Post-War Housing in Hackney: ‘Far removed from the pre-war conception of “council flats”‘

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1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Gibberd, Hackney, Multi-storey

The drive towards high-rise housing which began in the late 1950s is often crudely represented as evidence of the inhumanity of architects and planners and the megalomania of their local authority enablers. Leaving aside, for the time being, the question of just how misguided this trend was, the reasons for it were far more complex. A single borough can tell much of the story.

In 1948, Hackney Metropolitan Borough Council declared it would build no new housing above three storeys in height and, true to its word, in the early 1950s it built some of the most celebrated low-rise housing in the country.  Yet by the middle of the decade it was approving fifteen-storey tower blocks. What happened?

The more limited ambitions of pre-war construction provide a prologue. The Council had completed 2147 council homes by 1940, over two-thirds built in the previous five years as the drive to clear the slums and alleviate overcrowding took off.  These were overwhelmingly the five-storey tenement blocks of a form, with minor variations, ubiquitous across the capital.

Banister House

Shacklewell House

The 160-flat Banister House in Homerton, designed by Hackney’s preferred architects, Messrs Josephs, was opened in 1935; the three block Shacklewell House, six storeys with its mansard roof, the year after. Similar blocks followed – Nisbet House in Homerton and Hindle House in Shacklewell – and the Council received special dispensation to complete Wren’s Park House and Wigan House, in Clapton, during the War in 1940.  These are all solid homes but only Wren’s Park House (another Josephs design), with the Moderne balconies then in vogue, might claim any architectural distinction. (1)

Wren’s Park House

Much of this work of reconstruction was nullified by the War; around 4000 Hackney homes were destroyed by enemy action, a further 3180 severely damaged. Understandably in 1945, as Henry Goodrich, the Council’s Labour leader, stated, ‘the people of this country were looking more anxiously at the housing question than anything else connected with post-war plans’. (2)

To cope with the immediate crisis, the Council erected 450 prefab Uni-Seco bungalows and requisitioned empty properties across the Borough – 3800 by 1950. (3)  But the Borough’s ambition to build lastingly and better in the post-war era was shown when it asked RIBA to suggest six practices to undertake its housing design work.  In the event, the star names, Frederick Gibberd and Graham Dawbarn, figures of national significance in post-war public housing, weren’t on this original list but came from onward recommendation.

Mayfield Close

Hackney’s first post-war housing was completed in Mayfield Close in Dalston in 1947 – brick-built blocks, three-storeys high as the Council had prescribed.  But circumstances and fashion determined more imaginative solutions.  In 1948, the housing waiting list stood at 12,157.  A breakdown of applicants showed that one third required only one bedroom. (4)

The reality of diverse needs and the aspiration to build mixed communities was one incentive to move beyond the uniform two- and three-bed homes which had dominated council house-building to date.  Another was the opportunity provided to design more architecturally interesting and visually appealing schemes. Gibberd was clear that ‘buildings with quite different formal qualities such as blocks of flats, maisonettes and bungalows are needed to provide “contrast” and “variety” in the “composition” of an area’. (5)

Somerford Grove: early images of top-left and clockwise block of flats and terraced of flatted houses, old people’s bungalows, flats and houses and terraced two-storey houses

The result would be, in the words of GL Downing, Hackney’s Borough Surveyor:

more interesting and open lay-outs…and, with attention paid to landscape gardening, schemes far removed from the general pre-war conception of ‘council flats’.

This ‘mixed development’ ideal came to fine fruition in Gibberd’s Somerford Grove Estate, completed in 1949.  It was based, firstly, on what he called the ‘precinctual theory’.  The area’s through road was closed and replaced by a series of interconnected squares ‘throughout which the pedestrian receives priority’.  It was elaborated in a ‘series of closes, each with its own character’.  But it rested on a range of building types to meet a diverse community’s varied needs: three-storey blocks of two- and three-bed flats, single bed and bedsitter flats, two-storey blocks of two-bedded flatted houses with small private gardens, two-storey three-bed terraced houses and private gardens, and a terrace of single-storey bungalows for the elderly. (6)

Somerford Grove: contemporary view

In terms of design, additional variety and warmth was provided by the use of a range of surface treatments: in Gibberd’s description, pale pink and putty coloured walls for the flatted houses, alternating warm brick and rendered walls on the terraced houses, dark red and blue bricks for the old people’s housing.

Somerford Grove: contemporary view

This was the so-called New Humanism, taking its inspiration from Scandinavian social housing and reflecting too the model provided by the showpiece Festival of Britain Lansbury Estate on which Gibberd had also worked.  It’s unsurprising, then, that the Somerford Grove Estate received an Award for Merit from the Festival of Britain’s architectural committee.

It was all, according to The Times, ‘encouraging proof that even dense housing need not be inhuman’. (7)

Graham Dawbarn had also worked on the Lansbury Estate.   On Sandringham Road, the Housing Committee accepted his arguments that taller housing would be occupied by households without children and would add interest to the overall design.  It allowed a fourth storey but this was not yet the thin end of the wedge.  The three-storey maximum was reasserted at Norman and Dawbarn’s Wilton Estate.  This also showed characteristic Scandinavian and Festival of Britain features, notably in its cantilevered cast concrete projecting balconies, coloured facing panels and careful landscaping. (8)

Wilton Estate

All this seems to make Hackney’s rapid and comprehensive embrace of high-rise  all the more surprising and yet, in reality, the pressures and incentives to do so were very considerable.

As RIBA’s 1955 symposium on tall flats had concluded: (9)

the high cost of land, the encroachment of buildings on agricultural land and – too often – the featureless spread of housing estates beyond the confines of their cities are compelling a growing number of authorities to consider the contribution that the building of high flats can make to their housing and reconstruction programme.

Five years later, Hackney itself drew attention to the ‘lack of building sites and the ever increasing cost of site purchase [which] left the Council with no alternative but to build higher’.

Many other factors came into play too, particularly the rising number of households and the increase in smaller households – a function of both increased life expectancy and rising divorce rates.  Slum clearance (reducing density), higher space standards and improved community facilities on council estates, and land zoning also reduced the area available for building.  All this at a time when the private rented sector was in serious decline.  The 1956 Housing Subsidies Act – which offered higher subsidies the higher councils built – was therefore both cause and consequence of the drive towards high-rise housing.

The Beckers: eleven-story point block

The Beckers: four-storey maisonettes with community hall and tower to rear

In Hackney, an influx of younger councillors, replacing a more traditionalist ‘old guard’ in 1953, eased the transition.  Gibberd’s design for The Beckers on Rectory Road, which included two eleven-storey tower blocks of one-bed flats and bedsitters, was approved in mid-1955.  In other respects, it remained true to mixed development ideals with its low-rise block of two-bed flats and terrace of three-bed houses. That Scandi influence remains too, seen here in the landscaping and external treatments of coloured panelling and cream rendering.  (10)

The Beckers: elevation and plan

The Trelawney Estate on Paragon Road in central Hackney, designed with less architectural finesse by Ernest Joseph and including two fifteen-storey towers, was approved later that year as a direct result of the subsidies legislation then going through parliament.  Unexpected costs had made the impending subsidy regime more attractive and overcame the Housing Committee’s initial preference for lower blocks. Most of this large estate was completed in the early 1960s.

A Halesowen councillor who viewed the estate thought the scheme ‘made his own authority, which thought it was progressive, look like a snail which had lost its way’. (11) His words capture the more intangible dynamics which would also fuel the sixties’ drive to high-rise – the desire to impress, emulate or surpass.

Trelawney Estate

By January 1961, Hackney had built 4000 homes since the war – an achievement marked in the official opening of the Morland and Fields Estates to the west of London Fields. By now, one third of Hackney schemes were being designed in-house; this last by the Borough’s Chief Assistant Architect, RH Harrison. In another sign of confident municipalism, two-thirds of the Borough’s housing was now constructed by the Council’s direct labour department. (12)

The Morland Estate: gardens and community hall, twelve-storey tower to rear

The Morland Estate: maisonette block

Hackney, then, had come a long way from the modest yet exacting vision of council housing it had laid out in 1945 but it’s hard to see any great betrayal in the shift towards increased size and height that had occurred by the early 1960s. The desire to house the people well was consistent but, in the end, the very scale of that ambition, alongside the practical and financial pressures which have always shaped council housing fashions, seemed to compel high-rise solutions.  The new Borough of Hackney (incorporating Shoreditch and Stoke Newington), created in 1965, would build far more tower blocks and would, latterly, demolish many but that is another story.

Note

I’ve added additional images of Somerford Grove, the Wilton Estate and The Beckers to my Tumblr account.

Sources

(1) More details on slum clearance and rebuilding can be found in the volumes of the Survey of London: Hackney: Homerton and Hackney Wick, Hackney: Shacklewell, and Hackney: Clapton.

(2) Quoted in Michael Passmore, ‘From High Hopes to Tall Flats: The Changing Shape of Hackney’s Housing 1945-1960’, Hackney History, vol 15, 2009

(3) The Metropolitan Borough of Hackney Official Guide, 1950

(4) George LA Downing, Borough Engineer and Surveyor and Director of Housing Development, Metropolitan Borough of Hackney, ‘Some Aspects of Housing in a Metropolitan Borough’, The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, September 1949; vol. 69, no. 5

(5) Quoted in Harriet Atkinson and Mary Banham, The Festival of Britain: A Land and Its People (2012)

(6) Frederick Gibberd, ‘Housing at Hackney’, Architectural Review, vol 106, No 633, September 1949

(7) ‘Mixed Housing at Hackney’, The Times, September 6, 1949

(8) Love Local Landmarks: Hackney’s Locally Listed Buildings, 1-99 Wilton Estate, Lansdowne Drive, E8

(9) This, the following quotation and the analysis which follows are drawn from Peter Foynes, ‘The Rise of High-Rise: Post-war Housing in Hackney’, Hackney History, vol 1, 1995

(10) FRS Yorke and Frederick Gibberd, Modern Flats, The Architectural Press, London (1958)

(11) Quoted in Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block – Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (1994)

(12) Metropolitan Borough of Hackney, ‘The Official Opening of the 4000th Post-War Dwelling, Morland Estate, Lansdowne Drive, 21 January 1961’ (Hackney Archives)

 

 

Hackney Town Hall: ‘that great dignified centre of civic life’

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1930s, Hackney, Town Halls

When Hackney’s mayor spoke at the opening of the new Town Hall in July 1937, he expressed the hope that ‘the citizens of Hackney would look with pride and pleasure upon that great dignified centre of civic life’.  (1)

To be honest, it’s not likely that they always did – ‘dignity’ is not a word that readily characterises the storm and stress of some of the borough’s later politics.  But the Town Hall itself has stood as a worthy monument to the ideals of local government.

Time was when Hackney was a rather genteel village well beyond the grit and grime of the growing city but those days ended with the coming of the railway in 1850. When Mare Street was widened and as the tramways arrived in 1872, Hackney became an industrial and increasingly working-class suburb of London.

The 1866 Town Hall from the Illustrated London News, October 13 1866

A complicated mix of vestries and ad hoc bodies governed the area until 1900. The first Town Hall, built in 1802, was replaced by a grander building in 1866 ‘of the French-Italian style of architecture, effectively treated in Portland stone’. (2)

This was ‘a modern structure…a striking contrast to many of the quaint old buildings which surround it’ but it was, apparently, soon found wanting. (3)  And the more so as Hackney Metropolitan Borough Council was established in 1900 and as local government’s functions grew.

The new Council remained under Conservative control until – in that year of Labour triumph at the height of post-war discontent – Labour took control in 1919. But the Party lost every seat in the succeeding elections of 1922.

Thus it was a Conservative council which launched an architectural competition for a new town hall in 1934.  The winners were Henry Lanchester and Thomas Lodge with a design – ‘conventional but not showy’ according to Pevsner – which cost £99,870:  an Art Deco building of four storeys faced with Portland stone. (4)

Demolition of the old Town Hall and construction of the new, mid 1930s. Courtesy of Hackney Archives.

The old Town Hall was demolished and civic gardens and a war memorial constructed in front of the the new building.  That contained, traditionally, a grand entrance hall and staircase leading to that heart of local democracy, the Council Chamber.

The Council Chamber, Open House London 2013

Ground floor offices contained the sinews of local government – the offices of the Borough Engineer, Medical Officer of Health, Borough Treasurer and the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages.

Hackney Town Hall interior. Courtesy of Hackney Archives

A second floor contained the Mayor’s Parlour and the offices of the Town Clerk.  Modernity was trumpeted in the electrical thermal storage system and ventilation provided by electrically driven fans.  There were even synchronised electronic clocks. (5)

The Assembly Hall, Open House London 2013

Perhaps more impressive to the ordinary public was the new Assembly Hall built to the rear of the building, capable of seating 600 but with provision to be divided into three sections for a variety of other uses.

Assembly Hall bar, Open House London 2013

Corridor entrance to Assembly Hall, Open House London 2013

What remain outstanding are the Art Deco décor and fittings.  Now fully restored, it is a beautiful building.  And one that did bestow a dignity and grandeur to its civic role.

This was certainly the ideal of those city fathers (mainly fathers) who inaugurated the building in 1937.  Ironically perhaps, this was now – and would remain – a Labour council. Labour had swept to power in Hackney in 1934.  They maintained control until the abolition of the old Metropolitan Borough in 1965 with a near or absolute monopoly of seats for most of the period.

The opening ceremony. July 1937 with the mayor, Alderman Butler, to the left of centre and Lord Snell to the right. Courtesy of Hackney Archives

Thus it was that a Labour mayor, Alderman Herbert W Butler, and the then Labour Leader in the House of Lords, Lord Snell – born Harry Snell, the son of agricultural workers – presided over events on that July day.

Snell was an ethical socialist and the full flavour of that now largely forgotten politics is conveyed in his opening address.  This was a building ‘devoted to the business of living one with another to the benefit of all’. It: (6)

represented something more than mere stone and wood put together; it embodied the ideal of social living which they would have to keep going.  It was not the property of the Mayor and the Corporation; it was the property of the people of Hackney. It was for their use and to serve their needs, and what it did would react upon every home in every street in the borough. It was a symbol of their idealism and a focal point for the services of their great borough, and he hoped they would find in it an atmosphere of quiet dignity, purity of administration and of love for the purpose to which it was devoted.

A 32-year old Herbert Morrison, Mayor of Hackney

At this time, Hackney’s politics might be best personified by Herbert Morrison.  Morrison had been a Labour mayor of Hackney in 1920 in that earlier phase of Labour rule.  He was now Labour leader of the London County Council but his brand of Labourism – ethical roots and bureaucratic leanings – lived on.

This politics survived and thrived in Hackney after 1945.  But, for all its qualities and genuine pedigree, it became in its time a rather ‘Establishment’ politics focused on the bastions of old-style Labour representation – on the council, in the unions and in the tenants’ associations.

Meanwhile, Hackney – and the wider world – was changing.  By the eighties, the enlarged Borough was one-third ethnic minority (that proportion is now nearer two-thirds).  Women were another ‘minority’ who – in this new world – were not a part of old Labour’s ‘natural constituency’.  And a new generation of university-educated, Marxist-influenced politicians emerged whose socialism branded old Labour as conservative, even privileged.

A New Left politics developed which properly focused on local issues of race and gender and advanced forms of ‘community development’ and decentralisation which challenged the structures of old Labour power. Its representatives took power in Hackney in 1982.

The vital question, of course was could they also deliver the bread and butter services vital to all sections of the community and which remained the staple of local government’s role as  identified by Harry Snell fifty years earlier.

That’s as sympathetic a portrayal of the splits which ravaged Hackney’s local Labour politics in the eighties and nineties as I can come up with and, of course, it’s hugely simplified.

In headline terms, these splits were played out over rate-capping and the initial refusal of Hackney’s New Left to set a rate in 1985.  The Council backed down after the Labour Group split almost fifty-fifty on the issue.  They were seen, more discreditably, in later conflicts over personnel, policies and priorities in succeeding years. (7)

Luckily, this isn’t a blog about the intricacies of recent Labour politics.  Suffice to say, a more stable, less ideologically-coloured Labour politics grew after 1997.  Whether Harry Snell was turning in his grave in the meantime, you can judge.

Back to the Town Hall and back to local government and its more traditional functions.  The Council’s new Service Centre – designed by Hopkins Architects Partnership, built at a cost of £43,733,000 and winner of a 2011 RIBA Award for architectural excellence – was opened in March 2010.

The Hackney Service Centre on Hillman Street, opened 2010

Its 15,000 square metres, arranged over five floors, house the Council’s administrative staff but, more strikingly, it acts – in the massive atrium containing the Council’s one-stop shop and public reception – as an innovative ‘focal point for the services’ of the Borough that Harry Snell might be proud of.

Sources

(1) Quoted in ‘Hackney’s New Town Hall’, Hackney Gazette, July 5 1937

(2) ‘The New Townhall, Hackney’, Illustrated London News, October 13 1866

(3) Edward Walford, Old and New London: Volume 5, 1878

(4) Elizabeth Robinson, Twentieth Century Buildings in Hackney, Hackney Society, 1999.  Full architectural details of the Grade II listed building are provided in the English Heritage listing.

(5) Metropolitan Borough of Hackney, Programme of the Opening Ceremony of the New Town Hall, 3 July 1937

(6) Quoted in ‘Hackney’s New Town Hall’, Hackney Gazette, July 5 1937

(7) For a highly critical review of these politics, see David Walker and Rebecca Smithers, ‘Borough of hate and hit squads’, The Guardian, March 19, 1999

Especial thanks to the helpful staff of Hackney Archives for access to primary sources mentioned above and for permission to use the images noted above.

All reasonable efforts have been made to ascertain the copyright situation with these photographs and documents, but please contact Hackney Archives with any queries or further information.

Woodberry Down, Hackney: ‘the Estate of the Future’

Tags

1940s, 1950s, Hackney, LCC, Multi-storey, Regeneration

Residents of Woodberry Park can transport themselves to the epicentre of Europe’s fashion and food delights. An endless array of couture boutiques and exquisite dining awaits.

The Berkeley’s Homes website for ‘Woodberry Park’ is almost a parody of what used to be called ‘yuppification’.(1)  The chief selling point of this near East End location appears to be that it’s just 16 minutes away from the West End.

Earlier residents of the original Woodberry Down Estate in Hackney felt differently. One new tenant of Toxteth House in 1950 – she had been living in one room with her husband and two children, a third on its way – describes moving in: (2)

Up the stairs we ran, soon found number 9. The excitement of opening the front door, our own, finding a nice living room, large bedroom with fitted wardrobe and fitted chest of drawers, smaller bedroom and a bathroom with a green suite, separate toilet,  a lovely kitchenette full of cupboards and shining stainless steel sink and draining board.  What more could we want? We felt like King and Queen.

Back in the 1950s, Woodberry Down was heralded as ‘the estate of the future’.  It’s seen some tough times since then but, in a strange way, that claim rings true once more.  It’s just a very different future.

Its story begins in two events – in the drive towards slum clearance marked by Arthur Greenwood’s 1930 Housing Act and the election, in 1934, of a Labour majority on the London County Council under the leadership of Herbert Morrison.  The new council was ambitious to build and it soon noticed: (3)

a site about 64 acres in extent to the north and south of Seven Sisters Road…suitable for redevelopment  on a larger scale as a housing estate…close to the large public open spaces of Finsbury Park and Clissold Park, and served by excellent tramway, omnibus and tube railway routes.

The land was owned by the Church Commissioners, the LCC was armed with powers of compulsory purchase.  In the event, the Church Commissioners pleased their conscience and their purse by selling – to the consternation of a small but well-off local population.

Contemporary map of the site

The local newspaper’s headline ‘£1,000,000 Slum Dwellers’ Paradise’ – not intended as a friendly welcome – indicates the views of its readership.   On their behalf, it went on to state: (4)

Morrison has driven them out of London. They can find no homes to suit them under the area under his rule. In their place come people who will make Morrison even more secure in his County Hall office.

Some felt the area was going to the dogs in any case, literally so as Harringay greyhound stadium had opened nearby in 1928.

Planning of the new estate began immediately.  LCC councillors made the European tour of the day, visiting some of the grander continental public housing schemes.  They had concluded, in any case, that another cottage estate – such as those built at Becontree or Downham – would not suffice to house those who would be displaced by planned slum clearance.

Hufeisensiedlung, Berlin

EP Wheeler presented the first scheme, influenced by the Quarry Hill estate in Leeds, Vienna’s Karl Marxhof and Bruno Taut’s Hufeisensiedlung in Berlin, in July 1938.  It envisaged 1660 dwellings, in two to five storey blocks linked in a horseshoe shape, for a population of some 8000.

This visionary plan would not materialise. Legal action and compensation negotiations delayed its start and war halted further action.  Typically, however, as victory came closer, thoughts turned again to the new world that would emerge from the destruction of war.

In 1943 JH Forshaw – the co-author with Patrick Abercrombie of the County of London Plan of the same year – submitted a radically different scheme, one based (this is for the architectural historians out there) on the German Zeilenbau principle of aligned tall blocks set in parallel.

The five storey and eight storey blocks would run north-south ‘so that all rooms receive the benefit of sunlight at some time during the day’.  With the addition of some two-storey houses and maisonettes, 1790 dwellings would be provided in all.

Land was also set aside for schools, a community centre, library, an old people’s home, health clinic and shops ‘together with a site for licensed premises’.   This all very much reflected the ‘neighbourhood’ ideals of the day – an example of the ‘mixed development’ foretold in the London County Plan.

The first tenders were accepted in July 1946 and the first residents moved in just two years later.  The earliest completed homes were the eight-storey Nicholl, Needwood, Ashdale and Burtonwood blocks, considered innovative for their use of lifts and reinforced concrete (from recycled air raid shelters).

There was a conscious attempt to give expression to contemporary architectural ambition here with the cantilevered balconies and deep eaves and the whole was finished – an indication of Viennese influence – in a cream and light blue finish described as Tyrolean Roughcast.  The later five-storey blocks followed a more conventional balcony access model.(5)

In fact, professional opinion was generally unimpressed.  One critic asserted the ‘layouts dull, architecture unimaginative, and detailing coarse’.(6)

The new residents, naturally, were more concerned with comfort and convenience than architectural controversy but they were generally positive.  Very often, of course, they were moving from conditions which seem almost unimaginable today.

The flats seemed wonderful when we first moved in.  I thought mine was marvellous compared to the conditions I was living in before…we had a couple of basement rooms.

Not that such sentiments were universal.  Another incomer to Dean House ‘hated it’:

I walked in and all I saw was the distempered walls and I thought ‘Oh my God, what have we come to?’  And it was high up. I was terrified.

Still, the estate grew – by 1953 there were 6500 people living on the estate in 1796 homes – and a community developed.   These first residents were ‘chosen people’, vetted for need and for ability to pay.  Rents ranged from 14/6 (72.5p) for a one-bed flat to 51/10 (£2.59) for a centrally-heated five room flat and were collected weekly by the council rent collector.

And they were expected to behave respectably and obey the rules – no washing to be hung out, no pets, no subletting, no alterations, no floor coverings within one foot of any wall within the first 12 months…

The authority was the authority. The caretakers and the porters were the representatives of the authority, therefore you did what they told you to.

But this wasn’t a one-way street. The tenants’ committee had over a thousand members in the early 1950s and ‘Woodberry Down tenants were well known at County Hall as determined and hard bargainers for their estate’.  In 1956, after two years’ of campaigning, the LCC agreed to build eight children’s playgrounds.  The committee was finally provided with a club room in 1959.

In these years, the Estate was a showpiece – the ‘Estate of the Future’ as one newspaper proclaimed in 1953 – much visited by dignitaries and housing professionals, eager to learn the lessons of this grandiose scheme of community development. (7) The health centre – a model for the new NHS – opened in 1952 and Woodberry Down School – the first purpose-built comprehensive in the country – opened in 1955. The final housing – Rowley Gardens – was completed in the seventies.

The Seven Sisters Road, Woodberry Down, and the last trolleybus, November 1959

Such, such were the dreams.  But by the 1980s (if you’ve been following this blog, that’s a familiar phrase) times had changed.

Crime – or fear of crime – had risen.  Hackney boasted of being ‘Britain’s poorest borough’   The Estate felt and looked tired.  Residents complained of neglect and lamented the loss of those caretakers and rent collectors – ‘they kept an eye on things, saw the estate was tidy and got jobs done quickly’.  Now it took months to get something fixed.

Older residents missed their children who had moved away from the Estate:  ‘The youngsters, they don’t want our flats. They’re not up-to-date enough for them’.

By 2002 that was official. Two years earlier the Labour government had set out its Decent Homes Standard for public sector housing.  Woodberry Down didn’t meet it. Hackney Council’s Structural Evaluation Report on the Estate concluded that 31 out of 57 blocks on the estate were ‘beyond economic repair’ with wide-ranging problems including subsidence, damp, faulty drainage, poor insulation, asbestos and lack of disabled access and lifts.(8)

The regeneration strategy shifted from upgrade to rebuild.  The 1980 council or former council homes on the estate would be demolished and 4644 new homes constructed.  The 1458 socially rented homes would be ‘reprovided’ but an additional 2700 homes would be built by private developers for sale.  The tenure mix of the Estate would shift from 67 per cent socially rented to 34 per cent socially rented, 65 per cent privately owned.

The developer’s dream

This made the scheme self-financing.  The developers – Berkeley Homes – were guaranteed a 21 per cent profit in the deal agreed with the Council. This has been described by critics as ‘state sponsored gentrification’, even ‘social cleansing’.(9)

A three-bedroom flat in Woodberry Park sells for £885,000.  For a cool £1m you’ll get a roof terrace too. It’s said most of the flats have been sold to foreign investors buying to rent and then sell at profit.

Woodberry Park and the 27 storey Residence tower, photographed this year

That’s the critical view.  In defence of the Council, it can be said they had little option in financial terms – public funding for large-scale council housing development was simply not available.  Moreover, the actual council housing stock was not diminished and the proportion of ‘affordable’ homes was – at 41 per cent – relatively high.

The Council has also pursued an extensive consultation programme with existing residents, evidenced in the focus groups, workshops, road shows and lots of newsletters.

It can’t be said that all existing residents – particularly the 522 leaseholders who had bought their council homes who stand to lose financially – are happy.  To be fair, this likely reflects frustration from delays in the programme and the disruption it’s caused more than opposition to the scheme as such.  (I’ve provided a highly edited version of what has been a very tortuous process here.)

So, welcome to the brave new world of social housing.  Once our dreams were collective and, if the former Woodberry Estate never quite lived up to the hype, it represented, at least, an earnest and shared ambition to build high-quality housing and real community for ordinary people.  Will the new estate do that?

Sources

(1) Berkeley Homes, Woodberry Park website, ‘Couture and Cuisine’

(2) This and later quotations from residents are taken from Woodberry Down Memories. The History of an LCC Housing Estate, 1989

(3) Quoted in Woodberry Down Memories

(4) North London Recorder, 25 November 1938 quoted in Woodberry Down Memories

(5) Most of the architectural descriptions are taken from London Borough of Hackney, Yellow Book: London – Hackney, The Woodberry Down Estate, 2001

(6) Quoted in the Hackney Society, Twentieth Century Buildings in Hackney, 1999

(7) The Star, 17 November 1953 quoted in Woodberry Down Memories

(8) Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research, Woodberry Down Case Study Baseline Report, ND

(9) Koos Couvée, ‘Woodberry Down in Hackney: How ‘Regeneration’ is tearing up another East London Community’, TMPonline

There’s a lot else to read about Woodberry Down regeneration online including the 2007 Masterplan.