Charles Dickens House, Bethnal Green II: The Tide of Tall Building Turns

Tags

1960s, Multi-storey, Tower Hamlets

I’m pleased to feature this week the second part of Andrew Parnell’s fascinating guest post on Charles Dickens House and its wider context. Andrew is a walking tour guide with Footprints of London who leads walks on architecture and housing history. These include his walk Modernism and Modern Dwellings: Housing in Bethnal Green which takes in Charles Dickens House. More information and tickets for Andrew’s walks can be obtained from the website. 

The trend for high towers, system-building and prefabrication in the 1960s which, as described in Part I, influenced Tower Hamlets Council in the planning stages leading to the building of the 22-storey Charles Dickens House on the Mansfield Buildings slum clearance site in Bethnal Green in 1969, did not come ‘out of the blue’.

Charles Dickens House today

From an architectural perspective, tall building had started to be been seen in this country before World War II, with the likes of Highpoints 1 and 2, Berthold Lubetkin’s 8- and 9-storey ‘international modern’ style blocks in north London. Frederick Gibberd’s designs for Harlow New Town included a 10-storey block – The Lawn in Mark Hall North – that was built in 1949 and has been called Britain’s ‘first high block’. The Metropolitan Borough of Bethnal Green – one of the three boroughs that were merged in 1965 to form the London Borough of Tower Hamlets – had in the 1950s employed avant-garde architects, among them Lubetkin and the young Denys Lasdun, who produced blocks of over 10 storeys.

The Lawn, Harlow New Town

Lasdun’s firm in March 1955 had presented to the Bethnal Green Housing Committee a report on a Royal Institute of British Architects’ symposium on high building. Among the findings summarised in their report were: many people prefer living in high buildings because they enjoy ‘better and cleaner air’; low buildings are ‘monotonous’; high buildings can enhance the scene by ‘emphasising prominent points’; and the incorporation of maisonettes (two storey dwellings) in tall buildings had ‘overcome prejudice against living in high blocks’.(1)  This report, whilst seeking to make a strong case for high-rise, nevertheless reflects the view of many design and planning professionals throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s that tall blocks should be used sparingly and judiciously alongside different styles of building (so called ‘mixed development’).

Keeling House (to the left) and the Cranbrook Estate

It is hard not to sense in the Lasdun firm’s report an attempt to ‘enlighten’ the Housing Committee in an area – London’s East End – where it was said by others in the field that some councillors clung to ‘pro-cottage’, ‘traditional’ views on housing design and were therefore in need of a little education by professionals! (2) If that was the report’s purpose, it seems to have worked. The Bethnal Green Council went on to commission Lasdun’s and Lubetkin’s firms to produce some noted examples of modernist housing such as Lasdun’s sixteen storey ‘cluster block’ Keeling House (1955-1957) and Lubetkin’s innovative Cranbrook Estate (1961-1966).

From a technical point of view, system-building and prefabrication can be seen as a product of the fertile period of building research and development of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s which had seen such innovations as widespread use of reinforced concrete in cross-wall frame and later box-frame construction (eliminating the need for a steel frame).  Architects had embraced the new materials and techniques. They exploited the new ‘lightness’ achievable by the reinforcement of concrete. The geometrical shape and repetitiveness of a building’s structure were seen as things to emphasise, not to hide. Form followed function and produced beauty.

‘Charles Dickens House, Bethnal Green Road, 1967. Bison block showing the varied kind of facing given to the prefabricated panels’ (c) Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block

The other thing that these approaches to construction and design leant themselves to was, of course, prefabrication. A repetitive structure of rectangular shapes could be reduced to a kit of simple parts. By December 1965, the Tower Hamlets councillors were receiving a report on a Symposium at Olympia with the title ‘System Building: Can It Be Economic?’. The reported answer to this question was that system-building was ‘clearly cheaper’ and that in tall buildings it was ‘very competitive indeed’.  The Borough Architect obtained the committee’s approval for one ‘senior member’ of his staff to attend an ‘Advanced Course on Industrialised Building’. In May 1966, members of the council reported on a ‘study tour’ they had made to Denmark to look at industrialised building there. (3)

So the proposal put to the Tower Hamlets Housing Committee in 1967 for a system-built tall block – that would be named Charles Dickens House – on the Mansford Buildings site came as no surprise.

‘Mansford Street area’, P14033, 1972, showing Charles Dickens House to right (c) Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives

However, in all of this Tower Hamlets was coming a bit late to the party. Nationwide, the bandwagon of high building was well and truly under way by the mid-1960s. Glasgow, in the vanguard, had built three 20-storey blocks in eight months in 1960 which kick-started the chairman of the housing committee David Gibson’s messianic, largely high-rise, housing production drive. Similar dynamism was seen in other areas, particularly large municipalities outside London. To boroughs like these, high-rise and system-building seemed the obvious way to keep up the necessary pace of their building.

The Tower Hamlets committee did not give approval for its first block over 20 storeys high until 1966, and before the 1965 local government reorganisation its three predecessor councils – Stepney, Poplar and Bethnal Green – had approved only one such block between them and the London County Council (LCC) just three in the area. (4)

This comparative dilatoriness in Tower Hamlets – which was reflected in the wider London area generally – could be ascribed partly to the influence prior to 1965 of the London County Council, which was replaced in the reorganisation of that year by the Greater London Council.  The LCC had wielded greater power than its replacement, the GLC, to influence the housing policy of the second-tier London boroughs. In exercising that power, the LCC’s influential architects’ department stood firmly on the side of the ‘design faction’ – arguing for restraint in the use of high-rise building – in a schism that grew up between the ‘designers’ and the ‘producers’ from about the late 1950s onwards. The consensus among design professionals had always been that high-rise should be used sparingly to add variety (‘vertical accents’) in mixed schemes.

At the Mansford Buildings site, Tower Hamlets Council could be seen to be following, at least in the final result, the design faction’s blended approach to tall blocks. Charles Dickens House was inserted into a pre-existing plan for the site that consisted mainly of ‘cluster blocks’ of up to four storeys, producing a mix of housing for approximately 400 families, with shops, licensed premises and other amenities, all at a population density for the 9.5 acres of roughly 136 persons per acre, the density level recommended for inner London areas by the County of London Plan of 1943, a document which set out a vision for London’s reconstruction after the War in a period – the 1940s and 1950s –when the influence of the designers was at its height. (5)

‘Bird’s eye view Mansford Street area’, P104032, 1969 (c) Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives

By the late 1950s designers had started to turn away from high-rise altogether, towards other approaches such as low-rise, high-density developments. The concept of ‘urbanism’ gained traction – the idea that a sense of community is engendered by close proximity of buildings, rather than by leaving large open spaces between tall buildings.

The ‘producers’, on the other hand, who tended to be local politicians and officials, were driven by an urgent sense of the need to build quickly and in large numbers and sometimes saw the designers, with their concerns about aesthetics and population density, as ‘other-worldly’, even obstructive. By using the systems of large contractors who had their own design professionals attuned to the need for volume and speed, the producers could bypass those design professionals they saw as less practical.

There were strong feelings on both sides. Producers saw themselves as ‘coalface workers’ compared with the ‘quasi-academic’ designers. Many designers were contemptuous of those who were focussed on ‘mere production’ and saw the indiscriminate use of high blocks to maintain the production rate as a parody and misuse of the original concept of high-rise espoused by professionals in earlier decades. (6).

David Gibson in 1950

David Gibson, in Glasgow, voiced the producers’ justification for their approach in characteristically powerful and moral terms: ‘If I offend good planning principles, it is only in seeking to avoid the unpardonable offence that bad housing commits against human dignity’. For Gibson, aesthetics were never the most important consideration, but nonetheless the very shape of tall blocks – their arresting ‘modernity’ – was in keeping with his vision: ‘In the next three years the skyline of Glasgow will become a more attractive one to me because of the likely vision of multi-storey houses rising by the thousand’.

But soon the towers which had been a powerful symbol of the optimism which underlay the post-war housing production drive became the most powerful negative image of ‘modern’ housing. One contributor to the sudden, almost violent change of public mood occurred just a few miles from Charles Dickens House. In May 1968 in Canning Town, a system-built tower block, Ronan Point, partly collapsed when a tenant’s gas stove exploded in a high floor, killing four people and injuring more.

When the Ronan Point disaster occurred, plans for development of the Mansford Buildings site in Tower Hamlets had been approved and work at the site had already begun. Although the Tower Hamlets Council issued an instruction that no new proposals for high blocks were to be put forward pending the findings of a Committee of Enquiry on Ronan Point, work was allowed to continue on tall blocks in the borough that had already been approved. Later that year, the Enquiry found that high blocks were generally safe but that those built using large panel construction with load bearing walls should have their jointing checked. This included the Bison Wall Frame system being used to build the tower at the Mansfield Buildings site, so its joints were duly checked and approved. As a result, the tower, named Charles Dickens House, was completed and opened the following year.

Ronan Point

The Ronan Point disaster probably accelerated rather than caused the decline in high flats and system-building that ensued. Public, political and professional opinion had already started to turn against modern housing and tall buildings before the disaster in Newham. A number of possible causes can be identified.

As already mentioned, design professionals’ thinking had started to move away from high-rise in about the late 1950s. By the late 1960s, the housing shortage had turned, roughly speaking, into a surplus.

Public clamour for production waned and people now asked ‘What is all this building for?’ (a question to which many in the 1960s would surely have responded: ‘Isn’t it obvious? To get people out of slums!’). The political consensus started to break up when, following wins by non-socialist parties in the 1967-1968 local elections, multi-storey building was for the first time branded ‘Socialist’. In 1968 government subsidies for high-rise building, which had been introduced in 1956-1967, were abolished (although this subsidy had probably always been more of a consequence than a cause of the high-rise trend). Later, the 1970s in particular saw the emergence of management problems and severe anti-social behaviour in some modern developments.

The subsequent history of Charles Dickens House is fairly typical for buildings of its kind. By 2003 – then over 30 years old – it was in a state of serious disrepair: interiors of flats were in a poor state and insulation needed improvement. Residents were concerned at the inadequacy of internal security. With local authorities’ housing budgets now severely limited, Tower Hamlets Council was unable to finance the work needed to bring the block up to the government’s Decent Homes Standard. Borrowing limits meant it could only afford £2.28 million for the building’s regeneration.

In accordance with the ‘new model’ for social housing provision, Tower Hamlets Community Housing – a housing association with access to private borrowing not available to councils – was able to offer £18.5 million. Tenants – some of whom had exercised their ‘right to buy’ and owned long leases to their flats – were presented with a stark choice in terms of the ability of the competing owners to fund needed upgrades and opted for transfer to the housing association. (7)

In recent years, flats in the building, advertised as having ‘unbeatable views…in a well-maintained ex-local authority building’ have been offered for sale at prices in the region of £340,000 (2015) and £450,000 (2016). (8) How far the building can now be said to offer accommodation truly affordable to the section of the community it was built for must be questionable, but the prices at which flats seem to be changing hands must also call into question the often cited ‘truth’ that tall towers are universally viewed as undesirable places to live.

Charles Dickens House today

Over time, architectural preferences and the public mood change, often quickly and radically. Where once the view was expressed that old terraces of housing were ‘past modernising and want blowing up’, they are now cherished and it is tower blocks which, literally, have in some cases been blown up. Charles Dickens House was fortunate to be built before the curtain came down on tower block building and is perhaps fortunate to be still standing and providing homes today. Concerns were expressed about the safety of system-built blocks following Ronan Point and were cited as reasons for some of the tower block demolitions. It is worth noting, though, that Bison Wall Frame blocks in Edinburgh, about which such concerns had been expressed, survived the detonation of 2000 charges of high explosive and had to be smashed by a giant battering ram.

Was it their structural weakness which caused us to start demolishing high towers, or an effect of the changing cycle of public opinion about building styles? Will the cycle one day move on again so that blocks like Charles Dickens House are seen in a more favourable light, as the product of a massive housing production drive that was to no small degree motivated by ideals that deserve our respect?

Sources

With thanks to Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives for permission to use the images credited above.

(1) Minutes of Bethnal Green Borough Council Housing Committee, March 1955

(2) Page 180 of Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (Yale University Press, 1993), a work on which the analysis of the history of high-rise blocks in this article is largely based and from which the quotations of individuals involved, other than in relation to Tower Hamlets, have largely been drawn

(3) Minutes of Tower Hamlets Borough Council Housing Committee, May 1966

(4) Gazetteer I, Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block

(5) Minutes of Tower Hamlets Borough Council Housing, Building and Development Committee, June 1968

(6) The tension between the concerns of designers and the pressure to produce housing output is described at pages 153ff of Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block

(7) This account of the later history of Charles Dickens House is drawn from Stephanie Polsky, Dickensian Blocks: East London’s contemporary housing landscape, published in Soundings: A journal of politics and culture, issue 60, Summer 2015, pp 95-106

(8) Rightmove and Find Properly websites

Charles Dickens House, Bethnal Green I: ‘Clear the Slums!’ – the Surge that Produced Tall Blocks

Tags

1960s, Multi-storey, Tower Hamlets

I’m very pleased to feature, this week and next, two more excellent guest posts, these by Andrew Parnell.  They’ll focus on a particular and, in many ways, unremarkable tower block in Tower Hamlets but will also provide much of the wider story of the era’s high-rise and system-building programme.

Andrew is a walking tour guide with Footprints of London who leads walks on architecture and housing history. These include his walk Modernism and Modern Dwellings: Housing in Bethnal Green which takes in Charles Dickens House. More information and tickets for Andrew’s walks can be obtained from the website. 

A rectangular slab of 22 storeys, Charles Dickens House in Bethnal Green is a typical high block of flats of the mid-1960s, one of the many towers that are now an accepted part of our city skylines and go largely unremarked upon; what little comment they do attract these days tends to be of a negative, often hostile kind. The 1960s is hardly today seen as a golden age of public housing design in this country.

Charles Dickens House today

But when high blocks of this kind were being built – as they were in enormous volume in Britain during that decade – they were viewed much more positively. A closer look at the circumstances surrounding the building of Charles Dickens House helps to reveal some of the concerns, pressures and forces of opinion behind the strong tide which brought high blocks to our cities. Even before this particular building was completed, that tide was turning and starting to pull with equal force in the opposite direction, ushering in the widespread condemnation of such high residential towers.

Charles Dickens House was built between 1968 and 1969 for Tower Hamlets Borough Council, one of the relatively new, enlarged London Boroughs produced by the local government reforms of 1965. (1)  An entry in the minutes of that council’s Housing Committee in May 1965 notes that a Compulsory Purchase Order for the ‘Mansford Buildings site’, an area including the current site of Charles Dickens House, had been made in 1963 under Part III of the 1957 Housing Act – legislation which enabled local authorities to acquire and redevelop areas that were deemed unfit for human habitation – slums. An appeal was lodged, delaying the implementation of the order. The committee minutes quote the senior judge hearing the appeal, Lord Justice Salmon, describing the circumstances on the site as: ‘ninety families living in revolting conditions’. (2)

The compulsory purchase order covered an area of 9.5 acres on which stood, among other buildings, a number of tenement blocks built in the late 19^th century. They included Mansford Buildings, after which the clearance site was named, Toyes Buildings and Meadows Dwellings which occupied roughly the plot where Charles Dickens House now stands and which had been built in 1893 by the East End Dwellings Company, one of the philanthropic companies forming the Victorian housing movement which produced this country’s earliest social housing.

‘Toyes Buildings, 1968’, P14569 – before the site was redeveloped (c) Tower Hamlets Local History LIbrary and Archives

Rehousing tenants during the redevelopment of slum areas was always a major task for council housing departments but Bethnal Green encountered some unusual additional difficulty at the Mansford Buildings site. The council had started to rehouse residents of the site whilst the appeal against the compulsory purchase order was pending but members of the Housing Committee were ‘dismayed’ to be told that the owners of Mansford Buildings who had lodged the appeal, Quiltotex Limited, had re-let homes vacated by rehoused tenants notwithstanding that the premises had been ‘admitted to be in an outstandingly unfit condition’.

The Council successfully prevented further such re-lettings at Mansford Buildings but councillors’ dismay resurfaced when they were advised by Mr J Wolkind, the Town Clerk, that after the appeal was rejected the Council still had an unavoidable legal duty to rehouse the fifteen ‘new’ tenant families allowed in by Quiltotex, meaning that the Council had to go through the rehousing process twice. After the intervention of an indignant member of the Committee, Councillor McCarthy, the Council’s Housing Officer, Mr JM Simpson, was asked to enter into correspondence with Quiltotex’s letting agents, Messrs Donaldsons. It emerged from this that the majority of the fifteen new tenants had no prior connection with the borough so they would not have been given priority by the council for housing in Tower Hamlets. However, Donaldsons declined Mr Simpson’s request that Donaldsons themselves and their clients Quiltotex find alternative accommodation for the new occupants they had allowed into the building, arguing that they and their clients, in re-letting the condemned homes, had been ‘performing something of a public service in assisting these tenants in their housing problem’. (3)

It was not only councils in parts of London like Bethnal Green that still – twenty years after the end of the Second World War – regarded elimination of slum conditions as an unfinished task. The necessary repair of damage to housing done by that war had, to some extent, interrupted and delayed the process of eradicating slums that had started before it. Up and down the country in the 1960s, councillors and local government officials still saw getting people out of slums into decent accommodation as a burning need, sometimes expressed in forceful language like that of Bill Reed, Deputy City Architect for Birmingham: ‘For god’s sake get on and build those houses—and get people out of the slums’. (4)

Bill Reed (in centre) with then Birmingham City Architect Alan Maudsley, 1969 (c) Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block

Councillors referred to local people besieging them with demands to be rehoused. In Glasgow, probably the country’s most dynamic municipality in terms of house building during the period, planning officer, Ian MT Samuel said that that people ‘couldn’t get out of the old condemned houses fast enough.’ He recalled:  ‘I had a stream of people coming to my office…with the same question: ‘When’s ma hoose coming down?’’ Undoubtedly there were often other, less exalted, motives at play in the minds of these local leaders – electoral advantage, preservation of rateable value, even sometimes corruption – but it is hard to discount completely the sincerity of their stated desire to improve living conditions.

The fact that the new housing to which residents of slums were to be moved enjoyed modern conveniences rarely found in old Victorian dwellings such as the terraced housing of Bethnal Green – like electrical points in every room, water and space heating, kitchen fittings and generous space – was undoubtedly an attraction for residents being rehoused and offset concerns about moving to flats from more traditional housing. In the words of RD Crammond of the Department of Health for Scotland (responsible for housing): ‘To someone coming out of the slums, the idea of going into a house with a bedroom, a proper kitchen, hot water – it was the millennium for them, it was a dream – and it didn’t matter a damn to them if it was in a multi-storey block or a cottage’.  In these post-war decades, the ‘modernity’ of the design, construction and fittings were perceived as a positive, even exciting feature of the new style of housing.

Bob Mellish, 1965

Increasing the perceived scale and urgency of the problem, there was – in addition to the need to replace slums – insufficient housing to satisfy general need in many areas of the country. There was a resulting groundswell – almost a tidal wave – of pressure to build houses, accompanied by a considerable degree of political consensus that the housing to meet the need should predominantly be built by local authorities. The Tower Hamlets Housing Committee in late 1965 was reminded that there was an ‘enormous housing shortage in Greater London’. (5)  Robert (later Lord) Mellish, at the time a London MP and member of the government, urged local authorities: ‘Get ahead, get full steam ahead, get bloody building!’.

At the same meeting of the Tower Hamlets Housing Committee, mention is made of what was seen as one of the primary tools available for solving the problem – industrialised building: non-traditional ways of building using modern materials such as concrete and modern methods that sought to bring the techniques of the factory to the building site. These ‘systems’ made use of prefabricated components manufactured off site and assembled on-site using tower cranes. Large construction companies developed their own systems and offered them to local authorities.

‘System building’ was promoted – and perceived by many – as providing an economical, fast and efficient way of building housing in the form of tall blocks that provided both the density levels required in urban contexts and space between buildings for the other desired facilities such as play and parking areas. Building in this way largely eliminated the need for scaffolding, reduced the amount of skilled labour required and used far less steel than the methods that had been widely used for constructing tall buildings in the past. The last two considerations were particularly important given the onset of building shortages in the mid-1960s. The Tower Hamlets Committee was told: ‘The Ministry [of Housing and Local Government, then headed by Richard Crossman MP]  goes so far as to say that increasing demand in the building industry can only be met by supplementing traditional methods of building and making the best use of new methods and materials’.

‘Concrete Ltd, Bison Wall-Frame System (1962)’ (c) Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block

It was natural, then, that after the appeal against the Mansford Buildings Compulsory Purchase Order was finally rejected the proposal put to the Housing Committee for the site, in October 1967, included a system-built 22-storey tower block of flats. (6) The system to be used was the Bison Wall Frame System developed by Concrete (Southern) Limited – the company name could be that of a caricature 1960s building firm! – which was one of the most prolifically used systems nationally.

With the Bison system, a two-bedroom flat could be constructed from 21 precast components produced in one of the Concrete Group’s five factories nationwide. Most of the components were floor or wall panels with wooden door and window frames included (reducing carpentry needed on site) and provision for wiring and piped services embedded in them. Among the 21 parts, there were separate sections forming stair or lift wells (extending over three stories), staircases and a single bathroom and toilet unit weighing over seven tons (still well within a tower crane’s capacity to hoist up to the required level). (7)

‘Monteith Road under construction’ (c) Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives

Tower Hamlets Council’s first fully industrialised high-rise block was Bacton Tower built by the contractor Wates in 1966. But it was Concrete (Southern) which established a contractual relationship with the council that would produce a series of seven blocks in a ‘production line’ typical of the high-rise building of the time. All seven were of 22 stories containing 130 dwellings. The first three were at sites in Monteith Road (two blocks) and Wellington Way in Bow.

Monteith Road opening with Anthony Greenwood (c) Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives

The cost of building was of particular importance at a time of national financial difficulty. The pound had been devalued in 1967 and in December the following year the Minister of Housing, Anthony Greenwood, had urged the council: ‘we must secure a substantial surplus on our balance of payments’. At an earlier site at Roman Road, the Borough Architect and Planning Officer, Mr J Hume had recommended a last-minute switch from the contractor Rowley Brothers’ planned ‘traditionally built’ 20-storey tower to one of Concrete (Southern)’s 22-storey Bison blocks in order to produce a £1000 per dwelling reduction in cost required to satisfy the government’s ‘cost yardstick’ for obtaining ‘loan sanction’ for funding. He presented comparisons to the Housing Committee showing the traditional 20-storey tower producing 115 dwellings for £568,000 while the Bison 22-storey tower produced 130 dwellings for £455,806.

The committee was not best pleased that substantial professional costs had already been expended on the to-be-discarded traditional building at Roman Road and would now be wasted. They called for an ‘investigation of reasons’ for the situation by councillors with the borough’s professional advisers and officers. Mr Hume obtained approval to proceed with the Bison tower, but the meeting and subsequent ‘investigation’ may not have been entirely comfortable for him! (8)

Bison blocks at the Monteith Road and Wellington Way sites Tower Hamlets

When it came to the Mansford Buildings site, it was decided that the first stage of the development should take the form of another Bison block under a contract negotiated ‘in the same way as Monteith Road’ with Concrete (Southern) with whom the Council had ‘an excellent negotiating relationship’. Mr Hume reported that ‘after much study’ it had proved necessary to revise plans for the site by including a 22-storey block. This would make it possible to develop the site ‘properly’ to the required population density, to keep within the government’s cost yardstick and to provide ‘necessary play spaces, parking spaces and all other amenities required’. (9) He was here voicing some of the principal perceived attractions of industrialised high-rise building.

The stage was now set for Charles Dickens House be built.  We’ll follow that story in next week’s post.

Sources

With thanks to Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives for permission to use the images credited above.

The photograph of Bob Mellish is by Walter Bird and is made available by the National Portrait Gallery under a Creative Commons licence.

(1) TFT Baker (ed), A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 11, Stepney, Bethnal Green,(Victoria County History, London, 1998), republished by British History Online provides a comprehensive history of the politics and buildings of the area

(2) Minutes of Tower Hamlets Borough Council Housing Committee, 1965

(3) Ibid., 1965-1966

(4) Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (Yale University Press, 1993) on which the analysis of the history of high-rise blocks in this article is largely based and from which the quotations of individuals involved, other than in relation to Tower Hamlets, have largely been drawn.

(5) Minutes of Tower Hamlets Borough Council Housing Committee, November 1965

(6) Minutes of Tower Hamlets Borough Council Housing, Building and Development Committee, October 1967, Report of Architect and Planning Officer

(7) The Architects’ Journal, 11 July 1962 and illustrated in Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block (see note above) at page 86

(8) Minutes of Tower Hamlets Borough Council Housing Committee, September 1966

(9) Minutes of Tower Hamlets Borough Council Housing, Building and Development Committee, October 1967

The Castle Vale Estate, Birmingham, Part II: ‘a dignified low-rise estate’

Tags

1990s, Cottage suburbs, Multi-storey, Regeneration

We left Castle Vale last week, an undoubtedly troubled estate, damaged by the construction flaws specific to much system-built housing of the sixties and beset by the social problems affecting estates across the country as a traditional working-class economy collapsed and council housing itself became increasingly allocated to the most vulnerable of our community.

Castle Vale, 2004. Compare to the similar aerial view taken in 1993 in last week’s post (c) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

Something needed to be done but hostile central government attitudes and policy – notably Right to Buy and the deadly squeeze on new housing investment – ensured (quite deliberately) that local government was in no position to do it.  Thatcherism was hostile both to council housing and the (predominantly Labour) authorities which still managed it.  Conversely, the 1988 Housing Act had established privately managed and well-funded Housing Action Trusts (HATs) to regenerate some of the country’s ‘worst’ estates.  It’s not difficult to read the political agenda here.

The estate from one of the Farnborough Road towers in the 1960s (c) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

Birmingham’s Director of Housing, Derek Waddington, was authorised to discreetly investigate what was happening on the North Hull Estate, the first HAT in the country.  Though some Labour councils and tenants (such as those in Hulme, Manchester) resisted this apparent privatisation of assets and homes, the pragmatic case for following suit seemed unassailable.  As Waddington describes: (1)

Eventually I had to stand in front of the Labour group and tell them the professional facts. And then I left the council chamber and they sorted out the political elements. In the end they accepted it. For this one simple reason…the Government quango gets direct gift money up front to plough in the infrastructure.

Political backing from the Council and central government and a twelve-month campaign in favour was enough to ensure that 92 per cent of tenants voted to transfer to the HAT on a turnout of 75 per cent.

The Castle Vale HAT was established in June 1993.  After some wrangling, it secured greater tenant representation (the management board eventually comprised four residents, three local authority representatives and five independents) and government funding of £160m.

Chivenor House and school, 1960s

The first priority was to tackle the estate’s housing problems – the 1994 Masterplan proposed demolishing seventeen of the estate’s 34 tower blocks.  In the end, it was determined that costs outweighed the benefits of refurbishing fifteen further blocks. Currently just two remain – Chivenor House (now housing for the elderly) and Topcliffe House; both were attached to schools which would also had to have been demolished.  Twenty-four system-built and flawed four-storey maisonette blocks were also cleared.  In their place, 1458 new homes have been built and 1381 refurbished.

The new housing reflected the changed sensibilities of its time.  The sheltered housing scheme, Phoenix Court, built on the site of the Centre 8 blocks won a Secured by Design award from the police.  Twenty-eight ‘Reinventing the Home’ family houses were built by the Mercian Housing Association on Cadbury Drive, designed to adapt to changing domestic needs. There are small pockets of self-build and ‘eco-homes’ too.   Some of the new build looks fashionably gaudy; most of it safely suburban.

Chivenor House today

Though, as I write, ‘regeneration’ threatens good (and sometimes expensively renovated) housing and solid communities across the country, there seems no real need here to lament the loss of these particular blocks which were clearly poorly built from the outset.  But, then as now, ‘regeneration’ is accompanied by a host of attitudes and policies which should be questioned.

For one, there was now the familiar emphasis on the importance of tenure mix.  As often as not, this is now a means of generating income in a world in which the market rules and traditional and highly cost-effective means of investment – in other words, public loans which were repaid (with the benefit of both providing genuinely affordable housing and lasting community assets) within thirty years or so – are deemed unacceptable.   But there is also the assumption that estates themselves were a flawed social model, that ‘successful’ communities require higher levels of owner occupation and injections of middle-class affluence and aspiration.

Demolition of Castle 8 blocks, 1996 (c) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

It’s worth pointing out that council estates were once both a site and symbol of working-class affluence and aspiration and that – before they were deliberately designated as housing of last resort – they did contain a social mix.   Furthermore, on Castle Vale itself almost one in three homes had been built for owner occupation. Still, the HAT instituted a Tenant Incentive Scheme in 1997 which offered a £10,000 grant to existing tenants to purchase their home.  By 2004, owner occupation on the estate had reached 39 per cent (from 29 per cent in the 1990s).

1997 takes us back to the New Labour era and its slogan, espoused by Tony Blair, that his government would be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’.  Not too many speak up for New Labour nowadays but again, in the interests of balance, it should be pointed out that criminality and antisocial behaviour were problems which hurt, disproportionately, still overwhelmingly ‘respectable’ working-class communities.

The Trees pub prior to demolition (c) Valeboy and the Birmingham History Forum

All five existing pubs – which ‘had long been dominated by drug dealers and criminals’ according to the HAT – were demolished.  The HAT (as did some local authorities) also adopted toughened tenancy regulations which eased the eviction of households considered to cause nuisance.  Members of the so-called and locally notorious Green Box Gang were evicted in 1998. Further evictions followed. Tough police action, in cooperation with ValeWatch (a joint police-HAT initiative), directed against drug dealing and gangs also followed and, of course, lots of CCTV. Although crime rates didn’t start falling until 2000, it all seems a strong fulfilment of the New Labour mantra.

Refurbished housing (c) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

The great claim made by the HAT programme is that it tackled problems holistically by recognising that social, economic and physical problems were related.  Not a unique or searing insight perhaps but one that Castle Vale HAT practised at least by a concerted programme of interventions tackling, for example, employment. I won’t list the various schemes here (read No Longer Notorious, linked to below, for the HAT’s own celebration of its record) but by 2005 unemployment on the estate had fallen to 5.3 per cent – below the Birmingham average of 7.6 (though the fall in the latter suggests that the HAT can’t take all the credit). (2)

New housing (c) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

Health, rightly, given that life expectancy in Castle Vale was eight years below the national average, was another focus.  In fact, the estate had been an early pioneer of integrated healthcare with its doctors, midwives, social workers, and health visitors all based in the same building from the 1960s.  But a comprehensive 1992 survey paved the way for a wide-ranging set of initiatives to tackle the estate’s particular problems of alcohol and drug abuse, infant mortality, domestic violence and mental illness.  The Sanctuary, a model of one-stop multi-agency working, was opened in the heart of the estate in 1991.  Life expectancy has increased by seven years.

The Sanctuary (c) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

It’s hard to challenge such an apparently unalloyed good news story and why would you want to unless you’re a committed municipal curmudgeon like myself but it’s an undeniable and self-confessed fact that the HAT worked very hard on public relations.  As Angus Kennedy, Chief Executive of the HAT stated:

Image management is as important as physical improvements. If we can’t attract people to an area, then it doesn’t have a sustainable future.

Positive publicity featured in Mornement, No Longer Notorious

From 1996, Castle Vale HAT employed a full-time PR officer with an assistant and a £100,000 budget.  He or she worked well, perhaps with good material.  Positive press stories increased from 29 per cent in 1979-1981 to 93 per cent in 2000.  In 2001 the HAT began to develop its own ‘image management strategy…driven by a baseline study conducted by MORI’. (3)

It’s easy to be cynical about some of this, to think at least that all this effort could be better directed towards concrete improvements rather than communications flimflam and yet perception, if not all, has enormous impact on reputation and well-being – as many housing estates can testify.  We saw this recently when we looked at North Shields’ Meadow Well Estate.  A study of both estates demonstrated how ‘a problem reputation can reinforce or even magnify an estate’s material difficulties’.  (4)

We’ll make some allowances here then (whilst looking at some opposing views) – just imagine how council housing might have fared if it hadn’t been subject to such relentless press negativity in recent decades.

Then, of course, we lived in the era of ‘private sector good, public sector bad’ (a perception that I’d like to think might have shifted more recently).  Given that, it’s no surprise that a new shopping centre and particularly the opening of a new Sainsbury’s as its anchor in July 2000, was heralded by the Progressive Conservatism Project as having a ‘profound and important effect on morale and confidence’ in Castle Vale, previously a ‘brand desert’. (5)

Castle Vale shopping precinct, 1994 (c) Mornement, No Longer Victorious

All this allowed one journalist to gush in 2003: (6)

These once bleak streets are now lined with attractive new houses and mews flats, piazzas and courtyards, travel agents and delicatessen counters, a new football stadium and a thriving college for the performing arts.

According to Adam Mornement, ‘the forgotten wasteland populated by towers had become a dignified low-rise estate’.

Whatever the reality – and I suspect that Castle Vale remains grittier than that language implies – the whiff of gentrification is plain to see.  And not everybody embraced the changes. There was significant resistance to the HAT in its early years from the Tenants’ Forum who felt a loss of democratic control and ownership – one protest featured ‘You’ve Been Quangoed’ tee-shirts to make the point.  The HAT records this as a heeded reminder of the need to strengthen consultative processes. (7)

Looking back, a correspondent on the Birmingham History Forum regrets ‘all the green space, swallowed by the new housing, the Park Lane fields just across the railway…now an industrial complex’. (8)

For a real alternative perspective, read the anonymous (though perhaps not representative) comment on a laudatory article in a June 2013 edition of the Tyburn Mail: (9)

Let’s celebrate Castle Vale that may have needed work and tlc but ended up having everything taken away and replaced by things chosen by a certain few. Castle Vale went from a bustling busy estate to a dull and miserable former shadow of itself. Well done to the money men is all I can say – you spent little, pocketed lots, and left!

Others have criticised the quality of the refurbishment which has taken place. (9)

Still, it’s clear that most residents, old and new, have welcomed the changes and the positive improvements which have taken place.  A police officer who worked on the estate in the 1970s and 80s considers that the HAT ‘worked a miracle…the place now is a lot better than it ever was’.

The HAT was wound up in 2003.  A ballot of the HAT’s 1327 tenants that year voted by 98 per cent to transfer housing management to the Castle Vale Community Housing Association set up in 1997.  I’ll confess a sneaking admiration, though, for the 18 tenants who opted to return to Birmingham City Council control (and perhaps got better tenancy conditions as a result).

John McKenna, ‘Knight of Castlevale’, 2002 (c) Wikimedia Commons

Castle Vale is held up as the great Housing Action Trust success story and taken by many to symbolise what ‘good’ regeneration can achieve, particularly when freed from the ‘dead hand’ of local authority control.  I think you could read this post and draw that lesson.

Or you could draw another lesson.  Estimates vary but it’s probable that (to 2005) the estate’s regeneration cost £318m – £205m from public funds and £113m, ‘leveraged’ in, principally from the private sector.  Imagine if local government had that money to spend and a similar freedom to build, rebuild and act – democratically and ‘holistically’ – to defend and support its community.

Sources

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

(2) Adam Mornement, No Longer Notorious – the Revival of Castle Vale, 1993-2005 (Castle Vale Housing Action Trust, 2005)

(3) Alison Benjamin, ‘Putting the record straight’, Roof, November/December 2000

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

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

(6) Helen George, ‘New Castle’, Housing (magazine of CIH), February 2003

(7) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

(8) ‘Valeboy’, comment in Birmingham History Forum, October 21st, 2012.  The comment from the police officer below is taken from the same source.

(9) The extended comment is even more trenchant and has much more to say. See ‘Castle Vale plans Year of Celebration: 20 years of regeneration for an estate that should be proud of its democracy’, Tyburn Mail, June 17, 2013

(10) Patrick Burns, ‘Midlands: On the Vale’, BBC West Midlands, 4 March 2005

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

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Farnborough Road under construction (c) Birmingham Mail

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

Castle Vale, 1968 (c) Birmingham Mail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Castle Vale, 1983 (c) Birmingham Mail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(9) Michael Lutwyche, Hardcore (2008)

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

(11) Quoted in Mornement, No Longer Notorious

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

Tags

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 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, 1999

(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)

 

 

Norwich Council Housing, 1955-74: David Percival and ‘Regional Architectural Tradition’

Tags

1950s, 1960s, 1970s, Multi-storey

As we saw in last week’s post, Norwich’s post-war building efforts into the mid-50s were heroic – at peak, around 1000 homes were completed annually to meet the needs of a local waiting list standing at 7000 at war’s end.  From a design perspective, however, the new City Architect David Percival, appointed in 1955, was dissatisfied, critical of ‘the monotonous appearance of the earlier post-war housing estates’ and their ‘constant repetition of neat but uninspiring types of dwelling’. (1)

Vauxhall Redevelopment Area showing Winchester Tower centre left, Vauxhall Street and Walpole Street low-rise to left and later Suffolk Square and Somerleyton Gardens medium-rise deck access to right   George Plunkett http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk

Percival (trained at the Bartlett, previously Deputy City Architect under Donald Gibson in Coventry) was lucky to get the chance, in his own words, to do something ‘much more interesting and rewarding’.  His timing was perfect.  The City completed its general needs housing programme in 1958 and turned again towards the redevelopment of its rundown inner-city areas.

The Heartsease Estate

At the same time, architectural critics were attacking both the dullness and uniformity of inner-city municipal flats and the alleged tedium of New Town development and the cottage suburbs from which it drew inspiration.  Gordon Cullen was developing ideas of townscape – a sympathetic urban environment – and respect to a place’s uniqueness, its genius loci. Notions of ‘community’ evolved too, entailing something more than the mechanistic focus on neighbourhood centres and facilities of the immediate post-war period.

For all this, Norwich would be the perfect canvas and Percival a man with the vision and ambition to paint beautifully – his aim was: (2)

not only to reflect the regional architectural tradition in housing schemes but to give individual character to each site.

Together, Percival and Norwich’s Labour Council built some of the finest council housing of its time.

One straightforward manifestation of these complex shifts was a new emphasis on ‘mixed development’: the principle of building a range of housing forms to both break the monotony of traditional forms of working-class housing – public and private – and provide housing appropriate to a range of people and households in different life stages.

Four storey flats on Midland Street in the Heigham redevelopment area, 1962 George Plunkett http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk

Practically speaking, almost 70 per cent of council homes in Norwich built to date were three-bedroom, the average household size a little under three.  Under-occupancy was a problem and the need for smaller units pressing.  A 1957 survey of waiting list applicants showed 60 per cent willing to live in central area flats. Still, the Council was at first resistant to even the four-storey point blocks that Percival proposed but visits to Tile Hill in Coventry, Harlow and Northampton and the quality of his designs brought them round.  Together, they would make a very good team.

Alderson Place

An early project at Alderson Place in Finkelgate is a good place to start – a modest, intimate scheme of old people’s flats in twelve small blocks, grouped around attractively landscaped courtyards and backing unobtrusively onto the ancient St John’s churchyard.

The genius loci, in the form of a flint-built church nearby, is acknowledged by use of greyish brick… courts and passages inside the development are quite intimate but always, in Townscape fashion, leaving a view to the surrounding wide-open streets.

It won the City – the first of several – a Good Design in Housing award from the Ministry of Housing and Local Government in 1959. Ian Nairn, no less, praised its ‘cottage units’ and ‘sense of community’.  It’s an approach which, in more vernacular forms, would be developed and extended throughout Percival’s tenure.

Vauxhall Street

At the same time, a much larger redevelopment of the Vauxhall Street area, just west of the city centre, was beginning which would eventually comprise full range of housing types – from one-storey housing for elderly people, to two-storeyed terraced housing, flat and maisonette blocks and even, in the end, one of Norwich’s very few tower blocks.

Much of this smaller-scale housing here is fairly conventional brick-built but raised in design terms by the use of panelling and some sculptural detailing

Later extensions to the development are more daringly modernist in design.  Norwich’s approach to the Yorkshire Design Group was rebuffed but home-grown adaptations were built in a later phase of the Vauxhall scheme – the Somerleyton Gardens/Suffolk Square and Johnson Place blocks built between 1968-1971.

Suffolk Square, Vauxhall Street

On the site of the former Nelson Barracks, the City developed two schemes in the late sixties.  Between Mousehold Street and Pockthorpe Gate, you’ll find a dense scheme of brick-built, mainly four-storey blocks set amidst green courts and connected by elevated walkways.

Nelson Barracks Estate from Pockthorpe Gate

Facing it to the east lies the Heathgate Estate, ‘Norwich’s most grandiose development…somewhat reminiscent of the best-known of British deck-access estates of this period, Park Hill in Sheffield’ (though this might require a little imagination on your part).

Heathgate Estate

These were medium-rise schemes but the City also experimented with high-rise. High-rise was originally seen as a means of housing single people and small households in the city centre but plans to build the city’s first tower blocks in centrally located Ber Street were scuppered by underground chalk workings.  The eleven-storey Compass Tower, designed by Percival and opened in 1964, was moved instead to the Heartsease Estate on the city’s north-eastern outskirts where Ashbourne and Burleigh Towers followed shortly after.  It was stipulated that none of the two- and one-bed flats be let to families with young children.

Bowers Avenue, Heartsease Estate Jon Welch and made available under a Creative Commons licence

The Lord Mayor, who performed the opening ceremony, was clear on the significance of the occasion:  the block was a ‘symbol of the changing habits, thought and customs of a new generation – a generation living at a fast tempo often with both husband and wife out to work all day’.  He concluded: (3)

Today the tall flats are here by demand and choice. Practical in purpose and imaginative in design, they add their own character and distinction to the Heartsease Estate.

That enthusiasm seemed echoed in the decision to order two 16-storey blocks (each with 63 two-bed and 32 one-bed flats) in a package deal from George Wimpey in 1965 – Winchester Tower, off Vauxhall Road and Normandie Tower, off Rouen Road.  The Housing Committee hoped, perhaps optimistically, that the layout – six flats per floor – would ‘encourage communities in case of a bad tenant on the floor’

Normandie Tower, Rouen Road

In fact, these were the last tower blocks to be built in the City.  The system-built towers weren’t unsuccessful but they remained unpopular within the City Architects’ Department which resented its loss of input and disliked in committee where members disliked the exclusion of local building firms.

These aren’t perhaps the schemes which win Norwich kudos for the quality and imagination of its housing design but they remind us at least that it was a forward-looking city.  We should see that too in the innovativeness of the smaller-scale and more intimate developments which became the City’s signature style in the later 1960s and 1970s.  This is labelled, in architectural terms, the Vernacular Revival but, in my eyes, it remains recognisably modern, something very far from pale, ‘in-keeping’ imitation and, most importantly, a political statement that working-class homes could and should be designed to the highest standards.

Camp Grove

Saunders Court

The steep western-facing slopes beyond the River Wensum provided the perfect site for such an enterprise.  The first two phases of the Camp Road scheme were designed by the City Architects’ Department in the early seventies – a warren of traffic-free landscaped blocks and courts joined by curving footpaths and unexpected entrance ways, enlivened by careful variations of texture and colour.  It echoes in part the earlier street pattern and small-scale housing of the area.  Percival himself felt that ‘the best contemporary work’ was achieved with ‘a catholic understanding of the past’ (4)

St Leonards’ Place: Tayler and Green

It’s Phase III, however, along Ladbrooke Place and St Leonard’s Road which is more celebrated.  Designed by Tayler and Green (chiefly known for their superb council housing schemes in south Norfolk), it’s a striking scheme of three-storeyed 87 two-bed and three-bed flats, employing gable ends – front and back – to echo a traditional Norwich streetscape and using extravagantly 16 different types of brick and flint, cobble and colour wash and four different pantiles to provide variation and contrast.  It was built, incidentally, by the City Council’s Direct Labour Department. (5)

Pottergate/Cow Hill

Back to the city centre, there was a matching need to develop in-fill housing schemes that complemented and raised their run-down surrounds.  The Pottergate/Cow Hill scheme of thirteen flats grouped around a central green was designed by Tony Whitwood of the City Architects’ Department and completed in 1970. Combined with rehabilitation of older adjacent properties, the quality of the design did much to revive the area and it provided a model for the Broadland Housing Association scheme along the road on Ten Bell Lane, designed by Edward Skipper in the early seventies.

Ten Bell Court

Horsey and Muthesius set out to explain why Norwich has done different and consistently produced – even in its more conventional or modern forms and styles – such consistently high-quality housing.  They point to local tradition – Norwich had its share of slum back-to-backs and courts but they tended to be a little more spacious than the common run.  That remained to shape local expectations and was complemented by the spirit and the letter (in these Parker Morris days) of contemporary council housing – that ordinary people deserved good quality and roomy homes.

Quality itself was assured by an expert and committed City Architects’ Department.  The Council employed as many as three dozen qualified architects at peak; this at a time, Horsey and Muthesius remind us, when:

many council architects considered their work and capability superior to those of private architects, and certainly far above the standards of the speculative house builder.

Local skills, good supervision, competent direct labour, a number of capable city-based building firms helped.  The use of traditional local materials not only promoted that regional flavour that Percival had identified as an early goal but was an additional guarantor of high-standard construction.

I’d add that this was a progressive council with deep roots in its community which reflected a local pride in the city and a powerful civic identity.  The Council felt with peculiar force its loss of unitary county borough status in 1974 and this would prove the trigger for David Percival’s retirement also.

JB Priestley always found himself ‘happy and at home in the cities where I am asked at once, confidently and proudly, what I think of the place’. He concluded: (6)

Norwich is one of those cities.  It may be minute compared to London, Paris, Rome, but nevertheless it lives its life as a city on the same level of dignity.

That was a dignity conferred on the residents of its council housing too.

Sources

(1) David Percival, ‘Redevelopment Work in Norwich’, Housing Review, July-August 1960

(2) Miles Horsey and Stefan Muthesius, Provincial Mixed Development, Norwich Council Housing 1955-1973 (Norwich, 1986).  The succeeding quotation is drawn from the same source. Much of this piece is dependent on the research and analysis of this work which is an essential read for further detail.  Unfortunately, it exists only in poorly reproduced typescript but it deserves professional republication.

(3) ‘An Englishman’s Homes is his 11-floor castle’, Eastern Daily Press, 1 October 1964

(4) RIBA, Architect’s File: David Percival

(5) ‘Local Authority Housing, Camp Road, Norwich’, Brick Bulletin March 1978 and ‘Norwich. A Place for People’, Era, Journal of the Eastern Region of the RIBA, Issue 30, Jan/February 1973

(6) JB Priestley, English Journey (1934)

The Pepys Estate, Deptford: ‘a Tale of Two Cities’

Tags

1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Lewisham, Multi-storey, Regeneration

If you’ve been following recent posts, you will have read already about the award-winning design and prestige of the Pepys Estate in its earliest years and its subsequent reputation as a crime-ridden and racist ‘problem estate’. Today’s brings the story up to date.

After 1979, a political attack on council housing was matched by an apparently more benign concern (although with a conveniently shared language of crisis and failure) to regenerate so-called problem estates up and down the country. As such, the Pepys Estate was ripe for intervention.  This post examines the controversies surrounding its regeneration and their lessons which, in the context of some proposed solutions to London’s current housing crisis, seem as relevant than ever.

The re-clad Daubeney Tower, Pepys Park and new build along Bowditch

The first phase of the Estate’s transition was not controversial – in fact, it embodied precisely the conventional wisdom of its day.  Crime was high: 175 burglaries and 392 car crimes were reported in 1982. Fear of crime was perhaps higher: (1)

Many old people, women and children are afraid to use the lifts or stairs and will not do so unaccompanied. Nor do residents feel confident to confront noisy children, boisterous teenagers or non-resident intruders, because they cannot rely on the support of other residents.

Reflecting the fashionable theories of Oscar Newman and his British alter-ego Alice Coleman, blame for crime and antisocial behaviour was placed on the Estate’s design:

the inter-connectedness, the lack of ‘defensible space’ and opportunity for surveillance over common parts and the ease of access to and escape from the blocks.

That inter-connectedness had, of course, been one of the founding design ideals of the Estate and had once succeeded not only in the practical aim of separating pedestrians and traffic but in promoting community.  Now, by some alchemy, ‘the massive “streets-in-the-sky” catwalks separating pedestrians from traffic had become liabilities that destroyed neighbourhood connections’. (2)

Remaining walkways between Argosy House and Lanyard House

A Safe Neighbourhoods Unit Action Plan was presented in April 1982 and a series of measures to improve security followed – strengthened front doors to flats, double-entry phone systems to blocks, and CCTV.  A concierge system was trialled in Aragon Tower in a later phase of the scheme and walkways demolished between two of the medium-rise blocks, Bence and Clement Houses.  At the same time, a Neighbourhood Housing Office was established on the Estate and policing stepped up.  It was reported, as a result, that recorded crime had fallen by over half by the end of the decade though street crime less so.

If I’ve treated this initiative somewhat provocatively, perhaps I shouldn’t.  The improvement to residents’ lives was real and there’s no reason why secure entry systems and concierge schemes should be confined to middle-class developments. Crime should, of course, be ‘designed out’ where feasible.

My scepticism lies only in the tendency of some to assume design flaws were (here and elsewhere on other similar estates) the cause of crime.  We saw last week the range of social and economic challenges this previously safe and well-regarded estate faced by the 1980s and, given the demographics (just under a quarter of the Estate’s population was under 18), we might look to a far wider range of factors to explain both the rise and fall of antisocial behaviour.

A contemporary but out-of-date Lewisham Homes sign for the Estate – Merrick House is gone but the former shopping terrace is still shown

Regeneration proper began in 1992 when the Department of Environment approved the Deptford City Challenge initiative, a seven-year programme scheduled to spend almost £29m on reviving and renovating the Estate.

After extensive consultation with residents, the initial Estate Action programme which emerged proposed the demolition of just one housing block – the 44 flats of Merrick House in the centre of the Estate to be replaced by 18 new three- and four-bed houses with their own enclosed gardens.   Some walkways and the existing Community Centre and elevated shopping centre were also to be rased and replaced.

The Evelyn Community Garden

In the plethora of interventions of the time, a Pepys Community Forum secured (excuse the jargon, just for the hard-core social housing enthusiasts among you) Single Regeneration Budget Round 5 funding.  This resident-run community development trust survives to the present and among its initiatives is the Evelyn Community Garden on Windlass Road. (3)

Eddystone Tower with the new shops and community centre, occupying the former area of Merrick House, in the foreground

Merrick House and the shops came down (although the current small street-level terrace is far smaller and inferior in provision) and the refurbishment of existing blocks proceeded through the mid-1990s.  But events were to take a radically different turn from 1998 when Lewisham Council carried out a residents’ survey to review works carried out and plans for the future.

The survey appears to have been intended to provide cover for decisions already taken. Both the Pepys Neighbourhood Committee and Pepys Regeneration Forum objected to its format, which was taken to pre-judge outcomes, and the secrecy which surrounded its findings.

The controversial Lewisham Council advert intended to ‘sell’ the changed plans for the Estate to local residents

In 1999, the Council abandoned the proposal to build new family homes in the centre of the Estate and announced, contrary to existing promises, plans to demolish five of the Estate’s low-rise blocks (Limberg, Dolben, Barfleur, Marlowe and Millard Houses) and sell off Aragon Tower.

These blocks were indistinguishable from others on the Estate, all but Barfleur had already been improved under the Estate Action scheme, and an architectural survey commissioned by tenants found them to be structurally sound.  They shared one characteristic, however:  they happened to be closest to the river – ‘the area most amenable…to gentrification’. (4)

At the same time, the Hyde Housing Association was selected by the Council as its preferred partner in the proposed redevelopment and the Association – acquiring the blocks for £6.5m and receiving £9m from the Housing Association for its own scheme – was granted planning permission to demolish and rebuild one year later. All this, despite some fairly cosmetic consultation, took place behind closed doors.  The scheme required the ‘decanting’ of existing tenants in 222 council flats who were offered no right of return.   Tenants groups and housing activists mobilised in protest.

Protestors slammed the ‘social cleansing’ of the Estate

The new scheme – five blocks of flats plus two terraces of three-storey houses in its initial phases – was designed by the bptw practice (architects don’t like capital letters apparently).  This was a mixed tenure scheme (as now deemed necessary) – of the first 169 homes, 45 were for shared ownership and 124 for social rent – but it was also, more positively, tenure blind.

Longshore, part of the new Hyde Housing scheme

The scheme won an award as the Best Public Housing Development in the 2005 Brick Awards and was selected as a (positive) case study by CABE, the Government’s Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. (5)  To my untutored eyes, the new blocks along Foreshore, Longshore and Barfleur Lane look attractive, albeit in a generically contemporary way.  Owen Hatherley is more cynical: (6)

The new blocks are regeneration hence good, the old are council housing hence bad. Yet the council flats are much larger, and look much more robustly built, of concrete and stock brick – the newer flats are clad in the ubiquitous thin layer of brick or attached slatted wood, materials which have shown an unfortunate tendency to fall off.

Albermarle House (to the left) and the converted rum warehouses, now both managed by Hyde Housing

At least most of these homes remained more or less genuinely affordable (though presumably at higher Housing Association rents).  The sale of Aragon Tower to Berkeley Homes for £11.5m in 2002 was pure and unabashed gentrification and has resulted in the loss of 144 council flats.  Berkeley Homes added five floors to the existing 24-storey tower and 14 penthouse units.  One of the refurbished former council flats – ‘a superb two bedroom split-level flat within a fantastic modern development with concierge service, boasting a bright and contemporary living space’ – was recently sold by Foxtons for £440,000.(7)

The new Aragon Tower

To avoid any taint of council estate, a new entrance was constructed on the western side of the Tower from George Beard Road and early prospective purchasers were brought down by Thames Clipper to Greenland Pier upriver.  All this was described in a BBC documentary series in 2007, The Tower: a Tale of Two Cities.  Perhaps you’ve seen it; I haven’t and it’s not available online. There are mixed views of the series on the Estate but it does, at least, seem to have done a pretty good job exposing the stark social and economic divisions which currently shame us. (8)

Lewisham Council claimed to have run out of money and it’s true enough that the rules of the game were – and are – designed to curtail the ability of local councils to improve and expand their housing stock.  But it suited, too, a gentrifying agenda which sees some London councils only too keen to bring the middle-class and their money into their boroughs.

This was expressed honestly by Pat Hayes, the Council’s director of regeneration: (9)

The key to successful communities is a good mix of people: tenants, leaseholders and freeholders. The Pepys Estate was a monolithic concentration of public housing and it makes sense to break that up a bit and bring in a different mix of incomes and people with spending power.

Of course, one doesn’t hear much of ‘monolithic’ middle-class suburbs, nor – although they exist (and existed once on the Pepys) – of ‘successful’ working-class communities. And wouldn’t it be better if those ‘people with spending power’ were local people treated more fairly in our unequal society?

The cover of the Hyde Group’s glossy brochure advertising their Pepys Estate development

In reality, this form of ‘regeneration’ is all too often imposed at the expense of the existing community and against council tenants’ wishes and interests.  On the Pepys Estate, it resulted in the loss of 366 secure council tenancies. (10) As areas all around the Estate are redeveloped privately, the suspicious lull in current remedial works on remaining blocks in the care of Lewisham Homes leads some to believe the process may not be over.

The £11.5m secured from the sale was promised to housing schemes elsewhere in the Borough.  Still, you can do the maths – Berkeley Homes were the real winners.  It’s a perfect illustration of the skewed values and insane economics which currently shape the UK’s housing market.

Daubeney Tower with Aragon to the rear surrounded by old and new build © Derek Harper and made available through a Creative Commons licence

The Pepys Estate, let’s be fair here, has clearly benefited from much of the renewal which has taken place.  The Estate looks and feels good now; its homes are of a quality and at rents which millions of private renters dream of.  It remains a living example of the ambition and idealism of earlier generations to secure good, healthy, secure and affordable homes for ordinary people.

Ironically, the Surrey Canal – maintained as a feature in the GLC’s lay-out of the Estate but covered over during redevelopment – is now scheduled to be re-opened as a linear park. Gentrification has obviously made water features respectable again.

A penthouse apartment view from Aragon Tower as featured in the Sprunt architectural group’s flyer for the development

But if you want a stark symbol of current free-market politics and our new priorities ponder on the fact that a tower block, part of an estate built ‘for the peaceful enjoyment and well-being of Londoners’, is sold off to the wealthy because it’s next to the river and too good for the working-class.

Sources

(1) The 1982 Safe Neighbourhoods Report quoted in Tim Kendrick, Housing Safe Communities: an Evaluation of Recent Initiatives – the Pepys Estate, London Safe Neighbourhoods Unit (ND)

(2) Gareth Potts, Regeneration in Deptford, London (September, 2008)

(3)  Jean Anastacio, Ben Gidley, Lorraine Hart, Michael Keith, Marjorie Mayo and Ute Kowarzik, Reflecting realities Participants’ perspectives on integrated communities and sustainable development, Joseph Rowntree Foundation (July 2000) and Malcolm Cadman, Pepys Community Forum

(4) Michael E. Stone, Social Housing in the UK and US: Evolution, Issues and Prospects (October 2003)

(5) CABE, Case Study: Pepys Estate, Deptford, London

(6) The London Column, Pepys Estate, Deptford. Photo Tony Ray-Jones, Text Owen Hatherley (May 2011).  The blogger Single Aspect has also criticised the re-design of Aragon Tower.

(7) Foxtons, Two-bed flat for sale, Aragon Tower, Deptford SE8

(8) You can see the series being discussed by residents on the Spectacle Productions website

(9) Sarah Lonsdale, ‘Tears of a clown as his tower gets a fancy facelift‘, Daily Telegraph, November 12 2004

(10) For blow-by-blow details and analysis of the process, see the online archive created by Malcolm Cadman of the Pepys Tenants’ Action Group including his Chronology of Events and Tenants Action Group Pepys Archive.  For another highly critical account, go to Keith Parkins, ‘Scandal of Pepys Estate’, on Indymedia, February 9 2005

The Pepys Estate, Deptford: from ‘Showcase’ to ‘Nightmare’

Tags

1970s, 1980s, Lewisham, Multi-storey

We left the Pepys Estate, recently constructed and a prestige GLC scheme, in a good place last week.  It was popular and well-regarded: (1)

People were fighting to move onto [the Estate] and the lucky ones felt privileged.  They were proud to be part of a showcase – spotlessly clean and well looked after.

Completed in 1973, by the end of the decade one newspaper report on the Estate was headlined simply ‘Nightmare!’, the detail seemingly justifying that exclamation mark. The Estate, it continued: (2)

is littered with abandoned cars, graffiti splatters the walls, garages are deserted because people fear to use them and piles of rubbish clog waste disposal units.

In this post, we’ll examine and assess this trajectory.

Daubeney Tower

As we saw in the last post, the Estate was planned in line with some of the most innovative design principles of its day.  Particular attention was paid to the need to re-create community. Perhaps this reflected a conscious sense of the strength of existing community in South London.  It reflected too a growing literature celebrating the tightly-knit traditional working-class communities of the capital.  Wilmott and Young were writing about East London but their lament for the terraced-street culture of family and kinship then being uprooted by wholesale redevelopment surely had strong echoes south of the river. (3)

An old photograph of Grove Street which runs through the present Estate © http://www.olddeptfordhistory.com/

According to Les Back, an academic who lived and worked on the Estate in the later eighties, it was envisaged as ‘a phoenix-like planned society that would emerge from the rubble of slum redevelopment’.  To this end, beyond the architectural qualities and social amenities noted last week, the design as a whole was intended to promote community.  Thus, the external walkways we’ve learned to hate – a strong feature connecting the various elements of the estate – and even the internal corridors – which linked the low-rise blocks – were seen as media of neighbourliness.

A contemporary image of walkways linking Harmon House and Bemberidge House with Eddystone Tower to the rear.

And it may surprise you to learn – given the obloquy that subsequently descended on these planners’ fancies – that they worked.  One resident recalls a trip to the local shops – along those walkways – taking hours to complete as she stopped to talk to everyone she met, and she knew nearly everyone.  The corridors were also a place to meet and socialise; doors left unlocked with children playing in one flat but regularly checked on by neighbours.

Daubeney Tower with Harmon House and Pelican House to the left

This was true, apparently, even of the now reviled tower blocks.  People met in lifts and on landings. Fiona, my guide to the estate, living then in Aragon Tower, remembers a close and friendly community – ‘you could knock on any door’ – and recalls too how scrupulously tenants maintained the common areas according to a rota issued by the estate caretaker.

Residents also organised their own Social Club which in turn organised what Les Back calls ‘the pinnacle of local self-help’ – the Palaver celebrations (a kind of estate carnival) held annually in the early 1970s.

A contemporary sign for Bembridge House. Its naming reflects the original Deptford location of Trinity House.

When Lord Mountbatten formally opened the Estate in 1966, ‘he suggested that each estate tenant should be given a history of the naval dockyard’. (4)  Whether this was followed through or not, the area’s naval heritage was an important part of the Estate’s consciously patriotic identity, not just in the naming of the various blocks but also in the practice of the Tenants’ Association to formally ‘adopt’ a naval frigate.  Naval officers would visit the Estate and some tenants would visit the ships when docked.

There was, of course, a context for all this – there is always a context though so often it gets forgotten in the architectural analyses of social housing.  This was a respectable working-class community, still enjoying relatively high levels of employment.  The rents of the Estate – at between £5 and £8 for the lower-rise flats from the outset – were generally higher than those of other local estates and, given that ability to pay was one of the most important criteria applied when allocating tenancies at this time, steady employment and reasonable incomes were necessary.

If you know the Pepys Estate or its sometime reputation, you’ll know there’s one other thing I haven’t mentioned – race.  The Estate was in its early years and for some time an almost exclusively white estate, this the result of a more or less formal policy operated by the GLC.  As one former council housing officer describes:

It wasn’t as simple as ‘We don’t want black people living there’.  It was more like an assumption that black and white would rather live separately from one another.  So, as you go down the Old Kent Road you can see some estates are white and others are black or mixed. It didn’t happen by accident. Housing officers just didn’t allocate black people to [the Pepys Estate].

Conversely, the Milton Court Estate, about a mile to the south on the border with New Cross, was understood as a ‘black estate’.  Sonia Herelle had rejected a move to Milton Court for this reason; it appeared to her to be becoming a ‘ghetto’. In 1973, she became one of the first black people to move to Pepys.  Looking back, she recalls a ‘painful racism, most often expressed as distasteful avoidance but which could easily erupt into overt hostility’.(5) Olaudah Equiano who was seized and returned to slavery on the steps that remain on the Pepys Estate waterfront could have hardly felt less welcome.

Merrick House

As late as 1981, 72 per cent of the Estate’s heads of household were born in the UK (and a further six per cent in the Republic of Ireland).  Even Fiona, with her Scottish father and an Irish mother, felt she didn’t quite ‘fit in’ at the local primary school, so exclusively white and ‘local’ was it.

This would change.  It changed, belatedly, as London itself became ever more diverse but it changed principally through a technical shift in housing allocations policy.  By the late 1970s, needs-based assessment was becoming the norm and earlier criteria based on local connection and means were superseded.  It was left to Lewisham Borough Council, who took over the management of the Estate in 1979, to implement the change.

At the same time, life was getting harder for some of the older-established residents on the Estate.  Lewisham lost 10,000 jobs in the ten years from 1978 and unemployment trebled.  The rate of unemployment for all economically active males reached 13 per cent in 1981 but, while this was relatively high (the rate stood at 18 per cent in the wider area), it was far worse for the Estate’s children now growing into adulthood – over half of those aged 16 to 29 were without work.

There were also criticisms, closer to home, of the Estate’s management.  The nearest Housing Office was two miles away.  Repairs were carried out from a depot on a neighbouring estate and, although a mobile care-taking team was based at Pepys, it was responsible for an additional 1900 properties elsewhere.  All this seemed remote and inefficient.

As Right to Buy kicked in and the Borough’s housing stock fell and as central government grants fell (Lewisham suffered a 30 per cent reduction in its allocations from Whitehall in 1985), a perfect storm of housing shortage and disadvantage was emerging.  And when things go wrong, the human tendency is to seek someone to blame.  That was not Mrs Thatcher but, typically, figures closer to hand.  Many older Estate residents associated the decline of the Estate with its new arrivals, those from the black and ethnic minorities.

The youth club was a scene of racial tension but also where young people shared a musical culture. The roofs were designed to echo Kent oast houses.

It was at this point that the Estate’s reputation for racism took off.  There was, it was said, strong support for the National Front and other neo-fascist organisations.  There were many ‘racist incidents’, ranging from verbal harassment to physical assault to arson attacks on homes occupied by black and ethnic minority residents.

In this context, that strong sense of local identity and patriotism discussed earlier assumes a different, more sinister, meaning.  To Les Back, what had developed was a ‘parochialism’ and ‘nationalism’.  The ‘estate people’ (its older-established white residents) withdrew into a defensive occupation of their remaining strongholds, the Tenants’ Hall and Tenants’ Association, the bar in the community centre. Opposition to change took a racialised form in opposition to the incomers:

For the long-standing residents, their embitterment is essentially the result of what they feel is a broken promise. They were handed a residential space, which they took as their own, and now they feel as if that space is being invaded by ‘foreign’ newcomers and a council that is unsympathetic to them.

It’s ironic, really.  In writing this blog, I’ve been waiting for years for ‘community’ to come along.  Social scientists of the interwar years berated the lack of ‘community’ in the new cottage suburbs. Post-war commentators criticised its lack in the modern high-rise schemes.  And then, when a powerful sense of community does emerge on a council estate, it’s the wrong sort!

I hope you take that as the tongue-in-cheek comment intended but I’m highly suspicious of this eternal quest for community in social housing.  Put crudely, no-one bothers the residents of middle-class suburbia about their sense of community or lack of it – the middle class are never a ‘problem’.   I question the romanticisation of earlier forms of working-class community and I’ve seen plenty of examples of neighbourliness and fellow-feeling on those council estates which have so troubled some middle-class observers.

Previously a community centre run by tenants, this is now the the Borough of Lewisham’s Pepys Resource Centre. It’s located in a converted naval rum warehouse.

That said, here was a success for the planners – that ‘phoenix-like planned society’ had come about but all around it had changed and its vices had become more apparent than its virtues.  Let me be clear – this is not in any shape or form an apologia for racism but it is always working-class communities that suffer most from the shifts and stresses of capitalism.

Of those, the most significant recently have been de-industrialisation (the loss of traditional working-class jobs) and the changes brought about by immigration – not connected but sometimes perceived that way with xenophobia as a response.  UKIP is perhaps the most recent result of these dynamics and while there are comrades on the left who feel that ‘racist’ voters of UKIP should be disdained, I believe the experience of the Pepys Estate teaches something different.

In any case, ‘racism’ is always a complex phenomenon (though not, of course, if you are its victim).  Longer-term black residents of the Estate were generally respected and liked.  Their children were often accepted as ‘locals’ sharing a Pepys identity by their white peers although they had to negotiate a difficult cultural terrain and accept, on occasion, racist name-calling that they could never have experienced as mere banter.  It’s a cliché, of course, that black music often provided a shared culture for these young people.

Gransden House and Daubeney Tower

The hardest-hit group appears to have been the Vietnamese migrants who arrived in the early eighties.  They were affected by the perception (which appears to have been grounded in reality rather than urban myth) that they received sought-after low-rise flats desired by longer-term residents seeking transfers.  More generally, they lacked the common culture shared in significant degree by the Estate’s black and white residents.  In these years, many Vietnamese families locked their doors at night and refused to venture out.

The remaining element to address, as so often in the analysis of council estates at this time, is crime.  Fiona, who has suffered one burglary in her time on the Estate and never any perceived personal threat, remembers it as a safe place but the statistics remain stark.  Crime – burglaries, thefts, car crime and assaults – rose fast in the early 1980s, peaking at 49.1 crimes per 100 households in 1982.  In 1985, a quarter of households reported burglaries.

Drugs played their part.  A recreational use of marijuana among young people became something darker with the arrival of ‘scag’ – relatively cheap heroin – and drug use and dealing were widespread on the Estate. Alternative lifestyles and alternative economies among young people are perhaps not so surprising when conventional society has failed them so badly.

Newspaper reports from 1977 and 1979

Many residents wanted to move.  Some were able to buy properties elsewhere but many felt trapped as the Estate became more unpopular and transfers much more difficult. In the early 1980s, around a quarter of the Estate’s households were said to be on the housing transfer list. (6)  As an unpopular estate, its now hard-to-let properties were increasingly allocated to those with least choice, typically vulnerable people housed as priority cases.

These became another ‘Other’ – seen less as victims than culprits and sometimes with disrupted or disruptive life-styles that may seem to have justified the antipathy that many felt towards them.  As one resident remarked to Les Back:

When they moved the problem families in, that’s when you got a lot trouble and that…They started off with just one block. Now it’s all around the estate.

An older resident simply observed:

It’s like [this estate] is the end of the road, the toilet of society and we get all the dregs. A place is only as good as the people who live there.

We’ve come a long way from the showpiece estate of its earliest years but its highs and lows of this suggest a more complex story than is often assumed.  The homes were mostly of good quality, the Estate’s conception and design had worked initially to create a pleasant environment and a strong community.  But the Estate was victim to wider forces.  Could those wider forces now come to its rescue?  We’ll examine the regeneration of the Estate next week.

Sources

(1) Jean, a local health worker, quoted in Les Back, New Ethnicities and Urban Culture. Racisms and multi–culture in young lives (1996) in which it is semi-anonymised as ‘Riverview’.  Much of the detail and some of the quotations which follow are drawn from the same source.

(2) South East London Mercury, 15 November 1979

(3) Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (1957)

(4) ‘Lord Mountbatten at Deptford Home of the Navy’, South London Press, 13 July 1966

(5) Jess Steele, Turning the Tide: the History of Everyday Deptford (1993)

(6) Tim Kendrick, Housing safe communities: an evaluation of recent initiatives – Pepys Estate Coordinated Estate Improvement Scheme, London Safe Neighbourhoods Unit (ND)

The Pepys Estate, Deptford: for ‘the peaceful enjoyment and well-being of Londoners’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, GLC, Lewisham, Multi-storey

The Pepys Estate was famous, then it was infamous, now it just looks and feels like a pretty decent place to live.  It was a GLC showpiece before it became (or was portrayed as) a ‘nightmare’.  Its stories of crime and race and controversial regeneration can stand for a wider narrative of council housing over these years but a closer examination of their detail will take us far beyond the crude headlines.  This post focuses on the Estate’s origins.

From the GLC brochure, ‘The Pepys Estate – a GLC Housing Project’ (1969): ‘‘In the foreground is a block of old people’s flats…sited close to the shopping centre. The 24-storey Daubeney Tower dominates the scene and eight storey blocks run parallel to the River Thames’ © Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre and used with their permission

We could start in 1513, the date when Henry VIII established the Chief Naval Dockyard (frequented by Samuel Pepys when Clerk to the Navy Board in the later 18^th century) on the south bank of the Thames in the fishing village of Deptford.  Or 1742 when it became the Naval Victualling Yard.  Or 1858 when that became the Royal Victoria Yard in honour of a royal visit.

But this story – despite the rich maritime history and local heritage celebrated in the Estate’s names – begins a century later: in 1958 when the Admiralty agreed to sell the 11 acre site to the then London County Council for housing, principally for local people being displaced by the demolition of the run-down Victorian terraces which dominated the area.  Clearance of the adjoining Grove Street and Windmill Lane areas created a 45 acre site on which eventually would be built around 1500 homes for a population of around 5000.

A residue of the GLC’s role in designing and constructing the Estate and a reminder of its original lay-out.

Construction began in 1966 with the new Greater London Council in charge and was completed in 1973.  As housing responsibilities increasingly devolved to the new London boroughs, this was one of the GLC’s largest and most prestigious projects and, as such, it combined some of the most advanced and innovative design principles of the day.

It would be, from the outset, a community – a cradle to grave exemplar of welfare state ideals from its maternity and child welfare centre and youth club to the homes and clubroom provided for elderly people.  But it represented modernity and even affluence too – both in its ‘car-free shopping centre’ and its provision for residents’ parking: one, generally below-ground, parking space to every two homes with provision for this to rise.

From the GLC brochure: ‘Many of the garages are underground or incorporated in blocks but with separate access for vehicles. Illustrated is an entrance to some garages with paved area above part of it under the block providing safe covered play areas for the use of children in wet weather’. © Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre and used with their permission

Its cutting edge, however, is best seen in its overall design.  As the GLC brochure celebrating the new estate proudly proclaims, ‘in planning the estate, one of the main themes has been the separation of pedestrian from vehicular traffic’.(1)  This was achieved by an extensive series of elevated walkways connecting many of the blocks.  Fiona, my guide around the estate, who’s lived there since 1968, remembers you could walk from Deptford Park to the river without your feet ever touching the ground.

From the GLC brochure: ‘Part of the raised walkway system connecting the eight-storey blocks at the first floor level to the paved area around Daubeney Tower’. © Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre and used with their permission

From the GLC Brochure: the elevated shopping centre since replaced with a smaller ground-level terrace. © Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre and used with their permission

Another innovation were the so-called ‘scissors maisonettes’ – split-level flats which maximised accommodation space by reducing the internal area required for access and allowed flexible dual-aspect lay-outs to best exploit varied sites and orientations. (2)  From the front door, you’d walk up (or down) one flight of stairs to the kitchen and living room and another to reach the toilet, bathroom and airing cupboard. Then, one level above or below, lay the two bedrooms and a final short flight of stairs to a fire exit.

Conversely, the Estate also reflected the emergent trend to rehabilitate, rather than demolish, older properties where they could be converted into decent homes.   On the Pepys Estate, this took a particularly ambitious and imaginative form in the conversion of two former naval rum warehouses on the waterfront.

A contemporary image of the converted rum warehouses; Aragon Tower to the rear

In all, 65 small flats were provided here but, at a construction cost of £3600 each (three foot thick walls didn’t make the job easy), these were always intended to be let at higher rents and their residents remained aloof from the wider estate.  A sailing club, intended for local youngsters and now closed, and a branch library, still open, were also incorporated into the buildings.

From the GLC brochure,a view of the Estate from the north. The three tower blocks, Daubeney, Eddystone and Aragon, can be seen from left to right, the converted rum warehouses at the front left and the since demolished Limberg House at front centre. © Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre and used with their permission

As importantly, there was a real effort made to harness for the first time the advantages of the Estate’s magnificent location:

The barrier of industries and warehouses which has long separated Deptford from the river has been broken and amongst the features of the estate quayside gardens and a promenade along the riverwall are to be provided. Many of the new homes command fine views along the river from Tower Bridge to Greenwich Naval College including London’s dockland.

Other reminders of the site’s heritage were also acquired and converted:  The Terrace, a four-storey terrace of seven Georgian homes then occupied by the Naval Film Unit and The Colonnade, two-storey buildings which formed the original entrance to the Royal Victoria Yard.

A contemporary image of The Terrace; remaining walkways linking Bembridge House and Harmon House can be seen to the rear left.

Contemporary images of The Colonnade with Aragon Tower to the rear

Modern construction comprised ten interconnected eight-storey blocks and three twenty-four-storey tower blocks.  Here’s the ‘concrete jungle’ that some of you may be looking for but it’s worth reiterating the humanity and ideals which informed its building.

The blocks themselves were traditionally built and, beside some teething difficulties to be expected, experienced few of the problems associated with their system-built counterparts of the day. Old peoples’ dwellings were located conveniently close to the shopping centre.  Larger family dwellings were placed in lower blocks with ‘as few children as possible’ to be ‘accommodated in the tower blocks’.  A supervised playgroup was offered in Daubeney Tower for its children and those of the other blocks.

From the GLC Brochure: ‘For the children who do live in Daubeney Tower or nearby blocks a supervised playgroup has been organised…Even this cannot escape maritime influence’. © Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre and used with their permission

There was room to play elsewhere – ‘a large children’s area with ball court, paddling pool and other play facilities’ according to the brochure and ‘quiet green squares’ formed by ‘the grouping of the lower buildings’.  In all, there were 12.5 acres of open space – almost one-third of the Estate as a whole.  This was a far-cry from the densely-packed slum terraces that this scheme and others like it replaced (although it’s only fair to say that the docks nearby provided more adventurous play-space for many).

Children from the Estate playing at the nearby docks

It was a popular place to move to with homes and facilities far better than those the vast majority of its new residents had previously known.  Even the tower blocks which we’ve been taught to despise (unless we belong to the affluent middle class, of course, for whom they can provide the most prestigious addresses) were popular with most.

Fiona, living as a child in a corner flat on the tenth floor of Aragon Tower (next to the river), may have been luckier than most but she remembers the light and air and river views she enjoyed then which she misses to this day.  We romanticise those old terraces – squalid and dirty before they ever became des res’s – and forget some of the pleasures of multi-storey living.

We’re very clever and knowing about the alleged mistakes of the past but a little humbleness is called for.  We might, firstly, properly recognise the principles and care that were applied to the Estate’s planning and construction.  We should acknowledge, secondly, how much was achieved. Both were rewarded in 1967 by a Civic Trust Award granted in recognition of ‘its impeccable design’.

From the GLC brochure: ‘The grouping of the lower buildings allows quiet green squares to be formed’. © Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre and used with their permission

Finally, in twenty or thirty years’ time, we can look back on the mistakes we’re currently making.  Some may already be obvious. The design standards of many modern private homes (certainly those deemed most ‘affordable’) are often far below those of their past and present local authority equivalents.  Other apparent mistakes will reflect a changed conventional wisdom challenging that which we take for granted today.  And some will result from changing circumstances; in other words, the context and lived realities of ordinary lives which are ignored in so much of what passes as analysis of council housing.

The next post will look at what went wrong or – to be more accurate – at how far things changed and why but I’m leaving this week’s post on (no pun intended) a high note.  Back in 1966, the prestige and respectability of council housing ambitions were recognised, in Deptford, by the formal opening of the Pepys Estate by Lord Mountbatten.

This red-letter day was marred for the occupants of the flat chosen for the ceremony.  Charles Hayward couldn’t get time off work – he was dead busy at the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society where he worked as an undertaker; his brother was ill with flu but, hopefully, not about to add to his workload.  Charles’ wife, Florence, had to cope with the stream of visitors alone.(3)

Mountbatten dedicated the Estate to ‘the peaceful enjoyment and well-being of Londoners’.   Worthy but challenging ideals in hard times, we’ll see how far they were fulfilled next week.

Sources

(1) Greater London Council, The Pepys Estate – a GLC Housing Project (1969)

(2) For more on ‘scissors’ design, please go the excellent description provided by Single Aspect who’s also written informatively on the Pepys Estate and his personal experience of living on the estate.

(3) ‘Lord Mountbatten at Deptford Home of the Navy’, South London Press, 13 July 1966

I’m very grateful to the excellent Lewisham Local History and Archive Centre for their permission to use images from the GLC brochure in their possession.

Post-War High-Rise in Birmingham III: the blocks come down

Tags

1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Multi-storey

Birmingham’s torrid love affair with high-rise was ending by the late sixties.  The city built 464 high-rise blocks in the post-war period, the last of these on the Chelmsley Wood estate built between 1965 and 1972.  But though the 35 blocks on the Estate can appear dominating, in fact 85 per cent of its 14,000 homes were low-rise houses and maisonettes.  A critical turning-point had been reached.

Chelmsley Wood © Birmingham Mail

That was more obvious in May 1986 when Grantham and Fleetwood Houses in Northfield became the first of the Council’s tower blocks to be demolished.  By 2001 just 305 blocks remained in Council ownership; many had been rased, the Chelmsley Wood blocks transferred to Solihull.  The demolition programme continues – another eight blocks were scheduled by the Council for clearance in 2011.

You could write a book on ‘the failure of high-rise’ and many have.  This post will attempt a fresh and critical look at the arguments taking the experience of Birmingham as its guide.

Clyde Tower demolition, Lozells, 2006 © Birmingham Mail

Initially and surprisingly to some no doubt, it might be argued that high-rise blocks were a victim of their own success.  Writing in 1974, Anthony Sutcliffe could claim that the city’s ‘overall housing shortage [was] virtually solved by the later 1960s’ – the ‘municipal flat had done its job of replacing the back-to-back house’.  (1)

For the Birmingham Housing Department, this was a silver lining with a cloud.  The difficulty it faced was that it gave those on the waiting list an element of choice – and they rarely chose high-rise.  As far back as 1958, the City’s Housing Manager had admitted that 80 per cent of tenants preferred a house to a flat.

The Hawkesley Estate, Kings Norton © Birmingham Mail

From the later 1960s, the completion of new estates at Chelmsley Wood, Frankley and Hawkesley provided a large amount of low-rise accommodation.  As one housing officer recalls:

I remember the panic [in the Housing Department] when that happened. All of a sudden as those three estates came in there were whole swathes of empty dwellings that we struggled to get let and we did get them let, but it was a constant grind. The voids were always there.

In the earlier days of the rehousing programme, Birmingham’s housing managers had placed those prospective tenants judged least ‘respectable’ in council-owned slum housing awaiting redevelopment.  Now more vulnerable tenants – precisely those whose needs pre-empted the choice that others were able to exercise – were placed in the unpopular tower blocks.

High-rise blocks in Newtown © Birmingham Mail

‘Residualisation’ had begun: a process by which council housing came increasingly to cater for troubled families.  It was a process, moreover, which left the less favoured high-rise developments disproportionately affected by the social problems of both their residents and wider society.

Problems – and a powerful perception – of anti-social behaviour (most commonly on high-rise schemes) grew at around the same time.  The Housing Committee grappled with the issues of ‘hooliganism’ and vandalism from early 1970s with little success. Arguably, its actions exacerbated the problem.

Stechford, 1961 © Birmingham Mail

In the mid-seventies, the Council halted door-to-door rent collection and recruitment difficulties led a system of resident caretakers to be replaced by area teams.  There are many council house tenants who blame this loss of contact and supervision for the rise of anti-social behaviour which coincided.

Of course, correlation does not mean causation but it’s telling how many later estate regeneration efforts have attempted precisely to replicate these lost systems of authority and surveillance through their use of concierges and CCTV.  In Birmingham, the first CCTV systems on estates were introduced in 1984 and concierges from 1987.

Let’s turn to what many have seen as the more systemic problems of high-rise schemes.

We can begin, uncontroversially, by acknowledging a conceptual flaw in the ‘mixed development’ planning theory that did so much to license the growth of high-rise from the fifties and particularly so in Birmingham.  Mixed development urged that councils build a range of housing forms – flats, maisonettes and houses – at a range of heights.

Nechells Green Parkway, 1965 © Birmingham Mail

The intention was to fulfil a design aesthetic which overcame the monotony of traditional forms of working-class housing – both private terraced housing and council ‘cottage estates’ – but aimed, more significantly, to provide housing appropriate to a range of people and family units in different life stages.  A good idea but one which could only work if council tenants were continually on the move as their life circumstances changed. This, of course, was neither feasible administratively nor desired by tenants who wished to remain in established homes.

This argument can be reduced to a more simple formulation (as it is by high-rise’s most vehement critics) that multi-storey schemes were unsuited to young families. That, of course, was where Birmingham started – its very first high-rise schemes were intended for single adults – but that founding principle was soon lost in the rush to rebuild and rehouse as high-rise construction took off.

The City has attempted to reverse this trend from 1970 (when families in flats with young children were given priority for transfer) but Right to Buy and the reduction of housing stock has made the full implementation of the policy increasingly difficult.

A ‘common sense’ view that high-rise housing is inappropriate for young children is hard to argue with and the counter-argument that families in Scotland and Continental Europe seem to cope well enough with flats is rather perhaps evidence of the cultural rootedness and intractability of this form of thinking in England – and of the futility of resistance to it.

Nechells Green, 1960 © Birmingham Mail

Other conventional criticisms of high-rise – addressed, plaintively, by Glendinning and Muthesius in their important book on the topic – might be challenged, however. (3) For one, there is the largely unquestioned assumption that high-rise destroyed communities and, indeed, community itself.  Carl Chinn’s observation is representative: (4)

Neighbourliness had to evolve; it was a gradual process based on daily contact, local knowledge and informal meetings. Living in flats made these day-to-day occurrences more difficult. They prevented the emergence of a true neighbourhood based on neighbours who were aware of each other. Residents felt isolated in their flats, cut off from their fellow tenants by a lack of unofficial meeting places.  The street and its extensions had been the pivot of working-class life in Birmingham’s poorer neighbourhoods.

It’s a compelling case made by Birmingham’s foremost contemporary historian – and, of course, he takes care to record the squalor of the slums and improved living standards of post-war housing.

Still, we might be ready now to take a slightly more nuanced view. The Block Capital project in the neighbouring Black Country offers a more complicated tale of the successes and failures of high-rise and tells of the range of experiences – positive and negative – of those who lived in them. (5)

Other oral histories or just the informal stuff of Facebook reveal affection for some of the blocks and the existence of genuine community feeling. And estates up and down the country facing the threat of regeneration (as, sadly, it has become a threat in too many cases) also testify to the reality and resilience of community.

Erdington, 1959 © Birmingham Mail

But then ‘community’ has generally deserved the scare quotes, not a neutral concept but an element in ideological struggle – variously used to condemn or defend the slum working-class and to ‘improve’ or lament the new working class of the council estates.

In this context, attitudes to high-rise itself should also be understood as ideological – initially as a deliberate Modernist and modernising manifestation of Welfare State reformism and progress and, latterly, as a target of generally conservative opposition to the same.

It’s hard not to see what became the most powerful attack on council housing in general and multi-storey council housing in particular – the defensible space thesis – in this context.  It blamed both the nature of public housing – as neither literally or psychologically ‘owned’ – and the form of modern high-rise – its spaces encouraged and facilitated crime – for the rise of anti-social behaviour.  It ignored any wider social or economic context and neglected to record similar problems occurring on a range of very different estates.

Alice Coleman, the British guru of ‘defensible space’ and Thatcher adviser, got to experiment in Birmingham in 1989 when her Design Improvement Controlled Experiment team renovated – it knocked down a tower block and some maisonette blocks and added a village green – the Nazareth Estate in Longbridge to some local bemusement.  It wasn’t considered a ‘bad’ estate and the fact that the City Council was busy handing out ASBOs in 2005 suggests that something more than design might be responsible for youth offending. (6)

Ladywood, 1977 © Birmingham Mail

Finally, and on more objective ground, the final nail in the coffin of high-rise came dramatically with the collapse of Ronan Point in May 1968 and, more substantively over time, with the emergence of a range of structural problems and defects associated with system-building from the early 1970s.

Missing wall ties caused a large brick panel to fall from Geach Tower in Newtown in 1973; in 1974, 16 towers were found to contain High Alumina Cement vulnerable to decay.  Continuing concerns led to ‘spidermen’ (or an abseiling survey team if you want to be prosaic) examining every remaining high-rise in 1985.  It was concluded that ‘over 216 of the City’s stock of 426 multi-storey blocks’ [required] urgent action’.

The Bromford Estate © Smileyface, http://www.skyscrapercity.com/

The cost of renovation has been a further significant factor in the Council’s decision to demolish some blocks.  Other blocks have been adapted, however, a process begun in 1979 when Brandwood and Cocksmoor Houses in King’s Heath were adapted as sheltered housing.   On the Bromford Estate, seven blocks have been rased and two have been adapted to provide warden-serviced accommodation for the elderly.  In the other five, according to a local youth worker: (7)

They’re a lovely mix of folk with mental health problems, drug addicts, alcoholism or all three; with single parents, young families, single people who might be divorced, generally unemployed; some asylum seekers.

We’ll let the tone stand – it’s clearly a difficult environment and it’s the difficulty we should acknowledge: the job that we ask social housing to do whilst at the same time denigrating it and many of our most vulnerable fellow-citizens.

Brooks Tower demolition, Aston, 2002 © Birmingham Mail

At the national level, the turn from high-rise was marked by the ending of the high-rise subsidy in 1967, the White Paper ‘Old Houses into New Homes’ of the following year, and the 1969 Housing Act which prioritised reconditioning of older properties through its creation of General Improvement Areas and Housing Action Areas.

Never a place to do something by halves, Birmingham would now embrace this new rehabilitation drive: in 1972, the Council designated 62 General Improvement Areas, containing 68,000 homes, and 28 Housing Action Areas containing a further 15,000 homes.

Barry Jackson Tower, Newtown – currently scheduled for demolition

For all the problems, the abiding impression given by Birmingham’s continually evolving housing programme is of its ambition and its idealism – sometimes misplaced, occasionally diverted but rooted in a belief in local government’s duty to decently house its people.

Birmingham City Council remains the UK’s largest social landlord with 65,000 homes – around 17 per cent of the city’s total.  In 1977, the council house waiting list had fallen to 11,500. Today it stands at around 26,000. For that reason, two of the eight tower blocks scheduled for demolition in 2011 have been reprieved – against tenant opposition, it should be said. (8)

That is the rock and the hard place between which local government is caught and its plight will be made immeasurably more difficult by the policies of the new Conservative government.  You can forgive some nostalgia for the buccaneering days of 1960s.

Sources

(1) Anthony Sutcliffe, ‘7. A Century of Flats in Birmingham, 1875-1973’ from Sutcliffe (ed) Multi-Storey Living: the British Working-Class Experience (1974)

(2) The statistic, the verse and the quotation which follows are included in Phil Ian Jones, ‘The Rise and Fall of The Multi-Storey Ideal: Public Sector High-Rise Housing in Britain 1945-2002, with Special Reference to Birmingham’, PhD thesis, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Birmingham, 2003

(3) See chapters 30, 32 and 33 in Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block – Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (1994)

(4) Carl Chinn, Homes for the People. 100 Years of Council Housing in Birmingham (1991)

(5) See High-Rise in the Block Capital Project on-line and their publication, Living in the Sky: a History of High-Rise Council Flats in the Black Country (2015)

(6) Phil Ian Jones, ‘The Rise and Fall of The Multi-Storey Ideal’ on the redesign and ‘ASBO Threat to City Toddlers’, Birmingham Mail, 17 October 2005 on continuing anti-social behaviour.

(7) On the Bromford Estate, see Martin Crookston, Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow?  A New Future for the Cottage Estates (2014)

(8) Jane Tyler, ‘Fury as two Birmingham tower blocks set to be saved from bulldozer’, Birmingham Mail, 6 December 2013