Orchard Park, Hull, Part I: ‘One of the poorest peripheral estates in Britain’

Tags

1960s, 1970s

By the early 1980s, Orchard Park in Hull was described as ‘one of the poorest peripheral estates in Britain’. (1)  Anne Power was describing its relative affluence – or lack of it – but for many people her words would also reflect a judgment on the quality of the design and build of the estate.  The long story of Orchard Park might justify that – it’s a tale of good intentions, poor execution, hostile circumstance and, perhaps in the longer term, lessons learned.  In this post, we look at the apparent missteps and failings.

A contemporary map of the estate © OpenStreetMap

Hull had built some 10,700 homes before the Second World War. As a result of wartime devastation – over 1000 hours of raids destroyed 5300 homes outright in the city and damaged almost 115,000 – and the prevalence of the remaining slums, post-war ambitions were even higher.

Bransholme, with a planned population of 26,000, was the largest Hull estate (though not, as frequently claimed, the largest in Europe).  Orchard Park, with 10,000 residents, was smaller but formed a significant part of the large-scale building programme. Overall the Council built some 35,400 homes in the post-war period and housed, at peak, in 1981 some 47 percent of the city’s households.

Orchard Park under construction

Planning for Orchard Park, on open farmland on the fringes of the North Hull Estate, had begun as early as 1951 but early proposals were stymied by the conflicting interests of the various local authorities and developers involved.  The present-day estate emerged from 1963 under the aegis of City Architect David Jenkin.

Courtpark Road, the Courts

The estate takes the form of four so-called ‘villages’. The first, named ‘the Courts’, to the east of North Hull,  was completed in 1965 – 764 homes, almost all traditionally built two-storey houses with gardens front and back. It’s said to have ‘always been one of the more popular areas of the estate with a stable population’. (2)  The overall layout is a fairly crude form of Radburn with service roads and garaging provided to the rear of homes generally facing grassed open spaces.

Milldane flats from Hall Road, 2008 © Paul Glazzard and made available through a Creative Commons licence

The original intention was to complete all four phases of the estate to similar design but, with a new City Architect in place in 1964, JV Wall, Village 2 – the Danes, on the north-western corner of the estate, took a very different form.  Radburn principles – that separation of cars and people – were maintained but the homes, predominantly two-storey, three- and four-bedroom houses, were built in long and – to critical eyes – monotonous terraces: (3)

In many ways, ‘the Danes’ are similar in appearance to old terraced housing – rows and rows of high density terraces, all facing the same way. It is almost as if the design is an attempt to recreate the community feeling of the old slums.

Another distinctive aspect of the Danes was the large-scale use of Wimpey ‘No Fines’ housing, built of concrete (with no fine aggregates) cast in situ.  The upside of the method was the speed of construction; some 27 ‘shells’ were completed weekly at peak.  But there were downsides to which we’ll return.

Cladshaw, the Shaws © Charlie Baker and used with permission

Village 3, the Shaws, was begun in 1965 and finished in 1967.  This phase saw a return to traditional, brick construction, carried out by the Council’s own Direct Labour Organisation. The tried and trusted methods applied seem to have ensured this part of the estate remained popular and problem-free.

Finally in Village 4, the Thorpes, on the north-eastern fringes of Orchard Park, there were around 500 terraced and semi-detached two-storey houses and some 48 town houses plus three ten-storey towers each comprising 47 one-bed flats.

‘View of blocks on Thorpepark Road’, 1987. With thanks to the Tower Block UK

Across the estate, eleven tower blocs were erected, most of 17 to 19 storeys with two at 22 storeys, the tallest residential buildings in Hull.  The intent here, in this basic form of mixed development, was to achieve some greater housing density among the generally dispersed low-rise estate and to offer visual interest and contrast within Orchard Park’s low-lying flat terrain. (4)

In all, housebuilding was complete by 1969. In contrast, community facilities followed slowly and a promised neighbourhood centre never materialised.  A modest shopping centre finally opened in 1974.  By then, the estate was already seen as problematic.

One issue was the system-built Wimpey ‘No Fines’ housing.  As we noted, its speed of construction was impressive but a 1985 report from the Centre for Environmental Studies (CES) described it as having ‘all the hallmarks of a “crash programme”’ – and not in a good way.  It had been, they continued, ‘the root of many of the estate’s problems ever since’, unsurprisingly given the issues of condensation and internal rot and mould they refer to.

The problem here – as with system-built estates with similar flaws across the country – is not only the obvious discomfort for the residents directly affected but that estates (or parts of them) become unpopular and ‘hard to let’ and come to house typically those with least choice when it came to rehousing, the more vulnerable and disadvantaged of our community.

Garages and open space, Orchard Park © Charlie Baker and used with permission

The same CES report also criticised the layout of the Danes, noting the designers’ intention that each of its homes have, in effect, ‘two “front” entrances’, one linking with pedestrian routes, the other to the service areas.  This was a version of the Radburn system that existed across most of Orchard Park but, as Martin Crookston concluded, ‘so bastardised a version and so badly done, that the concept’s originators would not even recognize it’. (5)  The CES report noted a lack of privacy with pedestrian walkways up against front windows and ‘functionless “open space”, criss-crossed by informal “paths”’.

This combination of housing form and estate layout, in conjunction with the estate’s peripheral location, left Orchard Park in a parlous state.  Crookston, an advocate for the so-called cottage suburbs, is uncharacteristically critical of Orchard Park:

The overall layout has produced a lot of shapeless underused space which has no clear ‘ownership’ as well as a locality with no recognizable shape or sense of place.  A walking trip is a long plod through nothing very much, and bus stops on the main loop road … feel as though they are in the middle of nowhere … the housing itself [is] frankly unattractive – boxy little rows running off at an angle to the sweeping over-designed through-roads.

This, as he acknowledges, is a harsh judgment on a place many people call home but, superficially from an outsider’s perspective, it’s a hard one to disagree with.

Orchard Park, later aerial view

All this comes to look archetypical of a certain form of edge-of-town estate characterised by the town planner and urbanist Sir Peter Hall in a 1997 article. It first identified a number of physical problems often associated with such peripheral estates: poor housing stock, ‘an impersonal and alienating physical environment’, lack of variety in housing types and sizes, geographic isolation.  Most of these can be applied, in part at least, to Orchard Park, as can the social problems the article linked to such estates. (6)

By 1981, unemployment in Orchard Park stood at 18 percent. This was four percentage points higher than the Hull average which itself was among the highest in the country. Youth unemployment on the estate was said to reach 80 percent.  Ninety percent of tenants were on Housing Benefit, by some way the highest proportion in the city (on the adjacent North Hull Estate, by contast, the figure stood at around 40 percent).  If we take larger families and single-parent households as metrics of relative social deprivation (I mean poverty), there too Orchard Park scored highly – almost 11 percent of households had three or more dependent children.

There were other indicators too of an estate with problems, seen most powerfully, in housing terms, in the 11.3 percent annual turnover rate for the ‘No Fines’ houses which were only marginally more popular than the estate’s high-rise flats where the turnover rate reached 12 percent.

Anne Power’s description of Orchard Park as ‘one of the poorest peripheral estates in Britain’ was more than justified and its associated problems of design and form seemed almost overwhelming. What could change?  We’ll take a look in next week’s post.

Sources

My thanks to Charlie Baker for permission to use images contained in his report for Urbed, Orchard Park (September 2006). You can find more of his evocative photography on his website.

(1) Anne Power, Hovels to High Rise: State Housing in Europe since 1850 (1993)

(2) Outer Estates in Britain: Orchard Park Case Study (CES Paper 25, 1985)

(3) Outer Estates in Britain: Orchard Park Case Study (CES Paper 25, 1985)

(4) Stefan Muthesius and Miles Glendinning, Towers of the Welfare State. An Architectural History of British Multi-Storey Housing 1945-1970 (Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies, 2017)

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

(6) Peter Hall, ‘Regeneration Policies for Peripheral Housing Estates: Inward- and Outward-looking Approaches’, Urban Studies, Vol. 34, Nos 5-6, 1997

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Panelák Prague: Communist Social Housing in the Former Czechoslovakia, Part Two Housing the City

Tags

1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Non-traditional

I’m pleased to feature the second of two posts by Ben Austwick on Prague’s post-war public housing.  You should also read Ben’s earlier posts on the Amsterdam School, Expressionism and Experimentation and A New Model for Living.  Ben is a social housing surveyor in East London. His writing is available on his blog benaustwickart.blogspot.co.uk and photography on Instagram @benaustwick. He’s on Twitter @benaustwickart. 

In part one of my essay on communist housing in Prague, I looked at prefabricated concrete construction and the central role Czechoslovakia played in its development. As the technology was refined, Czechoslovakia was able to speed up its rehousing programme, building large estates on the outskirts of its towns and cities. In part two of my essay, I will be looking at Prague’s communist housing estates.

Krč © Ben Austwick

The first of these estates – sídlište in Czech – were built in the early 1960s. I visited two from this era, Krc in southern Prague and Malešice in the west. The five-storey blocks of Krc retain socialist realist elements that belie their age, with grand, austere classical doorways and pitched roofs with crenellated decorations. In a layout that was to become familiar, roads are kept to the rear side of the blocks with paths winding through landscaped grounds at the front. There were mature trees, planted when the blocks were constructed, so many that the open spaces felt like woodland. The blocks are painted in bright yellows and blues, with the occasional one in plain brown render, applied over the concrete panels but yet to be painted.

Malešice © Ben Austwick

Krc was probably my favourite of the sídlište I visited, the solid, well-built blocks obviously from a more careful era than some of the later ones I saw, mature trees as tall as the buildings themselves submerging the estate in woodland, winding paths and benches sat in dappled shade. Malešice in the west was similar, five-storey blocks nestling amongst the trees, and I saw a couple of rare, raw blocks of concrete panels amongst the cladding, clean and pristine and possibly in the middle of renovation. The cladding of concrete panels in render began in the late communist era.

Malešice © Ben Austwick

As in the West, grey concrete went out of fashion in the 1970s and there was a move away from standardisation to individualism. It started with subdued browns and burgundies, then brightly-painted balconies, moving towards brightly painted blocks in the 1980s, a process that sped up with the end of communism and the era’s reaction against anything reminiscent of that past. It is rare now to see visible concrete panels or even unpainted render, pastel blues, pinks and yellows being the most popular colours. Although not exclusively a Czechoslovakian phenomenon, as in other areas of social housing construction Czechoslovakia does seem to be a pioneer. The suburbs of Budapest are overwhelmingly grey and concrete in comparison. Relative wealth no doubt plays a part.

Krč © Ben Austwick

The five storey blocks of Krc and Malešice are very much of their era. In the Soviet Union a massive programme of social housing construction in the 1960s built millions of flats in ’Khrushchyovka‘ (named after Khrushchev, the then leader of the Soviet Union), five-storey concrete panel blocks that still dominate the towns and cities. It is interesting that despite Czechoslovakia’s innovation in this area, in many ways ahead of the West, the Soviet Union employed a French company to build the panel factories and guide construction. The Czech economy was simply too small to take on such a gigantic programme. This shows that despite Churchill’s rhetoric of an ’Iron Curtain‘ separating the communist East and capitalist West, which unfortunately has very much informed our view of East-West relations in this period, there was considerable cooperation in solving a housing crisis that affected the whole continent. Academics and engineers in Czechoslovakia, Scandinavia, France and even the United States exchanged ideas and attended each other’s conferences, and there is evidence of this cooperation everywhere. For example, the Uni-Serco temporary prefabricated bungalows that Britain built as a short-term solution to the housing crisis after World War II draw on Czechoslovakian and Scandanavian design.

Malešice © Ben Austwick

It is in this light that we must see the rapid progress of panelák technology in the 1960s. By the latter half of the decade, giant blocks containing hundreds of units were being built. The largest, on Zelenohorská in Staré Bohnice, is 300m long with 18 entrance doors. I visited Nové Dáblice in the northern suburbs, where similar gigantic slabs stretch at right angles from an arterial road, parkland, sports pitches and community buildings filling the gaps in between.

Nové Ďáblice © Ben Austwick

These blocks still carry echoes of socialist-realism in their plain lines which, along with rows of chimneys for the communal heating systems, plant them firmly before the next phase of panelák building, which was to dispense with all superfluous trim. It was the logical end point of a process that had increasingly moved away from architecture into industrial design.

Nové Ďáblice © Ben Austwick

Nové Ďáblice © Ben Austwick

I visited two of communist Czechoslovakia’s later housing developments while I was in Prague. The first, Jižní Mesto on the eastern outskirts, is famous as the setting for Panelstory, Vera Chytilová’s 1980 film drama concentrating on life in a Prague sídlište. This is an important film for anyone interested in communist housing, being the only one to escape the censors while being made, although it wasn’t long before it was banned.

Jižní Město © Ben Austwick

Panelstory focuses on community relationships with Jižní Mesto as a backdrop, but we do learn some things about the estate – that people were moved in when it was half built, having to cross building sites and climb wooden crates to get to their doors; that there was a five year waiting list for families to move in, and waiting lists to register with a doctor as amenities lagged behind housebuilding; that flats were let partly furnished, with cookers and fitted kitchens; that some of the fittings were of poor quality, with doors and windows being flimsy and unpredictable. Mainly though the themes of Panelstory are the universal ones of their time – urban alienation, the isolation and domestic drudgery of women, the anonymity of the new housing.

Jižní Město © Ben Austwick

As the date of the film attests, Jižní Mesto was built in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the high-rise building boom in the UK was over. It is vast, housing 100,000 people. Blocks are large, but not as large as the 1960s blocks of Nové Dáblice. New building techniques added plastics to the concrete, allowing for more rapid, lightweight construction, but also meaning poorer sound insulation. They are very plain, as Czech communist social housing reached an end stage of uniformity and utility. It is hard to imagine how oppressive this huge estate would be in grey concrete panels, although by the time they were built it is likely that an application of render and paint wouldn’t have been far away – although from the lessons of Panelstory, this may have taken some time to complete. The estate is now mainly painted yellow, green pale blue and salmon pink, but I saw some bare concrete panels.

Jižní Město © Ben Austwick

On a summer morning it was quiet and empty with lawns of parched grass between the blocks – none of the mature trees of the older sídlište. I walked a small circuit westwards of Háje metro station and was surprised that the estate ended within a short distance, disappearing into woodland. Maps show that it rises again beyond this, contradicting the idea of a vast, uniform expanse. Planning was obviously a concern. Nevertheless Jižní Mesto was the least successful of the estates I visited, although that being the result of its construction in the late stages of Czech communism was contradicted by a visit to two other late 1970s-early 1980s sídlište, Nové Butovice and Hurka on the western outskirts.

Nové Butovice © Ben Austwick

The time of day undoubtedly helped. I walked out of Nové Butovice metro station in the evening sun among commuters hurrying home to their flats, and the place felt like a busy, living community. It is also beautifully planned: the metro station opens onto a narrow plaza between commercial premises topped by panelák blocks, the striking modernist Slunecní Church in the distance, painted the same pastel blue as the paneláks.

Nové Butovice © Ben Austwick

Between Lužiny and Hurka stations, the B line of the Prague metro crosses a valley in a stunning red tube of a viaduct, built in 1990 just after the fall of communism, briefly leaving one hillside and disappearing into another. It passes over a man-made lake surrounded by parkland, which on this summer evening was filled with families. Panelák blocks in pastel shades surround, one with the date of construction – 1979 – stencilled below the roof like the nineteenth-century buildings of the city centre.

Hůrka © Ben Austwick

It’s here that the end of communism mingles with the architecture of the period after, not as radical a change as you might think. Investment in the far-flung concrete suburbs marks the Czech Republic’s attitude to its communist housing stock and invites comparison to the West. The communist nations of Eastern Europe were not the only ones to use system-built mass housing.  In Britain, the 1960s and 1970s saw the building of similar estates using similar construction techniques. The mixture of social and construction problems these estates suffered led to abandonment and demolition from the 1980s onward. In Prague this hasn’t happened; the sídlište have been kept and renovated.

Nové Butovice © Ben Austwick

In Britain, there were significant construction problems in panel system housing, often the result of subcontractors cutting corners, for example not using the requisite number of bolts to tie panels. As examined in Adam Curtis’s early film The Great British Housing Disaster, the buildings were seen as beyond saving and demolition as the only answer.

Hůrka © Ben Austwick

Why this didn’t happen in the former Czechoslovakia could be down to a number of reasons. There is the possibility that they were better constructed, not being subject to the convoluted chain of subcontracting that allowed the corner-cutting and outright corruption seen in Britain. While the sídlište certainly had their problems, soundproofing being the most notorious, that they are still standing shows they weren’t as badly built as Britain’s were perceived to have been.

Hůrka © Ben Austwick

This perception is important, as the demonisation of Britain’s council estates saw some perfectly decent ones demolished along with the badly built. As still seen today, local authorities in league with property developers are often keen to redevelop social housing into something more profitable, and there can be pressure from private companies to demolish and rebuild just for the sake of it, paid as they are for doing so.

Krč © Ben Austwick

The pressure to do this might not be as strong in the Czech Republic. It isn’t as wealthy as Britain and there may be more of a need to make do. A much bigger proportion of Czechs are housed in system-built estates – 3.1 million out of 10.5 million, in 1,165,000 apartments in 80,000 blocks – and their large scale demolition might just not be practical. Whatever the reason, Prague’s sídlište were renovated, transport links improved and new business and shopping areas built, as around Nové Butovice metro station. They followed a very different trajectory to Britain’s shunned, abandoned then demolished estates.

Malešice © Ben Austwick

The most important legacy of this is a proliferation of cheap, good quality, well-connected housing in a large, desirable city, at odds with much of Western Europe and particularly in our opposing example, Britain. In the communist era, rents were as low as 1.6 percent of family expenses in 1958 and were never higher than 5 percent. They are still kept cheap by rent controls. Studies have shown that Czechs like their prefabricated homes, a 2001 survey finding that 64 percent of panelák residents thought their accommodation was ‘ideal‘. Even Panelstory ends on a positive note, as a woman gazes at the sun setting over the tower blocks and says she wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.

Hůrka © Ben Austwick

After decades of undesirability, Prague’s panelák blocks are also becoming fashionable, something Czechs in the era of Panelstory would find very hard to believe. This is part of a phenomenon that has seen British Victorian housing, hated and demolished en masse in the post-war era, become desirable from the 1970s onwards; and good quality modernism, hated in the 1980s, become desirable in the present day. Nostalgia, historical interest, the demolition of the worst examples and the renovation of others, contribute to a phenomenon of rehabilitation so common as to seem inevitable and ubiquitous. That something so formerly hated as Prague’s mass communist housing should now be the subject of exhibitions, blogs and interior design shoots should be noted in planning and herald a less wasteful approach to regeneration.

Nové Ďáblice © Ben Austwick

The extraordinary scale of panelák building, and the urgency it was embarked on not just in construction but in theory, science and design can provide lessons in a new era of chronic housing shortage. Perhaps more controversially, the subservience of architecture to design could be re-examined, and ideas of mass prefabricated housing revisited using modern technology. While anonymous high-rise estates are far from the pinnacle of what is possible in architecture, decades of underinvestment have not left us in a position to be choosy, and I would certainly prefer to live in one than my insecure, substandard and overpriced privately-rented home. The political will to do this is another thing altogether – but as we have seen, it is possible.

With special thanks to Luise, Lubi, Theo and Freda

Ben Austwick is a social housing surveyor in East London. His writing is available on his blog benaustwickart.blogspot.co.uk and photography on Instagram @benaustwick.

Bibliography

Owen Hatherley, Landscapes of Communism (Penguin 2015)

John Jordan, ‘Industrialised Building in Eastern Europe’, Architects’ Journal, 1967

Maros Krivý, ‘Greyness and Colour Desires: the Chromatic Politics of the Panelák in Late-Socialist and Post-Socialist Czechoslovakia’, Journal of Architecture, 2015

Maros Krivý, ‘Postmodernism or Socialist Realism? The Architecture of Housing Estates in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia’, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2016

Karel Storch, ‘Stages in the Industrialisation of Building’, Architects’ Journal, 1967

Jirí Voženílek, ‘Prague’s Future’, Architects’ Journal, 1967

Kimberley Elman Zarecor, Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia 1945-1960 (University of Pittsburgh Press 2011)

Web

Sarah Borufka, A Look Behind the Thin Walls of Czech Panelák Apartment Buildings (2010)

http://www.radio.cz/en/section/czech-life/a-look-behind-the-thin-walls-of-czech-panelak-apartment-buildings

Benjamin Tallis, Panel Stories: Public Lies and Private Lives in Paneláks and Sídlištes (2015)

Cemented In: Prague’s Panelák Estates

Film

Vera Chytilová, Panelstory (1980)

Adam Curtis, Inquiry: The Great British Housing Disaster (1984)

Panelák Prague: Communist Social Housing in the Former Czechoslovakia, Part One Design and Development

Tags

1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Non-traditional

I’m pleased to feature another guest post from Ben Austwick who also contributed two fine posts on the Amsterdam School earlier in the blog, Expressionism and Experimentation and A New Model for Living.  Ben is a social housing surveyor in East London. His writing is available on his blog benaustwickart.blogspot.co.uk  and photography on Instagram @benaustwick.  He’s on Twitter @benaustwickart. 

Malešice © Ben Austwick

Prague survived World War Two with a rich architectural heritage. Its famous medieval centre is ringed with nineteenth-century apartment blocks, decorated in plaster reliefs, statues and ornate stonework. Art deco gems are scattered amongst them, along with examples of two rarer schools of architecture, Cubism and Constructivism. Architects from Jože Plecnik to Frank Gehry have iconic buildings here, and the city’s architecture is a major tourist draw.

Jižní Město © Ben Austwick

However, around half of Prague’s population live in the communist-built concrete tower blocks that make up much of the city’s suburbs. Long derided and ignored, history and hindsight invite a deeper study and even appreciation some thirty years after the last ones were built. There are lessons for the present day housing crisis in their rapid planning and construction, one of Eastern European communism’s few positive legacies, and their recent rehabilitation nods to long-term trends in architecture that should be given more credence in planning and urban regeneration.

Hůrka © Ben Austwick

The Czechoslovakian Communist Party came to power in the 1946 free elections, winning 38 percent of the vote in the only democratic communist victory in post-war Europe. Inevitably, it consolidated its power by banning opposition parties, and by 1948 Czechoslovakia was a dictatorship. As in much of Europe, these early post-war years were marred by a chronic housing shortage. In Prague, families shared rooms in dilapidated nineteenth-century apartments, and migrant workers from the poverty-stricken countryside slept in parks and under cars in the streets. It was one of the most urgent problems facing the country.

Krč © Ben Austwick

Czechoslovakia was an advanced industrialised nation, and the communist government inherited a sophisticated research and development complex as well as the industrial base to carry out a large-scale housebuilding programme. The Department for Cast and Prefabricated Buildings, established in Zlin in 1940, had developed a prefabricated concrete panel type of building construction – the panelák – in 1943. Further work had been stopped by war, but the communists were keen to continue research where they saw the possibility of an innovative solution to the housing crisis. The problems of cost and speed could be solved by the use of the factory production line, as they had in other industries.

Jižní Město © Ben Austwick

Renamed the Department of Prefabricated Buildings, the department worked with the might of a nationalised building industry behind it. The first experimental buildings were built in Zlin where it was based. Three-storey housing units, with large balconies to ease the transition from the traditional house, were built using prefabricated concrete frames. Skilled builders were still needed on site to infill the frames with brick, and the units had to be held together with wire and scaffolding until the roof was put on. It was haphazard and expensive, but clearly an early stage in a process that would be refined.

Nové Ďáblice © Ben Austwick

Czechoslovakia wasn’t alone in researching the possibilities of prefabricated building. The field was led by France, which began construction of the world’s first housing estate of prefabricated concrete panels (later to become infamous as a Holocaust transit camp) at Drancy in 1929. The Scandinavian countries, which had a history of prefabricated wooden construction, also had programmes. There was a considerable exchange of ideas between the countries at conferences and through academic journals, despite the divide between Eastern and Western Europe.

Malešice © Ben Austwick

An early Prague scheme was the 1200 unit Solidarita project of two-storey terraced houses, still standing in the suburb of Strašnice. Solidarita was influenced by developments in modern housing outside Czechoslovakia, in particular the Præstehaven estate in Aarhus, Denmark. By 1949 Czechoslovakia had developed standard requirements for floor area and living space, which translated into standardisation of materials such as concrete panels and fittings to be mass produced in factories. These two-storey terraces are typical of early, experimental prefabricated concrete housing, as structural issues were tested and monitored.

Malešice © Ben Austwick

The development of prefabricated housing signalled a move away from architecture into design, something earlier modernist movements such as Bauhaus had aimed for but never quite achieved. The need to build rapidly at low cost led logically to the development of standardised, interchangeable parts that could be manufactured on production lines. Everything from brick sizes to the socialist-realist decorations that can be seen on some of the earliest blocks was standardised.

Malešice © Ben Austwick

The Minister of Building Industry, Emanuel Šlechta had lived in the United States in the 1920s and was a specialist in mass production, having studied Fordism and Taylorism – pioneering time-and-motion theories that gave rise to the production line and the space-saving kitchen – and seen their application in industry. As material innovations were made, so were organisational ones. A flow construction technique was developed, where workers were given repetitive tasks in a moving assembly line from the factory all the way to the construction site – a precursor of the now ubiquitous just-in-time stock control method developed in Japan in the 1960s. Investment in new housing was high and considerable support was given to research and development. These innovations were concerned with the scale of the housing crisis and possible long-term savings more than short-term cost, and the need to house large amounts of people quickly.

Jižní Město © Ben Austwick

These developments culminated in the BA system, named after Bratislava, where it was developed by Vladimír Karfík. Pre-stressed concrete frames were infilled with lightweight, reinforced concrete panels, fastened together with steel bolts. Weight was supported by the exterior walls, allowing for flexible floor space with no load-bearing internal walls, developed so the system could be used in industrial buildings as well as housing. The BA system was a breakthrough in the development of prefabricated housing, and can be considered the first true panelák system. It rapidly led to a boom in housing construction.

771 U Prefy © Ben Austwick

The first panelák block was built at 771 U Prefy, in Dáblice on the outskirts of Prague. It is easily missed, an unassuming building in a village separated from the suburbs by a couple of miles of country roads. Like most of Prague’s paneláks, the once visible concrete panels are concealed by recently applied render and a coat of brightly coloured paint, and it would be unremarkable but for the decorative roof details and the classical forms of the windows and doors. But unremarkable is a feature of panelák architecture, which was to eschew any decoration and individualism in later years, focused solely on the need to house people.

771 U Prefy © Ben Austwick

This early building is small, just three stories high and the size of a large house. Blocks like this were built as infill in the centre of Czechoslovakian cities, an ad hoc approach that suited a still developing technology. I didn’t see any in central Prague, a compact inner city that escaped wartime bombing. Any that were built may have been lost to post-communist redevelopment.

We have to go forward a few years and a few miles out into the suburbs for the next examples of panelák architecture. These are the sídlište, the estates that grew around Prague as panelák technology improved. I will be visiting these in part two.

With special thanks to Luise, Lubi, Theo and Freda

Bibliography

Owen Hatherley, Landscapes of Communism (Penguin 2015)

John Jordan, ‘Industrialised Building in Eastern Europe’, Architects’ Journal, 1967

Maros Krivý, ‘Greyness and Colour Desires: the Chromatic Politics of the Panelák in Late-Socialist and Post-Socialist Czechoslovakia’, Journal of Architecture, 2015

Maros Krivý, ‘Postmodernism or Socialist Realism? The Architecture of Housing Estates in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia’, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2016

Karel Storch, ‘Stages in the Industrialisation of Building’, Architects’ Journal, 1967

Jirí Voženílek, ‘Prague’s Future’, Architects’ Journal, 1967

Kimberley Elman Zarecor, Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia 1945-1960 (University of Pittsburgh Press 2011)

Web

Sarah Borufka, A Look Behind the Thin Walls of Czech Panelák Apartment Buildings (2010)

Benjamin Tallis, Panel Stories: Public Lies and Private Lives in Paneláks and Sídlištes (2015)

Cemented In: Prague’s Panelák Estates

Film

Vera Chytilová, Panelstory (1980)

Adam Curtis, Inquiry: The Great British Housing Disaster (1984)

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

Tags

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

Council Housing in Walsall, Part III: Postwar Estates and High-Rise

Tags

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

This is the third of four posts telling the story of council housing in Walsall.  Beyond any local interest, it reflects the dynamics of a wider national history of council housing.  That fuller story will be told in my forthcoming book Municipal Dreams: the Rise and Fall of Council Housing which will be published by Verso in April 2018.

After 1945, the need for decent and affordable housing became one of the biggest issues in British politics and, in sharp contrast to the present, the local and national state mobilised on a massive scale to address this problem.  That meant in Walsall, as elsewhere, estates on traditional – though ‘improved’ – low-rise lines but it would mean in due course new and varied forms of multi-storey housing.

In reality, the former remained predominant.  Almost two-thirds of council homes built in the UK between 1945 and 1979 were two-storey houses in more or less ‘garden’ suburbs but in popular consciousness and media portrayal, the era became associated with high-rise flats, often described as ‘notorious’. In fact, multi-storey housing (of six-storeys or more) only surpassed one-fifth of new schemes in England and Wales in the short period between 1964 and 1967. (1) Walsall offers an excellent case-study by which to study the more complex and diverse realities of post-war public housing.

Southbourne Avenue

As we saw in the second of our Walsall posts, prefabs were adopted as a temporary ‘fix’ to an immediate post-war housing crisis but new permanent homes – in huge numbers – remained the goal. That goal, however, in an era of genuine austerity, first required the use of other non-traditional means. By 1950, 850 non-traditional homes had been built in Walsall, in a range reflecting the experimentation of the time.

Partially refurbished BISF housing on Hawbush Road

The largest number, at 240, were BISF houses – steel-framed homes (to a design by Sir Fredrick Gibberd) manufactured by the British Iron and Steel Federation.  Next came the Orlit homes produced by the Edinburgh firm of that name; 198 of these precast reinforced concrete houses were erected. Wates offered a similar form of pre-cast concrete construction while Wimpey offered in-situ concrete housing; 100 of each were built in Walsall. Other steel-framed homes and some 50 permanent aluminium bungalows completed the list.

Non-traditional housing, Heather Road, Dudley’s Field Estate

Many disliked the appearance of these new homes; even Walsall’s Chief Architect, AT Parrott, guardedly admitted they presented ‘a subject for very sympathetic handling if happy aesthetic results were to be achieved’. (2)  Design and construction flaws emerged later.  As brick supply increased and skilled labour became more readily available, traditional brick construction was happily resumed.

Some 490 of these non-traditional homes were built on the Dudley’s Field Estate in Bloxwich, Walsall’s first new post-war estate begun in 1946. Parrott described it as ‘probably our least successful from the point of view of appearance, but…very valuable as an object lesson’.  Interwar estates had been widely criticised for their dormitory feel and lack of community provision. The 1944 Dudley Committee and the 1948 Committee on the Appearance of Housing Estates were intended to address these deficiencies but in the immediate aftermath of war, in Parrott’s words:

Speed was of prime importance and, whilst certain attempts were made to add interest to the layouts, the vital lessons which have been brought the design of Council housing today to a standard never before reached had yet to be learned.

The Mossley Estate, 1660 new homes on completion, just to the north of Dudley’s Fields, and the Gipsy Lane Estate (now Beechdale), of similar size, to the south followed in short order.  If the good intentions were to provide these new estates greater facilities, these were fulfilled belatedly.  Eight hundred houses had been completed on the Gipsy Lane Estate before any shops were open and the Chief Architect himself described it as a ‘large and isolated estate, and a very long journey for the housewife whenever there is shopping to be done’.

Mossley Estate

Another feature of most of Walsall’s new build that it was located on reclaimed, brownfield land containing coal, clay and gravel workings, slag and brickwork waste Over 500,000 cubic yards of materials were removed from the Gipsy Lane site alone. The risk of subsidence here and elsewhere meant that most of the new homes were restricted to semi-detached pairs.

Pershore Road, Mossley Estate (c) Richard Vince and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Up to 1949, the focus on three-bed family homes remained total. Some two-bed homes followed and after 1954, a 25/75 two-bed/three-bed split was projected.  As part of the  the realisation of the waiting list’s varied needs, a site was set aside on the Mossley Estate for an old people’s home.  There were, as yet, no multi-storey homes though flats and maisonettes were said to be popular and some three-storey blocks were projected on outer estates.

Alumwell Road, Pleck

These were generously sized homes. Walsall’s three-bed houses averaged 963 square feet, some way over the 900 square feet minimum prescribed by Labour’s post-war Minister of Housing Nye Bevan.  The so-called ‘People’s Homes’ – at around 750 to 850 square feet – designated by his Conservative successor, Harold Macmillan, in the attempt to increase the rate of housebuilding, were significantly smaller.

Walsall’s 10,000^th council home was officially opened by the town’s Labour MP WT Wells at 65 Primley Avenue in Alumwell in June 1950.  The Council’s brochure to mark the occasion boasted of building an average of four houses every three working days since 1920 – an astonishing rate when compared to the present day’s faltering efforts and a tribute to the contribution public housing made (and could make again) to meeting our housing needs. (3)

St Matthew’s Close

There was little signature architecture and planning in these new estates though one later commentator remarked on their ‘carefully designed informal layouts with much greenery’ and the ‘steel casements, pantiled roofs and distinctive copper flashing’ of the Borough’s housing. (4) An exception to the decent but stolid output which predominated was the St Matthew’s Close scheme designed by Geoffrey Jellicoe and opened in 1953 as part of the now Grade II-listed Memorial Gardens on Church Hill – an area of open land resulting from the slum clearance drive of the 1930s. (5)

Alfred Street maisonettes

Halted by the war and delayed by the urgent need to build new housing after 1945, that determination to clear the slums took off once more in Walsall after 1954 when the Alfred Street area in Bloxwich was represented and new maisonette blocks erected (since replaced themselves, as best as I can tell). In 1958, there were plans to demolish 1500 unfit homes in the next four years.

Warewell Close

For the first time, Walsall was looking to multi-storey replacements. This had begun modestly in 1955 with Warewell Close on Lower Rushall Street near the town centre – two five-storey blocks, their form and, particularly, their colourful, angular balconies reflecting the New Humanist/Festival style then in vogue.  (The work of Frederick Gibberd and Norman & Dawbarn in Hackney in the 1950s offers a close comparison.)

By the end of the decade, Walsall was clear that multi-storey blocks were a necessary part of its housing mix in the ‘endeavour to make the best use of the land available where this has been suitable for this type of development’. (6)  This new direction is best seen in an estate deserving of wider recognition completed just to the south of St Matthew’s Close in November 1961.

The Orlando Estate

When I visited the Orlando Estate last summer, one of the residents was initially a little suspicious of this stranger taking photographs. When I explained my interest, she understood immediately and described it herself as ‘a time capsule of the 1960s’; she’d even written on it as part of a university course. So it’s had some love. Let’s give it some more.

Orlando Street prior to redevelopment

The four acre estate – Walsall’s largest redevelopment scheme to date – replaced severely rundown streets of two- and three-storey terraced housing. The official description provides context and detail: (7)

Because of the severe housing shortage in the Midlands, it was necessary to redevelop at high density without giving an impression of overcrowding; this has been achieved by designing a mixed residential scheme with four blocks of eight-storey flats, one three-storey block of flats, two-blocks of three-storey terraced houses and eleven two-storey terraced houses

The detailing is more telling – internal stairways in the eight-storey blocks finished with terrazzo, stairs and landings with granolithic, prodoglaze tiling on the walls, and entrance porches and internal screens of West African mahogany. External interest was added by coloured panelling and hung tiling.

The Orlando Estate

Some 169 homes were provided in this compact and attractive £403,000 scheme, completed, as the Chief Architect proudly records, seven months ahead of schedule. We can give Wates some credit here, both for the design – jointly devised by the Borough’s architect’s department and GF Elliott, divisional architect for the company – and execution. (You’ll find additional images of the estate in this Tumblr post.)

Providence Close, formerly the Leamore Redevelopment Area

Walsall’s second multi-storey estate was completed three years later as part of the Leamore redevelopment scheme which saw 180 properties demolished, replaced by 280 homes in a mixed development scheme of six nine- and twelve three-storey blocks.  The estate’s multi-storey car park was ‘believed to be the first of its kind in municipal housing’ and was another sign of the modernity these new developments represented.  This was another scheme built by Wates and jointly designed by the Chief Architect and Mr Elliott of Wates. (8)

An early image of the Sandbank Estate

Walsall’s ambitions grew, literally so in its next major scheme, opened in April 1965 at Sandbank, Bloxwich which featured one 16-storey and three 12-storey blocks – 253 homes replacing 44 including 18 surviving post-war prefabs. The scheme was built by Wates, this time, in another sign of the times, using a proprietary method of system building. (9)

The Chuckery Estate from St Matthew’s Hill

By 1965, Walsall Borough Council owned near 18,500 homes. When the borough expanded to incorporate Darlaston and part of Willenhall in 1966, it acquired a further 8500 but it continued to build.  The £1.5m Paddock Redevelopment Scheme in Chuckery, central Walsall was completed in 1969, comprising 357 flats in three 17-storey and two 13-storey blocks. (10)

Millsum House, the Chuckery Estate

It was built – you guessed it – by Wates and again designed jointly by Wates and the Borough architect’s department; system-built using steel moulds which allowed the direct application of decorative wall finishes. In full production, the on-site factory produced one floor each day for both the 13- and 17-storey blocks.  System building gets, for good reason, a bad press but here it seems to have been efficient and the end-result attractive.  A £2.2m refurbishment in the mid-90s– with its added colour and pattern – seems even more reminiscent of the Scandinavian schemes which had provided a model for system building’s British adoption in the sixties.

As Glendinning and Muthesius note, in ‘the Black Country, Wates established itself as a trusty mainstay of medium-sized boroughs…by constructing in-situ blocks and building up a local work-force’.  Such reliance on a locally dominant company (McAlpine also built some Walsall blocks but far fewer) could lead to unfortunate and corrupting results – as was the case with Bryants and Birmingham) but here it seems to be very largely a case of mutual benefit.  When Walsall’s Conservative council leader Sir Cliff Tibbits tried to test the market against Wates, he failed: ‘Wates were giving such good service that nobody wanted to leave them!’. (11)

Alma and Leys Courts, Darlaston

By the late 1960s, the star of high-rise housing was waning but there was an inevitable lag as already planned schemes were fulfilled. The last tower blocks built in the Black Country, the 15-storey Alma and Leys Court flats in Darlaston, were completed in 1973.

Meanwhile, low-rise building continued apace until, by the early 1980s, Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council (created in the 1974 reorganisation of local government which amalgamated Walsall with neighbouring Aldridge-Brownhills) the council managed some 42,000 homes, including some 66 tower blocks.  Next week’s post examines the very different housing politics of this later period.

Sources

My thanks to the Walsall Local History Centre and Archives for providing some of the sources used in this post.

(1) See Patrick Dunleavy, The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain, 1945-1975. A Study of Corporate Power and Professional Influence in the Welfare State (1981)

(2) AT Parrott and DR Wilson, ‘Housing Development in Walsall: Progress and Problems’, British Housing and Planning Review, July-August 1954. The quotations which follow are drawn from the same source.

(3) Walsall Town Council, The 10,000^th House (1950)

(4) Peter Arnold, A Guide to the Buildings of Walsall (2003)

(5) Historic England, Walsall Memorial Garden

(6) Walsall Town Council, The 15,000^th House (1958)

(7) AT Parrott, ‘New Housing at Walsall’, Official Architecture and Planning, December 1961

(8) Walsall Town Council, Leamore Redevelopment Scheme Official Brochure (1964)

(9) ‘Sandbank housing scheme, Walsall’, Architects’ Journal, 3 September, 1969 and Walsall Town Council, Sandbank Redevelopment Scheme (1965)

(10) Walsall Town Council, Paddock Redevelopment Scheme (1969)

(11) Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (1993)

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 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.

Council Housing and Community in Beverley: ‘from bad to worse’?

Tags

1950s, 1960s, 1970s, Community

Last week’s post concentrated on the built history of Beverley’s council housing – some 539 council homes provided before the Second World War and a further 1332 by 1964. These post-war decades were, perhaps, the heyday of council housing. This was an era when it was seen as aspirational housing, an undeniable step-up from the far lower quality privately-rented homes from which most people were moving.

But some said the new estates killed traditional working-class community whilst others, contradictorily, have lamented its more recent decline.  Beverley offers an opportunity to examine this vexed question, which suffers a surfeit of ill-informed commentary, more objectively.

Goth’s Lane

There was often a powerful sense of working-class respectability among new council tenants.  It’s palpable here in the observation of Mavis Stephenson who moved to one of the new post-war estates in 1950: (1)

You could walk down [Schofield Avenue] and it was a picture and included in that was a bit of competition. If Mrs next door cut her grass, well, that one cut grass and Mr Cooper that lived opposite he would cut his hedge, you know, and then he’d come to our side and look…every garden was all clean, tidy…swept and everything, it was lovely.

And, if that self-policing and competitive emulation were insufficient to encourage residents to keep up appearances, there was the formidable figure of Miss Christie, the local housing officer:

an old spinster…she knew everything did Miss Christie; she used to walk around the estates on foot, looking over walls and gardens and peering through windows. She stood for no nonsense. She certainly could evict people with no compunction at all, what she said went. Gardens had to be kept, she would not tolerate gardens or fences being run down. Curtains that were not clean and if things looked shabby she would knock on your door.

If that makes Miss Christie sound like a termagant, we should remember her other side: ‘if she saw anything wrong, she told ‘em they’d to get it done, really cared about the tenants, she really looked after them’.

This was an older housing tradition, rooted in the Octavia Hill school of ‘tough love’ social philanthropy but adopted by municipalities from the 1920s who increasingly looked to women property managers to enforce the domestic norms then expected. (In Lancaster, a Miss Baines was Miss Christie’s equally formidable counterpart.)

However, even in Beverley, some estates or areas were deemed ‘rough’.  Sometimes outsiders made this judgment, reflecting perhaps more their own prejudices than any objective reality. In the letters column of the Beverley Guardian, for example, in June 1945, one correspondent congratulated the Council on appointing a housing manager to deal with just such problems. (2)

Hodgson Avenue, Cherry Tree Estate

But Stefan Ramsden also found his working-class interviewees using similar language to describe ‘small parts of the council estates deemed particularly rough’ which they labelled ‘Corned Beef Island’ or ‘Shanghai’. (The North Hull Estate, six miles to the south, was also called ‘Corned Beef Island’ by some. In a less judgmental analysis, this reflected the difficulty of buying fresh food in areas short of shops.)

Cherry Tree Lane

A resident who moved to Greenwood Avenue in 1940 recalls the Cherry Tree Estate as ‘a rough area…quite rough for people like…not well-to-do, not well-off’.  This may reflect the fact – though it is not referenced in his comments – that this 1930s estate very largely accommodated those rehoused from central slum clearance areas.  (The same critical assessment was applied, in a similar context, to the Filwood Park Estate in Knowle West, Bristol.)  Generally, estates had, to this point, housed the better-off working-class whose stable employment enabled them to pay higher council rents and some established residents looked askance at these poorer incomers.

Post-war housing at the top end of Cherry Tree Lane, Goth’s Lane Estate

The oral histories recorded by the East Riding Council tell of surprising rivalries (between children at least) among the various contiguous estates on the town’s eastern fringe: ‘the Grovehill Estate and the Cherry Tree Estate used to have wars as kids’ remembers one interviewee, and AA James, quoted above on the Cherry Tree Estate, tells a nuanced tale of youthful misbehaviour:

They didn’t make trouble, maybe a bit of scrumping, maybe a bit of a battle with the people off Schofield Avenue area…You maybe had the odd scrap or something, the odd falling-out, but there was nowt serious, there was no pinching, no thieving or owt like that. And you didn’t damage or break things.

There’s a narrative here of youthful mischief but nothing more serious and it’s true, in those more innocent times, that the weapon of choice appeared to be ‘mud bombs’ rather than guns or knives. Implicit, sometimes explicit, is the belief that things have deteriorated:

It’s a very different estate now. [It changed] slowly over the years, you know, you can see things going really well [but] eventually from bad to worse really…

The instinct, my instinct at any rate, is to see these perceptions as rooted in nostalgia, as an understandable bias in the older residents typically interviewed in social histories to remember fondly their youth and lament subsequent changes. (3)

Coronation Close, post-war housing for elderly people

That the Council has acted to ‘design out crime’ by closing off some of the back passages that formerly ran behind houses suggests either some rise in more serious anti-social behaviour or less tolerance for behaviour that, whilst not accepted, was once dealt more informally.

This narrative of decline brings us back to the question of council estates and working-class community.  There have, in the first instance, been objective changes.  Stefan Ramsden notes the desirability of council housing in the early post-war decades but, by the 1960s as home ownership became more affordable, council housing acquired a lower status.

Dennett Road, Grovehill Estate

As ‘Janet Thompson’, born on the Swinemoor Estate in 1948, records: (4)

I think because you got a stigma with it…you were seen to be a lower class of people if you were in a council house. I don’t know why but that’s how it appeared to be…in the sixties… And the amount of people round about us that did the same thing…moved out.

Later, in the 1980s, others would buy their council homes and create something of the same status division within estates. Those still renting from the Council or from a housing association (in Beverley, now around nine percent of all households) were typically less skilled and proportionately more likely to be unemployed or on some kind of benefit.

Queen’s Road flats, Swinemoor Estate

A broader perspective has accused council estates themselves of destroying working-class community but in Beverley, at least, both the oral histories and academic analysis suggest its estates were once highly sociable and ‘friendly’ places.

Stephanie Fish describes one annual highlight – the bonfire nights in Hotham Square (albeit ‘often “raided” beforehand by the neighbouring Cherry Tree Estate gangs’) – and the regular social events held in the local parish hall or in the Co-op’s rooms above its Grovehill Road shop.

Hotham Square, Grovehill Estate

A similar recollection by Joan Binns, whose parents moved from Hotham Square in the pre-war Grovehill Estate to Coltman Avenue in 1952, illustrates how complex and contradictory is the attempt to ‘design’ community.  The well-meaning efforts of post-war planners seemed counter-productive here.  Her family were ‘very happy in their new home’, she remembers, but:

The Goth’s Lane Estate seemed very different to Hotham Square which is all straight lines and compact, whereas the Goth’s Lane Estate is all curves and wide spaces. In some ways this is very desirable, but I think it loses some of the ‘community spirit’ which are my happy memories of Hotham Square.

At any rate, Beverley’s estates were in overall terms highly sociable places.  It’s worth taking note of this when council estates have been so routinely and readily criticised as killing off just that ‘community spirit’ which allegedly resided in the ‘close-knit’ terraces from which so many of their residents moved.

Goth’s Lane flats

Beverley’s ‘small town’ feel may have been important in this and it’s worth quoting Ramsden at length: (5)

In places like Beverley, where new council estates were not so far from the old streets and where traditional industries entered a boom period in the post-war decades, this was a period in which local community had palpable meaning. Industrial workplaces continued to offer sufficient quantity and quality of employment to keep many young people from leaving the town, and therefore individuals’ local social networks were often a palimpsest of relationships and acquaintances built up over a lifetime.

But what Ramsden also notes is a labour market which broadly fulfilled working-class needs.  Ironically, it was the very success of the post-war economy with its full employment and rising living standards that brought about the ‘affluence’ so often considered as having killed off ‘working-class community’ in favour of more privatised and domesticated life-styles.

The negative view is summed up by the chair of the Swinemoor Residents Association: ‘[The estate is] far less community driven, far less friendly. Cosmetically it’s a lot better but there isn’t the neighbourhood feeling there used to be’.

Sigston Avenue, Swinemoor Estate

It’s tempting to view the hedges and fences erected in Sigston Road noted in last week’s post as some kind of symbol of this and it’s true, as Ramsden’s detailed analysis substantiates and conventional wisdom suggests, that working-class men did begin – putting it crudely – to spend more time at home with their wives and children and less time at the pub. It’s true also that informal forms of neighbourly self-help declined as rising living standards and state agencies such as the National Health Service catered for needs previously met informally.

Keldgate, 1905 (c) East Riding Archives

Perhaps it’s unfair to suggest that only romantics or revolutionaries lamenting the loss of an idealised working-class community rooted in the fundamental inhospitality of slum living would view these changes as a bad thing – but only a little.

In fact, as Ramsden argues: (6)

The decline in older-style neighbourhood sociability and mutuality was compensated by new forms, frequently conducted between relatives and friends who did not live on the same street but were scattered across the town.

In the final analysis, what we see is not ‘increasing “privatism”’ but ‘a more expansive sociability’ though one in Beverley still ‘anchored in locality’.

New social housing: sheltered flats for the elderly on Queen’s Road

In conclusion, Ramsden condemns the ‘declinism’ – the assumption that some Golden Age of working-class community existed somehow ‘betrayed’ by later materialism and individualism – that contains, knowingly or otherwise, its own negative judgment of the working class.  That, in the context of this blog, is a judgment made particularly of the allegedly malign influence of council housing. (We might even take this one stage further and question why working-class people are held to standards of neighbourliness and sociability neither expected nor demanded of the middle class.)

We’ve ended up at some distance from the bricks and mortar of council housing’s prime achievement in this Yorkshire town as elsewhere: the provision of good and affordable homes for the many who needed them.  But it is, in my opinion, a necessary digression when so many of society’s supposed ills are laid at the door of what was in reality one of our greatest achievements.

Sources

My thanks to the East Riding Archives and Local Studies service for making the older photographs credited here and in last weeks post available on a Creative Commons licence.  You can find other historic photographs of Beverley and the surrounding area on their Flickr page.

(1) East Riding of Yorkshire Council, ‘I thought I’d never find town’: A history of council housing on Beverley’s Riding Fields (2006)

(2) Quoted in Stefan Ramsden, Working-Class Community in the Era of Affluence: Sociability and Identity in a Yorkshire Town, 1945-1980, University of Hull PhD thesis (2011). See also Ramsden, Working-class Community in the Age of Affluence (Routledge, 2017)

(3) This is fully discussed in Stefan Ramsden, ‘‘The community spirit was a wonderful thing’: On nostalgia and the politics of belonging’, Oral History, vol 44, no1, Spring 2016

(4) Stefan Ramsden, ‘Remaking working-class community: sociability, belonging and “affluence” in a small town, 1930-1980’, Contemporary British History, vol 29, no 1, 2015

(5) Ramsden, Working-Class Community in the Era of Affluence

(6) Ramsden, Working-Class Community in the Era of Affluence

Growing up on the Speke Estate, Liverpool: a personal perspective

Tags

1950s, 1960s, 1970s

One of the most important aspects of this blog has been to give voice to the experience and views of council estate residents, so often ignored, too often maligned. I’m pleased to feature today a post from Tom – in response to posts on Speke on the blog in April and May this year – who describes his own experience of growing up on the Estate and his views on the mistakes that were made in its planning and design. 

Thank you Municipal Dreams for remembering the Liverpool suburb of Speke: a forgotten part of a forgotten city.

I was born in 1951 in, now demolished, Mill Road Maternity Hospital, Liverpool. My parents lived in the Dingle, a wartime bomb-damaged part of Liverpool 8, in a one-room bedsit with an outside toilet. They registered for a new city corporation rental house. For two and a half years my mother attended council surgeries for an update on the request. In 1954 we were allocated a two-bedroom house in Speke, on the city’s southern limit.

Properties in Speke were several orders of magnitude better than accommodation most of its residents had lived in previously. Houses were well built, brick throughout, and had front and back gardens. There were indoor toilets and plumbing for hot and cold water. If you wanted hot water however, you had to light the coal fire an hour before: electric immersion heaters were some time off yet.

Growing up as a child in Speke was idyllic. We lived on the northern perimeter road opposite a farm. Childhood was exploring woodland and playing ‘hide and seek’ in wheat fields. South of Speke was more farmland, more woods and the River Mersey, three miles wide at that point. The river was too polluted to swim in, but it had a sandy shoreline and off in the distance up river, an afternoon’s walk away, Hale lighthouse. What more could a child ask for?

Alderfield Drive from Speke Boulevard, February 1972 (c) Tom Speke

Speke Town predates the City of Liverpool, and had been fertile farmland for centuries. The genesis of Speke as a Council Housing Estate dates from the 1930s when Liverpool City Planners became enamoured with the ‘Garden City’ concept as a solution to the problems of a post Industrial Revolution inner city full of overcrowded slums. Plans were made for a ‘self-contained satellite town’.

The desperate need for new housing was exacerbated by Second World War bomb damage and further hastened by the post war ‘baby boom’ population explosion. In the space of a few years (c.1938-1953), Speke mushroomed from a pre-war census of ‘400 souls’ to 25,000 people. In the process, any vestige of old Speke, or its farming history, was bulldozed off the map. Speke Town was buried under the intersection of the newly constructed Speke Boulevard and Speke Hall Avenue.

Close scrutiny of the 1952 photograph, Dunlop’s factory in an earlier post, reveals that large chunks of Speke had still to be built, specifically the central shopping area known as the Parade. From memory, I was nine or ten years old before there were any central shops to go to. There were vans driving around Speke selling groceries, a practice that lasted until the mid 1970s. I have a cine film record.

This ‘Garden City’ idealism never progressed beyond the drawing board. Houses were built and then the building stopped: schools, shops, churches and community centres, all took up to a decade to build. The promise of a ‘self-contained’ Speke went unfulfilled.

The ‘Garden City’ idealism also contained an ill-founded assumption that city people would prefer to live in the country and could be transposed en masse. The ‘self-contained satellite town’ of Speke degenerated into isolated, urban, frontier country, still within the city limits, but a bus ride away from its nearest residential city neighbour.

Rear south-west corner of Stapleton Avenue and Ganworth Road, 21 November 1973 (c) Liverpool Echo

This ‘open play area’ (above) had been left fallow since the day the flats were built, twenty years previous. Within another twenty years, all the blocks of flats would be gone.

Tenement blocks surrounding open play areas besotted Lancelot Keay, Liverpool City Council Chief Architect responsible for Speke, and a knighthood for his efforts. Watch Sir Lancelot make his case: Liverpool Tenements of the 1930s.

Lancelot Keay was a nineteenth century dinosaur trying to solve a twentieth century problem. Speke residents didn’t share his enthusiasm for living in tenement blocks. By the 1980s, just thirty odd years after they were built, low-rise blocks of flats in Speke lay abandoned and derelict awaiting demolition. Structurally they would have been good for a hundred years, but within less than two generations they were considered not fit for purpose. People didn’t want to live in them. People wanted to live in houses.

All the low-rise blocks of flats in Stapleton Avenue and Ganworth Road (photo above), East Mains, West Mains, Millwood Road, Alderwood Avenue, Central Avenue, Central Way and Conleach Road were demolished and replaced by houses with gardens. Testament that ‘tenement blocks surrounding open play areas’ was a failure.

In the mid ’70s I made a cine film record of Speke. It was an Art School rant intended to show the estate in a less than favourable light: not a difficult task. The irony is that it has become historically significant, as less than half of what was filmed still exists.

Ganworth Road looking south, October 1973 (c) Tom Speke

Above is a street view of Ganworth Road with Speke’s signature three storey blocks of flats either side. It may look odd, from a 2017 perspective, to see two children and a toddler wandering around unaccompanied, but it was nothing out of the ordinary in the 1960s and 1970s. The legacy of living in flats was that children had no back gardens to play in, and resorted to playing in the streets.

A child admires ‘Speke Castle’, 13 November 1974 (c) Liverpool Echo

This concrete eyesore, above, is a 1960s’ interpretation of a children’s play area. By 1974 it was condemned by the National Playing Fields Association as grotesquely dangerous and only fit for demolition. The low-rise blocks of flats behind (West Mains) would soon join it awaiting demolition.

The 1950s and 1960s presented a paradox for Liverpool. The ring of housing estates that surrounded the city, of which Speke was but one, were overflowing with children, yet the population of Liverpool had been in steady decline since the 1930s, and continued to decline for the rest of the century. The inner city was being rehoused further and further afield, outside of the city. The population of Liverpool went from a 1931 peak of 855,688 to a 2001 census of 439,473.  (2)

The ‘baby boom’ years were followed by a shift to smaller families. This left a problem for Speke: what to do with all the three storey ‘large family’ houses, of which there were many. After abandonment, these were reduced to two storeys.

The section of Speke in the aerial shot (below) was built in the 1950s, but I doubt if anyone younger than forty can remember it as such. Half of what you see is no more. The white roofed rectangular buildings, centre, was All Hallows Secondary School, boys and girls, now All Hallows Drive houses. The school was demolished, not enough students.

The open space two blocks above the school was Speke Park, now Morrison’s shopping precinct. The retail hub of Speke shifted from the centre to its edge to access Speke Boulevard, top right diagonal. Fords [Jaguar/Land Rover] off picture, right.

To the left of Speke Park is the ‘open play area’ behind the flats, in the top photograph. The main road in the picture, top to bottom, is Stapleton Avenue / Alder Wood Avenue which runs east-west. Just visible at bottom right of the picture is Eastern Avenue. Check Google Maps and see what little remains.

North central Speke estate, c.1963, looking west (c) Lancashire Records Office, Preston

For ‘Beatles’ cognoscenti, the street second from the bottom, on the left, is Ardwick Road, the McCartneys’ second residence in Speke (1950-1955). Half way up on the left is Upton Green, surrounded by three storey blocks of flats, and home to the Harrisons (1950-1962).

On 20^th December, 1958, on the occasion of George’s brother Harry’s wedding reception, 25 Upton Green, Speke, was the venue of a pre-Beatles Quarrymen performance with John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison – drummer, if any, not known. (2)

George Harrison and Paul McCartney spent most of their formative years in the Liverpool suburb of Speke (George 12 years, Paul 9 years), but you have to look hard in the plethora of biographies to find any mention of their early childhood in Speke. Phoney Beatle mania has produced two ‘Caverns’ in Mathew Street, but ‘Beatles’ tour buses don’t go anywhere near Speke.

In the early 1960s, the Ford Motor Company car plant [now Jaguar/Land Rover] replaced the farm on the northern side of Speke. Speke Boulevard, forever known to my generation as ‘Ford’s Road’, was extended to run between the car factory and the estate, for the full length of Speke and beyond. To compound Speke’s isolation, this arterial road prohibited pedestrians for five miles or so, all the way to Widnes.

Eastern Avenue bus terminus from Speke Boulevard, February 1972. The sign reads ‘Any Person found damaging this fence will be prosecuted’ (c) Tom Speke

One of the consequences of this pedestrian prohibited road was that it separated the factory from the workers arriving by bus at the Eastern Avenue bus terminus. There was an underpass 200 yards away, but for whatever reason, people insisted on making their way through the fence to cross the road. This conflict persisted for thirty odd years until the terminus relocated to Morrison’s at the new shopping precinct. Progressively stronger fences were built with ever more ingenious ways found to get through them. It would have been cheaper to build a footbridge. I viewed this perennial conflict as individual protest against imposed isolation.

When I visit Speke, the difference I find most striking between now and even up to the 1980s, is not the missing or changed dwellings, but the amount of trees there are. Driving along Speke Boulevard is like driving through woodland. Trees now obscure all the sight lines of my childhood memories. Belatedly, the city has made amends for wiping a thousand years of history off the face of the earth in Speke’s construction. I cannot see, or remember there being, a single mature tree in the 1963 aerial photograph of Speke.

The 1960s’ Speke of my teenage years was a depressingly bleak, isolated, rectangular Gulag, devoid of any sense of history or community, built to house factory fodder. By the time I was sixteen, my life’s objective was to get out of Speke. Three years later I went away to Art School, never to return. I did visit, but never lived. My Mother, give her a medal, is still there: Speke resident for 63 years and counting. (RIP Father, 2010).

Speke as a Housing Estate did have two redeeming features:

• All the properties were solidly built with brick throughout.
• The estate was built before the advent of the ubiquitous high-rise tower blocks that blighted other estates.

The failings however were legion, chief among them was that it didn’t comply with the house buyers’ mantra of ‘location, location, location’: Speke Estate was built in the wrong place. Its isolation was, and remains, its handicap.

If there are Town Planners out there who still adhere to ‘self-contained satellite town’ thinking, I will happily maroon them on the eastern edge of Speke, without a car, to experience what isolation feels like.

Speke’s contribution to town planning dogma is a nail in the coffin of the ‘Garden City’ concept. Speke was designed as a solution to a problem, but resulted in generating its own problems. Speke planners may not have anticipated the changing shift in family sizes, but they are guilty of not ensuring that Speke would become a solution.

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Speke could never develop as a community because Speke was never self-contained. If you wanted to do anything, you had to find somewhere else that catered for your interest.

The founding vision of Speke as a township ‘planned to accommodate all classes of the community’ was as delusional as its ‘self-contained’ status. Speke, and all the other post war housing estates around Liverpool, were not communities, they were overspill.

In the absence of any community identity, people from Speke, and all the other Liverpool estates, were perceived differently. In a time of full employment, people living on estates were not accorded the ‘working class’ designation, but were thought of in the then unused demographic of ‘underclass’. Like the estates themselves geographically, people from the estates were regarded as ‘peripheral’, not part of the mainstream. You came from ‘an estate’. It didn’t matter which one, we were all tarnished with the same brush. I lived all my teenage years with this, and left at the first opportunity.

My parents tried for years to get out of Speke, but eventually resigned to staying when they were able to buy their house. My siblings left Speke, and Liverpool. I took it a stage further and emigrated.

I still talk ‘Scouse’. My accent was set in concrete by the age of six, and I have yet to find an alternative that I would want to emulate. I still follow Liverpool FC from a distance, but I could never live there again. Morrison’s precinct in Speke, and the Liverpool ONE complex, are commendable and possible turning point improvements. The irreconcilable is remembering the fifty years it took to get to there.

The Orient public house, Eastern Avenue (December 2016) and bar (November 2013) (c) Tom Speke

The Orient is the last remaining pub in Speke, and worth a visit if just to see a bar dedicated to both Liverpool and Everton football clubs. It is difficult to say how much longer The Orient can last. For decades, supermarkets in Britain, Morrison’s included, have been underpricing pubs out of existence.

Speke Estate is suffering the malaise experienced by small towns after a bypass is built. The fulcrum relocates: people leave, schools close, pubs shut, churches downsize. Speke in the 21^st century has half the population it had in the 1950s. St. Christopher’s Church (capacity 1,000) has the distinction of being built and demolished in a single lifetime. Schools are torn down as the numbers of children plummet. I had intended to show my film and photographs to the students at Parkland’s School, but it closed, only twelve years after it opened. Depending on whom you ask, it was either falling intake or falling standards. Either way, Speke no longer has a secondary school.

Speke’s fate was sealed on the drawing board: it was designed to have a bypass. No one ever goes through Speke: making a brief detour off Speke Boulevard to shop in Morrison’s doesn’t count. The problem was there from its inception. Speke, as the city planners envisioned it, should never have been built.

tomspeke@yahoo.ca

Sources

(1) A Vision of Britain through Time: Liverpool population

(2) Gratitude to the Quarrymen website for information.

 

Grenfell Tower

Tags

1970s, 2010s, Kensington and Chelsea

For almost four decades, we have been taught to see public spending as a bad thing; ruthless economising as a virtue.  We have come to know the price of everything and the value of nothing…and have ended with the funeral pyre of Grenfell Tower. 

Three days after the night of Wednesday 14 June, I still haven’t written anything about Grenfell Tower.  I’ve been trying to process the tragedy emotionally and intellectually. Even the pronoun jars.  This is – or should be – all about the pain and anger felt by the victims of the tower block fire. Those feelings are shared by many but have been appropriated by a few to fit their existing worldviews, to serve pre-existing agenda. In the meantime, it seems every journalist has become an expert, every pundit has their opinion.

I do know a bit about social housing but I’m certainly not an expert on all the issues raised by Grenfell Tower.  This is an attempt to look at some of the questions raised and to query some of the responses already emerging.

The first and most important questions are without doubt technical.  The flammability of the cladding has already been criticised but, beyond that, we need to look at the ‘compartmentalisation’ behind and around it which is supposed to isolate and contain any outbreak of fire.  It failed disastrously at Grenfell Tower.

The predominant British model of passive fire protection (using means which prevent the spread of fire, rather than sprinkler systems and the like which extinguish it) is a perfectly sound one but, by God, it has to work.  Why didn’t it at Grenfell?

This takes us to building standards and fire regulations.  There’s a consensus they need updating and a strong belief that Government has resisted that for reasons of cost-cutting and convenience.  We need to know how these standards and regulations are being applied and we have to ensure that those whose job it is to inspect and enforce have all the resources and authority they need.

This is not an issue about tower blocks – which can be as safe as any other form of building. We must resist those who are using Grenfell to attack tower blocks more generally.  Tower blocks provide decent homes for many thousands. The image of Grenfell’s burnt hulk will be used as some dystopic cipher for high-rise failure and the notion that tower block living is to be despised. The truth is that tower blocks, including council built ones, are back in fashion and many social housing tenants are being displaced from blocks in desirable London postcodes.

The tower in 2011 (c) Inigma, Wikimapia

But there’s something more and we’ve seen it powerfully on our TV screens for days. Grenfell Tower was home to a community. Families, friends, neighbours together and all, of course, intimately connected – cared for and about – to others in our wider community.  Can this awful event please put an end to the demonising stereotypes so frequently and so crudely applied to our fellow citizens who live in social housing?

Grenfell Tower also tells us little about the inherent design and build quality of tower blocks as a whole.  The sometime failure of system-building methods was devastatingly exposed in the Ronan Point disaster of May 1968. Grenfell may yet be its equivalent for the glitzy cladding refurbs which have become so prevalent.  Here it seems near certain that it is the tower’s recent renovation that is culpable for the loss of life which followed.

And then there are those who are using the disaster to condemn social housing more generally.  There’s room for informed discussion about housing types and models.  There should be no room for any attack on the single form of housing provision offering secure and genuinely affordable homes to those who need them most.

A second set of questions revolves around management and accountability.  The block’s landlord, the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (TMO) has come under enormous criticism, most powerfully from the unofficial tenants’ Grenfell Action Group.  Its criticisms of the recent refurbishment and tenants’ safety fears were ignored – with the consequences we now know all too well.

Criticism of impersonal and unaccountable landlords is common enough (and probably more prevalent in the private sector, let’s remember) but, here, it’s being applied to the new registered social landlords that have largely replaced council housing departments since the 1980s. The Kensington and Chelsea TMO was formed, uniquely, by a borough-wide transfer of housing – 9700 homes in all – from the Conservative-controlled council in 1996.  It doesn’t conform well to the generally more bottom-up model that TMO’s were supposed to represent.

The irony is that the new landlords were a reaction to the Council bureaucracies which had previously managed social housing and were promoted by advocates as more responsive and more representative.  Often, they were.  I’m not going to comment on Kensington and Chelsea – I don’t have the information I need – but a general criticism of any given system of housing management is probably unhelpful.  Frankly, council control could be good or bad. What counts in every case are forms of genuine accountability and clear and open lines of communication.  Let’s remember that when it comes to their housing, tenants are the experts.

Thirdly, and underlying everything said so far here and elsewhere, comes MONEY.  For almost four decades, we have been taught to see public spending as a bad thing; ruthless economising as a virtue.  We have come to know the price of everything and the value of nothing…and have ended with the funeral pyre of Grenfell Tower.

Every one of the criticisms made above is essentially about cost – about how much or how little we as a nation are prepared to spend on the health and well-being of our fellow citizens.  Public investment enriches lives; here it would have saved them.  The best memorial to all those who have lost their lives in Grenfell is that we as a nation choose collectively to invest in safe and secure public housing for all who need it.