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 north-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.

­­

Speke could never develop as a community because Speke was never self-contained. If you wanted to do anything, you had 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 town slowly dies: 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.

Harlow: ‘Sculpture Town’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Harlow

Last week’s post looked at the ideals which generated Harlow New Town’s unique programme of public art works and its early years.  Frederick Gibberd, Harlow’s architect-planner, had envisaged its civic centre as ‘home to the finest works of art’ – both a homage to the past and its Renaissance glories and a mark of the cultured urbanism aspired to in England’s new Elizabethan age.

This is a record of my visit last year, an eclectic mix therefore, rather than a comprehensive record – a sympathetic attempt to see and understand the works in situ and in the context of the mission Gibberd proclaimed.

By the early sixties, Harlow town centre – Gibberd’s broadly conceived civic centre – was taking off. FE McWilliam’s Portrait Figure­, stands in West Walk, bought by the Harlow Art Trust in 1957 after featuring in the London County Council’s open-air sculpture exhibition that year. It’s a portrayal of the sculptor Elisabeth Frink when McWilliam’s student at the Chelsea School of Art.

FE McWilliam, Eve (1956)

Another female figure of much greater vintage was acquired in 1960.  Auguste Rodin’s Eve (part of an unfinished duo – Rodin died before completing Adam) can be found in the Water Gardens rather awkwardly placed just in front of Five Guys – a burger chain, nothing more laddish.

Auguste Rodin, Eve (1882)

Not too far away is Ralph Brown’s Meat Porters, commissioned by the Trust from the artist (persuaded to change its original and appropriate name, Figures with a Carcass) and placed in the recently completed Market Square in 1961: ‘a focus of views in two kinds of civic space, a square and a street…and a pivot between them’.  There’s also something fitting, though far less high-minded, about its current backdrop.  It’s another striking work which seems to have a happy association with Harlow childhoods.

Ralph Brown, Meat Porters 1959)

Gibberd’s Civic Square – his Florentine piazza – and its complement, the Water Gardens, were completed in 1963.  I’ll confess to missing one of the latter’s most striking elements, William Mitchell’s Seven Reliefs/Mosaics which served as fountain heads for the Garden’s elongated water features – my apologies to the redoubtable artist who, born 1925, remains alive and kicking.  That perhaps is a commentary on the now truncated form of this space.  Despite Grade II listing and a vigorous campaign by the Twentieth Century Society, Lady Pat Gibberd and others, new values took priority and, if you Google ‘Harlow Water Gardens’ now you’re more likely to be directed to the ‘300,000 sq ft of retail space and a 70,000 sq ft new town hall’ completed in 2004.

The front page of this early brochure on Harlow shows the Water Gardens and Mitchell’s reliefs in their original form and place. The first Town Hall stands to the rear.

Also easily missed is a work entitled Returning from Work placed at the entrance of Harlow’s Central Library, ‘assumed’ by the Harlow Art Trust to be by Carl Heinz Müller and purchased in 1963.

Carl Heinz Muller, Returning from Work (date unknown)

The New Town was taking off and its now bustling centre received another notable sculpture, Trigon, by Lynn Chadwick, bronze-cast in a Swiss foundry and placed in Broad Walk in 1966.  It’s reminiscent in form of another of Chadwick’s works, The Watchers, placed by the LCC in the Alton Estate in the same year.

Lynn Chadwick, Trigon (1961)

Back in the Water Gardens, Elisabeth Frink’s Boar, though small, is a more eye-catching work.  It was Frink’s first commission, in 1957, the result of a visit by the then Patricia Fox-Edwards to the artist’s 1952 exhibition at the Chelsea School of Art.  Originally made of concrete, it was first placed in Bush Fair, the second of Harlow’s neighbourhoods to be completed, but weathering and vandalism caused it to be recast in bronze and relocated in its present position in 1970. (1)  By 1973, the Harlow Art Trust had installed 27 sculptural works on public sites across the town.

Elisabeth Frink, Boar (1957) in its original location

Boar, recast in 1970, in its current location

Leon Underwood’s clenched fist is Not in Anger.  The original Portland stone version was sculpted in 1925 and can now be seen at the Gibberd Garden designed by Gibberd himself in his later years and surrounding the home, a few miles from Harlow, which he occupied until his death in 1984. The cast bronze version was purchased by the Trust in 1979 and now has a place in The Stow neighbourhood centre.

Leon Underwood, Not in Anger (1975)

Another re-sited work is Echo by Lithuanian-born Antanas Bradzys placed, in 1970, within the Staple Tye shopping centre and moved to an adjacent nearby when the centre was redeveloped.

Antanas Bradzys, Echo (1970)

Three other works by Bradzys feature in Harlow; the largest and the one most remarked upon by residents for its location and visibility is Solo Flight (1982), commissioned by the Harvey Centre and located in the shopping mall until replaced by a lift.  It now occupies a striking position on First Avenue across from the St Mary-at-Latton church though it’s more likely to be noticed by passing traffic than walkers-by.

Antanas Bradzys, Solo Flight (1982)

Since this is a blog dedicated to celebrating the work of local government and unfairly maligned local councillors I’m pleased to record that it’s been dedicated in its new site to the memory of Sonia Anderson, a Labour councillor in Harlow for 41 years and onetime trustee of the Harlow Art Trust:  a champion of ‘social causes, the arts and education’, who died in 1998.  She had arrived in England, courtesy of the Red Cross, a refugee from Nazism of German Communist parents.  To her grandson, she taught ‘the importance of a broad education, reading and the arts…to see past people’s foibles and stand by what you believe in’. (2)  In this, she seems to personify the very best of what Harlow stood for.

Westgate, a rather depressed corner of Harlow town centre, might seem to represent some loss of that vision but it still houses Still Life by Fred Watson, his first major commission in 1985.  Its books surely represent a more elevated of their purpose than the premises just behind.

Fred Watson, Still Life (1985-86)

Anthony Hawken’s Iceni, 1995, a tribute to the Celtic tribe, stands outside a smaller terrace of shops in Colt Hatch, incongruous perhaps but in a good way – a significant artwork placed in the midst of an unremarkable suburban setting.

Anthony Hawken, Iceni (1995)

Shenzhou by Simon Packard is one of the most recent additions to the Harlow scene, commissioned by the Harlow Heath Centres Trust in 2008 and prominently located in the new Addison House Health Centre.  Perhaps that much-visited site, as much as its arresting form and fabric, accounts for the attention it has received, not all of it complimentary.  ‘It looks like it’s done out of tinfoil’, according to one observer. (3)

Simon Packard, Shenzhou (2008)

And finally on my way back to the station I noticed Butterfly, made by Madeline Allen for Barratt Homes in 2008 and sited off Fifth Avenue in a modern housing development.

Madeline Allen, Butterfly (2008)

I went to look at the housing – you can find my earlier blogs on the early years of the New Town and its later development by following the links – but I came away glad to have seen such an array of public art, sometimes for its incongruity but more often for its quality and presence. It was good to see the civic realm – it seems an antiquated phrase nowadays – so prized; pleasing to see Harlow continuing to attempt to live up to its founding values from that era when a post-war Labour government sought to ‘assure to our people full access to the great heritage of culture in this nation’.

Gwen Dymond, Harlow (1968) – a celebration by a local artist of some of the town’s major landmarks

In Lucy Lippard’s words, ‘public art is accessible art of any kind that cares about/challenges/involves and consults for or with whom it is made’. (4)  Has Harlow’s collection lived up those ideals?   The evidence seems mixed.  Clare Healey found just under half of her local respondents thinking that its public art made the town ‘a distinctive place to live’, a little under a third believing it had added to their sense of identity. But then again, almost half wanted more public art.

Typically, her sample liked most those works to which they connected personally on some level – Family Group, Meat Porters and Still Life were singled out in this way and ‘it became clear that residents had trouble relating to the more modem and abstract pieces in Harlow’.  That, I suppose, is a tribute to the gentle humanism which typified earlier post-war works.

All that might seem a limited response to the idealistic vision outlined by Frederick Gibberd on the town’s inception but that ‘taken-for-grantedness’ might be taken as natural as Harlow and the other New Towns become more ‘ordinary’ places.  Familiarity – the fact that these varied works become so easily part of the unremarked day-to-day background of busy lives – breeds, if not contempt, a certain casual disregard.  I dare say the citizens of Florence pass by Michelangelo’s David (or at least its current replica) outside the Palazzo della Signoria on a daily basis without so much as a glance.

 

As a visitor, I remain impressed by the range and quality of Harlow’s artworks and grateful for their placement amidst shops and streets and houses.  For Gibberd the ‘purpose of the sculpture [was] not to decorate the town.  It [was] not a form of costume jewellery’. Rather it was: (5)

To be enjoyed for its own sake as visual art, and to add interest and visual diversity to the urban spaces in which it is set.

In those terms, certainly, Harlow’s efforts have succeeded. ‘Sculpture Town’ may be a bit of touristic rebranding but Harlow deserves the accolade

Sources

(1) Historic England, Wild Boar Sculpture

(2) Cole Henley, ‘Phenomenal People: who’s your inspiring woman?’ (March 2012)

(3) Quoted in Clare Healey, ‘Is Public Art a Waste of Space? An Investigation into Residents’ Attitudes to Public Art in Harlow’, MSc in the Built Environment, University of London, 2008

(4) Quoted in Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (1997)

(5) Quoted in the Historic England exhibition, ‘Out There: Our Post-War Public Art’, Somerset House, February-April 2016. The exhibition is currently showing, free entry, at Bessie Surtees House, Newcastle upon Tyne

Details of the artworks are taken from Harlow Arts Trust, Sculpture in Harlow (2005)

Brutal London by Simon Phipps

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Brutalism

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

Thamesmead (1967-74), Greenwich

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

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

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

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

Robin Hood Gardens (1969-72), Tower Hamlets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alexander Road Estate (1972-78), Camden

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

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

Doddington and Rollo Estate (1969-71), Wandsworth

The Aylesbury Estate (1963-71), Southwark

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

Lillington Gardens Estate (1964-72), Westminster

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

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

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

Photography (c) Simon Phipps

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

You can follow Simon Phipps on Twitter at @new_brutalism

References

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

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

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

 

The Five Estates, Peckham, Part II: ‘It wasn’t all bad’

Tags

1970s, 1980s, Southwark

Last week’s post looked at the diverse origins of Southwark’s so-called ‘Five Estates’ and the ideals which inspired them.  This week, I’ll examine how those ideals failed or rather, perhaps, how they were betrayed by wider society. That also gives us a chance to assess some of the broader charges levelled against much of the mass housing of the period.

Already by 1987, an ex-local councillor was complaining how the snake-like design of the Gloucester Grove Estate amplified noise and – less a design flaw than a problem of upkeep – that towers and rubbish chutes at the end of each block were stinking and verminous. (1)  A Times report of the same year reported of the same estate that ‘gangs of youths roam constantly. Within days of being repainted, the miles of corridors and elevated walkways are an eyesore of filthy graffiti’. (2)

In happier times – Gloucester Grove: completed housing development 1978 (c) London Metropolitan Archives. collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk

In the 1994 bid for Single Regeneration funding, it was claimed £250,000 a year was being spent on repairing vandalised properties in the area. Some 42 per cent of residents of the Five Estates area as a whole reported that they felt unsafe. (3)

That proportion, though high, might seem low given the bid’s interest in accentuating the negative and the alarmist media portrayal of the estates. It’s maybe the more matter-of-fact assessment of one long-term resident which captures the reality better: (4)

It wasn’t all that bad once you lived on it, you knew your neighbours and you were basically fine if you were sensible…you don’t go around flashing your cash that’s for sure, but you were all right.

That, of course, was hardly a ringing endorsement and the truth of crime, and fear of crime, was real enough.  Back in 1987 again, the police had recorded 70 muggings across the Five Estates area in one week. (5)  The reality of crime, in its starkest form, became evident in November 2000 with the death of Damiola Taylor, a ten-year old Nigerian schoolboy whose family had recently moved to the UK – killed in an isolated stairwell of the North Peckham Estate.

The death occurred as the estate’s regeneration was already underway but it seemed to confirm the worst fears and strongest criticisms of those who blamed the estate’s design for its troubles.

That criticism had previously been most forcefully expressed by Alice Coleman. (6)  Coleman began with a simple premise: ‘Even without the scientific details one has only to think how criminal youths abound in problem estates and are quite rare in roads of single-family houses’. But she was adamant too that her King’s College research team which surveyed Southwark’s multi-storey housing – its aim ‘to establish whether there were specific design features contributing to 21 types of crime and social breakdown’ – had provided a ‘scientific’ explanation.

Sixteen such features were identified, for example:

two or three storeys are harmless, but more are harmful. Up to four flats per corridor are harmless but more are harmful. If an entrance serves no more than six flats it is harmless but with over six it is harmful.

And so on…North Peckham achieved a 13.1 design disadvantage score on Coleman’s index.

(c) Russell Newell

There was a common sense truth to some of this.  With 72 linked blocks in all, 92 vertical routes and 49 access points around the perimeter, the complaint of one resident that ‘you never know who’s prowling around because the walkways and the stairs are open to everybody’ seemed reasonable. (7) That article continued editorially:

These characteristics all contribute to a sense of anonymity due to intrusion by non-residents through each block, as well as providing escape routes for criminals.  The walkways are faceless with a series of doors to upper and lower flats, and the doors frequently front directly on what is a public highway.

This was the defensible space thesis incarnate.  It blamed both the nature of public housing – as neither literally or psychologically ‘owned’ by its residents – and its modern form – its spaces encouraged and facilitated crime – for the rise of anti-social behaviour.

Normal residents but the kind of shadowy stairwell to give Alice Coleman nightmares (c) Russell Newell, 7 Bridges

Coleman’s sweeping analysis (we’ll critique it later) received more genuinely scientific backing in the 1994 study ‘space syntax’ study by Bill Hillier of the Bartlett School of Architecture.  He concluded that North Peckham’s design ‘had literally generated a pathological pattern of space-use by creating lacunas in the system of natural movement’; spaces into which ‘kids were moving unsupervised and forming gangs’. (8)

Image 1: Bill Hillier explains Space Syntax theory to a group of residents; Image 2: a diagram of the North Peckham Estate showing restricted sight-lines (screengrabs from the Tomorrow’s World documentary)

Back in 1966, the ‘case for segregating people from traffic ‘had seemed ‘urgent’ and those walkways were praised for their cleanliness, safety and promotion of neighbourliness. (9)  The irony that they had now become, as ‘space…structurally excluded from everyday patterns of use’, ‘terrifying’ (in Hillier’s words), is almost too much to bear. Damiola Taylor had been killed in just such a location, one suffering from what Hillier labelled ‘perpetual night syndrome’.

Alice Coleman discounted socio-economic explanations of council estate troubles as vigorously (to paraphrase Owen Hatherley) as she counted dog turds but her statement that problems of crime and anti-social behaviour were ‘rare in roads of single-family houses’ was simply empirically wrong. ‘Suburban’ estates such as Norris Green (Liverpool), Blackbird Leys (Oxford) and Meadow Well (North Shields) suffered similar troubles and worse.  What connects these very different estates to Southwark’s is, of course, poverty.

Let’s begin with straightforward demographics.  In Liddle Ward (since abolished but then basically comprising the Five Estates) in the 1990s, 28 per cent of the population was under 16 – a similar proportion had been held to explain the problems of Southwark’s Brandon Estate back in 1975. Fifty-seven per cent of these children lived in low-income households (the highest in London); 16 per cent of households were lone-parent (the third highest in London). (10)

(c) Russell Newell, 7 Bridges

At the same time, unemployment stood at 31 per cent (the highest in London) and reached, among 16 to 19 year-olds, a staggering 62 per cent.  This had been a long-term problem.  Unemployment had rocketed from 22 to 43 per cent in the early 1980s.  A local Labour councillor, Mary Ellery, described the North Peckham Estate as ‘brilliant’ till then but: (11)

Unemployment knocked six kinds of shit out of people. Careers officers came into schools with the bad news when kids were fourteen, and from then on they knew there was no bloody point.  All you need to know is how to write your name and how to go on the dole. If you’re forty-plus, you’re on the shit-heap.

To the local vicar, in this context, burglary, where you could make £200 a night (in contrast to the £40 or £50 a week that scarce, regular employment offered), was ‘the kind of work that’s seen to be viable’.  Drugs also played their part in this alternative economy.

Race was a further complicating factor.  Previously people from the ethnic minorities had frequently been excluded from council housing through residency rules.  The primacy of needs-based assessment after 1977 and the fact that minority populations were often confined to the worst private rented accommodation saw this change in the eighties.

The Five Estates, then, had a population disproportionately drawn from the black and ethnic minorities – 57 per cent by 1991; in two local primary schools, around 60 per cent of children spoke English as a second language. That liberal vicar commented on the disempowerment of the estates’ minority population and the criminality of some of the community’s young people as a compensatory way ‘to seek power in other ways’.  Of course, some longer-established locals saw these newcomers as the cause of their problems rather than as fellow victims and so another layer of tension was added to a toxic mix.

‘Martin’ (c) Russell Newell, 7 Bridges

By the 1990s, the annual turnover of homes on the estates had reached between 20 to 25 per cent and it was claimed 70 per cent of residents wanted a transfer though usually they found no problem with their individual homes.  As homes emptied, squatters moved in – generally transient and disinvested in the local community – with the Council and police seen as apathetic or powerless in dealing with the issue.

As the estates became hard to let and as the local council housing stock diminished through Right to Buy, new bona fide residents were disproportionately those re-housed as homeless or vulnerable.  Many, it was said, came from the nearby Maudsley Hospital as longer-term patients were removed as part of the (misleadingly named) ‘care in the community’ programme.

The Camden Estate (c) Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block (1984)

Such a combination of problems – and they were found most often on council estates, not because council estates were awful places marked out by some foundational flaw of concept or design but rather because wider society dumped its problems on them – naturally demanded greater resources.  They didn’t get them.  In 1979, Southwark had a budget of £60m to maintain its 36,000 homes.  By 1987, as Thatcherite cuts kicked in, its budget to manage 62,000 homes (more inherited from the GLC) stood at £28.5m. It would have required £90m just to maintain its 1979 level of spending. (12)

Despite this, and in a very changed world – which saw councils fighting against the odds to effect positive change in a context where they were seen as part of the problem rather than a means to solution – regeneration efforts began in the mid-1980s.  Those will covered in next week’s post.

Sources

Special thanks to Russell Newell, who grew up in the area and took the photographs featured as a young photographer in the 1980s.  Visit his 7 Bridges project for further evocative images of the estate and its African-Caribbean community in particular and to find out more about his larger body of work.

(1) Quoted in Robert Chesshyre, The Return of the Native Reporter (1987)

(2) ‘Culture Shock Strikes Home’, The Times, 14 July 1987

(3) Peckham Partnership, A Bid for Single Regeneration Budget Funding (September 1994)

(4) Rose (in her 60s) quoted in Luna Glücksberg, ‘Wasting the Inner-City: Waste, Value and Anthropology on the Estates’, PhD in Social Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, January 2013

(5) Joanna Coles, ‘Is There Life in Peckham?’, The Spectator, 3 July 1987

(6) The quotations which follow are drawn from Alice Coleman, ‘Design Disadvantage in Southwark’, The Dulwich Society Journal, Summer 2008.

(7) This quotation from Mrs Emminia Onua and the following are drawn from Southwark Sparrow, February 1987

(8) Quoted in Matt Weaver, ‘Dangerous Structures?’, Building Design, December 15 2000.  You can see images of the North Peckham Estate and Bill Hillier explaining the application of space syntax theory to it in this fascinating video from a 1993 edition of Tomorrow’s World.

(9) Christine Rouse, ‘City Village for the Birds?’, South London Press, 6 December 1974

(10) These figures and the following taken from Glücksberg, ‘Wasting the Inner-City: Waste, Value and Anthropology on the Estates’

(11) This and the quotation from the Reverend Graham Derriman which follows are drawn from Robert Chesshyre, The Return of the Native Reporter

(12) Dick Mortimer (coordinator of North Peckham Project) ‘Breaking the high-rise spiral of decline: one authority’s campaign of refurbishment’, Municipal Journal, 15 May 1987

The Five Estates, Peckham, Part I: ‘Planning is for people’

Tags

1950s, 1960s, 1970s, Southwark

The ‘Five Estates’ were a figment of Southwark Council’s imagination.  That’s not to say that the five estates – wedged between Peckham High Street and Burgess Park – didn’t exist but rather that they were artificially combined for a £60m bid for Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) funding in 1994.  That bid required a single narrative of design failure and social breakdown and it succeeded – it secured the largest SRB award ever made.  Some £260m and ten years later, one of the country’s most sweeping regeneration projects was complete.  This post will examine the high hopes and ideals which inspired the estates’ initial construction.

The ‘Five Estates’, with thanks to 35%.org/north-peckham-estate

The five estates had little to unify them save that loose geographical proximity.  The Sumner Estate was the oldest – an LCC scheme from the 1930s comprising 13 blocks, all traditional brick-built four- to six-storey, walk-up and balcony-access tenements of their time.  It was extended in the post-war period with nine new blocks designed along essentially similar lines though now with lift access and jazzed-up, white concrete-faced balconies as a nod to modernity.  The older blocks had to wait to the mid-70s to get lifts and central heating.

Sumner Estate, 1973 (c) London Metropolitan Archives, collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk

The Willowbrook Estate between Sumner Road and the former Surrey Canal was anchored by the twelve-storey Tonbridge House, completed in 1963. The block’s striking acid-etched concrete cladding slabs designed by William Mitchell didn’t save it from later demolition.  A series of tile-faced, four-storey maisonettes followed, still standing and largely unaltered but for their new pitched roofs.

Willowbrook Estate, 1964 (c) London Metropolitan Archives, collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk

Willowbrook Estate, 1964 (c) London Metropolitan Archives, collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk

The other three estates form more of a package, at least in the sense that they were all completed in the early-mid 1970s, all at relatively high density and all incorporating contemporary ideas around the separation of pedestrian and road traffic and use of aerial walkways.  It was possible, they said, to walk from Burgess Park to Peckham Road without touching the ground

The Camden Estate (c) Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block (1994) captioned ‘Camden Redevelopment, from 1972, designed by FO Hayes et al. Ample car parking below to the communal facilities within the complex are provided’

The Camden Estate (including the earlier Monkland House built in the 1950s) comprised 874 homes of traditional brick construction.  The other two estates –Gloucester Grove and North Peckham – were more innovatory and, given their prominence in the arguments for regeneration, I’ll spend most time talking about those.

Gloucester Grove is the northernmost of the estates, fronting Burgess Park. It remains (substantially unaltered) the most striking architecturally, notable for its long, linked, snake-like construction – 1210 homes in 29 blocks in total, of brick-clad, heavy panel construction, between three and eight storeys in height joined by high, semi-circular, glass-tiled entrances containing stairways and lifts which provide a deliberately and eye-catchingly ‘modernist’ look to the estate as a whole.

An early architectural sketch of Gloucester Grove (c) Southwark Archives

Gloucester Grove: completed housing development, 1964 (c) London Metropolitan Archives, collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk

North Peckham is the best documented and – the most notorious – it’s often taken to represent the Five Estates regeneration as a whole.  It was the largest of the five – 65 five-storey blocks in all on a 40-acre site, comprising 1444 homes.  Despite its traditional, load-bearing brick, crosswall construction, this was the most innovative of the designs – a large-scale realisation of the ‘streets in the sky’ concept fashionable when construction began in 1966.

The estate was made up of two types of block – residential and parking.  In the latter, three lower floors provided lock-up garages for residents and parking spaces for visitors; at the second floor level a large platform contained ‘shops, pubs, laundries, and communal facilities such as halls and meeting rooms’.

North Peckham Estate parking block with shops and walkways at second floor level and maisonettes above (c) Southwark Archives

This was linked to a wide pedestrian deck which, according to the celebratory account in the Southwark Civic News, joined ‘the whole scheme together, forming a network of ways containing housing, shops and other facilities and forming the service route for postman, milkman, dustman and other tradesmen’.  Residents, it continued, could ‘walk freely along this two and half miles of deck away from the dirt, noise and danger of London traffic.’ (1)

Layout of the North Peckham Estate, 1972 (c) Southwark Archives

Let’s forget hindsight for a moment and examine the good intentions here.  There was the variety and mix of housing for a start – one to five bedroom maisonettes and flats, each with their own front door to the deck and the whole planned to serve a wide cross-section of the community. As the Civic News continued, praising the scheme’s ‘visionary planners’ led by Borough Architect FO Hayes:

Far from being the stereotype ‘Little Boxes’ the four basic types of homes will be put together in so many different ways that they will have individuality and variety.

North Peckham Estate with service road to rear, 1973

And the ground on which the Estate stood (excepting service roads) was ‘to be used entirely as an amenity for residents [as] a series of interconnecting courts, designed to cater for different age groups and family activities’:

Some will be planted with grass, trees, and shrubs where families may sit out, alone or with their neighbours, on summer evenings; others will be paved and out of reach of windows, so that the younger members may play ball games and make a noise in safety.

It sounds idyllic, doesn’t it?  And it had emerged with due deference to the community of the run-down streets it replaced. Hans Peter Trenton, who succeeded Hayes as Borough Architect in 1969 (he had earlier designed Southwark’s Aylesbury Estate), praised the ‘social coherence’ of the former terraced housing and described its ‘closely-knit social ties’ as ‘one of the foundation stones essential for the preservation of a civilised society’. (2)  This thinking informed preparations for the new estate.

The new design emerged from ‘detailed sociological and technical surveys’, initiated by the Council, and executed by the construction company Bovis, ‘before a brick was laid’. (3)  Trenton himself toured the old streets, talking to their residents and ‘explaining what was meant by such unheard of things as patios’.

If all this sounds like good PR or self-deceiving rhetoric, it’s worth pointing out that the finished estate earned widespread acclaim – to Lord Robens, it was a ‘European showpiece’.  A hard-bitten journalist (or perhaps I’m lapsing into cliché there) for the Municipal Review touring the Estate in 1972, found his ‘enthusiasm steadily mounting’: (2)

There are no towers or soulless slabs at North Peckham, no bleak expanses of exposed concrete, no grassed areas with ‘keep off’ notices to apply a cosmetic touch to harridan features. Instead there is grass which is meant to be played on and trees everywhere.  The authority’s adoption of low-rise, high-density – it was one of the first in the country to latch on to this – has been continued with a layout which disposes the buildings around a series of courtyards where children can play in safety…The courtyards and the soft contours of the buildings around them…convey a feeling of enclosure and intimacy rarely found in large projects of this kind.

This, he said, was an (apparently successful) ‘attempt to recreate the neighbourly atmosphere of old-established districts’ and he concluded almost lyrically:

the housewife can open the door to the tradesman much as she does in an ordinary street. The children can also run around unmolested by traffic, just as they used to do in the days of hop-scotch and the hoop…For once the idea that planning is for people has been infused with some meaning.

Residents’ views could be positive too.  Tina recalls (4)

her flat was beautiful…split over five levels, huge, with a big patio at the top…rooms for all her children, and the kitchen was so big they had a sofa and a telly in it, her children could play there, so they could keep the living room spotless for when family and visitors came along.

‘Mrs Smith’ remembers moving in: ‘We really liked it. It was more like a holiday camp.  It was very, very good’. (5)

North Peckham Estate, 1972

I’ve spent some time on this pre-history, not to exonerate planners and councils but, at the very least, to acquit them of the charge of ill intent.  It allows us too to examine ‘what went wrong’ without prejudgment because, if there was a honeymoon period, it seems to have been a relatively short one.

By 1977, the Peckham Society noted that the Estate was suffering ‘wear and tear’; the overall appearance of the Estate was ‘handsome’ but the ‘uniformity of the design and decoration’ (everything was cobalt blue apparently) left visitors, even residents, feeling disoriented. The vicar described an active community and the estate as ‘a place designed for neighbourliness and meeting’ but the walkways, according to the article, had become problematic – ‘used for a variety of games including primitive football, cricket and tennis with the result that windows in the public areas are frequently smashed’. Those promised play areas don’t seem to have materialised. (6)

Later, less inviting images of the Estate’s walkways

But this is tame stuff compared to what came later, a trajectory summed up in one magazine headline as ‘a dream in the 60s, a reality in the 70s and a nightmare in the 80s’. The report went on to claim that North Peckham had been described by the European Economic Community as ‘the most depressed housing area in western Europe’. (7)

We’ll look at the truth of that next week. What had happened to North Peckham and the other estates to turn such high hopes into ashes and what was the new thinking that would transform what were now so unquestioningly seen as the catastrophic errors of a previous generation of planners?

Sources

(1) ‘Life at Deck Level’, Southwark Civic News, July 1968

(2) HF Wallis, ‘A Living Showpiece at North Peckham?’, Municipal Review, November 1972

(3) Christine Rouse, ‘City Village for the Birds?’, South London Press, 6 December 1974

(4) Quoted in Luna Glücksberg, ‘Wasting the Inner-City: Waste, Value and Anthropology on the Estates’, PhD in Social Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, January 2013

(5) Quoted in Robert Chesshyre, The Return of the Native Reporter (1987)

(6) Bob Smyth, ‘The North Peckham Estate: a Brief Guide’, Peckham Society Newsletter, February/March 1977

(7) Sky Magazine, March 1988

Harlow New Town: ‘Are you going my way?’

Tags

1950s, 1960s, 1970s, Harlow

Last week’s post looked at the origins of Harlow New Town and the architectural and planning ideals – sharply criticised by some – which inspired it.  It was, in every sense, a young town but it’s grown up since then.  This post explores what became of the high hopes.

Eric Adams, the first General Manager of the Harlow Development Corporation, ‘showing the New Town plans’, 1952

By 1954, the first of Harlow’s major neighbourhood areas – Mark Hall North – was largely complete and it boasted a population of 17,000.   The work on the town centre began – belatedly it might seem – the following year.  Within a further five years, as the Great Parndon and Passmores districts were built, around three-quarters of the New Town was complete and a further 35,000 had made it home.  Further construction followed more slowly – the 24,000^th new home of the Harlow Development Corporation (HDC) was opened in Little Cattins, Sumners, in 1974.   Harlow’s population peaked in 1974 at 81,000 and fell slightly thereafter until a more recent surge which has seen that figure narrowly surpassed.

The 24,000th HDC home, Little Cattins, Sumners

The first residents came principally from north London, from the then boroughs of Edmonton, Tottenham, and Walthamstow (it’s still a disproportionately Spurs-supporting town).  Sometimes whole factories transplanted and: (1)

parties of workers came down in a charabanc with their wives and spent the day looking at the town. The morning was spent in doing the sights and the afternoon in looking at possible houses. ‘Everyone was always still pretty fed up by lunch-time,’ one girl on the Corporation staff told me, ‘but once we got to the houses they cheered up.

‘The 2000th new family are presented with the keys to their new house in Orchard Croft, 1953’ (c) Museum of Harlow

One new arrival, Laura Lilley, who came to Harlow in 1957, was ‘immediately struck by the cleanliness of it and the brightness of it’ compared to where she lived in London: ‘I had a garden and I also had something that I didn’t have in London, my own front door’. (2)

Unsurprisingly such celebratory accounts make no mention of the ‘New Town Blues’ that many new arrivals, particularly the women not in paid employment, were said to have suffered.  Various studies had suggested that those uprooted to new out-of-town estates and the New Towns in particular were prone to various ‘neuroses’ or ‘emotional disturbances’ as a result of their move.

Broadway Avenue (c) JR James Archives and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Harlow, keen to flag the benefits of its careful community planning, commissioned its own study which concluded, in the words of Mark Clapson, that ‘any neurotic symptoms manifested by the newcomers could not be accurately ascribed to the new town, but to the general experience of moving house and district’. (3)  This hardly disposed of the problems that some undoubtedly experienced but the evidence is that the difficulties were transitional.

Another survey of Harlow conducted in 1964 reported that mortality rates of newborns stood at 5.5 per 1000 compared to the national average of 12.3 and for those under four weeks at 6.0 compared to 14.2. (4)  It’s not facetious therefore – and far from trivial – to suggest that there are many who owe their lives to the New Town.

Paddling pool, Potter Street, Harlow c.1963

Interestingly, the same study stated that 40 per cent of the town’s householders had relatives living in Harlow (the HDC had made efforts to house elderly relatives): ‘four generations of one family living in the town was not now unusual’.   This is a worthwhile corrective to the common view that new housing schemes automatically broke the family ties which had bound working-class families together in their previous homes.

‘Situated on the outskirts of the New Town: the factory area, planned to provide workers with as much space and light as possible’ (c) Illustrated London News, 15 November 1952

And Harlow was a predominantly working-class town, though with a lower than average proportion of semi- and unskilled workers: 19 per cent in the late fifties compared to the England and Wales average of 30. (Conversely, the figures – 63 per cent for Harlow, 51 per cent for England and Wales – show above average numbers of ‘unskilled non-manual’ and ‘skilled manual’.) (5)

In fact, conscious of this criticism – it was a criticism to the extent that the New Towns were held to have insufficiently benefited the least well-off workers – the HDC made early efforts to attract a range of factory employment to the town. In any case, it was argued that in Harlow ‘the so-called “social escalator” [was] at work whereby the unskilled rise up the ladder’. (6)

For all Harlow’s working-classness, the great hope invested in the New Towns was that a form of classlessness would emerge.  Nowhere is this better expressed than in the speech made by Lewis Silkin – the Minister of Town and Country Planning responsible for the programme – introducing the new legislation in 1946: (7)

I am most anxious that the planning should be such that different income groups living in the new towns will not be segregated. No doubt they may enjoy common recreational facilities, and take part in amateur theatricals or each play their part in a health centre or a community centre.  But when they leave to go home I do not want the better off people to go to the right, and the less well-off to go to the left. I want them to ask each other ‘are you going my way?’

It’s one of my favourite quotations, capturing so much of the self-improving earnestness and essential decency of the Labour Party in its heyday.  (Silkin himself, the eldest of seven in a family of impoverished Jewish Lithuanian refugees, had begun his working life as a tally clerk on the London docks.)  You might point out that these are hardly revolutionary sentiments.  Rather what was envisaged was a form of levelling achieved as much by a ‘mass upliftment’ of working-class lives (a phrase that Bermondsey Labour Party had employed in the 1920s) and a psychological sense of cross-class community (that some perhaps had felt expressed in wartime) as by any economic radicalism.

Upper Park (c) JR James Archives and made available through a Creative Commons licence

In the New Towns, however, there was one form of social engineering – as much necessity in this time of rationing and private sector constraint as deliberate policy – that did conduce to classlessness: until the mid-1950s all Harlow’s homes were social rented, built by the HDC.   Even in 1971, only 12 per cent of homes were owner-occupied and that the result of later attempts to promote private development and the sale of around 4000 HDC homes.  Even in 2011 Harlow had – at 27 per cent – the third highest proportion of social housing of any English borough.

‘Illustrating the attractive brick-and-timber style of architecture: one of the residential streets in Harlow New Town, tree-shaded and spacious (c) Illustrated London News 15 November 1952

One contemporary journalist, explaining Harlow New Town to an American audience, described how ‘in this village green setting, the houses of the white-collar man and the factory worker stand side by side’ – there was to be ‘no wrong side of the track in Harlow’. (8)

Of course, class in this old and class-ridden country, is never quite that simple. For a start, the HDC built bigger houses for the middle-class and they all had garages.  And then, there were the middle class themselves.  Some saw themselves as idealistic pioneers in this new England – Monica Furlong singles out ‘teachers, social workers, wardens of community centres, probation officers, health visitors, doctors, clergy’ as well as the staff of the HDC itself.

Harlow interiors: Felmongers, 1955, at top, and Rectory Field, 1957 – does the grand piano signify a middle-class household? (c) Museum of Harlow

In others, the yearning for older demarcations and signifying ‘standards’ was a little more recalcitrant.  Furlong describes the attitudes of an ‘industrialist’ who had moved to the town:

Among the things he missed in Harlow was the prevalence of the public school accent, of people from the ‘right’ universities, of people who he felt confident would not commit any frightful gaffe when he entertained them. What his wife missed was elegance in the shops and in her neighbours, the consciousness of money being spent around her by people with a sense of chic. In the medium to high income groups of the town they found instead young men who talked in grammar-school cockney, and who had acquired their high qualifications on the wrong side of the academic tracks. They had found, too, shops with something slightly gimcrack about them, which seemed aimed at a clientele buying labour-saving gadgets on credit. They had found a passionate intellectualism of an exceedingly earnest type; expressed in the huge piles of literary papers at Smith’s, the library’s non-fiction borrowing figures (the highest in the country), the vast enthusiasm for technical and scientific books, and the bewildering mass of evening classes and clubs. So they moved to Bishop’s Stortford.

It’s a lengthy quote but worth unpicking, I think, for all that it reveals of Harlow’s aspirations and the tenacious snobbery that would do them down.

Those aspirations were expressed for it by the establishment of the Harlow Arts Trust in 1953 and the unequalled programme of arts patronage which has distinguished the town since then.  I’ll write about those in a future post but, for now, let’s bring the story up-to-date.

The original Town Hall and Water Gardens

There have been changes. The Development Corporation was finally wound up in 1980.  The Town Hall, designed by Frederick Gibberd and opened in 1960, has been demolished and replaced by a new Civic Centre, not unattractive but with the retail outlets now deemed necessary to pay for public infrastructure.  The Water Gardens in front, built between 1958 and 1963 – a centrepiece of the landscape architecture Gibberd thought necessary to the beauty and culture of the town – have been drastically truncated (despite a Grade II* listing). (9)  Google them now and you’re directed to the new shopping mall which has largely replaced them.  I won’t draw the moral.

Broad Walk towards Harlow Town Hall (c) JR James Archives and made available through a  Creative Commons licence

To Jason Cowley, raised in the town in the 1970s, Harlow was still ‘a vibrant place, with utopian yearnings’; The High – its central shopping area – ‘seemed to offer everything an energetic young boy could want in those days’.  Revisiting in 2002, to him, Harlow felt ‘like the kind of place you want to pass quickly through on the way to somewhere else: a place that has been forgotten, shut out from the swagger and affluence of the Blair years’. (10)

Broad Walk

North Gate

Current statistics bear out these impressions.  Long-term unemployment stood at just under ten per cent (compared to an Essex average of five per cent and a national figure of seven).  Wages for those in work were a little lower than the local average.  The town has a whole ranked 101^st out of 326 local authorities in England for deprivation – there ‘are few affluent areas in Harlow but many that are relatively deprived’.  Educational attainment was below the county average.  Crime and fear of crime were relatively high – just 28 per cent said they felt safe after dark. (11)  The town centre itself looks tired and many of its flagship shops long since departed to malls and big box stores elsewhere.

Harlow voted by 67 per cent to 33 for Brexit in the recent referendum.  Belatedly, that’s a metric we’ve come to recognise as a powerful measure of disillusion with, and exclusion, from the more comfortable status quo enjoyed by many.

All this indicates a disproportionately working-class town and one, though set within the relatively affluent south-east, which suffers the inequalities and deprivations that class bestows.  What do we conclude?  Is this the failure of the Utopian dreams which inspired it or simply the mark of a society which has given up on those dreams?

Sources

(1) Monica Furlong, ‘Harlow: New Town’, The Spectator, 29 September 1960

(2) Quoted from a wall panel in the Museum of Harlow.

(3) Mark Clapson Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns: Social Change and Urban Dispersal in Postwar England (Manchester University Press, 1998)

(4) ‘Harlow New Town Death Rate Well Below Average’, The Times, 25 September 1964, p7

(5) BJ Heraud, ‘Social Class and the New Towns’, Urban Studies, Vol 5, No 1, February 1968

(6) Rosemary Wellings (Harlow Development Corporation’s social development officer), ‘Living in a New Town’, Housing, vol 17, no 7, July 1978

(7) Hansard, New Towns Bill, HC Deb 8 May 1946, vol 422, cc1072-184

(8) Christopher Chataway, ‘Transatlantic Teleview: New Towns in Britain’ (1956), East Anglian Film Archive

(9) You can read about the Water Gardens in their full finery in this 2002 post from the Twentieth Century Society.

(10) Jason Cowley, ‘Down Town’, The Guardian, 1 August 2002

(11) A profile of people living in Harlow, March 2016, Organisational Intelligence

 

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

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Brutalism

Barnabas Calder, Raw Concrete

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

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

Trellick Tower (c) Barnabas Calder

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

As Calder argues:

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

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

Balfron Tower (c) Barnabas Calder

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

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

Balfron escape stair (c) Barnabas Calder

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

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

Balfron Tower entrance (c) Barnabas Calder

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

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

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

The Barbican (c) Barnabas Calder

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

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

The Barbican (c) Barnabas Calder

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

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

The Anderston Centre (c) Barnabas Calder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The National Theatre (c) Barnabas Calder

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

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

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

Christopher Beanland, Concrete Concept

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

You can find my posts featuring Brutalist buildings collected here.

 

The Castle Vale Estate, Birmingham, Part I: ‘Utopia’ to ‘civic pigsty’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Cottage suburbs, Multi-storey, Regeneration

In January 2016, David Cameron promised, as part of a new ‘blitz’ on poverty, to rebuild one hundred of the worst council estates in the country – the so-called ‘sink estates’ of ‘brutal high-rise towers and dark alleyways that are a gift to criminals’. (1)  There were plenty of people to point out the lies (let’s put this bluntly) that lay behind this latest PR announcement but to many it would have seemed strangely familiar too – another retread (like the Right to Buy announcement of the 2015 general election) of 1980s Thatcherism.

The appointment of Michael Heseltine to head the new ‘estate regeneration advisory panel’ completed the echo.  It was Heseltine, as Secretary of State for the Environment (in John Major’s government), who announced the selection in December 1991 of one such ‘sink estate’, Castle Vale in Birmingham, as the latest candidate for an earlier iteration of Cameron’s idea, the Housing Action Trust (HAT) scheme.

Castle Vale, 1993 (c) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

The estate is usually claimed as a shining example of the success of this earlier phase of estate regeneration and it has (as we shall see) some very good publicists to make the case. Although it provided a decent home to many of its first-generation residents (generally coming from far worse accommodation in the slum clearance areas of Aston and Nechells), Castle Vale was never a showpiece estate and by the later seventies it was seen as epitomising all that was wrong with large-scale and predominantly high-rise peripheral estates of its type. The Castle Vale HAT was established in June 1993, and since then much has changed, by nearly all accounts for the better.  Let’s examine the narrative.

We’ve looked at the beginnings of this story before.   In the interwar period, Birmingham had a council house building record second to none but in 1946 over half the city’s 283,611 homes still lacked a separate bathroom and some one in ten were back-to-back.  The decision was taken (against local tradition) to build high, seen as the only way to maintain appropriate densities in the inner-city.  More surprisingly perhaps, high-rise solutions were adopted in the city’s suburbs too. Almost two-thirds of Birmingham’s 464 tower blocks came to be built along or beyond the city’s ring road, justifying the soubriquet Saucer City by which it came to be known.  Thirty-four of these blocks were built in Castle Vale.

Castle Vale construction with Councillor Matthews and members of the Housing Committee

This hadn’t been the intention.  In 1960, the Council acquired the land of the 375 acre redundant Castle Bromwich airfield.   The City Architect, AG Sheppard Fidler, drew up a plan for a Radburn-style layout (of traffic arteries and cul-de-sac feeder roads, separating cars and people) which placed neighbourhood blocks of housing, shops and offices around communal green spaces. Sheppard Fidler had been Chief Architect at Crawley and brought such New Town sensibilities to his planning.

The City Council, however, was interested in building big and bold and less concerned with the niceties.  When his plans were rejected – the last straw in a long-running battle – Sheppard Fidler resigned. A second plan, envisaging a population of 20,000 based on spines of high-rise flats along the length of the estate, was adopted instead. (2)

Farnborough Road under construction (c) Birmingham Mail

Construction began in 1964 and was largely complete by 1969.  A settlement of around 4800 homes emerged, housing at peak nearly 11,000.  Unusually for the time, around 30 per cent of homes were built for owner occupation but, of the 3400 council homes, over half were in blocks of over five storeys. (3) Seventeen of these were laid out along Farnborough Road on the estate’s periphery and eight (the so-called Centre 8) in the middle of the estate. Two local shopping centres, five schools, two churches, a swimming pool and other community facilities completed the estate.

Castle Vale, 1968 (c) Birmingham Mail

All seemed well in these early years.  Geoff Bateson’s history records ‘a growing list of thriving community activities’ and states:

Crime rates were lower than many other areas. Turnover of residents was small. People wanted to be there and wanted to stay there.

Sue Spicer moved to a flat in the Centre 8 blocks in 1969: (4)

It was a huge improvement on our house in Aston. We had an indoor toilet, and there was so much green space. Mobile butchers and grocers came to our door. It seemed like Utopia.

Castle Vale Reed Square shopping centre, 1968. From the Phyllis Nicklin collection.

Others speak of misgivings.  As new families arrived, at one point, a third of the estate’s population was under 14 and some questioned the suitability of high-rise accommodation for many. (5)  Others spoke of the isolation of the estate.  Theoretically well-connected (major roads and two railways lines joined it to the city), at six miles from the centre and separated by those same roads and railways, it could still feel distant.

Pat Smith, a health worker on the estate from the late 1960s, argued:

People felt unsettled, on the edge. Many had come from the old back-to-backs, places with strong social ties. Castle Vale was a shock to the system. The lack of safe play space and the cost of under-floor heating were major bones of contention. People were used to coal fires which were much cheaper to run. But housing was the focal point of discontent.

At looking at what went wrong, we can begin with the construction flaws that bedevilled the estate from its early years.  The decision to use a Bison Wallframe system used by local builders Bryants (with whom, shall we say, certain officers and members enjoyed a close relationship) seems quixotic and partly dependent at least on the fact that the Council had pre-ordered a large number of Wallframe components from Bison and needed somewhere to put them (though the broader contemporary support for system-building should not be forgotten). (6)

Castle Vale, faulty block being checked by ‘spidermen’ (c) Bateson, A History of Castle Vale

Problems of water penetration though windows and faulty joints were found as early as 1967.  Some Bryants-built low-rise blocks suffered from cold bridging in roof members.  In 1974, when a London swimming pool roof built of high alumina cement collapsed, news that some of the Centre 8 blocks used the material reached residents although the Council had decided to monitor (pending major structural repairs that would be necessary in the future) rather than remediate.  Scaffolding erected around the affected blocks in 1985 remained until their demolition in 1994.

Problems with cladding (c) Bateson, A History of Castle Vale

The combination of design and build problems and council inaction was toxic to the estate’s reputation.  It became unpopular and, as such, a place where the Council placed the most vulnerable housing applicants who lacked choice and faced immediate need.  According to one resident, Castle Vale’s ‘problems began when people were moved here who didn’t want to be here’.  Another, who moved to the estate after separating from her husband in 1991, describes it as ‘a dumping ground full of single parents, alcoholics, and the mentally ill’. (7)

Castle Vale blocks (c) Bateson, A History of Castle Vale

It’s an unsympathetic turn of phrase but it captures the emerging tensions between longer-established tenants and new people moving in, often younger and single, often with particular problems.  The number of single person households doubled after 1981, families halved.

The rest is a familiar litany of the issues which faced so-called ‘sink estates’ up and down the country by the 1980s.  Crime and fear of crime rose – by 1992 it was claimed that 41 per cent of Castle Vale’s residents were victims of crime and 55 per cent afraid to go out at night.  Some blamed elements of the estate’s design for this: the HAT succinctly summarised the prevailing ‘defensible space’ theories of the day: (8)

the physical design of the estate…means that public and private domains are ill-defined, communal areas are not overlooked or supervised, and there is an intricate maze of ill-lit alleyways, making escape from the scene of crime or vandalism very easy.

Castle Vale, 1983 (c) Birmingham Mail

To others, of course, this wasn’t theory: (9)

When we were kids we were proud to come from the Vale, it had a feared reputation. There were alleyways everywhere and we knew them like the back of our hand. You used to get cars squeezing down the narrow alleyways, trying to get away from the police.

The criminality and antisocial behaviour was real enough, I’ll only add – like a cracked record – that it didn’t just occur on estates designed like Castle Vale but it did occur on very differently laid-out estates with a similar range of social problems.

Joblessness reached 26 per cent (against a Birmingham average of 19 per cent) as local employment opportunities fell and the B35 postcode became increasingly stigmatised.  And – always, to me, the most powerful and poignant index of inequality – people died earlier:  life expectancy on the estate stood at 68 compared to the national average of 76. (10)  That scaffolding around the Centre 8 blocks was both mark and metaphor of the estate’s dissolution.

Castle Vale in the 1970s (c) Bateson, A History of Castle Vale

It was obvious something needed to be done but, as demands rose in the 1980s, the City Council found its hands increasingly tied by the public spending curbs imposed by the Conservative government’s cuts to the Housing Investment Programme.

Looking back on this time, the then local MP Robin Corbett, who would become a major supporter of the HAT, recalled: (11)

I was absolutely appalled by what I saw, an estate of tower blocks like giant battery cages. It was a civic pigsty. It was clear that Birmingham City Council didn’t have the funds to make the necessary improvements.

But central government did.  We’ll look at the story of the HAT in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Press release, ‘Prime Minister’s Office, ‘Prime Minister pledges to transform sink estates’ 10 January 2016

(2) See Geoff Bateson, A History of Castle Vale (2005) and Thomas Deckker (ed) Modern City Revisited (2005)

(3) Richard Turkington, ‘Regenerating Large Housing Estates: Setting the Agenda at Castle Vale, Birmingham’, International Conference Housing in Transition, Piran, Slovenia, 3-5 September 1997 Conference Proceedings

(4) This and the quotation which follows are drawn from Adam Mornement, No Longer Notorious – the Revival of Castle Vale, 1993-2005 (Castle Vale Housing Action Trust, 2005)

(5) Carl Chinn, Homes for People: 100 Years of Council Housing in Birmingham (1991)

(6) As argued in Phil Ian Jones, ‘The Rise and Fall of The Multi-Storey Ideal: Public Sector High-Rise Housing in Britain 1945-2002, with Special Reference to Birmingham’, PhD thesis, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Birmingham, 2003.

(7) Both quotations drawn from Mornement, No Longer Notorious

(8) Castle Vale Housing Action Trust, Castle Vale Masterplan Written Statement, September 1993

(9) Michael Lutwyche, Hardcore (2008)

(10) Max Wind-Cowie, Civic Streets: the Big Society in Action (Progressive Conservatism Project, Demos, 2010)

(11) Quoted in Mornement, No Longer Notorious

The Meadow Well Estate, North Shields II: ‘decent people living on a decent estate’

Tags

1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Cottage suburbs, Regeneration

Last week’s post looked at the origins of the Meadow Well Estate and concluded these weren’t an adequate explanation either of its long-term stigma or the 1991 riots.  This week’s examines what followed.

If Meadow Well became the classic ‘problem estate’, this wasn’t apparent until the 1970s.  It had, however, been long neglected.  Belatedly, a £5.3m programme of modernisation began in 1971 which saw some general upgrading and the conversion of some of the Estate’s flats into self-contained houses. By 1974, the proportion of flats on the Estate stood at 74 per cent, down from the 84 per cent of the original design.

However well-meaning, the improvements exacerbated the problem of overcrowding on the Estate – eleven per cent of households were assessed overcrowded (compared to a Tynemouth average of two per cent) and large families predominated on the Estate, as they had from the outset.  In 1971, 35 per cent of its population were children, 14 years old or younger. When looking at the Brandon Estate in Southwark, this preponderance of youngsters (in fact, a slightly lower proportion) was held by some to be in itself a sufficient explanation of the Estate’s problems. (1)

Meadow Well also suffered severe social disadvantage – or let’s just call it poverty. Almost 60 per cent of heads of household were classified unskilled or semi-skilled, twice the Tynemouth average; male unemployment stood at 19 per cent, almost three times the North Tyneside average.  These figures would deteriorate as deindustrialisation hit the North-East with particular force in the 1980s. By 1991, it was said that on some streets four fifths of residents lacked work; youth unemployment rocketed.

At the same time, spending cuts – imposed by a Conservative government which deemed the Metropolitan Borough of North Tyneside (formed in 1974) to have overspent – hit the Estate hard.  The youth centre – burnt down during the riots, its destruction taken as a mark of their mindless violence – had been closed for ten months to save money; that perhaps a mark of another form of mindless violence.  The adjacent Royal Quays development, billed as a commercial revitalisation of the area, offered little to local residents other than a symbol of exclusion.

Avon Avenue

To Beatrix Campbell, Meadow Well was ‘one of the demonised domains of the North East.  It was a thrown-away place, imagined akin to Botany Bay, a place to which folks had been transported’.  Joe Caffrey, a local community worker described a ‘feeling of abandonment…people do believe, they genuinely believe, they’ve been abandoned by government, by local government, by the police and by other agencies’. (2)

In this context, crime rose.  In the words of Andy Dumble, a Meadow Well youth worker, there was:

No hope, no future – the opportunities to make it ain’t there, you’ve got to struggle really hard and the rewards are relatively small and young’uns can see that and they weigh it up against all the moral rules and that and they think, yeah, break it.

In the years preceding the riots, crime rates on the Estate were said to be the highest in the country.  Across its range, this criminality – from harassment and vandalism to burglary, car-jacking and ram-raiding – had its reasons, even its reason.  To some, it was a conscious kicking against the pricks; to others, it was part of a street culture led by older youngsters who were role models in the absence of others; to others still, it was a more or less legitimate way of getting by, earning some kind of living.

This was part of the anger felt when two young men of the Estate were killed in a stolen car during a police pursuit in September 1991, the trigger of the riots; they were going about their business.  But it exploded in the context of a deep antipathy felt towards – and allegedly reciprocated by – the police.  Nancy Peters captured the latter: ‘They class us as rubbish, the police did at one time…we were called everything’.  ‘Pigsville’, the name for the Estate at the local police station, was perhaps the least of it. (3)

To a young local male, the rioting was:

inevitable because of the harassment and the way the police were doing things – they weren’t going about it legally, they were doing it by their law, not the land’s law.

Of course, there’s an irony there and this liberal understanding of causes and dynamics might be viewed as too understanding by many of the Estate’s law-abiding residents, always the majority.

Nancy Peters opening the Mag House community centre

The women, in particular, were always found in the forefront of efforts to defend and serve the community.  Mass unemployment meant, in the words of Beatrix Campbell, that for men ‘their licensed means of episodic escape – waged work – was withdrawn. They were stuck at home.  The lads, on the other hand, stuck to the streets’.  Her conclusion?

Crime and coercion are sustained by men. Solidarity and self-help are sustained by women.  It is as stark as that.

Campbell’s feminist analysis is powerful but, for all her acknowledgement of context, there seems a slippage in her writing here – it becomes reductive and what stands as description slides into too simple explanation.  The women of the Estate were often more sympathetic: the men, they said, were ‘in a deep depression…they’ve sunk into a hole’; the kids gone wrong? – ‘who knows how those kids feel…to kick against this world, to feel so angry, so bitter’.

Beyond this, Campbell – whose study also examined Scotswood in Newcastle, the Ely Estate in Cardiff and Oxford’s Blackbird Leys Estate where riots took place at the same time – also concluded that estates themselves had become part of the problem:

Estates were once the ordinary manifestation of modernity. The agency was the municipality and mass housing was the form in which later modernism rearranged the landscape of most British cities.  Those were the days when working-class homesteads dominated the housing market, before and after the Second World War, when estate cultures held the rough and respectable in eternal and exhilarating tension. But those days were to disappear with the ascent of Thatcherism and the decline of public housing as popular housing.

In this perspective, the nature of estates (their separation and distinctness), while to some degree a result of the more recent economic and political shifts she describes, was also a cause of their problems.

The fact of ‘residualisation’ – that, after the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act and Right to Buy’s diminution of stock, council housing became increasingly allocated to our most vulnerable citizens – gives some credibility to this charge but it’s too sweeping and does scant justice to internal complexities and the decent ‘ordinariness’ of most estates and most communities. (4)

It captured a moment, though, and it reflected (and reinforced) a popular and media narrative which has powerfully shaped housing policy ever since, most malignantly under the present Conservative government.

We should get back to Meadow Well.  Whatever the analysis of their causes, the riots did at least persuade those in power that ‘something should be done’. There had been earlier interventions on the Estate.  A Home Office Community Development Project ran between 1972 and 1977. The Cedarwood Trust – still doing good work – was a pastoral organisation established by local people, the Church of England and North Tyneside Council in 1980.

Renovated housing, Amble Close

Big money came in after 1991 in the shape, firstly, of the North Tyneside City Challenge project running from 1992 to 1998 which received £37.5m of central government funding, spent mainly on Meadow Well and the former pit village of Percy Main.  The Meadow Well Single Regeneration Budget board supervised local regeneration expenditure between 1995 and 2000 – an estimated £15m from central government, £11m from other public funds and £11.6m from private sources.

Typically, much of this was spent on reconfiguring the Estate.  There was improved landscaping and fencing to enhance the environment and develop ‘defensible space’ – and CCTV, of course.  There was a successful attempt to improve police-community relations by bringing sympathetic officers onto the Estate.

New housing in Oakham Gardens

And, though in Meadow Well the decision was taken to preserve the existing council housing, there was the usual attempt to socially engineer the Estate through changing its mix of housing tenure.  By 2000, around 750 homes had been demolished with new houses built for sale or rent – around 170 privately-owned homes and 370 housing association. (5)

Carole Bell

More meaningfully, there were the doughty efforts of local community leaders – nearly all female – to provide services and restore pride in the Estate.  Carole Bell, who suffered initial hostility and harassment through her cooperation with local authorities, was a mainstay of Meadow Well Connected founded in 1994 – a comprehensive community facility at the heart of the Estate. (6) Nancy Peters was feisty and indefatigable in its defence. Both women were awarded MBEs, proving perhaps that the honours system isn’t irredeemably corrupt.

Perceptions were slow to change and the memory of the 1991 riots and Estate’s earlier stigma linger on.  Last week’s post noted how an early (and unfair) ‘labelling’ of the Estate had contributed to its negative image before the Second World War.  Recent research confirms how how powerfully ‘stigma’ remains a creation of key opinion-formers in the local economy and media irrespective of realities on the ground in Meadow Well and elsewhere. (7)

Nor, as their protagonists would be the first to admit, can the many worthwhile initiatives described alter the harsh economic realities which still shape local lives.  The Chirton ward, containing Meadow Well, is among the 5 per cent most deprived in the country; around one in six adults are unemployed and – in today’s economy –many suffer irregular or precarious (and always low paid) employment.

Messages from Meadow Well, Northern Architecture, 2014

We started this two-part post with Carole Bell’s wish that her community be thought of as ‘decent people living on a decent estate’.   I’m sure that’s true, just as I’m certain that – despite all the good work that’s been done – the Estate continues to suffer unacceptable levels of poverty and exclusion.   In this context, we should question less the design or concept of council estates but rather a society which tolerates such inequality in its midst.

Sources

Special thanks to Steve Conlan for providing and allowing me to use in this post and the last some of his fine images of the Estate taken in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  You can see more of Steve’s work online here.

(1) North Tyneside Community Development Project (CDP), North Shields: Working-Class Politics and Housing (1977). Documents from the North Tyneside CDP can be downloaded from the website of Purdue University, Indianapolis. The full collection of CDP records are held by the Tyne and Wear Archives.

(2) Beatrix Campbell, Goliath. Britain’s Dangerous Places (1993) and Joe Caffrey interviewed in An English Estate, a Channel Four documentary from Hugh Kelly, broadcast in October 1992.  Residents’ comments which follow are drawn from the latter source.

(3) Roger Graef, Jane Jacobs Public Lecture, London School of Economics: ‘Risk, Community and Safety’, 10 February 2005

(4) Campbell’s analysis is discussed in Chris Brook, Gerry Mooney, Steve Pile, Unruly Cities?: Order/Disorder (2006)

(5) Jo Dean and Annette Hastings, Challenging images. Housing estates, stigma and regeneration. The Policy Press and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation 2000

(6) See Sonia Sharma, ‘Meadow Well community stalwart Carole retires’, Chronicle Live, 29 August 2012 and the website of Meadow Well Connected for further information.

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