ECP Monson: A Thoughtful and Proudly Municipal Architect

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1920s, 1930s, Bethnal Green, Islington, Pre-1914

I’m very pleased to feature another guest post from Andrew Parnell who wrote an earlier post on Charles Dickens House in Bethnal Green. Andrew is a walking tour guide with Footprints of London and East London on Foot who leads walks on architecture and housing history in Tower Hamlets. These include walks in Bethnal Green which take in buildings designed by ECP Monson. More information and tickets for Andrew’s walks can be obtained from the Footprints of London website. 

The architect Edward Charles Philip Monson (1872-1941) designed over 25 London housing estates in the first half of the twentieth century. He worked in private practice but dedicated his life to public building, the overwhelming majority of it housing. In a period when housing provision for the less-well-off grew from its 19^th century philanthropic beginnings to the inter-war surge in local authority building, he worked for a variety of housebuilding bodies which reflect that progression.

ECP Monson

Monson remains relatively unsung in architectural circles, his work overshadowed by that of more celebrated, sometimes flamboyant, figures who came to prominence later in the century. His practice – in partnership with his brother Harry and son John – has been described as ‘capable, prolific but perhaps rather stolid.’ That may be true, but his work can also be seen as highly accomplished, adapting stylistically to changing trends and tastes whilst placing residents’ needs – practical and psychological – before architectural display.

After starting off professionally working in the practice of his architect father, Monson set up in his own right in 1904. Among his early commissions were several of the early estates built by the William Sutton Trust, a philanthropic body founded in 1900 with a huge monetary endowment by a wealthy benefactor. It joined a group of similar housing bodies formed by wealthy individuals in the mould of the Peabody Trust which had been operating since the mid-19^th century. The estates Monson designed were ‘grand and impressive places,’ in a relatively mellow, decorated style which distinguished the Sutton Trust’s work from that of the other philanthropic bodies which were variously criticised as ‘barrack-like’, ‘cliff-like’ and ‘prison-like.’ At the Sutton Estate in Chelsea, completed in 1913, for example, he used rustication, stone wreaths, swags and Corinthian colonnades to add ‘liveliness’ to the massive five-storey blocks. According to one resident, ‘the pointing [of the estate] was said to be so perfect that people used to come specially to see it.’

Sutton Estate, Chelsea

An attempt by the current owner to demolish most of the century-old Chelsea estate’s buildings was fended off by residents and others in 2018 on the basis not only of their architectural but also of their historical significance as early examples of large-scale social housing. That case brought to light another, much earlier conflict which arose around the time the estate was built between the Sutton Trust and the London County Council (LCC) which was then the ‘new kid on the block’ in the housebuilding world. The LCC criticised what it saw as the low level of spending, and the consequent basicness of the accommodation, created by the Trust which was operating under the financial constraints of a ‘no-profit’ approach. The fledgling local authority had levelled this criticism at the work of other philanthropic bodies – which it saw as competitors – and it was referred to in the recent case by the would-be demolishers to question the merits of the estate’s design.  

Sutton Estate, Chelsea, rear view

The argument failed when the context of the tension between the LCC and the philanthropic bodies was taken into account. The housing Monson designed for the Trust may have been very simple but it was intended to be affordable: by keeping building costs down, rents could be kept down. Ironically, the LCC in its first great housing project – the Boundary Estate in Bethnal Green – found itself obliged by financial pressures to charge high rents to recover its relatively lavish expenditure on building the estate with the result that the new buildings were occupied not by residents of the slums they replaced but by more affluent tenants. The Chelsea Sutton Estate, whatever its limitations, continues to provide 383 badly-needed social housing units (compared with 237 which the proposed redevelopment would have included).

After World War I, the rate of house-building by London’s Metropolitan Boroughs increased substantially, boosted by the introduction of housing subsidies and other measures contained in the Housing Act 1919. Monson attached himself to the Metropolitan Boroughs in two areas: Bethnal Green and nearby Stepney, both later absorbed into the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, in London’s East End; and Finsbury and next-door Islington, which later merged to become the single London Borough of Islington, in North London. He would go on to design a stream of estates for these councils in the 1920s and 30s.

One of Monson’s early projects for Bethnal Green, which was known as the Parmiter Estate during construction, gave rise to an amusing controversy when, as it was nearing completion in 1927, the left-wing (part-Communist) council voted to call it the Lenin Estate.

At the Parmiter Estate, Monson’s style had moved on from the gigantic blocks of the philanthropic period to a version of the neo-Georgian style widely used by the LCC and other local authorities by that time: simple, orderly and well-proportioned with windows taller than they are wide. However, at Parmiter Monson added decorative flourishes, such as venetian windows in the gables, which were uncharacteristic of this ‘house style.’ This may have reflected the Bethnal Green council’s desire to make a splash with the first estate to be designed by its ‘own’ architect. A splash it certainly made, with right-wing newspapers expressing outrage at the extravagance of ‘luxury’ flats built with public money by a left-wing council.

Parmiter Estate, Bethnal Green

In fact, during his career Monson adopted, or showed touches, of a variety of styles, reflecting latest trends, but sometimes seeming to jump back and forth across time, perhaps reflecting his clients’ preferences, or what they thought residents would prefer, or his own perception of what would be appropriate. As well as Neo-Georgian, the labels Queen Anne (itself a sort of potpourri of past styles), Arts and Crafts, Edwardian Renaissance/Baroque, Art Deco and Modernist have been used in relation to his various works.

For example, later in Bethnal Green he produced the Delta Estate (1936-7), a gem of a building which, with elegant curved-ended balconies and semi-circular concrete door canopies, discreetly adopts elements of the Art Deco-influenced style, used by other local boroughs in the 1930s, which they sometimes called ‘Moderne’ (everything sounds better in French!). Delta has what the architectural bible Pevsner calls ‘jazzy Expressionist brickwork’ over the doorways.

Brickwork and balconies on the Delta Estate, Bethnal Green

Lively brickwork can also be seen in another of Monson’s Bethnal Green projects, the Digby and Butler Estates (1936 and 1938), which, like the Delta Estate, have the wide windows (wider than they are tall) characteristic of the 1930s.  

The Butler Estate, Bethnal Green

However, another of his Bethnal Green works of the 1930s, Claredale House (1931-32), has windows which would look more at home in the old neo-Georgian style and even features a high brick archway entrance which seems to hark right back to the huge, stern archways found in some philanthropic blocks of earlier decades.  

Arches at the Sutton and Claredale Estates

In Bethnal Green and the other boroughs he was associated with, Monson worked for some radical councils implementing a huge social programme of public housebuilding. But from the limited information we have, it is hard to imagine he was a socialist firebrand. His photo shows him with big moustache, pince-nez spectacles and wing collar, looking every inch the Edwardian bank manager or solicitor. His curriculum vitae lists memberships of just about every relevant professional body, to many of which he devoted copious amounts of time voluntarily in committee and executive work, including as President of the Institute of Structural Engineers. A keen and senior member of the Territorial Army, he was also, as his father had been, a prominent Freemason.  

Whatever we may think of these associations, it should not detract from the fact that his professional life was overwhelmingly focused on what contemporaries referred to as ‘the Housing of the Working Classes.’ The output of estates by his small firm would have done credit to the whole architects’ department of a local authority.

Islington was the area where Monson was most prolific. His work there shows a variation and progression of styles, as in the East End. But there is one estate which, for me, represents an epitome or culmination of Monson’s work. The Brecknock Road Estate (1938-9) was recently added to Islington’s Local List of Historical Assets. It was nominated as being:

an evocative example of a thoughtful and proudly municipal conception of modern architecture.

By this late stage of his life and career, Monson had visited Europe and seen how some designers of mass housing there (for example in the Weimar Republic and ‘Red Vienna’) were adopting a modernist approach. At Brecknock Road, Monson used this style, but in a characteristically restrained manner. By this time, he may well have been working with his brother and son who continued the practice under his name after his death.  

The Brecknock Estate, Islington

Modernism at Brecknock Road can be seen in the rectangular balconies which now have 90 degree corners (no curves) and in corner windows at 90 and 135 degree angles in the two-faceted and three-faceted bay windows. The horizontality of long balconies and rows of windows is cut through by the vertical lines created by the bay windows and rubbish chute ‘chimneys.’ But this modernism is tailored to its context. The estate – comprising 225 flats in 16 perimeter blocks around two internal courtyards – makes a virtue of the sloping topography and irregular shape of the site. The blocks have stepped rooflines and their arrangement is not entirely symmetrical, so they occupy the space ‘in a relaxed way.’ The slate roofs are not flat – as strict modernism would dictate – but slightly pitched to match the Victorian roofs of surrounding streets. Between the blocks are glimpses into the attractively planted sloping courtyards. The outward-facing sides of the blocks are predominantly red brick punctuated by the white rendered balconies. The inward-facing sides are predominantly white and pale green, producing a light, airy feel.  

Brecknock Estate, Islington, rear view

Altogether this creates an environment in which you feel that people can live comfortably. One resident and (art) critic has written that the blocks are not monolithic but each ‘is a knowable community,’ and the lack of grand and large-scale effects mean residents can ‘feel more entitled to be there.’ It has a ‘sense of refuge and quiet.’ For an architect of social housing, those comments, coming from a resident of one of his estates, could be seen as the highest praise, an accolade as satisfying as a Grade I listing.

Monson’s work now stands in the shade – physical and critical – of that of more radical individuals with perhaps greater socialist credentials such as Denys Lasdun (whose Keeling House of 1957 in Bethnal Green towers over Monson’s Claredale House across the road) and the emigres from eastern Europe Berthold Lubetkin and Ernő Goldfinger. But Monson’s comparatively quiet, gentle and sensitive approach, expertly using changing styles but without letting any design imperative stand before the wellbeing and contentment of residents, could be said to have produced housing that has stood the test of time and fulfilled its primary function at least as well.

Sources

Royal Institute of British Architects, Biographical Files: Edward Charles Philip Monson and Edward Monson (father)

‘E. C. P. Monson, English Architect’, The Structural Engineer, October 1932, p 413

P. L. Garside, The Conduct of Philanthropy: William Sutton Trust 1900 – 2000 (Athlone Press, 2000)

Letter from The Victorian Society to The Planning Inspectorate re: William Sutton Estate, Cale Street and Ixworth Place, London, 28 March 2018

Ian Hunt, ‘Modernism for sociable living’, Journal of Islington Archaeology & History Society, Spring 2013, Vol 3, No.1

London Borough of Islington Planning Committee Recommendation, Brecknock Road Estate, 4 December 2012

P. Garside and T. Hinchcliffe, ‘E. C. P. Monson in Islington: local authority housing in 1919-65’,  London Architect, October 1982, pp 8-9

Modernism in Metro-Land, In House – Part 4: Islington, April 2017

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The Cranbrook Estate, Bethnal Green: ‘the struggle for a better tomorrow’

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1950s, 1960s, Bethnal Green, Lubetkin, Multi-storey, Tower Hamlets

The realisation that behind this stupendous tour de force lies only the domestic intricacies of municipal housing risks turning the whole display into an absurd melodrama, a folie de grandeur.

These are the words of John Allan, Berthold Lubetkin’s friend and biographer, in describing the architect’s last major work, the Cranbrook Estate in Bethnal Green. (1)

To be honest, the passer-by on Roman Road might be forgiven for seeing rather more ‘municipal’ than ‘grandeur’ with a quick glance but, in conception and design, the Cranbrook Estate deserves closer attention.  It remains a monument to post-war ambitions to house the people and a testimony, in particular, to the vision of the tiny borough of Bethnal Green.

Bethnal Green covered a little over a square mile.   And that – despite their proximity – was probably its only resemblance to the City of London. Bethnal Green was a working-class borough with a population in 1955 of around 54,000 – half that of 1931.   All thirty seats of the Council had been held by Labour since 1934 and would remain so till the abolition of the borough in 1965.

That falling population reflected the deliberate slum clearance of the 1930s and the Luftwaffe’s unofficial efforts during the London Blitz.  A total of 3120 houses had been destroyed in the war; thousands more were damaged.  Housing was a pressing issue. (2)

The first priority was to repair those houses capable of repair.  By 1953 this was largely complete and the London County Council and Metropolitan Borough Council refocused their efforts on slum clearance.  Both had already built homes in the borough too – the LCC over 800 by 1951, Bethnal Green 643 by 1953.

The Borough used private architects to design its housing and built by a mix of contractor and direct labour.  Pevsner comments on the ‘more sympathetic detailing’ of the Borough’s housing compared to that of the LCC. (3)  But the height of the Council’s ambition came with the Cranbrook Estate started in 1955.

In that year, Bethnal Green appointed Messrs Skinner, Bailey and Lubetkin as architects (a regrouped version of the Tecton Group which had designed the Spa Green Estate in Finsbury before the war) and approved the first stage of the scheme.  The Council also stipulated in draconian but necessary terms – given their intentions – that no applicants on the waiting list would be granted any of the new-build homes; it would all go to those living in areas to be cleared.

Cranbrook Street – which gave the Estate its name – before clearance

A year later, Bethnal Green Council  declared 17 acres of decayed Victorian terraces, workshops and one large factory a clearance area.  Compulsory purchase was agreed by the government in 1957.  A total of 1032 people in the clearance areas and a further 624 in adjacent streets would be displaced. (4)

Construction began shortly after.  The first units – Holman House, a five-storey block of 48 flats over a frontage of 12 shops, Tate House, 14 old people’s bungalows and Stubbs House, a two-storey block of old people’s dwellings – were officially opened by the mayor in March 1963. (5)  The Estate as a whole was officially opened in January 1965 and completed in 1966.

The blocks are named after Bethnal Green’s twin towns and boroughs

The new Estate – in plain numbers – comprised two fifteen-storey blocks of 60 homes each, two thirteen-storey blocks of 52 homes each, two eleven-storey blocks of 44 homes each and five four-storey blocks of 28 homes.  With ancillary dwellings, there were 529 new homes in total – 43 bedsitter flats, 115 one-bedroom flats, 271 two-bedroom flats and 100 three-bed flats.  This is one and half times the size of le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation.

But the numbers alone don’t tell the story – the genius of Cranbrook lay in its overall design.  This was Lubetkin’s vision – very much his: (7)

I always had the impression that he was the boss. We all used to come, all the mums, and meet him and he’d say: “How’s things working?” He’d come in and have a biscuit and a cup of tea and he’d say that no matter what flat he went into, his décor went with the furniture. He was very proud that everything went together.

He’d come up to London each month, his ‘sketchbook bulging with plans’.  In overall terms, the Estate was, according to John Allan, his ‘most ambitious achievement in urban orchestration, an essay in controlled complexity’.

The ensemble of six towers and five medium-rise blocks were arranged geometrically, set along two diagonal axes – pedestrian walkways which echoed the earlier street pattern.  The buildings progressively reduced in height from 15 storeys to 13 to 11 in the towers to five in the block of flats and shops on Roman Road, then to four in the series of maisonettes and to two, and finally – in a conscious diminuendo – to one storey in the old people’s bungalows on the Estate’s perimeter.

In James Meek’s words, the blocks were spaced apart and so angled that one face would always catch the sun and shadows cast would ‘rotate like the spokes of a wheel’.

The remains of Lubetkin’s trompe l’loeil

In the original design, one of the avenues was to lead directly at its north-western corner into Victoria Park but the Council couldn’t  purchase the intervening land.  Instead, Lubetkin designed an elaborate trompe l’oeil – a tapering ramp and series of diminishing hoops to give the illusion of distant vista.  This survives in vestigial form but is now looking rather forlorn.

There have been other changes too.  Some of the élan of Lutbetkin’s original design has been lost.  Those diagonal axes became a figure of eight.  The tower blocks  now have blank steel shutters erected across the deep openings which originally scored their façades; the green concrete bosses and glass beads which studded the façades have been replaced by aluminium boxes; white pipework scars their exterior.  Parts of it are clearly in need of refurbishment.  The passer-by might be forgiven for seeing the Estate as a little more ordinary than it actually is.

But Cranbrook must ultimately be judged as living space rather than architecture.  And, in these terms, it seems to have worked well.  Doreen Kendall, one of the original residents of the Estate and still living there:

loved it. I absolutely adored it. We had central heating so we didn’t need to light a fire any more. My husband thought we’d moved into a ship. All the walls were painted grey, battleship grey. Everything was grey except the wall where my books are and the bathroom, which was red, a dusty red.

And writing in 1993, one commentator concluded that Cranbrook ‘seems unaffected by the ills that beset other inner-city estates’. (8)  Perhaps this reflected the Estate’s demography.  Kendall, then chair of the tenants’ association, stated:

We’re a very close community. We all came out of the same clearance areas.  Children have grown up together and inter-married; some of them still live here

Others too have very positive memories: (9)

I have to say I loved growing up there and have very fond memories of playing out with friends and certainly always felt safe! Our flat was spacious – my bedroom now in a four bed house is about half the size of the bedroom I had in Offenbach House.

More recently, when one resident spoke of their fear of crime on the Estate, others were quick to defend the safety and friendliness of Cranbrook – though a few knew of particular ‘problem families’ who did cause trouble.

And that brings our story pretty much up-to-date.  The Estate is now managed by Tower Hamlets Homes, an ‘arms-length management organisation’ of Tower Hamlets Council.  That, however, was a close-run thing.  In 2005 it was proposed to transfer ownership to the Swan Housing Association but a campaign by Defend Council Housing and then local MP George Galloway secured a 72 per cent tenant vote in opposition.

The campaign against ‘privatisation’ as it was described by opponents was hard-fought.  The Council claimed it could not fund necessary repairs and refurbishment if the Estate remained in Council hands; Mr Galloway claimed that housing associations existed ‘for their own corporate reasons and their own corporate benefits’.  That was unfair but the result of the vote did reflect tenants’ fears about rents and tenancy conditions under new ownership and a sense that Council control offered more democratic influence over the management of their homes. (10)

In this context, Lubetkin’s disillusion with municipal design – which came to a head with the rejection of his plans for Peterlee – seems disingenuous.  Ultimately, council housing has been less about ‘grand designs’ than about providing decent homes for ordinary people.

But Lutbekin was an idealist – an ‘artist engineer’ who believed in the power of technology and design to transform and improve people’s lives.  And his lament for a time when the state and architects and planners shared a common vision of a better world and their power to create it retains its power: (11)

We came to feel that the symbolic value of modern architecture, which had been the basis of all its hopes and expectations, was steadily evaporating – not only because of bureaucracy’s effects in “clipping one’s wings” – but also because the public themselves became more and more disillusioned with any idea that art or architecture could lift them up or foreshadow a brighter future.  Instead of looking at architecture as the backdrop for a great drama – the struggle for a better tomorrow – they began to see only the regulations, housing lists, points system, etc., and so only expect “accommodation”. It was this slide of public opinion – perhaps even more than the tedium of bureaucracy that finally disarmed the exercise as far as I was concerned. It made all our efforts seem so hollow

Sources

(1) John Allan, Berthold Lubetkin. Architecture and the Tradition of Progress (1992)

(2) David Donnison, ‘Ch. 5 Slum clearance begins again in Bethnal Green’ in Donnison and Chapman, Social Policy and Administration (1965)

(3) Quoted in TFT Baker (ed), ‘Bethnal Green: Building and Social Conditions after 1945’, A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 11: Stepney, Bethnal Green (1998)

(4) Metropolitan Borough of Bethnal Green, The Redevelopment of the Cranbrook Street Area (1960)

(5) Bethnal Green Civic News, no 2, April 1963

(6) Metropolitan Borough of Bethnal Green, Programme of the Official Opening of the Cranbrook Estate by the Rt Hon Lord Beswick, 30 January 1963

(7) Resident Doreen Kendall quoted in James Meek, ‘Where will we live?’, London Review of Books, Vol. 36, No. 1, 9 January 2014

(8) Deborah Singmaster, Architects Journal, 15 December 1993

(9) See the comments on LoveLondoncouncilhousing, ‘Cranbrook Estate’, posted September 3, 2009, and read the blog for more photos and analysis.

(10) Mark Leftly, ‘Charm offensive’, Building.co.uk, issue 48, 2005

(11) Lubetkin quoted in John Allan, Berthold Lubetkin

I’m grateful as always to the helpful staff of the Tower Hamlets Local History Library for their help in accessing their excellent resources.

Keeling House, Bethnal Green: ‘We loved living in our crumbling tower block’

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1950s, Bethnal Green, Brutalism, Multi-storey, Tower Hamlets

A few weeks ago, Keeling House in Bethnal Green featured in BBC2’s Great Interior Design Challenge.  Its presenter Tom Dyckhoff paid due homage to the building’s architecture – a Denys Lasdun brutalist masterpiece – and to its history.  But let’s pay a little more attention to the latter here.  Now privately owned, Keeling House was once a vision of high quality housing for the people.

Before the Second World War, Bethnal Green was the heart of the traditional working-class East End – with social conditions to match.  At the height of the Great Depression, 23 per cent of the borough’s men lacked jobs and some 43 per cent of its population were overcrowded. (1) Both the London County Council and Bethnal Green Metropolitan Borough Council built extensively to rehouse local people.  The Claredale Estate was one such local council scheme, begun in 1932.

Claredale House, facing Keeling House, was a solid red-brick and rendered 73-tenement block – designed by the architect ECP Monson, also responsible for the Borough’s earlier and notorious ‘Lenin Estate’ nearby. It cost £38,000 but, as Mrs Rawle, the chair of the Housing Committee, stated: (2)

The present and past borough councils did what they could to improve property and bring it to a better level.  Their chief trouble was lack of money; in common with the other councils the Bethnal Green Council had not as much money for housing as it would like to have.

In a sign of the times, it’s now let by a housing association as single-room student accommodation. Back in 1945, there was added urgency to government’s mission to house the people – practically due to the impact of the Blitz, politically by the expectations raised by wartime promises.  Much wider clearance and redevelopment followed.

Sulkin House, Usk Street

The first contribution of Denys Lasdun to local housing came in 1952 when commissioned by the Borough Council to redevelop a bombsite off Usk Street. In Sulkin House – a small, eight-storey, two-wing block of 24 maisonettes, Lasdun pioneered the innovative ‘cluster block’ design that would mark out the larger Keeling House. (3) The key elements of this concept were the central, free-standing tower containing lifts and services and the separate towers containing accommodation which ‘clustered’ around it: (4)

The disposition of the plan is such as to eliminate the necessity of escape stairs and also isolates the noise of public stairs, lifts and refuse disposal from the dwellings.

It’s an ingenious design which breaks up the massed and repetitive appearance typical of normal tower or slab blocks.  It allows more light and air into the building whilst simultaneously providing greater privacy and quiet to housing areas. Lasdun had thought this through carefully and his ideas owed much to his well-meaning if slightly patrician conversations with local residents: (5)

These were people who came from little terraced houses or something with backyards.  I used to lunch with them and try and understand a bit more about what mattered to them, and they were proud people.  They kept pigeons and rabbits in their back yard and hung their washing there…And as a result of these contacts I didn’t have flats.  I said no, they must have maisonettes, two up and two down, or whatever it was, because this would give them the sense of home.  And from these conversations, they wanted a degree of privacy.  They said: you know, we’re not used to being in a great sort of huge block of one of thousands.  So the thing was radically broken up, this building, into four discrete connected towers, each semi-d. on a floor, each a maisonette.

Keeling House writ the cluster block concept large.  Completed in 1959, it was 16 storeys-high, four blocks around the central service core containing 64 homes in all – 56 two-storey maisonettes and, on the fifth floor and deliberately visible in the building’s profile,  8 single-storey studio flats. It’s an unashamedly brutalist design, constructed of reinforced concrete with precast cladding units of Portland stone finish.

From Canrobert Street, 1959

Ground level showing site-cast concrete and Portland stone, 1959

It’s not to everyone’s taste.  Locals reportedly found it stark and intrusive, out of keeping with the surrounding Victorian terraces.  One resident of the block itself described it as ‘the ugliest building I have ever seen – ugly and bleak’. (6) But, to my eyes, Keeling House has a strength and cleanness of line and variety of surface and angle which is striking – it’s a building which takes the ‘brutal’ out of brutalism.

Perhaps views have changed more generally. And despite its scale, Lasdun tried carefully to preserve the best of the old whilst incorporating the benefits of the new. This was an attempt, it was said, to stand those Victorian terraced streets – dilapidated but vital – on their end.

Ground floor maisonette, 1959

The services areas of each floor were common – a place to dry clothes (before the era of tumble dryers) and meet and chat.  Balconies, each serving only two flats, faced each other but did so obliquely, in a delicate balance of neighbourliness and seclusion.  Three-quarters of the tenants could reach their front door without passing another. The housing blocks were angled to provide shelter to each other and each home was angled to receive sunlight at some point during the day. Each had a private balcony.

All – unlike their Victorian predecessors – enjoyed fresh air and views. The 800 sq ft maisonettes comprised a lower floor with spacious living room and kitchen plus a hall, pram store and box store.  The upper floors comprised two double bedrooms, a bathroom and another, larger, box-store. This was not, despite the later jaundiced comment of a local councillor, a ‘monument to the stack-em-high principle of working-class housing’. (7)

Still, not all the high ideals worked out.  What was good for drying clothes – the wind eddied around that central service area – did not make for leisurely conversation.  Free access to the lifts, and thereby the common areas, left the block susceptible to problems – of vandalism and graffiti – which were common to many council estates in the 1970s and beyond. And structural problems emerged.

Tower Hamlets Council, Bethnal Green’s successor authority, spent £1.2m on repairs in 1984 –perhaps unwisely as we shall see – but within a few years things had got worse. Residents reported damp, cracks appeared in staircases and the concrete cladding started to crumble.  In October 1991, a Dangerous Structure Notice was served on the block and, in the following year, as its deterioration accelerated, residents were required to vacate.

Tower Hamlets estimated it would cost £4m to repair, money it could ill afford at a time when £500m was required to repair and upgrade its housing stock as a whole.  It was argued also that Keeling House’s two-bed maisonettes were unsuited to current local housing needs as larger families, single-parent families and the elderly came to predominate on waiting lists. The Council, desperate to get the building off its hands, was willing to sell the block to a housing association – the Peabody Trust could have had it for £1 – but none would take it on without the promise of very substantial central government or Lottery funding. In October 1993, Tower Hamlets voted to demolish the building.

Defenders of Lasdun’s vision and design rallied to save it and in the following month it was listed by Heritage Secretary, Peter Brooke.  He described it as an ‘architecturally outstanding example of 1950s public housing’.  It was the first tower block to be listed. Tower Hamlets, spending £80,000 a year on security for the empty block, was horrified by the decision – it couldn’t ‘afford to maintain an architectural mausoleum for the benefit of the DoE’, a spokesman said. (8)

Looking back, I’m not sure there are any villains of the piece here.  Defenders of Keeling House pointed plausibly to a history of neglect and to that repair job back in 1984 now generally conceded to have been ‘bodged’.  They argued that structurally the building was sound – most problems related to external panels – and that repair was a more economical option than demolition and building anew.

But the dire financial straits and circumscribed choices of the local authority were real too – as real as they had been in 1932. Critically, what did the residents of Keeling House think?  The Council claimed 75 per cent wanted to move, unsurprisingly perhaps given its then parlous state. Some, certainly, were critical but many loved the building: (9)

It was so peaceful.  Beautiful at night and you didn’t have to draw your curtains.  There was a very good atmosphere and we had lovely neighbours: a Jewish lady used to make us lokshen soup and latkes.

As the notices to move arrived, some residents marched in protest to the Council’s Neighbourhood Offices; one was moved to poetry: (10)

When the councillors are tucked up in bed so cosy and meek,

Will they think of our families they are throwing on the street.

Furniture in storage, bed and breakfast for our home.

You know about the crumbling block but now the time has come

Where all the neighbours will unite and try to make a stand.

We have feelings too but you just don’t understand.

What can we tell our children when they come knocking at the door?

Is this the sort of people our ancestors fought for?

HELP US STAND TOGETHER

 

One tenant told Lasdun that ‘we loved living in our crumbling tower block’.  Pam Haluwa of the Residents Association stated simply, ‘if you want to bring Keeling House up to a nice liveable state, we’ll all move in tomorrow’. (11)  Lasdun thought it had been a ‘happy building’ and perhaps, in general, he was right. In the end, the Council were forced to put the block on the open market and it was purchased by Lincoln Holdings for £1.3m in 1999.

A £4m refurbishment, masterminded by the architectural firm Munkenbeck + Marshall followed.  The spalling concrete was given a new protective coating, the flats were modernised internally and a new entrance foyer – with concierge – and landscaping were built at the front of the building.

Entrance foyer

A view from the roof with penthouse sun room to right

More radically, eight top-floor maisonettes have been converted into luxury penthouses with the addition of a roof-top sunroom.  The disused water tank standing at the very top of the building will be converted to a maisonette this year.

As might be expected, Lasdun, who died in 2001, was grateful that his building survived and approved the details of its redesign which won a RIBA award in the following year. But he lamented, as we should, that housing built for the ordinary people of Bethnal Green has been lost to the private sector.

Back in 2000, the new flats went on sale at prices ranging from £145,000 for a one-bedroom home to £375,000 for one of the three-floor penthouses.  A two-bed flat is currently on sale for just over £500,000.  But they don’t stay on the market for long.  I was told that 30 of the 67 flats are currently occupied by architects and it’s a much sought-after building in a rapidly gentrifying East End.

‘In the socially committed post-war generation, a lot more thought was put into social housing than into most accommodation in the private sector’. (12)  In our modern world, the market rules.

Sources

(1) T.F.T. Baker (Editor), Victoria County History, A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 11: Stepney, Bethnal Green (1998)

(2) Quoted in ‘Housing at Bethnal Green’, East London Advertiser, after 12 October 1932

(3) Details on Sulkin House, listed Grade II in 1998, can be found on the English Heritage website.

(4) Municipal Review, January 1954

(5) Quoted in John R Gold, The Practice of Modernism: Modern Architects and Urban Transformation, 1954–1972 (2007)

(6) Quoted in Patrick Kelly, ‘Listing the Unloved’, Inside Housing, 19 January 1993

(7) Quoted in Martin Delgado, ‘We loved living in our crumbling tower block, say residents’, Evening Standard, 30 April 1993

8) Quoted in Lee Servis, “Keeling Over!’, East London Advertiser, 9 November 1995

(9) Quoted in David Robinson, ‘The Tower block is back, but this time as a des res’, Daily Express, 22 July 2000

(10) Quoted in East London Advertiser, 23 October 1992

(11) Quoted in Robinson and Delgado respectively

(12) Elain Harwood, English Heritage, quoted in Jane Hughes, ‘Born again: the high-rise slum ‘, The Times, July 1 2000

The 1959 photographs are taken from Brian Heron, Disused Water Tank, Keeling House, Heritage Statement, December 2010.

I’m grateful also to the helpful staff of the Tower Hamlets Local History Library for their help in accessing its excellent resources.

The Lenin Estate, Bethnal Green: ‘Luxury Flats for Socialists’

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1920s, Bethnal Green, Tower Hamlets

We know what the Daily Mail thinks of Marxists.  It held the same opinion in the 1920s. So, when Bethnal Green Borough Council decided in 1927 to name its new housing scheme the Lenin Estate, it was – almost literally – like a red rag to a bull (or red bull to a rag, if you want to be clever).

In reality, it’s a complex and, in some ways, rather sad story.

Labour first took control of Bethnal Green Borough Council in 1919, returning 24 councillors to the Liberals’ six.  The Party’s ‘uncrowned king’, according to the local press, was Joe Vaughan who would be Bethnal Green’s mayor for the three succeeding years.  As a member of the British Socialist Party and, from 1920, its successor organisation the British Communist Party, he was proclaimed by The Call ‘the only openly-avowed Bolshevik Mayor’ in the country.

But at a time of fluid politics on the left and when there was very widespread sympathy for the Soviet Union in Labour ranks, he was far from being the only Communist in the Bethnal Green labour movement.

The national Labour Party consistently rejected Communist Party affiliation but individual Communists could join the party and would, in any case, be frequently selected as delegates of affiliated trade unions.  This ‘Broad Left’ was particularly strong in Bethnal Green.  In a generally bad year for Labour, it held on to power in the Council in 1922 by the skin of its teeth.

By the time of the next local elections in 1925, it was, however, an increasingly fragile coalition.  Nationally, Labour had barred individual Communists from membership.  Locally, if local press accounts are to be believed, rival groups of ‘Communists’ and ‘Moderates’ had published competing manifestos.

Still, some kind of joint slate was engineered for the November municipal elections and local ‘Labour’ actually slightly increased its narrow majority.  Of its 17 councillors, it was said 12 were Labour and 5 Communist.  One of the latter, Joe Vaughan, was a leading figure in the National Left-Wing Movement founded in December to oppose Communist expulsions.  The national Labour Party expelled the Bethnal Green constituency party the following year for its continuing Communist links.

To disinterested observers, all these left-wing squabbles will seem far removed from the more pressing issue of the people’s housing.  But constructive politics did continue.

The commemorative tablet marking the beginning of the Lenin Estate – the Parmiter Street scheme as it was then known – was unveiled in September 1926, the Communist chairman of the Housing Committee, Councillor William Paddock, absent through illness.

The name of the Estate was agreed by 14 votes to 10 at a heated Council meeting in July 1927. To Joe Vaughan: (1)

It would record the appreciation of members of the Council and their recognition of the great work he had done on behalf of the workers of the world…the children would be asking ‘Who is Lenin?’ and their parents, if they were honest, would be compelled to tell them what Lenin did for the downtrodden peasants of Russia.

To the Labour mayor, Alderman CW Hovell, on the other hand, it was:

an insult to the memory of men in the Labour movement who had passed to ignore them in favour of Lenin. He might have been all right in Russia but he was not, in his opinion, right for England.

A voice from the gallery called on Hovell to ‘Give up that chain!’ This was presumably a reference to his mayoral regalia rather than those chains which Marxists held to bind the workers of the world but, if not, it was a good pun.

A loan of £28,704 from the LCC financed the scheme – 32 two-bed and three-bed tenements in a handsome four-storey yellow-brick block designed by architect ECP Monson.  Even the politically hostile Bethnal Green News concluded the block was ‘magnificently constructed’ – though it gave credit for this to ‘Mr William Sims, the enterprising Stepney builder, who secured the contract’. (2)

Frontage on Cambridge Heath Road

But the high quality of the accommodation did not meet universal approval.  The Evening News claimed that the estate was nicknamed ‘Buckingham Palace’ and suggested, solicitously, that ‘some of the tenants find it difficult to furnish the large rooms…The living room on the average requires 20 square yards of linoleum’.(3)

The new residents included a carman and his wife with nine children, the eldest of whom was just 14, and a hawker and his wife with six children. The newspaper went on to describe the Estate’s tenants as ‘typical Bethnal Greenites’ – ‘undersized people with oversized families’.

They were grateful for their new homes, however, whatever the paper thought:

It is all so beautiful we don’t know where we are.  You should see the place we left.

Sound-proofed floors and roofs, inbuilt ‘artistic dresser-cabinets’ and a ‘water heating system specially designed for rapid service’ must indeed have been a massive improvement on their previous accommodation.

Side view, Parmiter Street

The Daily Mail, under the lurid headline ‘Lenin Flats De Luxe.  East End Very Angry’, pointed out that the flats had cost £800 each to build compared to the £500 cost of comparable LCC homes.  It was shocked too by the ‘free light’ the tenants received. (4)  In fact, there was a flat rate charge of between 1s 3d and 1s 5d (6p and 7p) for electricity included in rents of 18s 3d (91p) weekly for a two-bedroom flat and 21s 3d (£1.06) for a three-bed.

Internal quadrangle

The name and quality of the flats were not the only points of controversy.  It was unfortunate, perhaps, that one of their first tenants was Councillor Paddock.  The appearance of favouritism was not dispelled by the circumstances of his selection.

The Council stated officially that 1235 applications had been received for the 32 flats.(5)  At the meeting of the Housing Committee to select the first tenants, it was alleged, of 19 applicants, that 15 were people occupying one room and of those only two had fewer than three children.  Only one applicant had three rooms and just two children. (6) That would be Councillor Paddock.

Paddock’s disingenuous statement to the press that his ‘name was on the waiting list and when my turn came I appeared before the housing committee, of which I am chairman, in the ordinary way’ seems, to put it kindly, to contain its own contradiction.

But there’s more. The Daily Mail also claimed that Councillor Paddock had stated no Jews would be granted tenancies in the new estate – at a time when they formed about 12 per cent of the local population and were among its poorest.  Others on the Council denied any policy of the sort but the attention given to the claim suggests it had some plausibility.

And then, conversely, there was the charge – backed by a sworn statement – that five Jewish residents of the borough had been persuaded to pay sums of money ranging from £5 to £3 10s ‘to a person or persons not unconnected with the Borough Council’ for the promise of a tenancy. (7)

Daily Mirror, 25 August 1927

Not surprisingly, not unreasonably, the press had a field day.  The Council promised an independent inquiry into all the allegations to be conducted, it hoped, by the Ministry of Health and Housing.  But the Ministry declined to become involved.

The Council regretted the decision and the delay which, it said, ‘must inevitably militate against the success of any inquiry that might now be undertaken’.  Moreover, it lamented the fact that it lacked the necessary statutory authority to conduct its own independent inquiry.

The conclusion?  ‘We are unable to suggest a course of action which will give effect to the very strong desire of the Council to take further action in this matter’.(8)  One can almost hear the collective sigh of relief and, with this, the matter was kicked into some very long grass.  I can tell you no more, I’m afraid, about the rights and wrongs of the matter and the individuals, if any, involved.

Except that some form of rough justice did pursue Councillor Paddock.  In September 1927 he was expelled from the Labour-Communist group on the Council and then from the Communist Party itself – ‘for acting contrary to the interests of the working class’.

At the same time, Paddock tried to resign from the Council but couldn’t afford the 5s (30p) fee required.  One month later, the matter was taken out of his hands.  He informed the Council he was in receipt of poor relief – this disqualified him automatically from Council membership.

The sense of a life unravelling becomes definitive in December when Paddock was sentenced to five months’ imprisonment for stealing funds from the Christmas Club of which he was secretary, trustee ‘and everything else’. (9)

And then there’s politics.  The Communist Party’s Minority Movement – intended initially to radicalise unions from within – began to shift to a more sectarian stance. And in the summer of 1928, the international Communist movement moved towards a radical ‘Class against Class’ policy which denounced the Labour Party as ‘social fascists’.  In Bethnal Green, local tensions no doubt added to the animus – on both sides.

In the borough council elections of November 1928, Communists attacked Labour followers as ‘scabs of the worst kind’ and promised to ‘fight them tooth and nail’.  Bethnal Green Labour, for its part, stood ‘loyally by the policy of the national Labour Party’ and ‘refused to accept the dictates of the Minority Movement which is governed by foreign political organisations which’, it added, in case there were any doubt, ‘means Russia’. (10)

In the event, Liberals took all 30 seats.   Labour congratulated itself on ‘putting the Communists at the bottom…the Communist Party will be wiped out and we will be in the position of a real proper Labour Party’. (11)  Five years later, the Labour Party did, in fact, achieve its own clean sweep of the Council.  The Communist presence  in the borough remained strong and militant but it would never again exercise power.

As for the Lenin Estate, amongst the first actions of the incoming Liberal administration was to rename it the Cambridge Heath Estate.  It remains a fine building but it’s been sold off and now it’s called Cambridge Court.  A ‘delightful two bedroom apartment offering high ceilings, stripped floor boards, bespoke storage and off street parking’ can be yours ‘in this highly sought after and fashionable location’ for £369,000 according to estate agents.

Just sometimes – only sometimes – all that political noise and effort seems like so much ‘sound and fury, signifying nothing’.

Sources

(1) This and succeeding quotes taken from ‘Honouring a Bolshevist.  BG Housing Estate to be named after Lenin’, Hackney Gazette, 25 July 1927

(2) ‘Bethnal Green’s Lenin Estate’, Bethnal Green News, 27 August 1927

(3) ‘Worries of Lenin Estate Life’, Evening News, 25 August1927

(4) Daily Mail, 25 August 1927

(5) Report of Housing Committee, 15 September 1926

(6) Hackney Gazette, 27 September 1927

(7) Bethnal Green News, 24 September 1927

(8) Report of Law and General Purposes Committee, 7 February 1928, received by the full Council 16 February 1928

(9) Daily Express, 21 December 1927

(10) Eastern Post, 27 October 1928

(11) Eastern Post, 10 November 1928

My thanks to the helpful staff of the Tower Hamlets Local History Library and its excellent resources.