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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The remains of Lubetkin’s trompe l’loeil

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

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

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

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

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

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

Others too have very positive memories: (9)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(11) Lubetkin quoted in John Allan, Berthold Lubetkin

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

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The Spa Green Estate, Finsbury: ‘an outstanding advance in municipal housing…one of the showpieces of London’

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1940s, Finsbury, Lubetkin, Multi-storey

The Survey of London, not prone to hyperbole, describes the Spa Green Estate as ‘heroic’. Nikolaus Pevsner called it ‘the most innovative public housing’ of its time. English Heritage listed it Grade II* in 1998.

And you can see for yourself – it’s south of the Angel, just by Sadler’s Wells – that the estate looks good, achieving something very rare, being both impressive and intimate. The engineering and design are first-class and it’s a good place to live. That’s a rarer combination than it might be.

Tunbridge House and St John Street to fore

We’re back in Finsbury – one of London’s smallest boroughs before the war but, politically, one of its most ambitious. That ambition is best seen in the council’s partnership with the architect Berthold Lubetkin and his Tecton Group firstly in the famous Finsbury Health Centre and then in the Spa Green Estate.

Berthold Lubetkin

Lubetkin was a constructivist. It’s an ugly term for a rather beautiful concept – the ‘artist engineer’ who believes in the power of technology and design to transform and improve people’s lives. The Labour council of Finsbury – in the third most overcrowded borough in London – wanted more prosaically to clear slums and build decent homes for its people.  But it set high standards.

Slum housing in the area now occupied by the estate had been scheduled for demolition in 1936 and Tecton commissioned to design new housing – three blocks of multi-storey flats – in 1938.

In the event, war intervened and destroyed both these initial plans and 11 per cent of Finsbury’s housing stock. In 1945, Finsbury had a smaller population – of 38,000 – but a waiting list for council accommodation of some 4500 families. More audacious plans were called for, spurred by these increased demands and helped by the technological advances of war. The current scheme in its essentials was approved in May 1945, before the war’s end – an early symbol of Labour’s intention to ‘win the peace’.

Nye Bevan, Minister of Health and Housing, laid the foundation stone of the new development in July 1946.  He commended the estate for its ‘many novel features’ and gave it his ‘every encouragement’. Herbert Morrison, leader of the London Labour Party and deputy prime minister, performed its opening ceremony in 1949. A young Princess Margaret planted a plane tree which has survived longer than she did.

Undated aerial view,early 50s?

The finished development comprised 126 flats in three blocks. The largest – Wells House and Tunbridge House – eight storeys high, 190 feet long and 30 feet deep, were set in parallel north-south orientation across a large open court. The smaller Sadler House, four and five storeys high, is distinguished by its sinuous curves which make the most of the restricted space of the 3.9 acre site.

Spa Green illustrated in Margaret and Alexander Potters’ book, Houses, published in 1948. Click for a full-size view.

Technically, the buildings owe a huge debt to the engineering genius of Ove Arup whose innovative concrete box-frame enabled the clean, spacious lines and lack of internal ‘clutter’ that were a much remarked-upon feature of the new flats.

Architecturally, it is Lubetkin’s constructivist ideals which come to the fore. The larger blocks were plain in form but brilliantly enlivened by the design and detailing of their facades. The quieter courtyard side of the buildings (where the bedrooms were situated) featured a chequerboard design influenced by Lubetkin’s study of Caucasian textiles. The outward sides which faced the streets had a rhythmic pattern of windows and balconies and the whole was accentuated and enhanced by a rich use of colour – reds, yellows and blues.

Wells House, courtyard side. Note the roof terrace drying area

Wells House, street side

Sadler House

The estate was too small to warrant an on-site laundry but roof terraces and covered drying areas with specially designed aerofoils to capture and maximise the breeze were provided on both larger blocks.

In Austerity Britain and smoggy London and as a contrast to the bleak terraces and tenements which preceded it, the Spa Green Estate must really have seemed to mark the advent of a brighter future.

Internal arrangements affirmed a new age of the common man – or perhaps woman given the centrality of women’s domestic role in the period. As the Islington Gazette noted when Bevan opened the new estate:

the new flats will have most of the amenities of pre-war luxury dwellings but will be let at very moderate rentals.

The flats had balconies, light and ventilation from both sides, central heating, fitted bathrooms and kitchens. The kitchens were equipped with slide-away breakfast counters and ironing boards, inbuilt waste disposal and large serving hatches to the living room.

A current resident, born on the estate the very day that Bevan inaugurated it, recalls ‘My mum used to say “we’re living in luxury”‘.

This wasn’t hyperbole. No wonder that Finsbury Borough Council’s 1949 handbook to the estate proudly stated:

The estate is an outstanding advance in municipal housing. It will become one of the showpieces of London and there will be many visitors.

Such pride brought consequences. The Council also stipulated rather primly:

Washing must not be hung up on the balconies … The blocks have exceptionally well-designed architectural features, and the display of washing on the balconies will spoil the appearance.

One resident remembers a woman on a bicycle employed by the council to visit the estate and check compliance.

Indeed, expectations of tenants were high. Tenancy conditions required regular cleaning of fireplace surrounds, sweeping of stairs and landing daily, washing of stairs weekly on a rota basis. No carpets were to be beaten after 11am, no rubbish emptied after 10am, no music to be played between 11pm and 8am.

Originally the caretaker’s lodge, now a meeting room

This is where the ritual reference to council paternalism should come but let’s avoid that contemporary reflex and simply note that this was a discourse of reciprocity, of rights and responsibilities.  Anyway, aren’t low expectations more patronising?

Of course, such mutual investment from council landlord and council tenant came easily to Spa Green – an attractive and genuinely popular development. Other schemes – blander, bleaker – were less easy to love.

Spa Green also benefited from its relatively small size. Residents could expect to know everyone that lived on the estate, at least by sight. Children growing up on the estate remember a widening but always secure universe – from landing to block to courtyard and playground as they grew older.

Into the 1970s, children

would be out playing but at 8pm someone came out with a whistle and they all had to go to bed. They did as well. No-one argued.

That’s better than ASBOs, isn’t it?

After what comes a little too close to nostalgia, you’re probably waiting for the usual ‘what went wrong?’ Well, not much. There were complaints in the nineties about rubbish and the estate’s run-down appearance. In 1996 a Spa Green Management Organisation was established – with 98 per cent support from residents – to take over day-to-day management of the estate from Islington Council.

Long-term underinvestment accelerated an inevitable deterioration in fabric but a major £5m refurbishment, completed in 2008, has restored the estate to its founding vision and modernised facilities where necessary.

Entrance ramp to Wells House with restored colour scheme

Right to buy has had its inevitable impact and around one third of flats are now privately owned. The refurbishment sparked controversy, not least because of the very large bills – between £28,000 and £42,000 – faced by leaseholders who had purchased flats on the estate.  That aside and on this occasion ignoring larger issues about the marginalisation of social housing, maybe this is a social mix we should applaud. A one-bedroom studio flat in Wells House is currently on the market for £235,000 if you want to play your part in that.

As one commentator has observed (1):

Over half a century later Spa Green still radiates a sense of optimism that defies the commonplace dismissal of flatted estates as a modern urban aberration.

Spa Green looks good and feels good. Lubetkin’s daughter, Sacha, attending the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the estate, spoke of the ‘enormous love, care and attention to detail into the design’ that her father put into the estate and his determination ‘to provide for ordinary working people just as good a life as the rich had’. Here’s a vision – and an accomplishment – that we can applaud.

Sources

(1) John Allan in Berthold Lubetkin (2002) quoted in a good Wikipedia article on the estate. 

The Survey of London entry found on British History Online provides very full information on the estate and additional illustrations as does the very thorough Local Local History [sic] website.

Matt Weaver, ‘Designed to Infuriate‘, The Guardian, 16 November 2005 discusses the controversy over refurbishment costs and more recent developments.

James R Payne, ‘Long live Lubetkin’s republic‘, BDOnline, 25 July 2008, gives a good analysis of the refurbishment.

Most quotations and further detail are taken from the newspaper cuttings file on the estate in the Islington Local History Centre.  My thanks to them for their assistance.

Finsbury Health Centre: ‘Nothing is too good for ordinary people’

Tags

1930s, Finsbury, Lubetkin

Finsbury Health Centre is not your usual obscure and unsung piece of municipal design.  Even today, somewhat faded and hidden behind some rather overbearing vegetation, it looks something special.  In its day, it was famously daring in both vision and design – in both its ideal of comprehensive, unified and free healthcare for all and in the bold architectural fulfilment of this ideal.

Finsbury was a typically overcrowded and poor inner London borough.  But it was one with an unusually radical political history, rooted in the close-knit artisanal trades of the area.  It elected its first Labour councillor in 1900 and Labour gained its first – bare – majority in 1928.  Though the party lost heavily in the debacle of 1931, Labour regained – and retained –  a secure hold on power in 1934.  The council intended to use that power purposefully.

The driving figures in this were the council’s leader, Alderman Harold Riley, a local teacher descended from a Black Country mining family, and Councillor Chuni Lal Katial, a recent migrant from India, now a GP practising in the borough and chair of the public health committee.

The 1936 Public Health (London) Act empowered local authorities to provide medical services to their local population.  Finsbury Council took up this challenge but aspired to more.  Its Finsbury Plan outlined a far-reaching and coordinated strategy to elevate the conditions and well-being of the borough’s people.  It included a health centre, baths, libraries and nurseries.   Whilst war and financial difficulties prevented the entirety of that vision being fulfilled, the health centre was achieved triumphantly.

It was Katial himself who approached the modernist architectural firm of Tecton to devise plans for the clinic – the first public commission of a modernist design.  Of the proposals submitted, the council selected the most expensive for its quality and space.   The building was intended to live up to the maxim of its chief architect Berthold Lubetkin and the principles of its commissioners: ‘Nothing is too good for the workers’.

The illustrations below – part of the design outline provided by Tecton – contrast the ‘open planning’ ideals of the design to the heavy and rather overbearing architecture that typically preceded it.

Lubetkin believed the purpose of modern architecture was ‘to improve…the living conditions of the people, to create a language of architectural forms which…conveys the optimistic message of our time – the century of the common man’.

But his genius lay in the humanism of this ideal.  The Centre was to be accessible and inviting, a drop-in centre before the term had been invented.   For Lubetkin, ‘the centre’s opening arms and entrance were a deliberate attempt to introduce a smile into what is a machine’.

The brochure which marked the opening of the Centre, noted more dryly:

Care has been taken to give to the whole structure a light and clean appearance, to make it an edifice to the splendid service it represents; a building which will inspire confidence through its thoroughly modern and up to date appearance.

Glass bricks at the front entrance and side wings, red-painted columns, sky-blue ceilings, an open-plan reception – all were both practice and propaganda for a life lived more fully, more openly, more colourfully by a working population immured in poverty.

And if that wasn’t clear, murals on the wall exhorted the Centre’s users to ‘Live out of doors as much as you can’ and seek ‘Fresh air night and day’.

Finsbury’s ‘megaphone for health’ spoke loudly of a better, healthier life.

Practically, the Centre incorporated doctors’ surgeries, an antenatal and mother and baby clinic, TB clinic, chiropody clinic, dental surgery and solarium. The solarium provided ultraviolet-ray treatment to the children of the polluted and sun-starved borough – on chairs designed by Alvar Aalto.

The basement included facilities for cleaning and disinfecting bedclothes and a lecture theatre, even a mortuary for those past benefiting from the Centre’s services.

The Centre opened in 1938. Cllr Katial spoke to the thinking which inspired it:

For some time the disadvantages of a service which has grown up piecemeal, retarded in its development and scattered here and there through lack of accommodation, have been only too apparent to my council.  Fully appreciating these difficulties, and actuated by a desire vastly to improve existing facilities and to establish new services, we have unanimously gone forward to erect this new health centre.  Its opening marks…the dawn of a new era in public health service

It’s a dry, almost bureaucratic, language – the stuff that makes municipalism hard to sell and Municipal Dreams seem almost oxymoronic.  But embrace that studied practicalism: it is precisely this realism and eschewal of rhetoric that changed lives. (It’s true, however, that Lubetkin always had the best lines. Those translucent glass walls seen above were intended to be ‘as beautiful as the hair of a beautiful young girl in the summer sunshine.’)

Barely a year later, Britain went to war and the Centre was pressed into service to meet the needs of more immediate casualties of man’s inhumanity to man but it was already an exemplar and a promise of a better tomorrow.

One year after the Beveridge Report itself seemed to herald that tomorrow and as the thoughts of ordinary people were already turning to winning the peace, in 1943 a poster was issued by the Army Bureau of Current Affairs which used the Finsbury Health Centre as its central symbol of the new postwar world.

In the event, the poster was deemed too radical.  Churchill himself apparently considered its depiction of a child with rickets in a slum setting to be a ‘libel’ on working-class conditions.  The poster was withdrawn but the aspirations which it represented that Churchill either feared or couldn’t comprehend were not so easily suppressed.  Labour secured a landslide victory in the 1945 general election and the Finsbury Health Centre was to be a model for the National Health Service established three years later.

Today, it’s a Grade 1 listed building but it looks a little tired and that sparkling vision of municipal healthcare has been superseded.  At the time of writing, it is still a local health centre but there have been plans to sell off the building and relocate its services.  Opposition from local residents and architectural campaigners seem to have stalled these for the time being but the outcome remains uncertain.

What is certain is the practical idealism of the Centre’s creators.  Their belief in an ethos of public service and their implementation of the principle of public provision of healthcare for all, free of the distortions of market and profit, is as relevant today as it has ever been.

Sources:

The Save Finsbury Health Centre blog is a vital source for this article and for anyone concerned for the future of the Centre.  There are many webpages focusing on the Modernist architectural heritage of the Centre; the best is in BD Online.