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

Tags

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

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

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robin Hood Gardens, 2013

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

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

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

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

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

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

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

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

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robin Hood Gardens, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artist’s visions of the new Blackwall Reach development

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

(3) John Furse, The Smithsons at Robin Hood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags

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

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

© Will of Memory

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

Grosvenor Buildings in 1928

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

This, they hoped, would be: (1)

Alison and Peter Smithson

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

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

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

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

Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lansbury Estate, Poplar, Part 2: ‘I never thought I’d see such luxury’

Tags

1940s, 1950s, Gibberd, Poplar

Last week, I looked at the origins of the Lansbury Estate and its early development.  I finished with the question: what did the Lansbury mean to the people who lived there?

Well, according to the survey carried out by Ruth Glass and John Westergaard, most of them loved it.  The lighterman’s wife who had moved from a Limehouse basement said: (1)

This is what I’d hoped for. I’ve waited seven years for it. We were so desperate, we would have gone almost anywhere. I’m glad we didn’t, we belong round these parts.

The woman who had moved from her mother’s home in Millwall where her family of five had lived in two rooms said simply ‘I never thought I’d see such luxury’.

This wasn’t hype.  Of the incomers, 60 per cent had shared their previous dwelling, 63 per cent had had no access to an inside toilet and 73 per cent had had no access to a bathroom or even to a fitted bath.  The 1951 census showed 72 per cent of Poplar households lacked their own bathroom.

This was the world left behind.  It didn’t mean the new residents were blindly grateful – there were complaints about lack of play space and mothers who wanted to go to work criticised the lack of nursery provision.

Elizabeth Close

In fact, work was not so much desire as necessity.  The rents (including rates) of the new homes ranged from 25s (£1.25) for three rooms to 35s (£1.75) for five rooms at the end of 1951 – at a time when two fifths of the estate’s breadwinners earned less than £7 a week.  All the tenants paid more to live in the Lansbury than their previous accommodation; two thirds paid twice as much.

There was criticism, too, that the range of accommodation provided did not meet local needs.  Over 60 per cent of Lansbury households had young children under 10 years of age but only 27 per cent of the dwellings were houses or ground floor maisonettes with gardens.

East India Dock Road

Who were the new residents?  It was said that 80 per cent of the tenants were ‘outsiders’.  And it was true that those displaced by the redevelopment were not automatically given homes in the new estate – they were moved according to waiting list dictates to new developments as accommodation became available.

But in, fact, over half of all householders in Lansbury had been living in Poplar before they moved, and another fifth had come from the East End boroughs of Stepney, Bethnal Green and Shoreditch.

It was still an overwhelmingly local and working-class population. The men worked in traditional East End trades – 90 per cent of the chief wage earners were manual workers, 28 per cent worked on the docks or in ancillary trades.  Almost two thirds lived within two miles of their place of work.

Ricardo Street

For Glass and Westergaard, this was an enormous strength of the Lansbury.  They saw in the new Estate:

the neighbourliness, the local patriotism, the spirit of give and take, which are found everywhere in the East End. Families have helped one another in the business of moving in; housewives look after the children of neighbours; the Coronation was celebrated with the traditional street parties. Above all, most people in Lansbury have a great affection for their own borough and the East End; they are quite right when they say that ‘there are wonderful people in Poplar’.

In this, they anticipated the 1957 study of Michael Young and Peter Wilmott, Family and Kinship in East London.  This panegyric to the old East End slated the suburban estates to which many displaced residents were decanted precisely for breaking up such networks of self-help.

For all this, the neighbourhood units beloved of town planners never really developed a life of their own – people’s actual lives and affiliations were too complex to be so readily socially engineered.

With the impetus of the Festival of Britain gone, the Estate was, in any case, slow to develop.  Lansbury’s housing was due for completion by 1970. In the event, the Greater London Council added the last element to the overall scheme – on Pigott Street – in 1982.

Gibberd’s 1951 clock tower in the Chrisp Street Market

The shopping precinct, designed by Frederick Gibberd – the first pedestrianized shopping street in Britain and one of the more eye-catchingly modern elements of the overall plan – was ready for 1951 but not finally completed till the early seventies.  Bartlett Park, the Estate’s main open space, wasn’t begun until 1959.

And the Lansbury Estate came to seem almost anachronistic even as it was being begun.

In 1951, Harold Macmillan, Housing Minister in the incoming Conservative government, pronounced that the urgent need for more housing must be met by high-rise and high-density development.

The planning-led interdisciplinary team which had designed Lansbury broke up soon after the Festival and by the mid-50s new-build on the Estate comprised 11-storey point blocks.  Fitzgerald House, built in 1968 and towering above the Chrisp Street Market, is 19 storeys high.

As tower blocks rose, the docks closed – the East India Docks in 1965 and the last London docks, downstream in Beckton, in 1981. Capitalism, not the housing schemes of the old LCC, killed the traditional East End.

In the end, perhaps, the Lansbury Estate was less the first breath of a new world than the dying gasp of the old.

Initially, the pride that Glass and Westergaard reported was maintained.  According to John Jones, a long-time resident, people kept: (2)

the communal areas clean and tidy and there was a porter who looked after the external areas and kept an eye on the youngsters. And, for better or worse, the area policed itself through the local hard men or bookies’ runners and there was no great crime problem.

But by the 70s and 80s things were going downhill.  As another resident summarised, ‘The buildings began to develop problems, kids started spraying graffiti and the estate no longer felt safe’.  And then, to some, it became a no-go area.  It’s a familiar trajectory, rooted in the destructive dynamics of social transition and economic decline.

The estate sign on Kerbey Street which has escaped renewal so far

In 1997, Estate was declared a conservation area.  One year later, the Borough of Tower Hamlets set up the Poplar Housing and Regeneration Community Association (Poplar Harca) with a brief to renew the area, particularly those council estates whose residents had voted in a controversial ballot to transfer to this new registered social landlord.

The Lansbury was one such estate and Poplar Harca has invested considerably in the estate and its people. John Jones became the Lansbury Estate’s resident director for the association.

Meanwhile, the onward march of gentrification in the East End has had its impact in the new ‘Festival Quarter’ development on Canton Street.

The Lansbury looks now as though it has stood the test of time.  Its unadventurous style came to seem far more compelling as high-rise dreams collapsed, sometimes literally.  And its houses and flats still offer good quality, attractive accommodation at more affordable prices at a time when social needs – albeit very different from those of the 1940s – are just as pressing.

We might, after all, dream of those days when we only criticised municipal housing for its lack of ambition.

Sources:

(1) John Westergaard and Ruth Glass, ‘A Profile of Lansbury’, The Town Planning Review, Vol. 25, No. 1 (April 1954)

(2) ‘The Lansbury Estate: Post-Festival development‘, Survey of London: volumes 43 and 44: Poplar, Blackwall and Isle of Dogs (1994)

(3) Quoted in John Crace, ‘Keys to the Future’, The Guardian, 11 July 2001

Hayes People History, The Lansbury Estate 1951 – It’s what Labour Councils do, is a lovely post on the furnished show flat kitted out by the London Cooperative Society.

The Love London Council Housing piece on the Estate has some additional photographs and detail.

Poplar Harca’s webpage on Lansbury details the current work and activities of the association on the Estate.

The Lansbury Estate, Poplar, Part 1: meeting ‘the needs of the people’

Tags

1940s, 1950s, Gibberd, LCC, Poplar

The 1951 Festival of Britain – born in an age of hope and austerity – was envisaged as a ‘corporate reaffirmation of faith in the nation’s future’(1).  In social democratic Britain, a key element of this future was housing for the people and the Lansbury Estate in Poplar was to be its exemplar.

Its first beneficiaries were Mr and Mrs Snoddy, their two children and pet tortoise.  They moved in to a three-bedroomed flat in Gladstone House on Valentine’s Day, 1951.

But the origins of the Estate pre-date the Festival.  The London County Council’s ambitions to rebuild and rehouse had been spectacularly demonstrated after the first world war.  The second added urgency and, in a way, opportunity – 24 per cent of Poplar’s buildings had been either destroyed or seriously damaged in the conflict.

The LCC’s County of London Plan, drawn up by Patrick Abercrombie and County Architect by JH Forshaw in 1943, intended to seize this moment and reconstruct London on rational and humane lines.

One of the Plan’s great themes was the ‘neighbourhood unit ‘, seen as a lesson ‘learnt from the urban co-operation and sturdy individualism’ of existing London communities.(2)

A feeling of neighbourliness and social responsibility is much more likely to develop where dwellings are grouped than where they are strung out in long terraces or repetitive blocks of flats.

There was also a simple belief that London’s population needed to be reduced – the LCC proposed a 42 per cent reduction in the population of Stepney and Poplar. Alfred Salter’s earlier hopes for Bermondsey were not so fanciful after all.

These ideas met in the New Town movement of the day and in the Lansbury Estate, its metropolitan counterpart.

The Stepney and Poplar Reconstruction Area – which gave the LCC the compulsory purchase powers it needed – was authorised by the Minister of Town and Country Planning in December 1947.  Of 11 neighbourhood units declared, the Lansbury Estate would form Neighbourhood 9 – 124 acres bounded by East India Dock Road, Burdett Road, Limehouse Cut, and the North London railway line.  One year later the LCC compulsorily purchased 37.75 acres within the Neighbourhood – around 1,000 properties in about 370 separate ownerships.

The western end of the Estate under development, 1951

To all this the Festival of Britain was essentially irrelevant.  The Exhibition of Architecture, Town Planning, and Building Research was originally planned for Battersea Park but in 1948 Frederick Gibberd, architect-planner and Festival adviser, offered a new concept – ‘to take a bombed or cleared site of four to six acres as near as possible to the site of the main Exhibition [and] develop it as a cross section of a Neighbourhood’.(3)

Herbert Morrison, former leader of the LCC and the minister in charge of the Festival, seized on this idea and, for various reasons, the Poplar site was taken as ideal.

A Reconstruction Group was established within the LCC’s Town Planning Department – a multi-disciplinary team of architects, planners and surveyors and the first sociologist to be involved in such a project, Margaret Willis.

This was a planning-led project, intended to create a viable and self-sustaining community with all the shops, schools, churches and community buildings it needed.   It would include too the first modern purpose-built old people’s home in London.  Surveys of local circumstances and needs were carried out though, in practice, the public consultation was largely symbolic – plans were too far advanced to be stymied by local opinion.

In some ways, the Festival added little permanently to the Estate. It did, however, ensure a larger number of private architects contributing – Geoffrey Jellicoe, Peter Shepherd, Graham Dawbarn and Edward Armstrong – and a greater variety of styles than was typical of most LCC estates.

It also gave the scheme some urgency though it wouldn’t escape the bureaucratic hold-ups, Government economy measures and contractor shortages that were the inevitable mark of these ambitious and constrained times.

Corner of Pekin Street and Pekin Close

The first housing opened in February 1951.  The Live Architecture Exhibition and its temporary buildings opened in May, featuring the Building Research Pavilion and ‘Gremlin Grange’ –a jerry-built house in all its horror – and the Town Planning Pavilion.  The latter’s exhibits capture the ideals and priorities of the day.

The Battle for Land, The Needs of the People, How can these needs be met?  Work in Progress

There was a café too – the Rosie Lee.  And, of course, the Estate itself was named after the East End’s own favourite socialist, George Lansbury, who had died in 1940.

There were 478 new homes in the exhibition area – a fifth in six-storey blocks of flats, a third in blocks of three storeys or less, two-fifths in ‘mixed’ blocks of houses, maisonettes and flats, the rest in two-storey terraces.  No.  14 Grundy Street and no. 2 Overstone House were opened as show homes.  The 30 acre Estate as a whole – still some way from completion at the time of the Festival – would comprise 1,197 dwellings by the end of 1951.

Grundy Street

Overstone House

Sadly, the Exhibition itself was a bit of a damp squib – just 86,646 visitors made it out to the East End compared to the 8 million who attended the main Festival site on the South Bank.

Architectural opinion was also unimpressed.  The yellow stock brick and grey slates – selected to fit with established local housing – were widely seen as plain and uninspiring.

Pekin Street

JM Richards, editor of Architectural Review, described ‘the general run of the small-scale housing at Lansbury as worthy, dull and somewhat skimpy’.  He felt that ‘the aridity of design from which the Lansbury housing suffers is undoubtedly due to so much having to be sacrificed for the sake of cheapness’.(3)

Irrespective of aesthetic judgements, there was truth in this.  The Architecture Exhibition had been costed at between £300,000 and £500,000 but in June 1949 its budget was cut, at Government insistence, to £240,000.  In the same year, prices had risen by 6 per cent.  The result was that standards had to be lowered – literally in the case of the ceilings in parts of the scheme (to 8 feet) as building bye-laws were waived.

But architects shouldn’t have the last word.  The sociologists Ruth Glass and John Westergaard were measured in their appraisal.  It was true that the Estate offered  ‘hardly any examples of really outstanding contemporary design: its layout and elevations reflect modesty and competence’.  There was nothing which appeared inspired by ‘flights of imagination and adventure’.  Still, they concluded:(4)

‘an environment has been created – or re-created – that is neither a pale imitation of suburban boredom, nor an apologia for city life.

And then they asked the vital question: ‘What does Lansbury mean to the people who live there?’

This question and the later life of the Estate will be examined in next week’s post.

Sources:

(1) Ian Cox, The South Bank Exhibition: A guide to the story it tells, HMSO, 1951

(2)  ‘The Lansbury Estate: Introduction and the Festival of Britain exhibition‘, Survey of London: volumes 43 and 44: Poplar, Blackwall and Isle of Dogs (1994)

(3) From the Architectural Review, December1951, quoted in the Survey of London article above.

(4) John Westergaard and Ruth Glass, ‘A Profile of Lansbury’, The Town Planning Review, Vol. 25, No. 1 (April 1954)

Hayes People History, The Lansbury Estate 1951 – It’s what Labour Councils do, is a lovely post on the furnished show flat kitted out by the London Cooperative Society.

The Love London Council Housing piece on the Estate has good additional photographs and detail.

Poplar Town Hall: ‘a worthy workshop for the worker’s welfare’

Tags

1930s, Poplar, Town Halls

If you walk along the Bow Road in London’s East End, maybe towards the new Westfield shopping centre in Stratford, you’ll come across a building that, even in its present neglected state, looks as if it has a story to tell – a story of a different age and values and a time of collective aspiration.  This is the new Poplar Town Hall, officially opened in December 1938.

Poplar holds a hallowed place in Labour folklore as the venue of the Great Rates Revolt of 1921 when the Labour council refused to levy a cross-London precept on the rates in protest at the unfair burden that fell upon poor city boroughs.  Thirty councillors – including the sainted George Lansbury and six women – went to prison. But ‘Poplarism’ won the day.

That story should be read elsewhere but, whilst this was the high point of Poplar’s radicalism, the council retained its cutting edge for some years to come.  That cutting edge is best seen concretely in the new Town Hall, described by its architect, a long-standing Labour member of the London County Council, Ewart G Culpin, as ‘the first town hall in this country to be erected in the modern style.’

Poplar Town Hall, 1938

Today, the building is listed but beleaguered – its functions lost and not replaced when Poplar Metropolitan Borough Council was swallowed up by the new Tower Hamlets authority in 1965.  But it retains its power to impress and a lingering echo of the ideals which inspired it.

Poplar Town Hall (c) Reading Tom used under the Creative Commons licence. The sculptural panels shown below can be seen above the main entrance on the corner. The attic storey is a poor later addition.

The building was funded by a loan from the Ministry of Health and London County Council (LCC) – on the grounds that a consolidation of services would aid efficiency –  at a time of deep and long-lasting economic recession when contemporary sensibilities precluded any show of extravagance.  But if such was the necessity, it was necessity made virtue by Poplar’s Labour councillors.

Countering criticisms of the new Town Hall’s austere design, Alderman Key responded:

[If] the building were in reality a super factory transferred from Slough or the Great West Road … what of it? In so far as a factory was a place where worthily by the work of man’s head and hands the desires of his heart could be made living and fruitful that was what they wanted … this should have been a veritable palace of the people had not Poplar been so poor, but here it is, a worthy workshop for the worker’s welfare.

An unconscious echo perhaps of Herbert Morrison’s remark of the same era in which he proclaimed the LCC a ‘machine [which] works with precision, good sense and humanity.’  Labour councils could not rest on their compassion but had also to convince a still sceptical electorate of their competence and professionalism. Municipal dreams were grounded in harsh realities and Labour’s exercise of power had to marry principle with practical politics.

The building was constructed along clean Art Deco lines with minimal embellishment.  As the programme of the opening ceremony states that ‘it was the particular wish of the Council that the building’ be a place ‘where business could be efficiently and economically conducted.’

Yet more prosaically, it added that ‘in view of the smoke-laden atmosphere, dirt-collecting ornament has been avoided.’

But the sweeping lines of the construction and the use made of its awkward corner site remain striking and care was taken to provide decorative features and interior fittings which were modern, functional and true to the Council’s mission.

In the Civic Suite, ‘the Council Chamber, the heart of the Borough’ received ‘very special attention’ with its ‘flat floor with movable seating, walls flush panelled with Birdseye Maple, long, dignified windows and window curtains designed with sailing ships appropriate to Poplar.’ The Chamber was demolished in the 1990s.

Council Chamber

A mural in the Mayor’s Parlour (a room now altered beyond recognition with the mural supposedly placed in storage) represented the principal buildings of the borough.

Mayor’s Parlour with mural

The Municipal Offices, where civic grandeur was not required, were notable for their ‘lightness and a straightforwardness of planning…Simplicity has been the keynote.’

The Town Hall’s other principal element was an Assembly Hall with accommodation for 1,200.  ‘Meetings, musical and dramatic performances, dances and future “talkies” [were] all provided for,’ states the programme – a reminder of how broadly it was intended that the building serve local people.  This was demolished in the 1990s.

Concert Hall

Externally, the outstanding features are the main entrance mosaic celebrating the borough’s docklands industry and five bas-relief panels, both the work of David Evans.

Poplar Town Hall mosaic (c) Diamond Geezer

The panels depicted some of the tradesmen – apparently drawn from life in the first instance – engaged in the construction of the building: a carpenter, an engineer, a welder and two builders, all with the tools of their trade.  The steel girders in the background reflect again the modernist ethos of the overall design.

Any socialist realist echoes here were not accidental.  As Alderman Key stated:

I believe that the future welfare of the common people is bound up with the development of a social conscience which will see not only in the work of high and mighty but in the labours of road menders and sweepers, social builders and engineers, miners and sailors.

That is an aspiration which, for all the revolutionary social changes which have occurred since the bleak, class-ridden and poverty-struck days of the thirties, remains unfulfilled.  George Lansbury, who performed the official opening of the new building, would have been disappointed.

The Town Hall, in its lingering glory and in its sad decline, remains a monument to those hopes

Sources:

Metropolitan Borough of Poplar, Programme of the Ceremony of Opening the New Town Hall;  British Listed Buildings, Former Poplar Town Hall (Bow House); Jeremy Haslam, Poplar Town Hall sculptures.  My thanks to Diamond Geezer (and his excellent Flickr site) for the Docklands mosaic image.  Read his blog too.