Council Housing in Gateshead, part II post-1945: ‘The world has moved on’

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1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, Multi-storey

Last week’s post examined the huge growth of council housing that took place in Gateshead in the aftermath of World War One. Although some 10,500 children were evacuated at the beginning of the Second World War in September 1939, the town – despite being a major industrial centre – suffered very little from the wartime bombing anticipated.

The war, however, exacerbated an existing housing crisis and in 1942 it was estimated that 5620 people in the town were living in homes scheduled for demolition.  One early response to that crisis was the temporary prefab programme though only a relatively small number of the 156,623 erected nationally were allocated to the Gateshead area – 25 on Sunderland Road and 55 at The Drive in what was then part of Felling Urban District Council. (1)  The Borough of Gateshead itself had declared against temporary housing.

Orlit flats, Saltwell Road

Permanent prefabricated housing was another attempt to solve the housing crisis and deal with the shortages of materials and skilled labour which persisted into the 1950s. A precast reinforced concrete Orlit block of 18 flats survives on Saltwell Road; 150 semi-detached Dorran houses, formed of concrete panel walls, were built on Rose Street and Carr Hill Lane at Black Hill and elsewhere in the early part of the decade. Most of the latter, still in council ownership, were refurbished and reclad in the 1990s and more thoroughly renovated in 2014.

Dorran houses on Carr Hill Road, the one on the left presumably in private ownership and unrenovated

A longer-term product of war and the politics of post-war reconstruction was the planning movement, exemplified in the formation of the Ministry of Town and Country Planning and the New Town movement.  However, proposals in the Pepler-MacFarlane, North‐East Area Development Plan of 1949 to develop a New Town of 80,000 population in Barlow, eight miles to the west of Gateshead, were stymied by its distance.

Meanwhile the Council had announced ambitious plans in 1945 to build 1000 permanent homes within two years.  In practice, in unprecedentedly difficult post-war circumstances, only 171 new homes were completed by 1947 and a further 387 by the end of the following year in new estates at Highfield and Blue Quarries.

Hawkshead Place, Beacon Lough Estate

Another 1300 homes were built at the Lobley Hill and Beacon Lough Estates by 1950.  The latter was ‘a large and sprawling low-density estate’ according to Simon Taylor and David Lovie: (2)

typical of the large brick-built cottage estates constructed in many parts of the country in the years immediately after the war. With its numerous winding side roads and culs-de-sac, it was recognised by the Minister of Health as one of the best laid out housing estates in the country.

The ‘Wrekenton Neighbourhood Unit’, just south of Beacon Lough, of 1372 homes was another large-scale project. The Cedars Green Estate, on the other hand, was a deliberate contrast – small and secluded, comprising just 59 homes and regarded locally as a prestige development.

Slum clearance and the new Barn Close flats in 1955

By 1956, the Council had built 5482 new homes since the end of the war but pressure on land and new opposition to urban sprawl was forcing consideration of new approaches as the drive to finally clear the slums intensified.  This huge rebuilding drive was overseen by Labour Alderman Ben Nicholson Young who served as chair of the Housing Committee from 1945 to 1974. Leslie Berry was appointed Chief Architect in 1958 and the Borough Architect’s Department gained a national reputation for the novelty and quality of its designs.

Brisbane Court, Sydney Court, Adelaide Court and Melbourne Court , Barn Close, from the south, 1987 (http://www.towerblock.eca.ed.ac.uk)

A contemporary image of Regent Court

The Council’s first high-rise blocks – four ten-storey slab blocks – were completed at Barn Close in the centre of town in 1955. Three eight-storey blocks – Priory, Peareth and Park Courts – were completed on East Street and the ten-storey Regent Court two years later as a further element in central area redevelopment. (3)

Chandless clearance, 1956

Chandless Estate, St. Mary’s Court in foreground, 1987 (http://www.towerblock.eca.ed.ac.uk)

The Chandless Redevelopment Area nearby was approved in 1960. The three 16-storey towers, providing 384 flats, built in Phase I of the scheme were designed by the Architect’s Department and built by Stanley Miller Ltd – a major local contractor – using an innovative in situ concrete system.

A contemporary image of Bensham Court

Berry also oversaw the design of the 16-storey tower, Bensham Court, completed in 1963 and the four 12-storey towers at Beacon Lough in 1967.  Redheugh and Eslington Courts, completed in the Teams Redevelopment Area in 1966 were the tallest Gateshead blocks at 21 storeys.  Further high-rise continued across the borough.

A contemporary image of Redheugh and Eslington Courts

In sheer numbers, the results were undeniably impressive.  Gateshead built over 1000 new homes in 1965 and, in that same year, its 10,000^th council home.  By 1970, as the municipal borough’s historian recounts with some civic pride, 10,686 homes had been built since the war, at a rate of almost two each working day and three times the national average. (4)

‘Gunnel houses’ Beacon Lough East Estate

Beacon Lough East Estate, 1970 (Photographer, The Studio; Gateshead Libraries, GL002509)

And, amidst the drive to build big, were attempts to create innovative mixed development schemes.  One such was the extension to the Beacon Lough Estate, built in the mid-sixties in which four 12-storey blocks in a parkland setting were accompanied by 165 flat-roofed ‘gunnel houses’ (named after the passageways connecting the semi-detached homes), patio bungalows for older people as well as some conventional brick-built terraced housing. A primary school, pub and shops completed the ensemble. The Estate won a Government award for ‘Good Design in Housing’ in 1968.

Prime minister Harold Wilson opening St Cuthbert’s Village, 1970 (Gateshead Libraries, LS000214)

The most novel was St Cuthbert’s Village, completed in 1969, comprising: (2)

a maze of low- and medium-rise linking ‘scissor blocks’ with roof gardens, on either side of Askew Road and, radiating from the centre and linked by various communal walkways and steps around open communal areas.

St Cuthbert’s Village, 1987 (http://www.towerblock.eca.ed.ac.uk)

It was planned as a self-contained community of 3500 people, largely young single people and couples, and opened, to much fanfare, by prime minister Harold Wilson in April 1970. But facilities followed slowly and residents felt isolated.  The estate’s high-density living, far from promoting the neighbourliness intended, seems to have created dispute and ill-feeling. By 1992, a local press report was describing St Cuthbert’s Village as ‘as estate plagued by soaring crime and poor design’. Gateshead Metropolitan Borough Council reckoned each flat cost £1000 a year to maintain compared to the borough average of £424.  A survey of residents concluded that fully 85 percent wanted to move out. (5)  By 1995, all but the 18-storey point block had been demolished.

Clasper Village plan

A general disenchantment from high-rise was manifest from the late 1960s, reflecting – practically – its failure to deliver promised cost-savings and problems with construction and design, notably on system-built estates.  One early local response to this was the construction of Clasper Village in 1970 though the choice to build low-rise cluster blocks also reflected the existence of underground mine workings in the Teams area which precluded high-rise construction.

Clasper Village, c1975

In 2004, observers commented on the popularity of its ‘intimate scale’ – ‘accommodation there has always been in high demand; it remains an attractive and well-maintained residential unit’. (2)  Seven years later, the Gateshead Housing Company found little to praise, complaining of its lack of housing mix (the estate comprised only two-bed flats), a void rate of 21 percent, an annual turnover of lettings of near 15 percent, and problems of condensation and water penetration affecting most of its homes. Levels of anti-social behaviour were said to be about average but perceptions were as significant: ‘the stigma and reputation has significantly affected demand for properties on the estate’. (6)

All that goes to remind us that all judgements are necessarily temporary and that reputational damage can be as harmful to estates as design flaws as real as the latter were in the case of Clasper Village.  Demolition of the estate commenced in 2014. In May,. this year, as part of a £1.8 million funding deal with Homes England, the Council committed to a £30 million regeneration of the 12 acre site. (7)

A contemporary image of Priory Court

Other high-rise estates suffered less dramatic problems – the lack of play areas at Barn Close was said to have caused problems of antisocial behaviour, Priory Court was apparently plagued by beetles breeding in heating ducts – but the shift from high-rise was now complete. (2)

Nursery Lane demolitions (http://www.towerblock.eca.ed.ac.uk)

System building was part of the problem. Four ‘Ronan Point-type’ tower blocks at Nursery Lane, built using the Larsen Nielsen system and designed by John Poulson for Felling Urban District Council in 1968, were demolished by the new metropolitan authority in 1987. (8)

In 2004, Gateshead Council transferred its entire housing stock of some 20,000 homes to the Gateshead Housing Company, an arms-length management organisation (ALMO).  The promise was to improve housing services; the practical necessity was to secure funding needed to carry out the Decent Homes Programme announced by the Labour government four years earlier.  The ALMO’s initial ten-year life-span was extended by a further five in 2015.

Demolition of Chandless Estate, 2015 (photograph by Sharon Bailey, courtesy of the Spirit of Chandless website)

The decision to demolish the Chandless Estate, a system-built estate suffering structural issues said to prevent economic repair, was taken in 2010.  As the 16-storey Monk Court block in Chandless was being prepared for demolition in 2013, Councillor Catherine Donovan (Gateshead Council’s Cabinet member for Housing) concluded ‘the world has moved on and families expect different things of their homes’. (9)  Demolition was complete by 2015.

Two years later, Gateshead Council committed to building its first new council homes for thirty years – seven homes in Dunston and 14 in Winlaton and Blaydon. The Council also announced plans to 36 homes through its wholly-owned business, the Gateshead Trading Company though just 15 percent of the latter were categorised as ‘affordable’. (10)

All these were a modest component of a larger plan to build 11,000 new homes across the Gateshead area by 2030. The larger target would be met principally through cooperation with so-called ‘volume providers’ (including a joint venture between the Council and developers Galliford Try and housing association Home Group) as well as by support given to small and medium-enterprise building companies. (11)

Amidst ongoing policy changes and recent modest moves giving local authorities greater powers and financial freedoms to build, all this is – to say the least – shifting terrain.  It’s also well beyond my comfort zone, both practically and ideologically.  Suffice to say, that a relatively straightforward and highly cost-effective model which built what we must now call social-rent homes in huge numbers in Gateshead and across the country has been replaced by a system of complex public-private partnerships, opaque finances, and ‘mixed developments’ which all too often fails to deliver the genuinely affordable homes most required.

Central Gateshead, 1971

As we’ve seen, local government didn’t get everything right but it’s hard not to applaud the ambition or admire the scale of what was achieved. That ambition and scale could be a little intimidating, perhaps overreaching, at times as the above image suggests. Nevertheless, it’s entirely proper, in my view at least, to envy an era when the local and national state invested heavily to secure decent homes for all whilst, of course, we learn its lessons, both positive and negative.

Sources

My thanks to Gateshead Libraries for providing several of the images used in this post.

(1) According to the invaluable and comprehensive Prefab Museum website.

(2) Simon Taylor and David B Lovie, Gateshead. Architecture on a Changing English Urban Landscape (English Heritage, 2004)

(3) For further detail, see the incredibly useful and informative database provided by Tower Block UK.

(4) FWD Manders, A History of Gateshead (Gateshead Corporation, 1973)

(5) Andrew Smith, ‘Estate to be Demolished’, The Journal, 3 September 1992

(6) Minutes of The Gateshead Housing Company Asset Management Committee, 30 June 2011

(7) Gateshead Council, ‘£1.8 million to boost development of new homes in Gateshead‘, 22 May 2019

(8) ‘Gateshead to demolish four towers’, Building Design, no. 832, 17 April 1987, p44

(9) Katie Davies, ‘Gateshead’s Chandless Estate is demolished bit by bit’, Chronicle Live, 12 September 2013

(10) Peter Apps, ‘Gateshead Council to build first homes for 30 years’, Inside Housing, 24 November 2017

(11) Gateshead Council, Housing Delivery Test Action Plan (ND, c2017)

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The Edward Woods Estate, Hammersmith, II: ‘High Rise Hope’?

Tags

1970s, Hammersmith, Multi-storey, Regeneration

Last week’s post left the Edward Woods Estate, just a decade into its existence, in a parlous state – criticised by the Borough which built it, unloved apparently by its residents, and with the range of problems coming to seem typical of such high-rise modernist schemes.  Hammersmith and Fulham’s Director of Housing, Tony Babbage, had concluded that tenants had ‘started to reject the estate as a good place to live’. (1)

An undated photograph taken by Bernard Selwyn © Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Archives

All pretty damning on the face of it but a reading of a tenants’ survey undertaken by the Council at this time allows more nuanced judgment. In practical terms, it shows some 66 pensioner households and around 50 with children living, contrary to declared policy, above the tenth floor in the three tower blocks. Surprisingly, however, ‘elderly people were the most satisfied with living on the estate’. They were also ‘the most likely to be happy living off the ground’ which people with families disliked because ‘they felt it was dangerous for the children’. (2)

Beyond that, ‘the main dislikes of the estate were the unreliable lifts, dirtiness, refuse chutes and the vandalism’.  But, contrary to what you may have been led to believe, people liked ‘the homes themselves, the general location and the neighbours’.

Poynter House, 1981 © London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham Archives

What they wanted was simple. A quarter wanted improved security patrols (in other words they wanted to be and to feel safe), 14 percent wanted better cleaning, and 12 percent wanted an improved repairs service.  The latter might seem a surprisingly low figure given that 40 percent of households had repairs outstanding and some 46 households had been waiting over six months for repair work to be carried out. You can draw your own conclusions but two things seem clear to me.

One, as we’ve seen in a diverse range of estates across the country, this was a period – for reasons I’ve never seen convincingly explained – when antisocial behaviour spiked. (Football hooliganism was another manifestation of the same malaise.)  In housing terms, the obvious target of blame to many seemed to be the design of the new multi-storey, modernist estates – their lack of ‘defensible space’ and ‘natural surveillance’ in the jargon of the time and the design features – decks and stairways – held to facilitate crime.  The simple fact that similar problems existed across a variety range of estates should lead us to question this widely-accepted conventional wisdom.

Stebbing House and play area in foreground, 2017

Two, residents were not in fact railing against the design of their homes but, for the most part, against poor maintenance and upkeep. Perhaps a 1979 Daily Telegraph report exaggerated but it concluded ‘that no stair cleaning had been done for weeks’ and on the lower floors, residents were ‘forced to negotiate rubble, broken glass and kitchen rubbish’. (3)

A further look of the Director of Housing’s report allows a different reading of the Estate’s problems, rooted far less in the systemic failure of an entire model of housing provision and far more in contemporary, specific and remediable deficiencies:

The tenants at large view with dismay what has happened to the estate. They feel very strongly about the estate itself. They take the view that the estate has been allowed to deteriorate rapidly.

Public housing budgets are always constrained and were to become catastrophically so in the 1980s but it’s also clear in this earlier period that some councils were failing to invest in basic upkeep and services.

If it took a crisis for that to become obvious, it’s only fair to report that at this point the Council began to act quite radically and systematically to put things right. By the end of the year, a local management team had been set up and £350,000 committed to replacing failing rubbish chutes, upgrading lifts and a range of other remedial work.

Two years later, the Estate was included in a new central government initiative, the Priority Estates Project, intended to promote local management and tenant participation in some of the most troubled estates across the country.  In Edward Woods, this led to 528 flats being equipped with an entryphone system.  A purpose-built Neighbourhood Office was opened in Boxmoor House five years later. (4)

Boxmoor House, 2017

The tide was turning.  Elsewhere, there was already talk of the demolition of ‘failing’ tower blocks, particularly those with structural defects.  But that for Peter Fox, Director of Housing, was a ‘sort of defeatism [he] could never contemplate’.  Ideally, he would have liked ‘to do as they do in private blocks and install concierges, carpets and potted palms’ but he had, he said, to be realistic. (5)

That was a realism perhaps imposed by class attitudes as much as those financial pressures touched on but, in fact, a concierge scheme was introduced in Stebbing House in 1989 and they’ve since become common in social housing schemes. (6)

Such innovations were largely funded by the variety of area-based initiatives promoted by central government in the era.  Finance – both Conservative governments to 1997 and the New Labour administrations subsequently cut local authority housing budgets – continued to limit what could be done and to dictate the form that regeneration took.

By 1998, it was estimated that the Estate required about ‘£7m worth of essential repairs and improvements’. Under the new financial regime and given what Stephen Burke, Hammersmith and Fulham’s deputy chair of Housing, described as ‘the prohibitively high costs of renovating Saunders House’, these could only be paid for by working with housing associations (whose funding was being boosted) and in partnership with private developers (7)

The current estate signs shows new layout and park

By 2003, the 58 homes of Saunders House and two garage podiums were demolished in order to allow the Notting Hill Housing Trust and Copthorn Homes (a subsidiary of Countryside Properties) to build 122 new homes for rent and sale. A new public park, Norland North, financed by Section 106 money (financial support for community infrastructure paid by developers as part of the planning permission process), was opened in 2009.

In the meantime, Labour’s Decent Homes Programme had been launched in 2000 – an initiative to improve estates and catch up with an estimated £19 billion backlog of needed repairs and refurbishments nationwide.  It did not, however, provide the necessary funding to councils as such.  Hammersmith and Fulham was forced – as were many similarly placed authorities – to establish an ALMO (an arms-length management organisation) which was permitted access to necessary funds.

Stebbing House with Boxmoor House in foreground, 2017

New kitchens and bathrooms in the tower blocks, extensive landscaping, redecoration, renewals and repairs across the Estate followed.  The ALMO was wound up in 2010, having served its purpose, and management brought back in-house.  New central heating systems were installed in tower block studio flats in 2011. The detail might seem trivial in itself (unless you were a beneficiary, of course) but it reminds us that continued investment maintains and fulfils the promise of decent and affordable housing which has lain at the heart of council housing since its inception.

So we’ve travelled some distance – from the promise of modernity to its dysfunctional fulfilment or, if you wish to employ some of the more colourful narrative language of the time, from dream to nightmare, utopia to dystopia.  And we’ve come through that to something far better. Perhaps the conclusions we draw on the modernist council estates of the 1960s depend more at which stop we get off (to stretch the metaphor) and whether we are prepared to continue our journey forward.

A 3D Revit model of the estate © Terrain Surveys

The Edward Woods Estate continued that journey. The installation of new central heating in 2011 was part of a larger £16.13m low carbon refurbishment of the Estate headed by the Hammersmith and Fulham working with ECD Architects, the Breyer Group and insulation specialists Rockwool.  The scheme was closely monitored and allows us to draw much broader conclusions about the Estate in the present.

It falls within the 12 per cent of most deprived areas in the country; the proportion of people on benefits is double the national average.  It is home, disproportionately, to people from minority communities, almost one third are Black or Black British.  Some 83 percent of homes are still council rented. When asked about the Estate, almost all residents felt safe in their homes and in the area; two thirds knew and got on with their neighbours. (8) With the refurbishment complete, the proportion of residents saying their quality of life was ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ rose from 68 percent in 2011 to 78 percent in 2015. (9)

The image of damage to Poynter House, prior to the installation of cladding, in December 2006 suggests how fire should be contained in high-rise blocks when systems are working effectively  © Nico Hogg

The refurb included the addition of thermal cladding to the tower block exteriors.  The tragedy of Grenfell Tower, which lies barely half a mile to the north, has cast a terrible shadow over such ‘improvement’ and caused Edward Woods residents severe alarm.  Fortunately, in this case, the Council could report that the cladding used – fire-resilient stone wool insulation rather than the flammable panels used at Grenfell – passed all subsequent safety tests. (10)

I think this allows us to leave the final word with the redoubtable Anne Power: (11)

Established council estates can offer decent conditions, satisfied tenants, community stability, well-maintained buildings, high density, additional infill buildings and community facilities. Edward Woods estate in Hammersmith and Fulham meets all these conditions, while housing nearly 2000 almost entirely low-income council tenants.

The refurbishment, she concluded, had provided ‘High-Rise Hope!’  Perhaps that’s a story we can tell about the longer history of the Edward Woods Estate.

Sources

My thanks to the Archives and Local Studies service of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham for many of the sources used to inform this post and for permission to use the images credited. They can be contacted at archives@lbhf.gov.uk.

My thanks also to Dave Walker at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Local Studies and Archives  for permission to use images in their holdings

(1) Hammersmith and Fulham Borough Council, Report of the Director of Housing, Edward Woods Estate W11: Initial Assessment (December 1979)

(2) Hammersmith and Fulham Borough Council, Edward Woods Estate Residents Survey (1979) [Edward Woods box file, Hammersmith and Fulham Archives and Local Studies]

(3) ‘Lift breakdown turn flat blocks into prisons’, Daily Telegraph, 31 August 1979

(4) The Centre – Oct ‘85’ [Edward Woods box file, Hammersmith and Fulham Archives and Local Studies]

(5) John Young, ‘Locking the Tower Block Door’, The Times, 30 April 1981

(6) Governing London, August 10 1989 [Edward Woods box file, Hammersmith and Fulham Archives and Local Studies]

(7) Michael Gerrard, ‘Bulldozers to demolish blocks for £7m facelift’, The Gazette, 31 July 1998

(8) Anne Power, ‘High Rise Hope’, LSE Housing and Communities, 19 October 2012

(9) Sustainable Homes, ‘Research on impact of large estate renewal in London revealed’, Blog, 28 July, 2015

(10) The H&F response to the Grenfell Tower fire, 20 July 2017

(11) Anne Power, ‘Council estates: why demolition is anything but the solution’, LSE British Politics and Policy, 4 March 2016

The Edward Woods Estate, Hammersmith, I: ‘the problem areas of today’

Tags

1960s, Hammersmith, Multi-storey

It is generally accepted that many of the model dwellings of yesterday have become the problem areas of today. Multi-storey developments were encouraged through subsidies for dwellings over a certain height. This was followed quickly by industrialised building with little or no research into tenant satisfaction and cost-in-use. Whole communities were uprooted in the process of providing the largest number of dwellings in the shortest possible time. These economies in building forms together with the basic group errors in judgment have left a huge legacy of problems for council services in the ‘80s.

That was the verdict of Tony Babbage, Director of Housing for the Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, on the Edward Woods Estate in December 1979. (1)  Many, perhaps most, would endorse that view and see little to revise in it subsequently.

An image of the estate, probably taken in the late 70s/early 80s from Frinstead House on the Silchester Estate © Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Archives

What we know – or think we know – about high-rise housing depends heavily on what we read and when we read it. Beyond that, confirmation bias – the tendency to interpret new evidence as corroboration of our existing beliefs – kicks in. An examination of the longer story of Edward Woods, the shifting perceptions surrounding it, and, above all, the lived experience and views of its residents allows us to tell a more complex and, in many ways, more positive story.  That said, I’d prefer you to read this not as a ‘defence’ of high-rise housing but as a reminder of the competing ‘truths’ which define it.

Nowadays, the Edward Woods Estate lies east of the Westfield shopping complex, just across the dual carriageway A3320.  Formerly, this was an area of railway lines and sidings and dense late-Victorian terraces. The latter were structurally sound for the most part but overcrowded, poorly maintained and lacking basic facilities.  By the late 1950s, as the national drive to clear Britain’s unfit housing took off, they were considered slums. The site was compulsorily purchased by the Metropolitan Borough of Hammersmith and largely cleared by 1961.

A decade later, policy had shifted towards the rehabilitation of such so-called ‘twilight’ areas.  Central government increasingly questioned the expense and efficacy of clearance and new build programmes; others, as we saw, had grown critical of the multi-storey estates which often replaced the inner-city terraces. The 1969 Housing Act, replacing redevelopment areas with General Improvement Areas and Housing Action Areas, confirmed this policy reversal.

Back in the early sixties, however, there were other modernising pressures in play locally. That elevated section of dual carriageway separating Westfield and the Edward Woods Estate is the West Cross Route leading to Westway, a completed fragment of the London Motorway Box planned in the 1960s.  These plans, first mooted in Abercrombie’s 1943 County of London Plan, were intended to adapt the capital’s creaking infrastructure to the modern age of motor transport.  As public opinion turned against the cost and blight of the new urban motorways, the scheme was abandoned in 1973 but it had, in Hammersmith, provided another reason for clearance and redevelopment.

Norland House and Stebbing House, 1977. The towers of the Silchester Estate lie to the far left and, in the centre (behind the road sign), Grenfell Tower © London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham Archives

In the meantime, the drive towards high-rise housing was in full swing.  For Hammersmith in the early 1960s, the ‘greatest obstacle to the Slum Clearance programme [was] the difficulty experienced in finding acceptable accommodation for the families to be displaced’.  The same report spoke hopefully of new multi-storey blocks to be built in the Latimer Road (South) Clearance Area that might help solve this problem. (2)

Half a mile to the north, in the neighbouring borough of Kensington, the London County Council began the construction of the predominantly high-rise Silchester Estate in 1963 and, just to the east, the  borough itself was planning the Lancaster West Estate and Grenfell Tower.

This was the era of high-rise (even as most council housing continued to be traditional two-storey housing).  The seemingly common sense view that high-rise blocks provided greater housing density held sway and there was little appetite to re-create the congested, airless terraces. In fact, the surrounding open terrain tall blocks needed – to offset problems of shadowing and overlooking – ensured, by the prevalent people per acre metric, they offered little in the way of greater density.

Hammersmith initially proposed, at 31 storeys, two towers which would then have been the tallest residential blocks in London.  Those plans was knocked back by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government which suggested a limit of twenty storeys.  In May 1962 Hammersmith’s compromise suggestion of three 24-storey blocks and five 5-storey maisonette blocks was accepted.

Edward Woods studies the brochure marking the estate’s official opening, 1966 © London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham Archives

Construction of the lower-rise Mortimer and Swanscombe Houses began in 1964 and the first part of the estate was officially opened in December 1966 by Edward Woods, OBE, JP.  Woods had been a Hammersmith councillor for 40 years and leader of the Council from 1951. He had retired in 1964 and the naming of the Estate was taken as a fitting tribute to his many years of service. The council he had represented was itself replaced by the new Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham in the following year.

The first of the three tower blocks, Poynter House (Stebbing and Norland followed), was officially opened, again by Edward Woods, in March 1968. At 72m, these were among the tallest residential blocks in the capital. Comprising reinforced concrete frames and solid brickwork flank walls, these were not system-built and were erected by the Council’s own direct labour organisation.

Under construction © London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham Archives

The opening brochure speaks of plans for eight shops, a doctor’s surgery and a housing office also located on or around the estate and six covered car parks with space for 584 cars and children’s play areas on their top decks.  Some 814 homes were provided at an overall density of 136 people per acre which represented the London County Council’s maximum for such inner-city developments.

There’s an air of bright modernity around the whole project; the estate had: (3)

been designed to create as much space as possible and when complete the land between the blocks will be landscaped and groups of semi-mature trees planted. Between two of the twenty-four storey blocks, Poynter House and Stebbing House, an open ‘piazza’ will be provided.

Even the new flat-roofed Watneys’ pub, the Duke of Sussex opened in 1965 – ‘designed to blend architecturally with the Borough Council’s development’ – was a symbol of this optimistic futurism. (4)

The Duke of Sussex in the foreground; the estate under construction to the rear © London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham Archives

Ten years later, the mood was very different.  We’ll look at the big picture – previewed in the opening paragraph – in a second but let’s begin with some practical issues.  Firstly, crucially, the lifts didn’t work properly. Two per block, they were criticised as too small, too prone to breakdown and too susceptible to tampering. (5)

There were some structural issues – water leakage into flats from podium slabs, falling tiles and so on – and there seems to have been considerable cost-cutting in relation to the promised landscaping and play areas.  One critical observer noted only one ‘small tarmacked fenced-in area with 12 swings’ for some 500 children. The planned community centre was axed due to Council cut-backs; the top floor space of Norland House an inadequate replacement.

The estate from the south, 1977. Note what still appears to be a temporary shop in the right foreground © London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham Archives

In design terms, the dark and insecure car parking spaces had been abandoned by tenants as ‘vandalism had run rife’ and ‘badly lit areas on stairways’ were ‘inviting to muggers’.  Oscar Newman had published his critique of the larger public housing schemes in the US, Defensible Space – his concern was the lack of it – in 1972. Those criticisms were already crossing the Atlantic.

By 1979, a critical article in the Municipal Journal could conclude: (6)

By the Borough’s own admission the ‘Edward Woods Estate is monotonous to look at and its scale is oppressive’. Levels of vandalism on the estate are high. Deck access, for example, has produced the general problems of lack of security. All the underground communal garages are unused and bricked up.

The estate had ‘an air of hopelessness and decay’.

In this context, the damning verdict of the Director of Housing quoted above hardly looks misplaced.  He continued in like manner that Edward Woods was ‘not a natural community but rather a polarised population – people don’t feel part of the estate and tend to be rather suspicious of their neighbours’.  Some households, who might once found support in the ‘village atmosphere’ of less dense communities, were labelled as ‘problem families’. ‘Tenants generally’, he concluded, ‘have started to reject the estate as a good place to live’. (7)

That might seem the end of the story, and it will be for those who condemn high-rise housing in all its forms. In fact, even at the time, an opposing story-line was possible and the longer picture allows a very different narrative.  We’ll follow all this in next week’s post.

Sources

My thanks to the Archives and Local Studies service of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham for many of the sources used to inform this post and for permission to use the images credited. They can be contacted at archives@lbhf.gov.uk.

My thanks also to Dave Walker at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Local Studies and Archives  for permission to use images in their holdings

(1) Hammersmith and Fulham Borough Council, Report of the Director of Housing, Edward Woods Estate W11: Initial Assessment (December 1979)

(2) Report of the Medical Officer of Health for the Metropolitan Borough of Hammersmith, 1961 (Wellcome Library, London’s Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports 1848-1972)

(3) Hammersmith Housing Committee, ‘Poynter House, Edward Woods Estate’ (March 1968)

(4) ‘The Duke of Sussex, St Ann’s Road’, Watney’s Red Barrel, October 1965 (My thanks to Jessica Boak and Ray Bailey, authors of 20th Century Pub for this source.) Later renamed The Favourite, the pub was demolished in 2012 and replaced by a block of private studio flats.

(5) Kevin Withers, ‘A Comparison Made between the Lancaster West and Edward Woods Estates in West London’ (ND typescript, Kensington and Chelsea Archives). Detail in the succeeding paragraphs is drawn from the same source.

(6) ‘Vandalism: Municipal Journal Special Feature’, Municipal and Public Service Journal, 14 December 1979

(7) Hammersmith and Fulham Borough Council, Report of the Director of Housing, Edward Woods Estate W11: Initial Assessment (December 1979)

Council Housing in Walsall, Part III: Postwar Estates and High-Rise

Tags

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

This is the third of four posts telling the story of council housing in Walsall.  Beyond any local interest, it reflects the dynamics of a wider national history of council housing.  That fuller story will be told in my forthcoming book Municipal Dreams: the Rise and Fall of Council Housing which will be published by Verso in April 2018.

After 1945, the need for decent and affordable housing became one of the biggest issues in British politics and, in sharp contrast to the present, the local and national state mobilised on a massive scale to address this problem.  That meant in Walsall, as elsewhere, estates on traditional – though ‘improved’ – low-rise lines but it would mean in due course new and varied forms of multi-storey housing.

In reality, the former remained predominant.  Almost two-thirds of council homes built in the UK between 1945 and 1979 were two-storey houses in more or less ‘garden’ suburbs but in popular consciousness and media portrayal, the era became associated with high-rise flats, often described as ‘notorious’. In fact, multi-storey housing (of six-storeys or more) only surpassed one-fifth of new schemes in England and Wales in the short period between 1964 and 1967. (1) Walsall offers an excellent case-study by which to study the more complex and diverse realities of post-war public housing.

Southbourne Avenue

As we saw in the second of our Walsall posts, prefabs were adopted as a temporary ‘fix’ to an immediate post-war housing crisis but new permanent homes – in huge numbers – remained the goal. That goal, however, in an era of genuine austerity, first required the use of other non-traditional means. By 1950, 850 non-traditional homes had been built in Walsall, in a range reflecting the experimentation of the time.

Partially refurbished BISF housing on Hawbush Road

The largest number, at 240, were BISF houses – steel-framed homes (to a design by Sir Fredrick Gibberd) manufactured by the British Iron and Steel Federation.  Next came the Orlit homes produced by the Edinburgh firm of that name; 198 of these precast reinforced concrete houses were erected. Wates offered a similar form of pre-cast concrete construction while Wimpey offered in-situ concrete housing; 100 of each were built in Walsall. Other steel-framed homes and some 50 permanent aluminium bungalows completed the list.

Non-traditional housing, Heather Road, Dudley’s Field Estate

Many disliked the appearance of these new homes; even Walsall’s Chief Architect, AT Parrott, guardedly admitted they presented ‘a subject for very sympathetic handling if happy aesthetic results were to be achieved’. (2)  Design and construction flaws emerged later.  As brick supply increased and skilled labour became more readily available, traditional brick construction was happily resumed.

Some 490 of these non-traditional homes were built on the Dudley’s Field Estate in Bloxwich, Walsall’s first new post-war estate begun in 1946. Parrott described it as ‘probably our least successful from the point of view of appearance, but…very valuable as an object lesson’.  Interwar estates had been widely criticised for their dormitory feel and lack of community provision. The 1944 Dudley Committee and the 1948 Committee on the Appearance of Housing Estates were intended to address these deficiencies but in the immediate aftermath of war, in Parrott’s words:

Speed was of prime importance and, whilst certain attempts were made to add interest to the layouts, the vital lessons which have been brought the design of Council housing today to a standard never before reached had yet to be learned.

The Mossley Estate, 1660 new homes on completion, just to the north of Dudley’s Fields, and the Gipsy Lane Estate (now Beechdale), of similar size, to the south followed in short order.  If the good intentions were to provide these new estates greater facilities, these were fulfilled belatedly.  Eight hundred houses had been completed on the Gipsy Lane Estate before any shops were open and the Chief Architect himself described it as a ‘large and isolated estate, and a very long journey for the housewife whenever there is shopping to be done’.

Mossley Estate

Another feature of most of Walsall’s new build that it was located on reclaimed, brownfield land containing coal, clay and gravel workings, slag and brickwork waste Over 500,000 cubic yards of materials were removed from the Gipsy Lane site alone. The risk of subsidence here and elsewhere meant that most of the new homes were restricted to semi-detached pairs.

Pershore Road, Mossley Estate (c) Richard Vince and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Up to 1949, the focus on three-bed family homes remained total. Some two-bed homes followed and after 1954, a 25/75 two-bed/three-bed split was projected.  As part of the  the realisation of the waiting list’s varied needs, a site was set aside on the Mossley Estate for an old people’s home.  There were, as yet, no multi-storey homes though flats and maisonettes were said to be popular and some three-storey blocks were projected on outer estates.

Alumwell Road, Pleck

These were generously sized homes. Walsall’s three-bed houses averaged 963 square feet, some way over the 900 square feet minimum prescribed by Labour’s post-war Minister of Housing Nye Bevan.  The so-called ‘People’s Homes’ – at around 750 to 850 square feet – designated by his Conservative successor, Harold Macmillan, in the attempt to increase the rate of housebuilding, were significantly smaller.

Walsall’s 10,000^th council home was officially opened by the town’s Labour MP WT Wells at 65 Primley Avenue in Alumwell in June 1950.  The Council’s brochure to mark the occasion boasted of building an average of four houses every three working days since 1920 – an astonishing rate when compared to the present day’s faltering efforts and a tribute to the contribution public housing made (and could make again) to meeting our housing needs. (3)

St Matthew’s Close

There was little signature architecture and planning in these new estates though one later commentator remarked on their ‘carefully designed informal layouts with much greenery’ and the ‘steel casements, pantiled roofs and distinctive copper flashing’ of the Borough’s housing. (4) An exception to the decent but stolid output which predominated was the St Matthew’s Close scheme designed by Geoffrey Jellicoe and opened in 1953 as part of the now Grade II-listed Memorial Gardens on Church Hill – an area of open land resulting from the slum clearance drive of the 1930s. (5)

Alfred Street maisonettes

Halted by the war and delayed by the urgent need to build new housing after 1945, that determination to clear the slums took off once more in Walsall after 1954 when the Alfred Street area in Bloxwich was represented and new maisonette blocks erected (since replaced themselves, as best as I can tell). In 1958, there were plans to demolish 1500 unfit homes in the next four years.

Warewell Close

For the first time, Walsall was looking to multi-storey replacements. This had begun modestly in 1955 with Warewell Close on Lower Rushall Street near the town centre – two five-storey blocks, their form and, particularly, their colourful, angular balconies reflecting the New Humanist/Festival style then in vogue.  (The work of Frederick Gibberd and Norman & Dawbarn in Hackney in the 1950s offers a close comparison.)

By the end of the decade, Walsall was clear that multi-storey blocks were a necessary part of its housing mix in the ‘endeavour to make the best use of the land available where this has been suitable for this type of development’. (6)  This new direction is best seen in an estate deserving of wider recognition completed just to the south of St Matthew’s Close in November 1961.

The Orlando Estate

When I visited the Orlando Estate last summer, one of the residents was initially a little suspicious of this stranger taking photographs. When I explained my interest, she understood immediately and described it herself as ‘a time capsule of the 1960s’; she’d even written on it as part of a university course. So it’s had some love. Let’s give it some more.

Orlando Street prior to redevelopment

The four acre estate – Walsall’s largest redevelopment scheme to date – replaced severely rundown streets of two- and three-storey terraced housing. The official description provides context and detail: (7)

Because of the severe housing shortage in the Midlands, it was necessary to redevelop at high density without giving an impression of overcrowding; this has been achieved by designing a mixed residential scheme with four blocks of eight-storey flats, one three-storey block of flats, two-blocks of three-storey terraced houses and eleven two-storey terraced houses

The detailing is more telling – internal stairways in the eight-storey blocks finished with terrazzo, stairs and landings with granolithic, prodoglaze tiling on the walls, and entrance porches and internal screens of West African mahogany. External interest was added by coloured panelling and hung tiling.

The Orlando Estate

Some 169 homes were provided in this compact and attractive £403,000 scheme, completed, as the Chief Architect proudly records, seven months ahead of schedule. We can give Wates some credit here, both for the design – jointly devised by the Borough’s architect’s department and GF Elliott, divisional architect for the company – and execution. (You’ll find additional images of the estate in this Tumblr post.)

Providence Close, formerly the Leamore Redevelopment Area

Walsall’s second multi-storey estate was completed three years later as part of the Leamore redevelopment scheme which saw 180 properties demolished, replaced by 280 homes in a mixed development scheme of six nine- and twelve three-storey blocks.  The estate’s multi-storey car park was ‘believed to be the first of its kind in municipal housing’ and was another sign of the modernity these new developments represented.  This was another scheme built by Wates and jointly designed by the Chief Architect and Mr Elliott of Wates. (8)

An early image of the Sandbank Estate

Walsall’s ambitions grew, literally so in its next major scheme, opened in April 1965 at Sandbank, Bloxwich which featured one 16-storey and three 12-storey blocks – 253 homes replacing 44 including 18 surviving post-war prefabs. The scheme was built by Wates, this time, in another sign of the times, using a proprietary method of system building. (9)

The Chuckery Estate from St Matthew’s Hill

By 1965, Walsall Borough Council owned near 18,500 homes. When the borough expanded to incorporate Darlaston and part of Willenhall in 1966, it acquired a further 8500 but it continued to build.  The £1.5m Paddock Redevelopment Scheme in Chuckery, central Walsall was completed in 1969, comprising 357 flats in three 17-storey and two 13-storey blocks. (10)

Millsum House, the Chuckery Estate

It was built – you guessed it – by Wates and again designed jointly by Wates and the Borough architect’s department; system-built using steel moulds which allowed the direct application of decorative wall finishes. In full production, the on-site factory produced one floor each day for both the 13- and 17-storey blocks.  System building gets, for good reason, a bad press but here it seems to have been efficient and the end-result attractive.  A £2.2m refurbishment in the mid-90s– with its added colour and pattern – seems even more reminiscent of the Scandinavian schemes which had provided a model for system building’s British adoption in the sixties.

As Glendinning and Muthesius note, in ‘the Black Country, Wates established itself as a trusty mainstay of medium-sized boroughs…by constructing in-situ blocks and building up a local work-force’.  Such reliance on a locally dominant company (McAlpine also built some Walsall blocks but far fewer) could lead to unfortunate and corrupting results – as was the case with Bryants and Birmingham) but here it seems to be very largely a case of mutual benefit.  When Walsall’s Conservative council leader Sir Cliff Tibbits tried to test the market against Wates, he failed: ‘Wates were giving such good service that nobody wanted to leave them!’. (11)

Alma and Leys Courts, Darlaston

By the late 1960s, the star of high-rise housing was waning but there was an inevitable lag as already planned schemes were fulfilled. The last tower blocks built in the Black Country, the 15-storey Alma and Leys Court flats in Darlaston, were completed in 1973.

Meanwhile, low-rise building continued apace until, by the early 1980s, Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council (created in the 1974 reorganisation of local government which amalgamated Walsall with neighbouring Aldridge-Brownhills) the council managed some 42,000 homes, including some 66 tower blocks.  Next week’s post examines the very different housing politics of this later period.

Sources

My thanks to the Walsall Local History Centre and Archives for providing some of the sources used in this post.

(1) See Patrick Dunleavy, The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain, 1945-1975. A Study of Corporate Power and Professional Influence in the Welfare State (1981)

(2) AT Parrott and DR Wilson, ‘Housing Development in Walsall: Progress and Problems’, British Housing and Planning Review, July-August 1954. The quotations which follow are drawn from the same source.

(3) Walsall Town Council, The 10,000^th House (1950)

(4) Peter Arnold, A Guide to the Buildings of Walsall (2003)

(5) Historic England, Walsall Memorial Garden

(6) Walsall Town Council, The 15,000^th House (1958)

(7) AT Parrott, ‘New Housing at Walsall’, Official Architecture and Planning, December 1961

(8) Walsall Town Council, Leamore Redevelopment Scheme Official Brochure (1964)

(9) ‘Sandbank housing scheme, Walsall’, Architects’ Journal, 3 September, 1969 and Walsall Town Council, Sandbank Redevelopment Scheme (1965)

(10) Walsall Town Council, Paddock Redevelopment Scheme (1969)

(11) Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (1993)

The Broadwater Estate, Tottenham, Part II: ‘a strong vibrant community’

Tags

1980s, 1990s, Haringey, Multi-storey, Regeneration

We left Broadwater Farm last week, a much improved and increasingly popular estate, but police-community relations were in a state of simmering tension and exploded catastrophically on the night of Sunday 6 August 1985.

One day earlier, police had raided the home of Cynthia Jarrett.  This lay some way off the Estate but her son Floyd – the target of the raid – was a leading member of the Broadwater Farm Youth Association (BWFYA).  Mrs Jarrett died of heart failure. Another black woman, Cherry Groce, had been shot and seriously injured in a similar police raid in Brixton the previous week.  On the Sunday, protestors moving off to what was billed as a peaceful protest outside Tottenham Police Station, found their way blocked – and all other exits barred – by police in full riot gear. The confrontation escalated and, in the seven-hour riot which ensued, PC Keith Blakelock was brutally murdered.

A full-scale state of siege followed.  Four hundred police officers occupied the Estate over the following weeks and some 270 police raids took place over the next six months. Some 159 arrests were made.  In the longer-term, beyond the crude and sensationalist coverage of the tabloids (unsurprising perhaps in such a genuinely shocking event), serious investigation into the causes of the rioting began, most notably in the inquiry, commissioned by Haringey Council, led by Lord Gifford QC.

The overall verdict – supported by the fact that relatively little damage to property or looting occurred – was that: (1)

The riot…was not primarily about poverty, unemployment or bad housing…The protest by the youths was essentially about policing – police activity and police attitudes.

A demonstration from the late 1980s (c) Robert Croma and made available through a Creative Commons licence

In this sense, the unwise but unfairly misrepresented words of Haringey’s council leader Bernie Grant were accurate:

The youths around here believe the police were to blame for what happened on Sunday and what they got was a bloody good hiding.

In the aftermath, the local community, spearheaded by the BWFYA, and the Council laboured tirelessly – in fact, building on the good work done before the riots – to rescue the Estate from the nightmare which had befallen it.  A £33m grant in 1986 under the Government’s Estate Action programme provided much needed capital.

A large part of that finance went on modifications to what were held to be the design flaws of the original scheme.  A ‘Ground-Level Reinstatement Plan’ removed shops from the deck level of Tangmere to Willan Road and created new lobbies (with concierge services) at surface level for the larger blocks.  The walkways were removed in 1993.

The image from Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block, shows Broadwater Farm after refurbishment in 1990. The flagstaffs mark the Remembrance Garden.

There were other improvements too but much of the work improving the environment and ‘feel’ of the Estate was carried out under the aegis of the BWYFA.  A Remembrance Garden (a plaque commemorates ‘those who died and suffered’ in the 1985 riots) and a Nation’s Square celebrating the Estate’s diverse community, were created. (2)

Rochford block with Anthony Steele’s mural and the former first floor deck removed. Photograph 2016.

Murals – one on the end of the Rochford block painted by Anthony Steele, a local black youth depicting Martin Luther King, Gandhi, John Lennon and Bob Marley; another on Tangmere by a local Turkish resident with its own symbolic message of peace and harmony – were created to beautify the Estate.  A third – the Waterfall mural on the end of the Debden block painted by Bernette Hall – was added between 1990 and 1991.

Debden (with Bernette Hall’s Waterfall) and Hawkinge with Kenley to rear. photograph 2016

More tangibly, given a youth unemployment rate of 37 per cent on the Estate (the figure for London as a whole was 12 percent), there were serious attempts to create local jobs. Enterprise workshops and training initiatives, often local co-ops, were set up to provide skills to young people as well as necessary local services.

The effort to employ residents on the ongoing renovation works was aided by the multi-disciplinary, area-based design teams developed by John Murray in the Council’s Building Design Service from 1979 with the support of Jeremy Corbyn, then chair of Haringey’s Planning Committee.  Murray was a founder member of the New Architecture Movement founded in 1975 to democratise the profession and promote cooperative working with ‘users’, those who, too often, were merely the subject of architects’ grand designs.  Murray was elected head of the Building Design Service in 1985 and would go on to become Borough Architect.

Debden. Photograph 2016.

On Broadwater Farm, the local team worked closely with Estate residents and employed local labour. Part of the scheme involved appointing two local young people as trainee architects – an important attempt to open up an increasingly closed and elitist profession. At peak, the Building Design Service employed around 200 staff, 60 per cent of whom were black and ethnic minority – figures which reflected the Borough’s rich diversity. (3)

By 2003, the Estate was virtually fully occupied and forty residents had purchased their homes under Right to Buy.  An annual survey found only two per cent of residents felt unsafe in their homes (compared to a Haringey average of 15 per cent) and over half the residents had lived on the Estate for ten years.  It was, by all objective accounts, a stable and safe community.

Christian Wolmar concluded that – beyond the structural changes intended to ‘design out crime’ – much of the improvement lay with the strength of the local community: (4)

the very design of the estate, the fact that the lay-out is so different from the ordinary terraced housing around with a clear line that distinguishes Broadwater Farm from its surrounding area has been helpful in creating a sense of community.

Interestingly, this was a comment echoed in part last year by Victor Olisa, a Haringey police officer: ‘The crime level’s probably lower than other parts of the borough because it’s a contained estate’. (5)

Hawkinge with Kenley to rear. The first floor deck has been transformed into private ‘defensible space’ and a new ground floor entrance provided. Photograph 2016.

This suggests that either those walkways were doing a lot of heavy lifting in the bad old days or that much of what we believe about the Estate depends, not so much on any objective truth – good or bad – but on context, circumstance and perception.

An academic analysis by Dominic Severs makes an interesting comparison between (predominantly outsider and middle-class) attitudes towards the ‘rookeries’, the particularly notorious districts of slum housing of the Victorian era, and the ‘no-go’ estates of the modern era, ‘characteristically high-rise, modernist and “non-street”’.

Martlesham with Northolt tower to rear. Photograph 2016

What they share, he argues, is a defining set of characteristics: (6)

Separation from the mainstream of transit and economic activity; the complexity and ambiguity of constituent spaces; the difficulty of navigation by outsiders; enclosure; covered entrances creating symbolic barriers or markers of ownership; the indirect relationship of street to home; and the complex and potentially illegible relationship between public and private spaces…

It would be absurd to ignore the real problems suffered by Broadwater Farm over the years or gloss over the tragic events of 1985 but it is nonetheless vital to recognise just how much of the obloquy suffered by the Estate – and other similar schemes such as the Pepys Estate in Lewisham or Southwark’s ‘Five Estates’ – rests on their difference and separation, the class prejudices these promote, and the alarmist fears fanned by hostile commentary.

Some of that commentary was revived by the riots of 2011.  On 4 August, Mark Duggan – a young black man raised on Broadwater Farm with a record of criminal activity (though its seriousness was disputed) – was shot and killed by the police.  The death played into continuing tensions between the police and the black community and fed the belief that the latter was unfairly targeted and treated.

In disputed circumstances, on 7 August an initially peaceful protest outside Tottenham Police Station, led from Broadwater Farm but involving many not from the Estate, degenerated into violent disorder, looting and arson on Tottenham High Road.  Comparable events occurred across twelve other areas of the capital and a similar number of towns and cities across England.

This view of Northolt shows that parts of the estate still look poor and rundown. Photograph 2016.

One London study inferred a correlation between the location of rioting and the proximity of ‘large post-war housing estates’; Broadwater Farm, for example, was close to disturbances in Tottenham, Wood Green and the Tottenham Hale retail park to the north. (7)  But broader, national analysis showed an array of causal factors: sheer opportunism was one, the chance of ‘shopping for free’ as looting was described; an inchoate sense of grievance motivated by the disparities of affluence and poverty was another.  What stood out most, however, was a widespread resentment of police behaviour. (8)

Broadwater Farm has a history, a seemingly inescapable one, but – the ‘accident’ of its personal association with the victim of alleged police wrongdoing aside – it seems hard to blame the Estate itself for the riots of 2011 and appropriate to focus on wider societal causes.

This wasn’t the view of David Cameron. (9)

The riots of 2011 didn’t emerge from within terraced streets or low-rise apartment buildings. As spatial analysis of the riots has shown, the rioters came overwhelmingly from these post-war estates.

And accompanying off-the-record briefings suggested that Broadwater Farm was to be one of the ‘sink estates’ to benefit from his razing of the ‘high, brutal high-rise towers and dark alleyways’ which apparently fomented such disorder.

Croydon. Photograph 2016

Little of this made sense – its apparent ignorance or wilful disregard of estate regeneration occurring since the eighties, the paltry investment proposed, its evasion of so much more (not least Conservative policies since 1979) which might be blamed for the 2011 riots. As a piece of political grandstanding, it garnered the headlines Cameron presumably wanted but its substance was as evanescent as his own tenure of office.  He was gone six months later and Brexit critic Michael Heseltine, the ‘tsar’ appointed to oversee the proposals, ten months after that.

Broadwater Farm Community Centre

Clasford Stirling collecting his MBE, 2007 (c) Tottenham Journal

Meanwhile, lasting change has occurred on Broadwater Farm.  First-class facilities have been added to the Estate including a new community centre, children’s nursery and health centre. Contemporary media reports praise the highly sought-after ‘state-of-the-art primary school’ and children travel across London to attend the football academy run by Clasford Stirling MBE. (10)

It’s not perfect – senseless ‘postcode wars’ exist between young people from the Estate and others from neighbouring areas, police-community relations have improved but need work, class and racial inequalities and injustices persist – but it might be thought time to leave the Estate alone.

But Broadwater Farm is threatened – the word seems appropriate in this context – by further regeneration.  Though not directly a part of the Haringey’s controversial Development Vehicle, the Council nevertheless believes that the area ‘presents an opportunity for a large scale regeneration project’ which includes ‘steps to redress tenure imbalances and alter the currently negative perception of the area’. (11)

It’s a now conventional view which sees council estates as ‘improved’ by importing middle-class owner-occupiers and private renters.  As such, of course, it doesn’t challenge ‘negative perceptions’ but reinforces them.

I’ll leave the last word with the Estate’s Residents’ Association: (12)

Broadwater Farm provides decent quality housing for thousands of people. It is a strong, vibrant community. Huge amounts have been spent on providing concierge suites, new roofs and windows, providing a Community Centre and many other facilities. All residents want to look to the future on our estate, rather than having our lives needlessly disrupted by demolitions and decants.

Sources

(1) Tricia Zipfel quoted in Dominic Severs, ‘Rookeries and No-Go Estates: St Giles and Broadwater Farm, or middle-class fear of “non-street” housing’, Journal of Architecture, vol 15, no 4, August 2010

(2) BWF Youth Association Co-op Ltd, Cultivating the Farm (Broadwater Farm, 1988)

(3) See Haringey Building Design Service Involvement in Broadwater Farm after 1985 and Real Estates, ‘Hidden History: John Murray’s Letter to the Guardian’, 4 January 2014.

(4) Christian Wolmar, Broadwater Revisited (September 15 2003)

(5) Louise Riley, ‘Broadwater Farm Estate’s Youth Are Battling to Escape the “Folklore” of Mark Duggan’s Death and 1985 Riot’, Huffington Post, 6 August 2016.

(6) Severs, ‘Rookeries and No-Go Estates’

(7) Space Syntax, 2011 London Riots Location Analysis: Proximity to town centres and large post-war housing estates (2011)

(8) LSE and The Guardian, Reading the Riots: investigating England’s Summer of Disorder (December 2011)

(9) David Cameron, Estate Regeneration (10 January 2016)

(10) Louise Riley, ‘Broadwater Farm Estate’s Youth Are Battling to Escape the “Folklore” of Mark Duggan’s Death and 1985 Riot’

(11) Haringey Council, Haringey Development Vehicle Business Case (October 2015)

(12) Haringey Council’s Local Plan Consultation: Response by Broadwater Farm Residents’ Association (March 2015)

The Broadwater Farm Estate, Tottenham, Part I: from ‘holiday camp’ to ‘dumping ground’?

Tags

1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Multi-storey, Regeneration

The Broadwater Farm Estate is – with apologies to its residents who know it differently and better – notorious: the scene of rioting in 1985, blamed by some for the disorder in Tottenham in 2011, and apparently one of the ‘sink estates’ to be transformed by David Cameron’s short-lived ‘blitz on poverty’ in 2016.   Let’s tell a different story.  We’ll look at ‘what went wrong’, of course, but offer an alternative perspective which questions the easy blame-game. And we’ll look at the high hopes and good intentions which created the Estate and at what, over the years, has gone right.

The Broadwater Farm Estate from the west, Kenley and Northold towers to left (c) Iridiscenti and made available through a Creative Commons licence

For a start, there was a context.  In 1961, according to Haringey’s Planning Officer, 90,000 households occupied 70,000 dwellings in the borough. Mr Frith estimated judiciously – since some single people preferred to share – that there was a shortfall of 14,000 homes in Haringey.  Around a third were over 70 years old and half of the housing was privately rented and of poor quality. (1)

Contemporary thinking and changed economics might tell another story here – of solid terraced housing and potential family homes which should have been rehabilitated but were, instead, sacrificed to the hubris of politicians and planners.  But that came later.  At the time, as Ernie Large (the chair of Haringey’s Housing Committee till 1968) made clear, the logic of demolition and new build was compelling: (2)

What we were doing was clearing slums in South Tottenham and other parts of the borough, so that people who actually went into the Broadwater flats originally found them palaces compared with what they were living in previously, i.e. back to back slums.

The 21 acre site for Broadwater Farm was found on land allocated to allotments to the side of the Lordship Recreation Ground.  The Moselle Brook which meandered through the area was culverted underground.  The high water table and alleged risk of flooding justified the use of piloti on all the estate’s principal blocks – stilts which raised them above an open ground floor.

Some later critics thought this an affectation – Jim Sneddon (an architect who lived on the Estate for two years) condemned the use of ‘inappropriate architectural forms to preserve the stylistic quality of [the architects’] modernist designs’.  But they unquestionably fulfilled another, uncontroversial, design goal of the time as the Council brochure to new tenants explained: (3)

Complete vehicle and pedestrian segregation has been aimed at, and all blocks are linked by pedestrian access deck below which car parking facilities are provided together with a network of service roads.

Those extensive below-block ground floors provided around 1.5 parking spaces per household for a newly-affluent working class.

Tangmere shopping centre as envisaged

In the original design, there were plans too for a significant local shopping centre – 24 shops including ‘a public house, supermarket, newsagents, etc.’ – in the Tangmere block. It was ‘intended to form a focal point of the scheme…a “ziggurat”, a building U-shaped in plan [with] shops on three sides around a central open space’. (4)

The artist’s impression also speaks to the relative working-class affluence that the Estate was intended both to reflect and foster.  The homes themselves reflected this progress – airy flats build to generous Parker Morris space standards with the mod cons now expected.

This 1988 image of the Tangmere shopping centre (after the 1985 riots from which it never recovered) shows a gritter reality. With thanks to Prof Miles Glendinning and Tower Block UK, University of Edinburgh.

The Council brochure pointed to other features and amenities of the new estate including the district heating system – ‘constant hot water for heating and domestic use…supplied to all homes from the central oil-fired boiler’.  It couldn’t be regulated in the individual flats but, as the Council pointed out, you could always turn a radiator off.

Most new residents had little cause to complain: (5)

We came from a house that was built in 1816, so when we first arrived here it was like a holiday camp. There were bathrooms, indoor loos, you didn’t have to go out in the freezing cold anymore.

Dolly Kiffin later recalled ‘a lot of peace’ on the Estate: (6)

The front room was quite big and it was so warm for the kids…It was all nice and clean. And especially at night when you sit over the patio and look all over, it’s a beautiful sight.

In all, 1063 new homes were provided, predominantly one-, two- and three-bed flats and maisonettes, in twelve blocks, housing around 3400. Aside from Tangmere, there were eight other six-storey blocks, adjoined by lower four-storey maisonette blocks. Two nineteen-storey towers, Northolt and Kenley, completed the ensemble.  (All the blocks were named after Second World War airfields.)

Kenley in 2016 after refurbishment

Taylor Woodrow Anglian won the £5.6m contract and began construction in 1967.  This was the heyday of industrialised building, then seen as essential to the effective delivery of the contemporary mass housing programme.  On Broadwater, the Larsen-Nielsen Large Panel System was employed.  The collapse of Ronan Point in May 1968 came as the point blocks were under construction and work halted for several months while a strengthened system was adopted.  Other blocks were also completed to a modified design.

The first families moved in in 1970; the last – into a small section of terraced housing – in 1973. All but 34 households – the local press described the exceptions as ‘the lucky 34 who will be given tenancy of brand new flats in the Broadwater Farm Estate’ – were people who had lost homes through slum clearance.  The Housing Committee looked forward to what they anticipated to be ‘an everlasting monument’ to their achievements. (7)

We might suppress the ready ironic snigger that comes with hindsight but it’s true enough that significant problems emerged early on the Estate.  The flat roofs seem to have created severe issues of water penetration and damp in many of the flats.  The heating system – now deemed inefficient – caused noise nuisance.   Cockroach infestation, lift breakdowns and frequent rubbish fires added to the litany of residents’ complaints.

This photograph shows the ground floor parking in 2016

If these could be judged construction flaws, another, larger, criticism was voiced of the Estate’s overall design.  Here the piloti and under-block spaces they created took centre-stage. Broadwater Farm’s fiercest critic was, again, Jim Sneddon:

This single element has possibly been the modern damaging, as it physically created a concrete ‘underworld’ for crime to thrive. Badly lit and overlooked by nothing, these ‘dark arches’ became a muggers’ paradise. Tenants became afraid to venture out after dark. Security began and ended at the tenants’ own front door.

The necessary counterpart to these surface level spaces and the goal of traffic-free access were the raised walkways which joined the various blocks of the Estate.

A 1988 image of Tangmere block with walkway to the right. With thanks to Prof Miles Glendinning and Tower Block UK, University of Edinburgh.

According to Paul Dennehy, a neighbourhood housing officer on the Estate in later years, the ‘streets in the sky’ provided rat-runs and escape routes for criminals: ‘If you’d done a crime elsewhere, you’d come to Broadwater Farm and that was it. The police couldn’t find you’. (8)  Decades later, as court cases revisited earlier violence, senior officers complained that Broadwater Farm was ‘impossible to police’. (9)

All this, of course, played firmly and persuasively into the ‘design disadvantagement’ thesis of Alice Coleman who argued that typical features of modernist housing estates – walkways and the concurrent lack of private ‘defensible space’ being the most salient – caused crime and antisocial behaviour.  Not for nothing was her major work, published in 1985, entitled Utopia on Trial.

The suggestive power of photography: the Estate not looking good in wet twilight in 1988. With thanks to Prof Miles Glendinning and Tower Block UK, University of Edinburgh.

Unsurprisingly, her critique was echoed by Jim Sneddon: ‘the architectural dreams of the 1930s [a reference to Le Corbuserian-inspired modernism] have become a nightmare in the ‘70s and ‘80s’. He criticised the confidence of the 1960s as ‘unbelievable arrogance on the part of the architectural profession’.

We’ll come back to this but it’s important from the outset to establish another and arguably determining outcome of these early problems.  The Estate became unpopular, ‘hard to let’ in the language of the day.

As early as 1973, a suppressed Council report had identified emerging difficulties.  Paraphrased here in a local press article, the report allegedly: (10)

added to the ammunition already available to those who believe as tower blocks reach skywards, they reach previously unscaled heights of human misery.  ‘Problem’ families – many of them single-parent families – were seen to be placed together, claimed the author.  The sight of unmarried West Indian mothers walking about the estate aggravated racial tension. Adolescent absentees from school frequent the blocks, terrorising the elderly.

In another reading, you might question the labelling of single-parent families and wonder why the ‘sight of unmarried West Indian mothers’ should cause such apparent grievance but racial tensions on the Estate were real.  The Tenants’ Association, established in 1970, initially excluded black members and its president was forced to resign in 1974 after a TV appearance speaking on behalf of the National Front. Still friction remained as black youths, even white youths seen to mix with their black peers, continued to be barred. (11)  These prejudices, more so as they were expressed by key actors beyond the Estate, came to play their own part in its stigmatisation.

By 1976, 55 percent of would-be Haringey tenants refused the offer of a home on Broadwater Farm and the turnover of tenancies was twice the Borough average. (12)  Clasford Stirling, who moved onto the Estate in 1978 and was a hero of its later revival, concluded Broadwater Farm had become a:

dumping ground…It was just a mass of graffiti, shit everywhere, people didn’t care, neighbour didn’t know neighbour, we had a lot of empty flats, people didn’t want to live over here, we had a lot of suicides, a lot of muggings and a lot of crime.

At this point, you might expect we’d move directly to the violent disorder of 1985 but the actual history of the Estate is more complicated.  Serious measures to address the undoubted problems of Broadwater Farm began in 1979 when it was designated part of the Priority Estates Project, a Government scheme promoting systems of local management and repair and tenant participation as means of improving what were judged the ‘worst’ of the country’s council estates.

Another 1988 image of Tangmere block shows the estate, with new landscaping, in more favourable light. With thanks to Prof Miles Glendinning and Tower Block UK, University of Edinburgh.

And improvement did occur.  A new neighbourhood housing office was set up and £1m spent on repairing and replacing windows, redecoration and improving security.  Caretaking and cleaning services were improved. The Council also made a concerted effort to recruit local staff to work on the Estate, particularly from its minority communities.

More importantly, the estate itself mobilised.  The Broadwater Farm Youth Association (BWFYA), founded by Dolly Kiffin, was set up in 1981, Clasford Stirling an early member.  Community leaders emerged, determined to revive the Estate and challenge its poor reputation.

All this appears to have made a significant impact.  By 1984, the Estate’s homes were no longer judged hard to let and crime rates had fallen markedly: burglaries by 62 percent, vehicle crime by 50 percent, for example. (13)

The estate map, photographed in 1988, captures work to do and continuing political tensions. With thanks to Prof Miles Glendinning and Tower Block UK, University of Edinburgh.

This was a success story but other realities were more intractable.  The Estate remained disproportionately home to Haringey’s disadvantaged ethnic minorities – 42 percent of its population came from New Commonwealth and Pakistan backgrounds compared to 32 percent of the Borough’s population as a whole.  More importantly, 60 percent of young people on the Estate were unemployed and around 75 per cent of its population said to be ‘dependent on some form of welfare support’. The Department of Environment classified the Estate as ‘extremely/severely depressed’.

One other factor, that which would loom largest in the period ahead, remained.  Many residents, particularly the younger ones and those from minority populations, resented what they saw – what they frequently experienced – as heavy-handed and oppressive policing. Efforts, led by Dolly Kiffin, to ease police-community relations foundered.  Next week’s post examines the tragic events of August 1985 and their more positive aftermath.

Sources

(1) DW Frith, London Borough of Haringey Department of Town Planning, Houses and Flats: a Social Study (May 1967).  The private rental figure comes from Anne Power, Estates on the Edge. The Social Consequences of Mass Housing in Northern Europe (Macmillan Press, 1997)

(2) Quoted in Lord Gifford, The Broadwater Farm Inquiry: report of the independent inquiry into disturbances of October 1985 at the Broadwater Farm Estate, Tottenham (1986), ch 2, p15. Lord Gifford’s Broadwater Farm Inquiry Report and its 1989 follow-up can be found, alongside much else, in the Bishopgate Institute’s online archive of the papers of Bernie Grant, Haringey Council leader and MP.

(3) The criticism is from Jim Sneddon, ‘My years of misery on Broadwater Farm’, Building Design, October 25, 1985, p12-13.  Later quotations from Sneddon are drawn from the same source. The quotation which follows is from Haringey Council, Broadwater Farm Tenants’ Information (ND)

(4) London Borough of Haringey, Proposed Local Shopping Centres at Broadwater Farm and Park Lane (ND) and Haringey Council, Broadwater Farm Tenants’ Information

(5) Bill Kemp quoted in Ben Willis, ‘Out of the darkness’, Inside Housing, 30 September 2005

(6) Quoted in Lord Gifford, The Broadwater Farm Inquiry, ch 2, pp15-16

(7) Quoted in Dominic Severs, ‘Rookeries and No-Go Estates: St Giles and Broadwater Farm, or middle-class fear of “non-street” housing’, Journal of Architecture, vol 15, no 4, August 2010

(8) Quoted in Ben Willis, ‘Out of the darkness’

(9) Chief Superintendent Colin Couch speaking in 2014 at the Old Bailey trial of Nicky Jacobs for the murder of PC Keith Blakelock (he was found not guilty) quoted in Elizabeth Hopkirk, ‘Design of Broadwater Farm Estate criticised at Old Bailey’, BD Online, 10 March 2014

(10) Quoted in Severs, ‘Rookeries and No-Go Estates’

(11) ‘Broadwater Farm: a “criminal estate”?  An interview with Dolly Kiffin’, Race and Class, vol 29, no 1, 1987

(12) Anne Power, Estates on the Edge

(13) Haringey Council, Evidence to the Broadwater Farm Public Inquiry (May 1986). The same source provides the figures on ethnic composition and social disadvantage which follow.

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