Scandinavian contemporaries.  The front of the Hall, famed for its acoustics and a favourite recording venue, is inscribed with the words of local son William Morris (which also provide the Borough motto), “Fellowship is Life; Lack of Fellowship is Death’.

London City Hall (ca) Garry Knight and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Finally, we can bring the story up to date by referring to some 21^st century examples of new civic architecture. City Hall, the home of the Mayor of London and Greater London Assembly, was opened in 2002 – a high-tech building created by Norman Foster and Partners. Not everybody likes its appearance but the building is notable for reflecting current imperatives of sustainable design.

Brent Civic Centre

The new Brent Civic Centre, opened in 2013 near Wembley Stadium lets us end on a positive note.  The building unites Brent’s civic, public and administrative functions under a single roof – in the words of its designers Hopkins Architects, ‘a new hub and heart for the community where residents can meet, shop and eat’.  The latter, of course, is another reflection of changed times and priorities and an ethos in which public service is at best complemented by commercial imperatives and, at worst, subordinated to them.

I haven’t seen it but it looks, to be fair, a rather stunning building and, since it houses a community hall and library as well as a civic chamber and offices for the 2000 employees who keep the borough’s services going, let’s celebrate it as a worthy update to the civic heritage this post records.