Mark Swenarton, ‘Cook’s Camden’ Book Review: ‘to take forward the project of the welfare state – but to do it better’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Brutalism, Camden, Neave Brown

Mark Swenarton, Cook’s Camden: the Making of Modern Housing (Lund Humphries, 2017)

To Mark Swenarton, the work of Sydney Cook (Camden Borough Architect from 1965 to 1973) and his talented team represents ‘an architectural resolution unsurpassed not just in social housing in the UK but in urban housing anywhere in the world’.  Usually that kind of comment might be dismissed as hype but here I think huge numbers would agree. This fine book makes the case comprehensively and convincingly.

Cook’s big idea, shared and executed brilliantly by the architects he recruited to Camden, was for housing which was low-rise and high-density.  It directly challenged the architectural fashions of the day – the tower blocks which (in perceptual terms at least) dominated new council housing from the mid-1960s and the mixed development ideas which licensed them.  Equally, he rejected ‘off-the-peg’ system-building.

The new direction pioneered in Camden offered, in the words of Neave Brown, Cook’s best known recruit, an opportunity not only to re-engage with the ‘traditional social and physical form and virtues of the city’ but, crucially, ‘to try and improve on them’.  This wasn’t some pastiche revival of the old terraces but rather, as Swenarton claims, a ‘modern urbanism’; one that ‘could be generated without creating a rupture with either the existing grain of the city or the prevailing way of life’.

And then, essentially, there was the politics; unlike some historians of architecture Swenarton is good on the politics.  Camden was, by some way (excepting the Cities of London and Westminster), the richest borough in London, with a rateable value of £3,994,000.  Moreover, it was from inception a left-wing borough (despite a significant Tory interregnum from 1968 to 1971), determined, as one its leading members Enid Wistrich stated, ‘to be the tops’.  Housing was to be the chief expression of its progressive and innovative politics.

Fleet Road, image by Tim Crocker

Neave Brown, recently awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal for lifetime achievement, takes centre stage. His first Camden project, Fleet Road designed in 1966-67, established the philosophical keynote of Camden’s new housing. In Brown’s words, the ‘primary decision’ was taken:

to build low, to fill the site, to geometrically define open space, to integrate.  And to return to housing the traditional quality of continuous background stuff, anonymous, cellular, repetitive, that has always been its virtue.

Alexandra Road, image by Tim Crocker

This was followed through on majestic scale at Alexandra Road.  Here there would be terraces, not the voguish streets in the sky which excited many architects of the day.  They would form, Swenarton says, ‘a continuous fabric…interspersed with public or semi-public squares’; ‘rather than the buildings being objects surrounded by space’, as was the case in the prevailing mixed development schemes, ‘the buildings should define the space’.

Much more could be said and it is covered in great detail in the book but Swenarton also gives due space and credit to other Camden architects.  Peter Tábori, though barely 27 when appointed by Cook to design the Highgate New Town development in 1967, brought an impressive architectural pedigree, having been tutored by Ernő Goldfinger (remembered by him as ‘a born educator’), Richard Rogers and Denys Lasdun no less.

Tábori was firmly opposed to the estate concept which dominated public housing at the time, taking his ideas of ‘through routes and visual connection’, self-policing public space and clearly defined private space from the newly influential writings of Jane Jacobs.

It’s a necessary – though sad – reminder of the limitations of architectural good intentions to learn that by 1983 the estate (because it was in essence an estate) was deemed ‘a haven for hoodlums…a warren of lonely walkways and blind spots’.  Fourteen years later, another journalist concluded ‘as an experiment in social housing, the Highgate New Town development has failed’. It hadn’t, of course, but it had gone through (and has since recovered from) troubled times. The simple fact – though complex reality – is that wider societal dynamics often influence our residential experience far more than design itself.

Branch Hill, image by Tim Crocker

However, it was the Branch Hill Estate in Hampstead, designed by Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth, begun in 1971 and finally completed in 1978, which best captures both the increasingly fraught housing politics of Camden and the design brilliance.  Chapter 6 ‘Class War in Hampstead: the battle of Branch Hill’ describes the former – ‘it was a classic tale of privilege versus the people’ in Swenarton’s words.  Chapter 7 ‘The Poetics of Housing: Benson and Forsyth at Branch Hill’ powerfully evokes the latter.

Branch Hill, image by Tim Crocker

The Labour Group was determined to build council housing in leafy, affluent Hampstead; the Conservative Group (though internal differences existed) mostly opposed.  The cost of the project with respect to the initial purchase price of the land and the design and constructional fixes that a difficult site and restrictive covenant required, brought this conflict into sharper focus.  In the end, Labour – back in power in Camden in 1973 and nationally from 1974 – won out and the housing was built.

It was quite probably, as hostile commentary claimed, ‘the most expensive council housing in the world’ – 21 pairs of two-storey houses in three rows, costing in total some £2.8m.  But it is also, according to Derek Abbott and Kimball Pollit, ‘the most sophisticated semi-detached housing in the world’.  The covenant on the land insisted upon a two-storey maximum height and semi-detached homes. That Benson and Forsyth achieved a resolution in signature Camden style – stepped terraces, external walls of board marked and smooth white concrete, and dark-stained timber joinery – yet unique and distinctive is a tribute both to the architects and the political will and vision of the Council.

Underlying this, for Benson and Forsyth, was:

the fundamental belief that, while buildings must satisfy practical requirements empirically, they must also embody those abstract properties which arouse the senses and satisfy the mind.

Branch Hill, and Camden’s other architect-designed estates, fulfil this dictum with style and panache.

The tide, however, was turning.  The Conservatives’ 1972 Housing Finance Act stipulated so-called ‘fair rents’ closer to the market rents of the private sector (albeit offset by a comprehensive national scheme of rent rebates). Camden, alongside other Labour authorities, initially pledged to resist the legislation but capitulated. (Famously, only Clay Cross Council in Derbyshire fought the Act to the bitter end.)  The ensuing high rents were another problem for the Branch Hill scheme.

Mansfield Road, Gospel Oak – an example of ‘urban dentistry’, image by Tim Crocker

By 1975, it was Anthony Crosland, Labour’s Secretary of State for the Environment, declaring ‘the party’s over’. Economic hard times and financial crisis called time on the public sector expansion which had marked much of the post-war period. In Camden, there were other straws in the wind.  A middle-class, owner-occupier revolt had scuppered earlier plans for the comprehensive redevelopment of Gospel Oak back in 1966.  It anticipated a broader sea-change – a move against large-scale slum clearance (indeed, a questioning of what constituted a ‘slum’) and a drive towards rehabilitation of what were now called ‘twilight areas’.

In the 1970s, this change was reflected in an expanded policy of municipalisation – the Council’s acquisition and management of formerly private rental properties.   Its counterpart was what Swenarton calls ‘urban dentistry’ – selective demolition of housing deemed beyond repair and small-scale infill, often designed (though to typically high Camden standards) by private practices.

Maiden Lane, image by Tim Crocker

As noted by Swenarton, Labour’s 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act represented another shift – though its longer-term consequences were poorly understood – in the nature of council housing with its codification of needs-based allocation.  Another Benson and Forsyth scheme (though their original designs were significantly modified), Maiden Lane caught the brunt of this:

The result was that many of the tenancies…were channelled by social services straight to homeless families and others with greatest need. This was a social composition very different from most of the Camden estates.

Maiden Lane became notorious, one of those estates demonised by the media as dysfunctional and crime-ridden. The architects insist that its ‘architecture, quality of place internally and externally….was elegant, humane and economic’ and blame ‘ineffectual management, social conflict, and banal architectural intervention’ for the estate’s later woes.  There’s some truth in this for sure but it’s another reminder that architecture – whether deemed good or bad – is far from solely determining the lived experience of residents.

Maiden Lane has been substantially redesigned since and, if you’re seeking a symbol of just how far we’ve come from the heady idealism of Cook’s Camden, the Council has recently built 273 flats on the estate: 149 for sale on the open market, 53 for shared ownership and 71 new council flats. Those for sale reflect the new wisdom that private capital must be harnessed to finance the regeneration and expansion of social housing.  But, unusually, the development as a whole increased council housing stock and Camden Council continues to own and management most of its social housing. (1)

Alexandra Road, image by Tim Crocker

Alexandra Road, Grade II* listed in 1994, had its problems too though these related to the complex saga of its drawn-out construction and escalating cost. ‘Conceived in 1968, in the period of optimism generated by the post-war boom, but constructed during the crisis decade that followed’, the finished estate of 520 homes took twice as long to build as projected and cost, on completion in 1979, some £18.9m.  At the same time, it became a pawn in Labour’s internal politics as a ‘hard left’ faction (some may dislike Swenarton’s use of the term) led by Ken Livingstone wrestled for control against what had now become Labour’s old guard.

Livingstone, elected a Camden councillor in 1978, became chair of housing and used a Council-instigated public inquiry into what was now widely seen as the Alexandra Road debacle as a means of discrediting the former leadership.  In truth, the inquiry found no blame attached to the Architect’s Department (though it noted staff shortages, for which it was blameless, were a factor) and there were myriad problems – relating to the site, changing specifications and, above all, contemporary troubles in the building trades – which did account for the scheme’s financial difficulties.

However, at the last minute, the Council itself inserted a clause suggesting that some of the increasing costs might have been avoided ‘if the Architect himself had exercised more foresight with regards to the demands of the project’.  Livingstone moved on to the bigger stage of the Greater London Council. Incredibly, Neave Brown, so unfairly impugned, would not work in Britain again.

A sad end to what John Winter has called a ‘a magical moment for English housing’.  At the outset, for Sydney Cook and his team:

the challenge was to address the deficiencies of the housing that had been, and was still being, produced by local authorities across the country: to take forward the project of the welfare state – but to do it better.

By 1979, and decisively under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, it was, as Swenarton notes, ‘no longer the deficiencies of the form of housing produced by the welfare state, but the welfare state itself that was under attack’.  In the end, in this brave new world, Camden’s path-breaking housing programme had minimal domestic impact though it was influential on the Continent.  Alexandra Road, and the Borough’s other pioneering schemes, suffered ‘from having been released into a different world to that in which it was conceived…set on the very cusp of the change from socialism to the me-generation’. (2)

You’ll find all this discussed more fully in the book and much, much more – in particular a rich analysis of architectural influences and forms which I’ve barely touched on here. I’m sorry to gush but it’s hard to imagine a better book on its topic.  OK, I’ll earn my reviewer’s credentials by wishing for a bit more on the buildings’ after-lives (discussed a little more fully in some of my blog posts) but the book does what it sets out to do superbly.

Lamble Street interior, Gospel Oak, image by Tim Crocker

The photography stands out – Martin Charles’ earlier images and Tim Crocker’s wonderful contemporary photographs of which I include a selection.  The schemes themselves are pretty photogenic in skilled hands but Crocker’s shots of lived-in interiors and real live people inside and out bring out their qualities in a more humane and personal way than is common in architectural photography. These are complemented by a profusion of maps, plans and architectural drawings.

Congratulations to Stefi Orazi for the book design, to the publishers Lund Humphries for their commitment to the highest production values, and, above all, to Mark Swenarton. His scholarship and hard work have surely produced what is and will remain the definitive account of Cook’s Camden.

Cook’s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing, by Mark Swenarton, is published by Lund Humphries (HB £45) The book is for sale on the publisher’s website with free UK postage. If you insert the code CAMDEN10 on check-out, single copies will receive a £10 discount.   

References

(1) David Spittles, ‘It’s a game changer: Camden is first council to build homes to sell’, Evening Standard Homes and Property, 19 November 2014. The article incorrectly states that the whole of the scheme was built for private sale.

(2) Martin Pawley, ‘Living on the Edge of Time’, The Guardian, 2 April 1990

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.

 

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.

 

Balfron Tower, Poplar: ‘they all said the flats were lovely’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Brutalism, Regeneration, Tower Hamlets

In last week’s post, we left Balfron Tower just as its first residents were moving in, among them the Tower’s architect, Ernő Goldfinger, and his wife, Ursula.  That affluent couple moved out after a couple of months.  It’s a cruel irony that Balfron Tower, conceived in the twentieth century as decent housing for ordinary people, will in the twenty-first become the preserve solely of the most wealthy.  How did it come to this?

Balfron and the Brownfield Estate © Theo Simpson, Lesser Known Architecture

Back in 1968, the champagne parties thrown by the Goldfingers for their neighbours made it easy for some to condemn their stay as a piece of show-boating by a wealthy couple who would soon return to Hampstead but Goldfinger was serious in his intention to discover the strengths and weaknesses of his design.  This is clear in his own account and in the careful notes drawn up by Ursula – even if they do smack a little of an ethnographic exercise in participant observation. (1)

Goldfinger at Balfron

For instance, good on detail, Ursula noticed how difficult the heavy swing doors to the bridges were for those with parcels or a pram.  And the access corridor was ‘appallingly cold in an East wind’.  These comments are tempered by her observations of the community: ‘everyone was helpful with the doors, not just to me but with each other or a child, or anyone at all’.  And that cold corridor was:

well kept, I have never seen rubbish in it at any time of day. Milk bottles are left outside the doors all day as people are at work, never turned over or broken. Some people have door mats outside, I have not yet heard that one has been stolen. This happened to me and friends of mine in Hampstead.

As regards the flats themselves, those she had visited were ‘ beautifully kept, people are going to a lot of trouble to install them mostly with outrageously terrible furniture, carpets, curtains and ornaments’ – although she did add that she didn’t think the fabric designs ‘much worse than those I see at the Design Centre’.

We might mock the condescension here and feel unsettled by her surprise that working-class people could actually behave rather well but it is worth making the point that this was a respectable and law-abiding community.  If things went wrong later, this wasn’t the result of some original sin in the building’s design.

Balfron Tower from St Leonard’s Road © Stephen Richards and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence

Some of the early faults were corrected. Ernő noted copper gaskets on the windows which made a ‘trumpeting noise’ in the flats when winds were high (they were replaced) and the need for thresholds on front doors (which were added), for example.  They both noted – the eternal problem of municipal high-rise – the inadequacy of the lifts and he added an extra lift to his plans for Trellick Tower, Balfron’s sister in north Kensington completed in 1972.

In general, Balfron seems to have been popular in their early years.  According to Ursula, one woman stated of her flat that she ‘wouldn’t change it for Buckingham Palace’.  Ursula continued:

I have heard many people who live low down say they would like a flat higher up. I have heard no tenant who lives high up say they would like a flat lower down…they all said the flats were lovely…I have never heard anybody express regret for the terrace houses they have mostly come from.

But three months after the Tower’s opening Ronan Point collapsed and the love affair with high-rise was very near its end.  Moreover, Balfron would not be immune from the social and environmental problems which afflicted council estates up and down the country from the late seventies.

For those who hated high-rise and hated in particular the uncompromising architecture of Balfron, the lessons were obvious: ‘high-rise living, at its worst, can be a ghastly and isolating experience’. (2) An intrepid reporter sent to the Tower found evidence to back this up: a 59-year old resident living alone on the top floor felt like ‘a battery chicken in a box’; he didn’t know his neighbours and had been burgled twice.  A young single mother complained, understandably, how badly being ‘cooped up in the flat all day’ was affecting her two pre-school children.

Sign in service lobby

There were criticisms too of poor maintenance.  On the abolition of the GLC in 1985 the Tower was transferred to the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.  Its new caretaker described it as ‘a disaster area…burnt-out cars, black soot stains, bin rooms full of old rubbish’. (3)

For all that, Balfron was never as notorious or troubled as Trellick – the same source describes it as having ‘had a boring life’ and possessing a more stable community – and it seems to have recovered quickly.  CCTV was installed in 1990 and that caretaker later reported few problems with vandalism: ‘I know all the kids, who their mums and dads are. I’ll knock on someone’s door if I’ve seen them doing something’.

Refuse chute in service tower

Balfron has worked, not for everyone and not all the time – not a modernist utopia for sure but a decent home to most of its residents.  It stood the test of time structurally too.  There was no experiment with system-building here and the concrete fabric is described as being ‘in good condition’ and many of the internal finishes ‘surprisingly resilient’.  That solid concrete – ‘spine walls and slabs that pass straight from the inside to the outside’ – does make for very poor thermal insulation, however, and requires substantial work to meet modern standards. (4)

Doorway. The original residents didn’t like the letterbox doubling up as a door knocker and installed electric bells with trailing wires much to Goldfinger’s disappointment

It was Grade II listed by English Heritage in 1996 and ownership was transferred to the local Poplar HARCA housing association in 2006 after one of those ‘an offer that can’t be refused’ ballots that marked the housing stock transfers from councils to housing associations of the time.  Tenants were promised new kitchens, new bathrooms, a whole range of repairs and improvements – basically the kind of necessary upgrade that local councils were financially unable to offer.

Poplar HARCA also planned to build 130 new low-rise homes on the Brownfield Estate for which Tower residents would have priority. If they moved out, their former flats would be sold to help finance the overall programme of redevelopment. (5)

One or two households were still holding out in September 2014

In 2010 it became clear – belatedly, it might seem – that the building’s repair and refurbishment would require all tenants to be – in that chilling bureaucratic phrase – ‘decanted’.  And the rules of the game changed.  The option for tenants to return to improved homes has been removed; all flats are now to be sold on the open market.

Poplar HARCA reckons it will spend £137,000 on each flat – an expensive job made more expensive by the need to safeguard the architectural integrity of a listed building. In December 2013 Londonewcastle, which describes itself as ‘a luxury residential property development company’, was awarded the contract to do the work.  In the words of its website: (6)

Whether clients move to us for a hip studio, neighbourhood apartment or luxury penthouse, Londonewcastle creates inspiring, vibrant environments which combine high specification residential services with select retail, restaurant and offices.

Understandably, the City types who move in (Canary Wharf is so close) or the speculators that buy won’t want poor people sullying their space.

God and Mammon – the view to the south and the likely workplaces of the new residents

In the meantime, as Balfron has emptied (one or two families are still holding out), its flats have been let out to property guardians and artists.  This brings in a little income, it provides a little security but it’s hard not to see all of them as an insidious gentrifying vanguard – embedded agents of regeneration, in the words of one critical participant. (7)

The view to the west showing the Chrisp Street market and clock tower and parts of the Lansbury Estate built for the 1951 Festival of Britain

The kind of ‘urban renaissance’ proposed for areas such as Poplar nowadays rests on conspicuous consumption and the affluence of middle-class incomers.  It displaces and marginalises existing communities.  By way of contrast, look just to the west, go back sixty years, and see a different world, different priorities – the Lansbury Estate, a council estate built in 1951 to meet ‘the needs of the people’ and the model then of a better and more democratic future.

‘Local housing association Poplar Harca has been seeking a partner to give a new lease of life to the 145 apartments in the late-1960s brutalist block designed by architect Erno Goldfinger for the Greater London Authority’. Image and blurb from the Londonewcastle website

Defenders of Poplar HARCA would argue they are doing their best to work the system – a sell-off of prime real estate here, some replacement social housing there.  The rules require that we sell off homes in the social rented sector to maintain the ones we have. The same rules imply that some homes are too good for ordinary people.  And, in practice, those rules break up communities and disperse too many tenants far from their original homes and neighbourhoods.

There may be some good people trying to make those rules work as effectively as possible for those that need housing.  But many more are making a quick buck and the rules need changing.  We have come to accept our society’s divisions and the exclusion of our poorest neighbours. The need to defend existing social housing and build anew has rarely been so stark.

The Focus E15 protest at the loss of social housing at the nearby Carpenters Estate in neighbouring Newham

As Balfron Tower, built to provide good quality and affordable housing for the ordinary people of the borough, is set to become a plaything of the hip and wealthy, there are 23,500 households on the waiting list for social housing in Tower Hamlets; 1500 households, officially homeless, are living in temporary accommodation. (8)

Its sell-off is a loss of housing for those who need it most.  For the rest of us, it’s a loss of common purpose and decency.

Sources

(1) Ruth Oldham, ‘Ursula Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower Diary and Notes’, C20: The Magazine of the Twentieth Century Society, 1 September 2010

(2) George Tremlett, Conservative housing policy director on the GLC, quoted from a speech to RIBA in the East London Advertiser, 21 July 1978.  The following quotations come from the same source.

(3) David Secombe, ‘Balfron Remembered’, The London Column, September 19, 2014

(4) Will Hunter, ‘The future’s golden for Balfron’, BD Magazine, October 2008.  The quotation is from Greg Slater of PRP Architects who are consultants on the refurbishment.

(5) London Borough of Tower Hamlets, East India Estates Offer, August 2006

(6) londonewcastle.com, ‘Our Aims’

(7) Richard Whitby, Angels, The Phoenix, Bats, Battery Hens and Vultures – The Bow Arts Trust Live/Work Scheme

(8) Tower Hamlets Citizens, ‘Tower Hamlets. A Report on the Housing Crisis in one of London’s most expensive boroughs’ (2014).  For detail on the attempts to remove tenants from the waiting list, read James Butler, Social Cleansing in Tower Hamlets: Interview with Balfron Tower Evictee.  The favoured tactic is to use the Rent Deposit Scheme for privately rented accommodation – more expensive and of inferior quality. Thus we spend money on Housing Benefit to subsidise private landlords rather than investing directly in homes.

Rab Harling took photographs of 120 of the flats over three years as a ‘portrayal of a community living with housing insecurity.’  View his slideshow here.

Balfron Tower, Poplar: imparting ‘a delicate sense of terror’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Brutalism, Regeneration, Tower Hamlets

Balfron Tower is now one of the stately homes of England – a National Trust attraction no less.  Recently it’s hosted an arts season, a Shakespeare play, and it’s provided live-work accommodation for twenty-five artists since 2008.  And all that, to be honest, makes me sad because once Balfron was simply housing for the local people who needed it – although its size and style and big name architect did always get it special attention.

Photograph taken in 1969 showing original concrete chimneys to service tower boilers (from LBTH, Brownfield Estate, Poplar Conservation Management Plan)

The site for what is currently the Brownfield Estate, in which Balfron is located, had been identified as early as 1951.  The now truncated St Leonard’s Road was one of Poplar’s principal streets; the area as a whole comprised a dense grid of old and substandard terraced housing.  The land was acquired in 1959 just as the new Blackwall Tunnel Northern Approach to the east was cutting its own brutal swathe through these old streets.  In 1963, the London County Council asked Ernő Goldfinger – one of the most celebrated modernist architects of the day – to design the first buildings of the new development.

Rowlett Street Phase I, as the Balfron Tower was originally known, was built – by the LCC’s successor body, the Greater London Council – between 1965 and 1967 and officially opened in February 1968 by Desmond Plummer, leader of the GLC.

It is 26 storeys and 276 feet high – in plain construction terms, ‘an in-situ reinforced concrete cross-wall structure linked to the service tower by precast concrete bridges at every third floor’. (1)  It contained 146 homes in all, 136 flats and 10 maisonettes.  The maisonettes were located at ground level and on the 15^th floor – the latter provides the distinct break which can be seen in the otherwise uniform façade of the Tower.

Service tower

The idea of a service tower had been pioneered by Denys Lasdun at Sulkin House and Keeling House in the 1950s.  Its advantage, as Goldfinger pointed out, was that ‘all noisy machines, including lift motors, water pumps, fire pumps, rubbish chutes, and the boiler house at the top, are completely insulated from the dwellings’.   Noise within the flats was also reduced ‘sideways by a 9 inch concrete wall and top and bottom by a 1 foot thick concrete floor’.  It wasn’t so easy to deal with the near-motorway just outside the block.

Service tower lobby

The service towers also contained two communal laundries and ‘hobby rooms’ for teenagers, one for table tennis or billiards and the other set aside – in language which must have been a little dated even for its time – as a ‘jazz/pop room’.  Decades later, in a rather more authentic demonstration of youth culture, the Tower was home to pirate radio stations which made good use of its commanding height.

Living room and access to balcony

Goldfinger hoped that the large balconies provided for each home would provide a play area for toddlers; ‘a sunken play area with slides, towers, water and a sandpit’ was located at ground level with a day nursery to follow.  He acknowledged that ‘common shopping and welfare facilities’ were lacking – as they were in so many estates in which councils understandably prioritised the immediate pressing need for roofs over heads.  This, he said, was a problem which needed to be solved on ‘a political plane’.

As for the height of the block, Goldfinger was sure this was a positive: ‘The whole object of building high is to free the ground for children and grown-ups to enjoy Mother Earth and not to cover every inch with bricks and mortar’.  (2)

Goldfinger was a larger-than-life character and this makes it easy to conflate the building and the man and see both as somehow ‘brutal’ – more concerned with a showpiece building than the lived experience of its residents.  In fact, he recognised clearly that:

the success of any scheme depends on the human factor – the relationship of people to each other and the frame of their daily life which the building provides.

‘These particular buildings,’ he continued, ‘have the great advantage of having families with deep roots in the immediate neighbourhood as tenants’.  Of the first 160 families in the estate, most were rehoused from the immediate neighbourhood and all but two from Tower Hamlets. They tried, where possible, to rehouse former neighbours together.

Goldfinger hoped, perhaps a little optimistically, that the access galleries – he counted the number of front doors on each, 18 on seven of the levels – would form ‘“pavements” on which the normal life of the neighbourhood’ might continue ‘very similar to a “traditional East End” street’.

Access corridor

Those corridors weren’t exactly ‘streets in the sky’ but he saw their design as far preferable to a traditional point block where only a few flats could be arranged around a single internal corridor.

Such were the good intentions and it’s worth recounting them to remind ourselves that these Brutalist blocks were designed – above all and for all their drama – to provide good homes for ordinary people.  (The same is true of the even more heavily criticised Robin Hood Gardens estate nearby, designed by the similarly controversial Smithsons.)

In fact, it’s often the acolytes rather than the architects themselves who most deserve criticism.  There’s an astonishing amount of writing about Balfron Tower which simply fails to register that it was housing at all.

Then there are the architectural descriptions which seem to celebrate the more dramatic but arguably inhuman features of its design, reaching their nadir in this account of Balfron by Goldfinger’s former collaborator, James Dunnett: (3)

It is as though Goldfinger, from among the Functionalist totems, had chosen as a source of inspiration the artifacts of war. The sheer concrete walls of the circulation tower are pierced only by slits; cascading down the facade like rain, they impart a delicate sense of terror.

Lynsey Hanley, perhaps unfairly critical of Balfron elsewhere, was very reasonably critical of this: ‘is living in a council flat supposed to be delicately terrifying?’ (4)

Internally, of course, the flats were spacious and airy with a quality of fixtures and fittings that very few of their residents would have enjoyed before.  And the views were wonderful.

The contemporary view to the west

Among the first to move in were an unusually affluent couple from Hampstead – Ernő and Ursula Goldfinger.  They moved in to flat 130 on the 25^th floor (now refurbished with sixties kitsch as part of the National Trust tour), paying as was proper the full rent of £11 10s rather than the subsidised figure of £4 15s 6d due from tenants.  They stayed two months.

Goldfinger wanted: (5)

to experience, at first hand, the size of the rooms, the amenities provided, the time it takes to obtain a lift, the amount of wind whirling around the tower and any problems which might arise so that I can correct them in future.

In next week’s post, we’ll see how that experiment went, we’ll assess how Balfron Tower succeeded as social housing for its more usual residents, and we’ll examine the twisted politics which have brought it to its current sad state.

Sources

(1) Ernő Goldfinger, ‘Balfron Tower’, East London Papers, vol. 12, no.1, Summer 1969

(2) Letter to the Guardian, 21 February 1968

(3) James Dunnett and Gavin Stamp (eds), Ernő Goldfinger: Works 1 (1983)

(4) Lynsey Hanley, Estates (2007)

(5) Quoted in Nigel Warburton, Ernő Goldfinger. The Life of an Architect (2004)

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

Tags

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.

Robin Hood Gardens, Poplar: ‘presence, dignity and a bit grim’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Brutalism, GLC, LCC, Poplar, Regeneration, Tower Hamlets

We left Robin Hood Gardens in limbo last week. In 2008, Tower Hamlets Council had voted for its demolition.  Its supporters – primarily architects excited by its founding vision but also campaigners for social housing – mobilised to save it.

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

Much of the architectural case appears to me somewhat self-referential – an argument about the ‘iconic’ status of the buildings and ‘seminal’ role of the Smithsons with – in many, though not all, of the contributions – little regard for the lived reality of the estate for those who inhabited it.

It’s perhaps unfair to select the most egregious example of this approach but Stephen Bayley does, in my view, deserve special mention.  He wrote: (1)

Robin Hood Gardens suffered from the start with a singular lack of commodity and firmness.  Worse, the unintelligent housing policies of Tower Hamlets populated Robin Hood Gardens with the tenants the least likely to be able to make sensible use of the accommodation.  You have to whisper it but the Unité d’Habitation works because it is populated by teachers, psychologists, doctors, designers, not by single mothers struggling with buggies

Aaah, social housing made safe for the professional middle classes – what a vision!  In fact, to be fair to the Smithsons, they designed the estate very much with mothers in mind.  Perhaps it’s just single mothers Bayley objects to though they’re not that common on an estate with a significant Muslim community.

He continued, ‘As Marx asked, does consciousness determine existence or does existence determine consciousness?  Or, to put it less correctly, do the pigs make the sty or does the sty make the pigs?’.

This was not only insulting but stupid, given that Marx had concluded very firmly – it was the keystone of his philosophy – that being determined consciousness or, as Bayley might prefer, the sty made the pigs.  Not, therefore, a great encomium for Robin Hood Gardens.

Robin Hood Gardens, 2013

More serious commentators, headed by BDonline which has campaigned to save and renovate the estate, made a better case.   They pointed out that the poll of tenants was seriously flawed. Residents did want better housing conditions but their dissatisfaction focused on the poor upkeep of the estate and problems of overcrowding – neither of which problems can be blamed on its design.

Another resident conducted his own unofficial poll and concluded firmly that a majority of residents favoured refurbishment and most were wary of the alternatives on offer. Darren Pauling found that out of 140 households surveyed, 130 opposed demolition. (2)

At this point, I’d normally quote residents’ views as evidence – and plenty are available – but in this case, to be honest, they’re likely to offer little better than an anecdotal back-and-forth.  The reality is that responses tended to reflect the questions being asked and the choices being offered and often reflected the bias of the questioner.

I’m not claiming, therefore, to offer some definitive judgment but I hope these conclusions are balanced at least.

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

The residents do generally seem to think that the flats themselves, notwithstanding problems of overcrowding as families grew, are pleasant: (3)

You know what they call this place around here? They call it Alcatraz. At least the people who don’t live in it do. My friends ask ‘How can you live there?’ but they can’t believe how nice it is inside.

I don’t like the outside very much – but once you get inside your own flat it’s really very nice. You’ve got fresh air back and front – either on the street deck or on the balconies.

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

But the estate as a whole does suffer serious design flaws, agreed by their defenders and acknowledged even by the Smithsons. Those ‘streets in the sky’ never really worked – they were too narrow and placed inhospitably on the outside of the blocks.

© Christian Skovgaard and reproduced under the Creative Commons licence 2.0 Generic

The ‘pause places’ never offered even a simulacrum of personal space. Entrances and access points were unattractive. 

And then there’s the overall appearance.  As Rowan Moore concludes: (4)

Personally, I can see what they brought to make it stand apart from the average estate – presence, dignity, an integrity of concept and detail – but I can also see how, for almost everyone but architecture buffs, such concepts might seem vaporous next to the more obvious truth that it all feels a bit grim.

This has to matter, doesn’t it?  And Brutalism doesn’t really need to be quite so ‘brutal’.

Unlike many other much-criticised estates, Robin Hood Gardens never seems to have enjoyed a heyday.  It was born into bad times – a period of economic decline in the East End when racist thuggery and racial tensions were rife. This, of course, was not its fault.

Robin Hood Gardens, 2013

And, for all the superficial plausibility of the ‘defensible space’ thesis, the longer history of Robin Hood Gardens does not bear it out.  Antisocial behaviour has declined – even as the estate has been run down and its environment declined. Recent reports reveal much less graffiti and far less antisocial behaviour – these appear to have been a generational and social phenomenon rather than one rooted in the estate’s design.

Ironically, the estate’s problems may have reflected less its modernism and more a backward-looking design conception.  It was predicated on what had become – even when it opened – an old-fashioned view of working-class sociability.

The street-life it referenced and attempted to resurrect was finished – not killed by the Council or callous planners but superseded by working-class aspirations towards home and family and the relative economic affluence which fostered these.  Those that lament this shift should remember that streets and pubs loomed large when home circumstances were fundamentally inhospitable.

In fact, the estate received little architectural acclaim at the time of its construction.  It suffered the backlash against high-rise of the day – as did the World’s End Estate in Chelsea completed five years later.  When English Heritage controversially rejected the estate’s listing, they concluded that it was neither: (5)

innovative or influential. The case for historic interest is…lost precisely because the project came so late in this phase of modernist architecture in Britain, without however representing a glorious culmination.

If, as I think, the case for saving Robin Hood Garden is unproven, powerful questions remain about what will replace it.  For this, we have glossy brochures and slick websites in abundance to persuade us of the brave new world on offer.

Artist’s visions of the new Blackwall Reach development

What the £500m Blackwall Reach regeneration project offers is basically more – more housing, more commercial units, more open space and higher density.  Up to 1475 new homes will replace the 214 on the current low density estate.  In terms of design, however, as critics have argued, it all looks a bit generic.

But though we might feel some cynicism towards this developers’ dream, the context of housing need is Tower Hamlets is compelling. There are 23,400 households on the waiting list of which almost half are designated priority cases and two-fifths are suffering overcrowding.  The Council currently has 1500 families placed in temporary accommodation. (6)

In the new scheme, around half the dwellings will be privately-owned and some 35 per cent will remain social rented.  The remainder will be shared ownership.  

Those social rented homes will be transferred from Council control to the Swan Housing Association.  Current council tenants who want to be rehoused in the new scheme are concerned about being transferred to a new landlord.  They expect their rents to increase and rights to decrease.

The Council claims that 43 per cent of new homes will be ‘affordable’, of which 80 per cent will be socially rented. There is also improved provision of larger ‘family’ homes of three-bedrooms or more – 429 in all.

Of course, ‘affordability’ is a slippery concept.  The Government now defines ‘affordable’ rents as being up to 80 per cent of local market rents. According to Government figures, the average monthly rent for a two-bedroom property in Tower Hamlets in 2013 was £1777 which leaves a supposedly ‘affordable’ rent of £1422. (7)

Back in September 2012, before even the worst excesses of the London housing market, Tower Hamlets calculated that a four-person household would require an income of £48,464 to afford a so-called ‘affordable’ rent on a two-bed property. Median household income in the borough was estimated at £28,199. (8) 

Of course, housing benefit is available. As Colin Wiles has argued: (9)

the consequence of this policy is the creation of thousands of new benefit-dependent tenants while the £24bn housing benefit bill will continue to soar. The government has rendered the word affordable meaningless.

That is the reality of Benefits Street and the ‘welfare dependency’ suffered by millions of hard-working families in Britain today.

In conclusion, ‘affordability’ – as we noted in the case of the Aylesbury Estate – is a sorry, dishonest travesty of the term.  More homes are needed and there may be a case for social mix.  There seems – as things are currently organised – to be a necessity for private capital.

But it’s hard not to feel that all this is a long way away from those very practical municipal dreams which embraced our collective duty to house the least well-off and were driven by need not profit.

Tower Hamlets gave final approval for the demolition of Robin Hood Gardens in March 2012.  That demolition began in April 2013.  Architects, historians and – most importantly – residents will now have to comment on this modern vision of social housing and assess again how closely reality matches ideals.

Sources

(1) Stephen Bayley, ‘You want the brutal truth?  Concrete can be beautiful’, The Observer, 2 March 2008

(2) Darren Pauling, ‘I’m sick of concrete jungle creeping up on Robin Hood Gardens’, East London Advertiser, 6 December 2010.   See also, Chris Beanland, ‘Robin Hood Gardens: An estate worth saving?’, The Independent, 24 February, 2012

(3) John Furse, The Smithsons at Robin Hood

(4) Rowan Moore, ‘Robin Hood Gardens: don’t knock it…down’, The Observer, 5 December 2010

(5) John Allan, ‘Robin Hood Gardens, Poplar, London’ English Heritage, Conservation Bulletin 59, Autumn 2008

(6) The London Borough of Tower Hamlets (Blackwall Reach) Compulsory Purchase Order 2013. Statement of Reasons

(7) Valuation Office Agency, ‘Private Rental Market Statistics: England Only‘, December 2013

(8) London Borough of Tower Hamlets, ‘Response to Housing Issues‘. 11 September 2012

(9) Colin Wiles, ‘”Affordable housing” does not mean what you think it means‘, The Guardian, 3 February 2014

I’m very grateful to Soraya Smithson and the Smithson Family Collection for allowing me to reproduce Sandra Lousada’s evocative pictures of the estate.

Robin Hood Gardens, Poplar: ‘an exemplar – a demonstration of a more enjoyable way of living’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Brutalism, GLC, LCC, Poplar, Regeneration

What more is there to be said on Robin Hood Gardens?  Its architecture and its planned demolition have inspired voluminous and passionate writing on both sides of the debate – it’s become less a council estate, more a proxy in a cultural war.

© Will of Memory

This story begins in 1963 – though it stretches back further, of course, in terms of East End housing problems and the visions of politicians, planners and architects in solving them.  Still, in that year, three small areas of land became available to the then London County Council for redevelopment. Alison and Peter Smithson were commissioned to draw up designs for two separate buildings with plans for further which would form ‘one big linked dwelling group’.

Grosvenor Buildings in 1928

Two years later, the Greater London Council decided to demolish the adjacent Grosvenor Buildings – seven private tenement blocks opened in 1885, replacing slums cleared by the Metropolitan Board of Works.  The council acquired 1200 tenants in need of rehousing and an additional five acres of land.  The Smithsons acquired a new drawing board for their vision.

This, they hoped, would be: (1)

Alison and Peter Smithson

an exemplar – a demonstration of a more enjoyable way of living in an old industrial part of a city.  It is a model of a new mode of urban organisation which can show what life could be like.

They were influenced, of course, by le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation but had pioneered their own version of ‘the building as street’ in rejected plans for the City’s Golden Lane Estate in 1952.

Construction began in 1968, the first flats opened in 1971 and the scheme as a whole was completed in 1972 at a cost of £1,845,585.  It comprises two precast concrete-construction slab blocks – a ten-storey building adjacent to the Blackwall Tunnel approaches and a seven-storey running, more or less in parallel, along Cotton Street.  These are, visually, a fairly uncompromising example of Brutalist design.

There are 214 flats in all – 38 flats intended for old people at ground level and a mix of two- to six-bedroom maisonettes for the rest with a population of around 700 at a housing density of 142 persons per acre.  The flats are spacious and well-lit.

Aerial view from east: East India Dock Road to right and Blackwall Tunnel entrance below

The site was – and remains – problematic, sandwiched as it is between three busy roads.  The Smithsons countered this with a ‘stress-free central zone protected from the noise and pressures of the surrounding roads by the buildings themselves…a quiet green heart which all dwellings share and can look into’. (2)  They compared this open space – a little fancifully maybe – to a Georgian square.

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

The Smithsons also addressed the noise issue by placing bedrooms and kitchen-diners on the inner, quieter, side of the blocks and by the use of a number of other innovative design features.  It’s worth making this point to counter any simplistic view that this was design contemptuous of its residents: (3)

One of the men on site said that this, what we were trying to do, was too good for the people that were going to live in it.  We find this unacceptable to say that it is too good.

The Smithsons wanted the new Robin Hood Gardens to offer dignified, even – in their own terms – homely, accommodation for those who would live in the estate.

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

The other key design feature were the access decks to the dwellings, envisaged as ‘streets in the sky’ and intended to reference and encourage a traditional model of East End sociability:

The deck itself is wide enough for the milkman to bring his cart along or for two women with prams to stop for a talk and still let the postman by.

Additionally, although Robin Hood Gardens didn’t get the ‘yard gardens’ that the Smithsons had planned for Golden Lane, they did create small alcoves – they called them ‘pause places’ – off the decks which they hoped residents would personalise through the use, for example, of flower boxes.

So far, so good.  The GLC Householders’ Manual issued to the new tenants captures some of the anticipation and, perhaps, some of the trepidation that marked the moment: (4)

Although Robin Hood Gardens is of unusual design and has attracted much attention…only through the people who live here will it achieve any real life.  For it is how the place is used that finally decides the quality of life that a family can live here….It is now your turn to try and make it a place you will be proud to live in.

Just one year later, that pride seemed in short supply.  The American architectural critic Anthony Pangaro described the estate’s lifts as vandalised and defaced. He criticised those ‘pause places’ as allowing ‘no definition of private territory or any sense of belonging to individual occupants’. (5)

© Christian Skovgaard, Flikr. Reproduced under the Creative Commons licence 2.0 Generic

Here he echoed Oscar Newman’s critique in his book Defensible Space which had been published one year earlier.  Newman contended that public high-rise developments were particularly liable to crime and antisocial behaviour as their residents felt no sense of ownership or responsibility for them. Design flaws typically acted to facilitate such behaviour.

This was certainly the later conclusion of Alice Coleman, the UK’s guru of ‘defensible space’, and her team when it visited Robin Hood Gardens. The estate allegedly scored 14 out of 16 on the scale of features held to encourage crime. (6)

Another harsh critic of Robin Hood Gardens, Charles Jencks criticised those vaunted ‘streets in the sky’: (7)

They are under-used; the collective entries are paltry and a few have been vandalised.  Indeed they are dark, smelly, dank passage-ways, places where, as Oscar Newman has argued…, crime may occur more frequently than elsewhere.

We’ll come back to the validity of all this later.  What is undeniable is that Robin Hood Gardens quickly acquired a seemingly justified reputation as a very troubled estate, as confirmed in the descriptions and testimonies of John Furse’s 1982 doctoral thesis.  His verdict on the estate is damning: (8)

The access to the building is, to our mind, ill-conceived: the ‘stress-free’ zone is abused: the lack of common privacy is a constant worry: the vicious writing-on-the-wall is hard to ignore, and is undeniably related to much of the mindless vandalism that has broken down the communal facilities. The tenants do not make use of the decks and, consequently, the idea of ‘street’ does not have any factual validity…[Our] final assessment must be that, socially, the building does not work.  The lucidly argued Smithson aesthetic fails at Robin Hood.

Beyond the alleged design flaws and social issues, structural problems had also emerged.  A 2006 survey found the blocks to be ‘in poor condition’ with significant defects to the external envelope and roof coverings. It recommended the replacement of existing bathrooms and kitchens and identified problems with electrical wiring and other services.  A 2007 study concluded it would cost £70,000 per flat to bring them up to the Government’s Decent Homes Standard.

Tower Hamlets Council, the successor landlord to the GLC, voted for demolition in 2008 – a decision apparently supported by over 75 per cent of residents. We’ll come back to that too.

This, it turned out, was the beginning rather than the end of the debate about the future of Robin Hood Gardens.  At this point the Great and the Good of British architecture weighed in.  They argued passionately that the estate should be saved.

We’ll follow that debate and appraise its outcome next week.

Sources

(1) ‘The Smithsons on Housing’, BBC2 documentary, by BS Johnson, 1970, quoted in Alan Powers (ed), Robin Hood Gardens: Re-Visions, Twentieth Century Society, 2011.

(2) Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘Robin Hood Lane – A Housing Scheme for the GLC’ in Ordinariness and Light, 1970

(3) From ‘The Smithsons on Housing’ as is the quotation which follows.

(4) Quoted in ‘Robin Hood Gardens, London E14’, Architectural Design, September 1972

(5) Quoted in Hermione Hobhouse (General Editor), Survey of London: volumes 43 and 44: Poplar, Blackwall and Isle of Dogs, 1994

(6) Valerie Grove, Sunday Times, 7 June 1987, cited in Graham Stewart, Robin Hood Gardens  Blackwall Reach, ND

(7) Charles Jencks, The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Post-Modernism, 2002

(8) John Furse, The Smithsons at Robin Hood, University of Sussex PhD, 1982

I’m very grateful to Soraya Smithson and the Smithson Family Collection for allowing me to reproduce Sandra Lousada’s evocative pictures of the estate.

The Park Hill Estate, Sheffield: ‘Streets in the sky’

Tags

1950s, 1960s, Brutalism, Multi-storey

You either like or loathe the Park Hill flats. For one thing, they’re hard to ignore – if you arrive by train, you’ll see them immediately, lowering above the steep hill just behind the station. Then there’s their Brutalist look. It’s an ugly term but by strict dictionary definition – a stark style of functionalist architecture characterised by the use of steel and concrete in massive blocks – Park Hill conforms exactly.

© Wikimedia Commons

For all that, much of the Park Hill story is familiar: desperate need, high ambition, official acclaim, sorry decline – from hero to zero like many of the social housing developments we’ve looked at. But Park Hill’s story deserves a closer look and some revision.

The area of Park Hill was: (1)

a close-packed mass of insanitary back-to-back slums and other unfit housing…mingled with outworn, industrial buildings and begrimed with the smoke of the railway and city centre.

Much of the housing had been condemned as unfit for human habitation before the Second World War and slum clearance attempts had begun. But after the war, the City Council decided a bigger and bolder solution was needed. Their model was to be le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation development in Marseilles, completed in 1952.

Sheffield’s own version of these ‘streets in the sky’ was designed by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith under the guidance of J Lewis Womersley, Sheffield’s City Architect. Construction began in 1957 and was completed in 1961.  The estate was officially opened in June that year by Hugh Gaitskell, Labour Leader of the Opposition.

© Copyright Dave Hudson, licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

There were 996 flats, housing around 3000 people, (2):

so planned as to give each household privacy and quiet despite the essentially communal nature of the project. . . Each dwelling, irrespective of size, is provided with a large sheltered balcony where small children can play in the open air, where a pram can be put out and on which an occasional meal can be taken.

The flats fronted on to the 3 metre-wide street decks which are one of the best-known features of the estate, wide enough for a milk float and friendly enough to allow easy socialising with neighbours.

Externally, the blocks harnessed the steeply sloping site, maintaining a flat roof line but ranging from four storeys high at the top of Park Hill to 13 at the lower end.

The 32 acre site also contained four pubs, 42 shops (including ‘the best fish and chip shop in Sheffield’ according to many), a community centre, social clubs, a health centre, dentists and nursery and primary schools. Grenville Squires – a caretaker on the estate for 26 years, one of a team of twelve – says it ‘was like a medieval village; you didn’t have to leave.’ (3)

And far more than many other developments, there were strong attempts to maintain and develop a community feel. Those decks were ‘allegedly the product of close study of working-class life by [the architects] who sought to reproduce the safe and sociable streets of yore without the danger and din of traffic’. (4) Old neighbours were housed next to each other, former street names were re-used, even the cobbles of the terraced streets were used to pave the pathways down to the station and city centre. 

Municipalism’s vocabulary rarely soars. Alderman DW Gascoigne, Public Works Committee deputy chair and leader of the City Council, stated simply: ‘A squalid area has been transformed into an area where human beings can live in dignity.’ (5)

Less than forty years later, ‘dignity’ was the last word that many would have associated with Park Hill. Concrete fared less well in the colder, wetter climate of Yorkshire than in Marseilles. People complained about the lifts not working and problems with noise. The Garchey refuse disposal system – ‘from sink to incinerator’ – broke down frequently and certainly couldn’t cope with disposable nappies.

© Wikimedia Commons

More significantly, the estate had acquired an evil reputation – those ‘streets in the sky’ were now said to be the perfect getaway route for local muggers. The estate was seen as ugly and criminal – ‘a cloud of bad breath hanging over Sheffield’ and a terrible symbol of the city for those visitors by rail.

Brutalism never seemed better named and had the flats not been controversially Grade II* listed in 1998 they would perhaps have been demolished.

Park Hill was taken by many to be another nail in the coffin of social housing and its grander architectural ambitions.

Let’s examine this view. Firstly, the simple but too often forgotten point needs to be made that it represented far better housing than any the vast majority of its tenants had ever known (6):

It was luxury. Me, my husband and our baby were living in a back-to-back. My parents were there, too, and my brother. We had no bathroom, just a tin bath on the back of the door. So when we got here it was marvellous. Three bedrooms, hot water, always warm. And the view. It’s lovely, especially at night, when it’s all lit up.

Then there’s the possibly apocryphal remark that is often quoted of one satisfied resident: ‘You think I live in council housing.  I’ve got a penthouse.'(7)

© Wikimedia Commons

Secondly, nearly all speak of a tight-knit and supportive community. Often these views held even as Park Hill was being designated the Sheffield badlands (8):

Everybody seemed to get on with their neighbours and there was a strong bond between families and the friends I made there I regarded as friends for life.

I lived there most of my life. No one who didn’t live there, can say anything bad about it at all. We all stuck together and looked after each other and felt safe.

Such comments are readily dismissed as rosy-hued nostalgia. But shouldn’t the views of actual residents be privileged over the urban myth and moral panic of much of what passes for social commentary in relation to working-class communities – from Victorian times to the present?

More objectively, the estate’s resident sociologist – there really was one – reported outstanding success and ‘an exceptionally vigorous tenants’ association’ in the estate’s early years.

But the fact of later decline is undeniable. What changed?

© Wikimedia Commons

We can blame the council (or, more sympathetically, the tightness of local authority budgets) for poor maintenance.

Some tenants also blame the council for its allocations policy: ‘They gave anyone who wanted one a flat’; ‘problem people’ were concentrated in the estate rather than being ‘spread around the council housing stock’.

With greater distance, maybe we see here the impact of the political and economic whirlwind that ravaged Sheffield in the 1980s – and the reasons why Mrs Thatcher’s demise may be less lamented in Sheffield than elsewhere.

Labour’s well-meaning 1977 Homeless Persons Act placed strict duties on local councils to house some of society’s most vulnerable people. But it was followed by Mrs Thatcher’s Right to Buy and virtual ban on the building of new council housing.

Then came the decimation of the local economy. A sixth of the local workforce – some 40,000 people – lost their jobs as the local steel industry collapsed. Unemployment in the city as a whole reached 15 per cent in 1984.

One resident recalls Park Hill as ‘a marvellous place to live’ into the late 70s, a time when ‘everybody seemed to work…a thriving community’. The contrast is obvious.

So let’s not blame the design. Ivor Smith, one of the original architects, rejects the label ‘Brutalist’ (or, at least, its connotations): ‘We didn’t think we were Brutalists. We thought we were quite nice guys’. Asked if he would have done anything differently, he said the flats should have had windows onto the decks – ‘a street has windows at street level’ – but cost-saving at the time had ruled this out. (9)

And let’s not condemn those practical dreamers who believed in society’s duty to house all its people well and built housing on a massive scale to do it.

The Park Hill story is not finished. In 2003, the Council outlined a new vision for the estate as a ‘vibrant, mixed tenure estate with owner occupation, rented and affordable for sale properties with high quality retail and commercial premises’. Park Hill, they hoped, would become ‘a fashionable city centre address’.(10) Urban Splash were appointed developers in the following year.

At this point, alarm bells may be ringing. A process of gentrification, involving the further marginalisation of social housing, is plain. The Council has stipulated that one third of the 900 new flats will be ‘affordable’ but, of these, two-thirds – just 200 – will be for social rent. The price of the flats for sale is generally higher than former residents can afford.

Could things have been done differently? I’m not close enough to know and it’s obvious that we live in a very different world – for good and ill – than the one inhabited and imagined by those earlier municipal reformers. It is private money and privatised aspirations that are creating the new Park Hill.

Old and new: refurbished flats to the right © Keith Pitchforth, licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

Urban Splash are good self-publicists and there is certainly a buzz around Park Hill and a flair in its refurbishment that will provide the estate with a new lease of life.

But I’ll leave the final word to someone who loved the estate in its former heyday, Grenville Squires (11):

She’s lovely. She’s my mistress, the only lady who’s fetched me from the marital bed at two in the morning and made demands. She has come on hard times, but all she’s got to do is wash her face and put on a new dress and she will be fine.

Sources:

(1) ‘Sheffield Replanned’, 1945, quoted in The Open University, Park Hill, Sheffield: continuity and change.

(2) JL Womersley, City Architect, 1955, quoted in The Open University, Park Hill, Sheffield: continuity and change.

(3) Quoted in Rachel Cooke, ‘How I leant to love the streets in the sky‘, The Observer, 23 November 2008.

(4) Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture. The History of a Social Experiment (2001)

(5) Quoted in The Open University, Park Hill, Sheffield: continuity and change.

(6) Quoted in Rachel Cooke, ‘How I leant to love the streets in the sky‘, The Observer, 23 November 2008.

(7) Quoted in BBC South Yorkshire, Park Hill, 2007, as are most of the following quotes from tenants.

(8) Quoted in Rowan Moore, ‘Park Hill estate, Sheffield – review‘, The Observer, 21 August 2011.

(9) Quoted in Rachel Cooke, ‘How I leant to love the streets in the sky‘, The Observer, 23 November 2008.

(10) Sheffield City Council, Park Hill, 2003.

(11) Quoted in The Open University, Park Hill, Sheffield: continuity and change.

Owen Hatherley provides a very critical perspective on Park Hill’s renovation in ‘Regeneration?: what’s happening in Park Hill is class cleansing‘, The Guardian, 28 September 2011.

Edward Platt, ‘Multi-million-pound make-over for Sheffield’s notorious Park Hill Estate‘, The Daily Telegraph, 21 September 2012, is more positive.

There are good blog postings on Park Hill.  Single Aspect‘s blog on social housing is well worth following and has an entry on Urban Splash’s renovation. Sid Fletcher writes with passion on Park Hill in a guest post on Wondrous Places. The Wookie has images of Park Hill shortly before the renovation.

Urban Splash have a large site on their Park Hill project with some background information – and full details of properties for sale if you’re interested.