Orchard Park, Hull, Part II: ‘It’s never had it better than now’

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1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Regeneration

We left Orchard Park in Hull in last week’s post in a bad way, in some ways a typical peripheral estate with what by now seemed the usual problems but in other respects an example writ large in terms of its poor quality design and level of social disadvantage.  A further element was introduced by what appeared to be rising problems of criminality and antisocial behaviour.  In this week’s post, we’ll examine the ongoing attempts to revive and improve such increasingly stigmatised estates for which Orchard Park was a significant test-bed.

Orchard Park © Charlie Baker and used with permission

It certainly qualified as a hard-to-let estate, a phenomenon identified by the Labour government of James Callaghan in 1978 and then targeted in the Priority Estates Programme (PEP) inherited by the Conservative government which succeeded.  Its emphasis was on modelling systems of local management and repair and promoting tenant participation.  A growing assumption was also that particular housing forms encouraged crime.

A retrospective Home Office study of three PEP estates (two in Tower Hamlets, London, and the other the Orchard Park Estate) concluded that while all ‘had high crime rates and adverse design’, Orchard Park ‘had a greater level of disorderliness, associated with youth in particular, which fostered a greater sense of insecurity amongst residents, particularly women’. (1)

A worthy entrant for the gardening competition? © Charlie Baker and used with permission

All this played into the mix of changes carried out in Orchard Park in PEP-related activity from 1986 to 1992.  A local estate office was established to deal with repairs, caretaking and lettings. Neighbourhood Management Committees were set up in 1989; various security and environmental initiatives ensued.  A Gardening Competition for residents inaugurated in 1993 takes us back to the domestic respectability promoted by similar such competitions in the cottage suburbs since the 1920s. (2)

There was also some attempt to use the lettings policies in supporting established residents and engineering a more socially beneficial mix of new tenants. The Home Office report captures the contradictions and limitations of such a policy in the face of the intractable realities governing council housing allocations in a period of growing shortage and increased hardship.

Lingcourt, Orchard Park

The report concluded that ‘Territoriality, social cohesion and “empowerment” increased among the residents of the houses’.  Among new tenants, the single mothers, generally provided houses (rather than flats), seem to have complemented the more established residents living disproportionately in the estate’s low-rise homes and contributed to their relative low turnover and ‘respectability’.

At the same time, the combination of a declining economy, homelessness legislation and the shortage of council housing stock ensured that:

a greater number of young poor people and those discharged from institutional care were coming on to the estates. Their arrival at a time of high unemployment and into conditions of poverty created a destabilising influence, swelled the numbers of vulnerable tenants and encouraged more disorderly activities and lifestyles.

These new tenants were housed disproportionately in high-rise flats and:

Despite a programme of improvement to the security of the tower blocks, and better management of the estate as a whole, the newcomers – that is the young, childless poor – displaced many of the previous, elderly residents and attracted crime to themselves, both as perpetrators and victims, concentrating crime in their part of the estate.

It’s all a reminder that council estates are disproportionately required to bear the burden of social and economic problems beyond their purview or, as I would argue, that estates are a victim of societal failings but not their cause.

Orchard Park © Charlie Baker and used with permission

The Home Office report (found, appropriately, on the National Police College website) focused on crime prevention and the various attempts to ‘design out’ crime.  It epitomised a critique and prescription for troubled council estates which became mainstream from the mid-eighties, aimed at, in its words:

1. Creating better dwelling security and more ‘defensible space’

2. Halting a spiral of deterioration … [by] reducing ‘signs of disorder’ and fear of crime

3. Investing in the estate so that resident’s will develop a positive view and thus a greater stake in their community …

4. Increasing informal community control over crime both through increased surveillance and supervision by residents and housing officials and facilitating the development of a set of norms and expectations against offending on the estate.

That’s a pretty good summary of the ‘design disadvantagement’, ‘defensible space’ theories that were popularised in the UK (and simplified) by Alice Coleman in the mid-1980s though, in Orchard Park (its high-rise blocks notwithstanding), it was applied not to modernist, multi-storey housing but to a generally low-rise estate.

Knightscourt © Ian S and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Another, perhaps not altogether disinterested, account celebrates the design modifications implemented across the estate. (3)

Monotonous, unkept [sic] pathways in front of terraced houses were transformed by creating fenced off private yards for each household. A programme of colourful redecoration to external areas did much to brighten the estate’s formerly drab façade.

And ‘attractive tiled canopies were erected around the entrances’ of the three Mildane high-rise blocks, ‘creating a pleasing appearance, as well as giving protection from falling objects’.

At the same time, entryphone systems were installed and CCTV within lifts and ground floor communal areas, the latter at the time apparently accessible to view by tenants on a dedicated TV channel through a communal aerial, bringing a whole new level to our obsession with crime drama on the box.

The article concludes that offences committed by non-residents ‘virtually ceased’ and that the ‘few cases of theft and vandalism’ that persisted were attributable to ‘a minority of residents’.  The changes clearly represented an improvement and there’s no need to sneer at sensible crime reduction initiatives which reduced its prevalence and meaningful environmental improvements even if the overall argument seems a little overstated.   Generally, things were looking up; the chair of the Danes Management Committee concluded ‘The estate is a cleaner, happier place. Repairs are done quickly, the local office is run efficiently.’ (4)

Nevertheless, Orchard Park remained a ‘problem estate’ into the 2000s even as, of course, it continued to provide a decent home to most of its residents.   Of those homes, Right to Buy having wrought its changes even in this apparently unpromising terrain, only around 68 percent were social rented by 2011 with now nine percent let by private landlords.

‘Tinned up’ homes in Feldane Orchard Park © Charlie Baker and used with permission

It remained an unpopular estate to outsiders; when some choice existed between 2001 and 2003, the vacancy rate stood at 26 percent and the average re-letting period at 322 days, three times worse than any other Hull estate. Fifty-two percent of OP residents were satisfied with their neighbourhood against an average of 72 percent city-wide. (5)

Ribycourt

When the urban design consultancy Urbed worked with Gateway Pathfinder to create (in their words) ‘an engagement and capacity building programme for tenants and residents’ in Orchard Park, the vision of some seemed modest at first glance though the attitudinal shift they wanted might have been life-changing for some: (6)

My vision for Orchard Park is that it comes in line with all the other communities in Hull and it’s not singled out, when my son is eighteen and goes for a job he isn’t discriminated against because his postcode is HU6.

The veteran local Labour councillor Terry Geraghty articulated a similar ambition:

We need to get away from the idea of Orchard Park being on its own; we are all one community and we need to break down those barriers. The image the area has is not deserved, 90% of the people that live here are incredibly hard working people and we need to get the information to those in business that just because someone lives in Orchard Park it doesn’t mean they are any less capable of doing the jobs that everyone else in Hull can do …

At the time, unemployment among the economically active was at 27 percent on the estate, compared to 12 percent in Hull as a whole and six percent nationally.  The Estate was among the five percent most deprived in the country; the Danes, tainted by its original design and construction flaws, was in the worst one percent. Meanwhile, for all the previously lauded design modifications, the Estate suffered the highest crime rate in Hull. (7)

Martin Crookston, an advocate for the cottage suburbs and their revival, concluded uncharacteristically that:

Orchard Park, created at the tail-end of the long years of estate-building, and at the outer edge of its city as that city started to run out of economic steam, was probably always an estate ‘too far’ – at the problem rather than potential end of the corporation suburb spectrum.

He counselled ‘radical change’.

High-rise and clearance © Charlie Baker and used with permission

In many ways, the Council has acted on that advice.   The first three of the high-rise blocks to be demolished went in 2002, including ironically two of the Mildane blocks improved by those ‘attractive tiled canopies’ back in the eighties.  The twenty-two storey Vernon House in Homethorpe was demolished in 2004.  In 2008, the council began planning the clearance of the remaining seven.

This obvious, apparently radical change wasn’t universally welcomed.  With little in the first instance to replace them, one local resident feared it as a sign of ‘managed decline’.  An elderly resident of one of the tower blocks, confounding stereotypes, lamented their loss: (8)

I like the flats as they are, I don’t want them changed at all. I leave my door open most of the day but I lock it at teatime … We’ve got beautiful views, you must admit, you get away from everybody, you don’t answer the door if you don’t want to. I would miss my view, I would never go and live in a house and look across at somebody’s back yard.

She suggested they reserve her block for those aged over 55, a solution to tower block living adopted in two of the estate’s towers.

Highcourt demolition, March 2015 © Keith Jackson

Despite initial stays of execution for Gorthorpe and Kinthorpe blocks in 2012 (such was the housing shortage), demolitions continued.  Twenty-storey Highcourt, was demolished in March 2015. Residents’ comments capture the mixed feelings of the event: (9)

I was a young girl living in north Hull when this block of flats was built. I remember the new building being celebrated because there was a houses shortage at the time but now it’s demolition is being celebrated.

For another, it was an eyesore but he’d miss it on his morning walk.  The last of Orchard Park’s high-rise blocks went with the demolition of the Gorthorpe flats in 2016.

Meanwhile, Orchard Park and Hull more widely was subject to the initiatives governing housing policy and finance nationally.  The Housing Market Renewal or Pathfinder programme laudably aimed to ‘provide lasting solutions for communities blighted by derelict homes through investment and innovation’; its chosen means – which seemed to focus on the demolition of sometimes decent housing and market-led solutions – were far more controversial.

The Hull and East Riding Housing Market Renewal Pathfinder (or Hull Gateway) was established in 2005 but plans to tackle the Thorpes in Orchard Park came to nought and the initiative as a whole was defunded in 2010. (10)

The cover of Hull’s PFI document, August 2010

The Council also entertained hopes that the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), introduced by John Major but significantly expanded under New Labour, might enable the sweeping changes many nevertheless thought necessary.  The title of the 2008 bid document, The Transformation of Orchard Park – Shaping the Place, Creating a Fruitful Future, captures those hopes; its 16 sections and 29 appendices reflect their breadth; and the price tag – at £142m – suggests the extent of the work deemed necessary. (11)

In summary, the proposals envisaged the demolition of 752 council houses, 255 privately owned houses, and 33 council bungalows and their replacement with 1020 new homes in the private sector and 680 new homes for social renting. This was a net gain of 660 homes but the figure conceals a net loss of 105 social rented homes.

Courtpark Road

It’s worth pausing – amidst the money talk and statistics – to examine what’s going on here and how powerfully it symbolises the policies and presumptions of the era.  Firstly, we have the dependence on private capital – the minimisation of state investment reflecting both a callow political fear of public spending (better understood as investment) and an unquestioning belief in the efficiency and ultimate beneficence of the market.

Secondly, perhaps less controversially still, there is the belief in so-called mixed communities (ignoring the fact that estates already accommodate a mixed community) and mixed tenure.  It marks a moment when council estates as such were deemed to have failed socially and economically.  For all the specific design shortcomings of Orchard Park, we might think it the victim of social and economic failure rather than its agent.  And we should certainly question why all these contemporary ‘fixes’ to long-term housing problems seemingly require the loss of desperately needed social rented homes.

The Orchard Park PFI was awarded £156m in July 2009.  In one of the first substantive acts of the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, all new PFI schemes (including Orchard Park) were cancelled in November 2010.  Given the huge and ongoing expense of the PFI programme and its complexity and troubled implementation, that might seem a relief but it left Hull still scrabbling for finance and dependent on partnerships with private developers or housing associations which could access capital.

New homes being built in Homethorpe © Humberbusiness.com

Nevertheless, some of that has borne fruit in the construction of new homes in the Danepark area and a recently completed scheme in association with Wates and the Riverside Group housing association at Homethorpe creating 52 new homes for rent including 16 one-bed council flats. A major refurbishment programme providing external cladding to the 1668 ‘No Fines’ homes in Orchard Park began in 2016.  The Harrison Park extra care apartments for those who need to assisted living are some of the finest in the country.

The Orchard Centre

The £14m Orchard Centre (a local council hub and health centre) opened on the southern fringe of the estate in 2009. A new community park and multi-use games area has opened.  Remodelling of the run-down shopping centre has made that a more attractive space.

How to conclude? What to conclude?  If you want an illustration of the power of selective narratives, let’s look at two recent press reports.   A March 2018 report in the local press recounts three recent stabbings and residents’ fears that violence on the estate was ‘getting out of hand’.   A few months earlier, another report had been headlined ‘We’ve lived on Orchard Park for 50 years – and it’s never had it better than now’. Mrs Gray moved with her husband to their terrace house in Cladshaw in 1966 and has lived there ever since: (12)

I know some people have bad things to say about Orchard Park but we have had no trouble and we brought up our children here.

Let’s finish with that – not because Orchard Park has been untroubled or without failings, some of which could have been foreseen and forestalled with greater investment and better design, but because it reminds us it’s been a home to many thousands, usually a good one and, hopefully, an improving one.

Sources

My thanks to Charlie Baker for permission to use images contained in his report for Urbed, Orchard Park (September 2006). You can find more of his evocative photography on his website.

My thanks also to Tim Morton for providing the 1993 PEP report referenced and Keith Jacobs for supplying photographs of the demolition of Highcourt.

(1) Housing, Community and Crime: the Impact of the Priority Estates Project (Home Office Research Study 131, 1993)

(2) ‘Orchard Park, Hull’ (Priority Estates Project, 1993)

(3) Roy Carter, ‘Designing Crime Out of the Urban Environment’, Orchard Park Case Study, Architect and Surveyor, vol 64, no 9, October 1989

(4) ‘Orchard Park, Hull’ (Priority Estates Project, 1993)

(5) Martin Crookston, Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow?  A New Future for the Cottage Estates (2016)

(6) Quoted in Charlie Baker, Urbed, Orchard Park (September 2006)

(7) Crookston, Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow? 

(8) Angus Young, ‘Orchard Park’s Gorthorpe and Kinthorpe tower blocks to be demolished after Hull City Council U-turn’, Hull Daily Mail, May 2, 2014

(9)Quoted in Claire Carter, ‘Gone in Eight Seconds’, Daily Mail, 9 March 2015

(10) The Urban Rim website Gateway Pathfinder provides full details.

(11) The Urban Rim website also provides a full chronological account of the Orchard Park PFI.

(12) Phil Winter, ‘’”Orchard Park violence is getting out of hand”: Fear as estate sees three stabbings in under a month’ Hull Daily Mail, 21 March 2018 and Kevin Shoesmith, ‘We’ve lived on Orchard Park for 50 years – and it’s never had it better than now‘, Hull Daily Mail, 30 September 2017

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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

Council Housing in Walsall, Part IV: from 1979 to the present

Tags

1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Regeneration

This is the last 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.

We left Walsall’s council housing last week at its peak – literally so in terms of the high-rise blocks built in the late sixties but numerically too when, in the early 1980s, the Council managed around 42,000 homes in the expanded borough.  This final post concentrates on the politics of council housing in more recent decades, including some radical attempts to decentralise local government with an idiosyncratically local flavour.

Firstly, however, Right to Buy.  The sale of council homes to sitting tenants legislated by Margaret Thatcher in 1981 saw the Council’s housing stock decline dramatically but it was a policy pioneered by her Conservative predecessors in Walsall as far back as 1967.

Birmingham Post, September 1967

In that year, the council offered its council houses (flats were excluded) for sale to sitting tenants at a discount of 20 per cent with a flat rate fee of £40 to cover expenses.  One hundred applications were received with 500, it was said, in the pipeline, incentivised by the 15s (75p) a week increase being proposed for council rents. (1)  The real damage to council housing stock, however, came in the later iteration of Right to Buy; by 2003 only some 23,000 homes in Walsall remained under council management.

There were other winds of change too. Estates up and down the country fell on hard times in the 1970s. At the same time, minority communities – often previously excluded from council housing by local residency rules yet frequently in greatest need – were, as needs-based allocations became the norm, being granted tenancies in greater numbers.

Pleck flats, 1987. With thanks to Prof Miles Glendinning and Tower Block UK, University of Edinburgh.

The two currents collided in ugly fashion on the Pleck Estate in Walsall.  In March 1977, a newly-formed tenants’ association called for the vetting of new tenants as a means of countering vandalism.  This became explicitly and straightforwardly racist a few months later when the chair of the association stated his belief that ‘on the whole Asians will not conform to our way of life…the way things are going in Pleck flats they are going to be turned into ghettos’. The Commission for Racial Equality found the Housing Department to have colluded in this discrimination. (2)

Caldmore Green

Other far more benign but controversial localist currents were emerging in in Walsall politics at this time. A left-wing Caldmore Residents’ Group  (Tribunite in its politics for older readers) established a Caldmore Advice Centre and Caldmore Housing Association to campaign for the depressed community’s interests. They were intended to represent and promote a radically devolved vision of local government and its services, focused on the neighbourhood.

The Group’s leading activist, Dave Church, spoke critically of the gap he saw that had grown between local councillors and the wider council bureaucracy and those they worked for: (3)

In the vastness of the civic centre, many [local politicians] had had little or no contact with the people they were supposed to serve; personal contact on such rare occasions that it had been unavoidable had nearly always meant some more or less frightening confrontation with a tenant driven to despair by neglect and indifference and who had somehow managed to evade the elaborate defences provided by the civic centre.

The Group became influential in the local Labour Party and in 1980 Walsall Labour fought the local elections on a far-reaching manifesto entitled Haul to Democracy which committed it to forming neighbourhood offices to deliver housing and welfare services and mobilise a community-based politics.  A Labour victory saw 35 such centres created but, ousted by an anti-socialist alliance within two years, it was a short-lived experiment.

Walsall Civic Centre

Structurally, the issue remained dormant for the decade which followed but by 1995 Dave Church’s left-wing politics had triumphed within the Labour Group.  The Party’s manifesto in that year, Power to the People, went even further than the 1980s scheme in proposing the complete devolution of Walsall’s local government by the formation of 55 locally elected neighbourhood councils.

The Conservative Party characterised the programme as ‘loony leftism’ and the new neighbourhood councils as ‘mini-Kremlins’ but, more importantly, the council found itself at odds with Tony Blair’s Labour Party.  By the end of the year, the predominant left-wing faction within the Labour group was suspended from Party membership and Labour had lost control of the council.

It would be easy, and not wholly misguided, to see this defeat of a radical, grass-roots politics as a consequence of New Labour’s centralising tendencies and its crushing desire to earn itself the electoral respectability which would, two years later, lead to its 1997 landslide.  But the plans, however good their intent, were dangerously flawed.

Their promised job cuts and budget savings alienated local and national trades unions; the left-wing group was isolated even from other radical Labour councils of the time; and the proposals themselves were illegal under existing local government legislation. In essence, this was a voluntarist left-wing politics which lacked the grass-roots support it claimed to embody. The ‘Democratic Labour’ group formed by expelled councillors had lost all its seats by 1999 by which time more mainstream Labour representatives had resumed control of the council. (4)

Ultimately and ironically, a very watered down version of this devolutionist politics emerged in the regeneration schemes which followed. In April 1996, after his removal from office, Church’s bid for Single Regeneration Budget funding was rewarded by a £14.6m grant from its ‘Empowering Local Communities’ programme. Elected local committees were formed in the seven areas of the Borough to benefit from the funding. (5)  Other local committees were formed in the five areas which received City Challenge funding.  These, of course, were consultative, not executive.

The New Art Gallery is a signature element of the town’s wider regeneration

These regeneration programmes were part and parcel of a very changed housing politics. The Conservative government which came to power in 1979 didn’t like council housing. Right to Buy was only the most blatant example of this.  Cuts in the Housing Investment Programme budget were another.  Walsall bid for £22m support from central government in 1980-81 but was granted £13m. One new council house was started that year.  In 1981-82, it bid £20m, reckoning that 1000 new homes were needed to make at least a dent in the 9000-strong waiting list. It received £7.5m. (6)

The various estate regeneration programmes, whatever their sometime positive effect and intention, were also a means of marginalising council-owned and managed homes as funding was restricted for the most part to third sector providers.

The Chuckery Estate

The Tenants Management Organisation (TMO) established in Chuckery 1988 was formed in response to an Estate Action bid.  Three others were founded around the same time to take over management of other high-rise estates.  TMOs were promoted as a means of allowing residents and tenant activists real management of their own homes.  In Walsall, at least, they seem to have been successful and poplar. By the end of the decade there were eight TMOs in Walsall. The Walsall Alliance of Tenant Management Organisations (WATMOS) was formed in 2002 and currently comprises eleven subsidiaries, including – in an interesting example of contemporary third sector entrepreneuralism –  two in the London Borough of Lambeth. (7)

Providence Close, Leamore, run by a WATMOS TMO.

By this time, large-Scale Voluntary Transfer was the new game in town – a process initiated under the Conservatives in 1988 which took off under New Labour after 1997 – which transferred council housing stock to housing associations.  The rules which restricted new state investment in housing and regeneration to the latter made the process all but inevitable.

Walsall transferred the entirety of its housing stock in 2003 though the transfer ballot approval was underwhelming – 50 per cent of tenants agreed to transfer on a 71 per cent turnout. At any rate, the Borough’s 22,971 homes were transferred; around 21,000 to the Walsall Housing Group housing association and 1700 – the remaining tower blocks – to WATMOS.

The transfer enabled the implementation of the Labour Government’s 2000 Decent Homes Programme which has upgraded and improved many thousands of homes in Walsall and across the county.  Another very New Labour programme, the New Deal for Communities, was implemented in the Blakenhall, Bloxwich East and Leamore area of Walsall in 2005.

Tower blocks, which had once heralded a bright new housing future, were often judged incapable of improvement. In the 2000s, Walsall demolished nine of its tower blocks – including three 1950s blocks at Blakenall Gardens and two 1960s blocks in Darlaston.  Alma and Leys Courts, the last to be completed, were ironically among the first to be razed – in 2001. (8)

The Pinnacle (formerly St Mary’s Court), Willenhall

All that will confirm much conventional wisdom about the ‘failure’ of high-rise housing but a more nuanced view is justified.  The 16-storey St Mary’s Court block was closed by the council and scheduled for demolition in 1997. Instead, it was sold to the private sector, refurbished (and rebranded as The Pinnacle) and it survives to provide good homes – just no longer to social housing tenants.

It’s also true that high-rise council tenants had been unhappy.  In 2002, as demolitions were in full swing, a survey showed just 33 per cent of tenants in Walsall tower blocks satisfied with their landlord. WATMOS claims that a 2009 survey of the same homes showed 92 per cent satisfaction under their new management.  Taken at face value, the evidence suggests anger directed more towards poor management and neglect than high-rise living as such.

Clarke House with Cartwright House in foreground, Sandbank Estate (1988). With thanks to Prof Miles Glendinning and Tower Block UK, University of Edinburgh.

That seems justified anecdotally by a 2013 press report (sparked by a government report calling for blocks to be demolished and replaced by ‘streets people actually want to live in’) in which residents of the Sandbank Estate challenged its authors to visit and enjoy its ‘1950s-style community spirit’.  One long-term resident stated, ‘even if I won the lottery tonight I’d still live here. I’d just get a butler in’. (9)  Such views – and a more complex story of high-rise living – are confirmed in the Block Capital’s Living in the Sky project, a history of high-rise council flats in the Black Country.

Barracks Lane, Blakenall – a scheme of 73 new social rented homes built by the Walsall Housing Group

Meanwhile, the majority of Walsall’s now social housing remains the solid two-storey housing built by the Council over many decades.  It’s a diminishing resource as more homes are privately purchased but it remains a vital and life-enhancing one for many thousands. The Walsall Housing Group has built some 530 new homes since 2003. In the current climate, that is an achievement though it’s one which pales into insignificance when compared to the building and slum clearance programme of its predecessors studied in previous posts.

Sources

(1) ‘”Hot cake” council house sales’, Birmingham Post, 26 September 1967

(2) CRE, Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council, Practice and policies of housing allocation (February 1985)

(3) Quoted in Mark Whitehead, ‘”Love thy neighbourhood” – Rethinking the Politics of Scale and Walsall’s Struggle for Neighbourhood Democracy’, Environment and Planning A, vol 35, 2003

(4) This account is drawn from Whitehead, ‘”Love thy neighbourhood” – Rethinking the Politics of Scale and Walsall’s Struggle for Neighbourhood Democracy’ and John Rentoul, ‘So, just how loony are they in Walsall?’, The Independent, 9 August 1995

(5) Pete Duncan, Sally Thomas, Neighbourhood Regeneration: Resourcing Community Involvement (Policy Press, 2000)

(6) David Winnick, MP, Housing (Walsall), House of Commons Debate, 30 July 1981, vol 9, cc1341-8

(7) Gene Robinson, ‘Taking control of Walsall’, Inside Housing, 15 April 2011 and WATMOS Community Homes: About

(8) The Block Capital Project, Living in the Sky: a History of High-Rise Council Flats in the Black Country (2015)

(9) ‘Walsall tower blocks high in satisfaction’, Express and Star, 2 March 2015

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.

The Speke Estate, Liverpool II: ‘Speke is not Sarajevo; Speke is quite a nice estate’

Tags

1980s, 2000s, Regeneration

Last week’s post left Speke, in the 1960s, a thriving community. It would be easy now to focus on its decline and later troubles, to lapse into the language of ‘failure’ that has been affixed so readily to it and other council estates with its implication of some Original Sin, some fatal flaw of conception and planning but, in fact, the Estate has been a good home to many people over time.

The McCartney family were early residents.  Paul spent his early years in 72 Western Avenue and then at 12 Ardwick Road in Speke. The Harrisons lived in a tiny terraced house with outside toilet in Wavertree until, in 1950, they and George moved to a brand new council house at 25 Upton Green, Speke.  (You can read more about the childhood homes of the Beatles in an earlier blog post.)

George Harrison at 25 Upton Green, Speke

Their success story could hardly be typical but plenty of others look back to these years fondly.  You’ll find many of these recollections on the community forums but I’ll begin with one example – from ‘Gillian’ who thought she had better write something or else risk collapsing in ‘floods of sentimental tears’: (1)

My family moved to Speke 1950; from what they had moved from this was luxury. My sister Agnes told me about everything being new, hot running water, toilets inside, the only downside to this paradise was for a while was it was a building site, very, very muddy. In time things changed but it was very much a community, groups and activities were formed. OK, there wasn’t enough schools but other arrangements were made.

She remembers spending time at what passed for the local beach on the Mersey shoreline at Oglet. She recalls her own childhood home, a small block of flats ‘with their three floors of landings and stairs [which] had been brushed and scrubbed and neatly finished off with whiter than white edges and front doorsteps’.

Central Avenue

Another correspondent, resident in Speke for over forty years describes it as ‘a great place to live in the 60s and some of the early 70s’.  But, in a common refrain, he’d ‘seen it change over the years’: (2)

It used to be a lovely place to live…

I lived by the Park when I was younger and it was a lovely park.  There were bowling greens, tennis courts, the lads could play football.

It was a good area for employment when I was younger…

You won’t miss the elegiac tone in those comments, something more than a typical nostalgia for younger days. Those comments contain their own codas: ‘a lovely place to live…Yes, about ten or fifteen years ago’; ‘a good area for employment…and now there is nothing’.

Ardwick Road

Speke did suffer from the outset from its location some seven miles from the city centre. The 45-minute bus ride wasn’t too much of an issue so long as the Estate was, as planned, relatively ‘self-contained’ and economically self-sufficient but that isolation – that sense of ‘an enclave surrounded entirely by the barrier of roads, fields, the airport runway and the River Mersey’ later proved a problem.

‘Dunlop Rubber Co, Works and Environs, Speke, 1952’ EAW047310, Britain from Above (c) Historic England

The major problem, though, was the collapse of a once vibrant local economy.  Between 1978 and 1985, Liverpool as a whole lost 40,000 jobs but Speke was particularly hard hit.  British Leyland had opened its Speke Number Two Plant in 1970. Industrial relations were poor and the TR7 unsuccessful. The closure of the plant and 3000 redundancies were announced in 1978.  Dunlop announced the closure of its Speke factory with the loss of 2400 jobs in 1979.

Eddie Loyden, the local Labour MP, estimated 8000 jobs lost in his constituency in two years: (3)

If one recalls the dream of the post-war period that Merseyside would develop alternative industries to deal with the decline in the docks, in transport and in warehousing, upon which the city had depended for so long, one can see the serious problem on Merseyside.

Loyden would lose his seat to the Conservatives in 1979 and the first attempt to revive Speke’s fortunes was signature Thatcherism – the creation of the Speke Enterprise Zone in 1981. Enterprise Zones offered tax breaks and infrastructure incentives to private companies to relocate to areas of high unemployment.

In Speke, however, the (more or less) free market failed to work its magic – not a single company opened in the Speke Airport Enterprise Zone. As one later observer noted: (4)

Even with the tax incentives nobody wanted to come here – the place still looked awful, still felt awful, still performed really poorly…The area was extremely unwell, almost terminally ill, and the [Enterprise Zone] was like a couple of paracetamol.

The creation of the Merseyside Development Corporation in 1981 was a small boost but, in Speke, nothing much happened until the formation of the Speke Garston Development Corporation in 1996, a joint initiative between the North West Development Agency and Liverpool City Council benefiting from some £14m government funding. (5)

Economic regeneration efforts have continued. Liverpool Vision – an economic development company (the first Urban Regeneration Company established in England) – was established in 1999 and from 2008 has funded the redevelopment of Speke’s district centre. The arrival of Morrisons, Iceland and TK Maxx, alongside smaller retailers, mark the retail successes now taken as an essential marker of economic well-being.

The new Speke Centre

Overall, it’s reckoned that 20,000 jobs have been created locally by the late 2000s though many of these were in the new biopharmaceutical and biomanufacturing sectors – skilled employment in an area where, only a few years earlier, 43 per cent of people had classified themselves as unskilled. (6) The success of Jaguar Land Rover’s Halewood plant just across Speke Boulevard, with its workforce of around 4200, is a welcome boost to more traditional working-class employment in the area – a further £130m extension was announced in January this year. (7)  Printing firms Prinovis and Communisis are also providing good jobs to local people. (8)

In reality, none of this is easy. It’s true that earlier and more direct interventions by the local and national state created substantial employment in Speke’s early years (boosted by the war and post-war prosperity) into the 1970s. But, despite the vigorous efforts of the local labour movement to retain jobs, globalisation (abetted by neoliberalism) has taken its toll on this generation of industry and has created an unemployed working class ill-fitted to the new high-tech industries.  Call centres – aided by the perceived friendliness of the Scouse accent – sprang up in Speke in the 1990s and, no doubt, more zero-hours, unskilled jobs have been created since. (9)

Central Avenue

Meanwhile, an estate which had once catered for a disproportionately (and relatively) affluent Liverpool working-class – those in work who could be reliably expected to pay above-average council rents – was now one of the poorest areas of the city, indeed of the country.  In 2000 it was the judged the second most deprived ward in England; only Benchill in Wythenshawe fared worse.  In 2002, average household income was £5000 below the city average.  Those statistics reflected the high unemployment in Speke (in 2001 over 8 per cent of the ‘economically active’ were unemployed compared to the national average of 3.4 per cent) and the high level of sickness and disability (almost 17 per cent; over three times the national average).

All Saints Road

This was an indication of both the economic tsunami which had befallen Speke in particular and the more general transition of council housing since the 1970s to housing for the least well-off of our society.  In Speke itself around 46 per cent of homes remained social rented but that term denotes another shift – from ‘Corpy’ houses to housing association, largely the result of a large-scale voluntary transfer of stock from the Council to South Liverpool Housing in 1999.

Urban regeneration (as opposed to economic) has affected Speke too.  As the population fell and unsightly voids rose, some housing was ‘tinned up’ and then demolished (which added its own sense of blight for a period) in the late 1980s, some unpopular maisonette blocks were ‘top-downed’, and some new housing built.  The scheme announced by South Liverpool Homes in 2012 offers a cameo of this new world – 110 ‘residential units’ in all: 66 for ‘affordable rent’, 16 for shared ownership and 28 for private sale. (10)  In this case, it is perhaps not so far from the founding vision of Speke as a township ‘planned to accommodate all classes of the community’.

New South Liverpool Housing scheme (artist’s impression)

The difficulties of social engineering through housing design and tenure are well illustrated by the story of the Dymchurch Estate, built earlier on the western edge of Speke to accommodate predominantly older people.  The Estate’s closed court, Radburn-style layout proved unpopular and its homes were increasingly allocated to young and transient single people: ‘the flats became notorious for drug abuse and giro drops’. (11)

For a time Dymchurch was judged locally to the worst part of Speke (the Liverpool Housing Trust has led later regeneration efforts) but the Estate’s residents had become accustomed to a more generalised stigmatisation – the taxi-drivers who would refuse to drive to the area were typically the most visible element of this.  Paddy Ashdown, then Liberal Democrat leader, visited in 1998 (presumably he didn’t need a taxi) and likened Speke to Sarajevo, then in the throes of civil war.

That was a gross caricature as one resident commented: (12)

Speke is not Sarajevo; Speke is quite a nice estate. The only problem is that you have people, who come flying in here, there and everywhere who actually don’t live on the estate, nor can they see the potential of what is going to happen over the next few years.

And indeed much has happened since then.  I won’t privilege my own flying visit over the knowledge and experience of local residents who I invite to add their own impressions but the Estate looked fine to me, its housing in good nick, not visibly depressed and with very little evidence of vandalism and anti-social behaviour and certainly none out of the ordinary.  New schools, a new library, a revived shopping centre look to have lifted the Estate and, of course, it continues to offer decent homes to many.

The story of Speke continues. The story to date is, unavoidably perhaps, of high ambition only partially or perhaps briefly fulfilled – a reminder that we need an economy that works for people as much as those people need good, affordable housing.

Sources

(1) This quote from 2012 and the following from 2014 are from the Speke Guestbook.

(2) The following quotes are drawn from David Hall, ch10 ‘Images of the City’ in Ronaldo Munck (ed), Reinventing the City?: Liverpool in Comparative Perspective  (2003)

(3) Eddie Loyden, House of Commons Debate, Dunlop Plant, Speke (Closure), 26 March 1979

(4) Rob Monaghan (Liverpool Vison) quoted in London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Enterprise Zones: Only One Piece of the Economic Regeneration Puzzle (July 2012)

(5) Thomas Ellerton, Exploring the impact of New Labour urban regeneration policy at the local scale: the implications of an approach to ‘joining-up’ on the coordination of urban regeneration, University of Sheffield PhD thesis (April 2014)

(6) Pavan Mehta, The Impact of Urban Regeneration on Local Housing Markets – A Case Study of Liverpool (ND)

(7) Alistair Houghton, ‘Jaguar Land Rover Extending Halewood in £130m Investment‘, Liverpool Echo, 30 January 2017

(8) My thanks to Kenn Taylor whose comment above pointed me to this positive detail.

(9) Linda Grant, ‘Calm Yourself Down’, The Guardian, 10 July 1999

(10) Homes and Communities Agency, Speke Regeneration Liverpool (November 2013)

(11) Liverpool Housing Trust quoted in David Hall, ch10 ‘Images of the City’

(12) Quoted in David Hall, ch10 ‘Images of the City’

The White City Estate, Shepherd’s Bush: ‘I like it but maybe it’s not for everyone’

Tags

1990s, 2000s, Hammersmith, Regeneration

Last week’s post examined the origins of the White City Estate at a time when the state’s role in providing decent homes for working-class people was firmly embedded.  Those ideals remained – and can be seen in the further development of the Estate – long into the post-war era but from the 1970s there were some who argued council housing caused rather than alleviated poverty. The Estate would become a site of this struggle and even today – as its ongoing regeneration continues – it’s a symbol of how far contemporary ideas around the form and character of social housing have shifted from the earlier model pioneered by the London County Council (LCC).

‘Air view of the White City Estate, Hammersmith’ from The County of London Plan (1943) – showing the Estate as completed by 1939

Originally, the intention remained to improve the design and facilities of council estates. Hammersmith Park, built on the site of the Japanese Garden created for the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910, was reopened for the benefit of White City residents with added tennis courts and playground in 1954.  More recently, it has become a mark of our changing values when, in 2013, the then Conservative-controlled Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham proposed to lease half the park to Play Football, a private company intending to let pay-to-play facilities.  Some form of compromise appears to have been reached but one which will, nevertheless, see free public facilities hived off to the private sector. (1)  Given the swingeing cuts to local authority budgets, the incentive – hard-pressed councils might argue the necessity – to monetise community assets will continue. (2)

Malabar Court

While the White City Estate was substantially complete by the early fifties, the neighbourhood shows the continuing attempts to modernise and adapt council housing to changing times.  Malabar Court (at the corner of India Way and Commonwealth Avenue) was designed by Neil Moffett and Partners as sheltered housing for elderly people and opened in 1966. A ‘pile of ascending hexagons’, Pevsner thought it a ‘welcome respite’ to what he considered the dull uniformity of the rest of the Estate. (3)

White City Close

The small White City Close (or Wood Lane) Estate, east of White City just north of Television Centre, shows how far thinking around council house design had evolved by the 1970s.  In a conscious reaction to the high-rise boom of the 1960s and overbearing scale of some earlier local authority schemes, White City Close was designed as a compact series of two- to four-storey brown-brick terraces enclosing landscaped footways and courts.  Designed by John Darbourne and Geoffrey Darke and opened in 1978, it’s a little echo of their earlier and successful Lillington Gardens Estate designed for Westminster City Council and their far more troubled (and since largely demolished) Marquess Estate built by Islington in the late seventies.

In 1981, ownership and management of the White City Estate was transferred to Hammersmith and Fulham Council from the Greater London Council but by the 1990s the Estate and its community had fallen on hard times.  In 1996, the Council (under Labour control from 1986 to 2006) successfully applied for an £8m grant from the Government’s Single Regeneration Budget to revive the Estate.

Commonwealth Avenue

Environmental improvements, housing upgrades and a renovated health centre followed but, if subsequent reports are to be believed, much remained to be done.  According to the Evening Standard in 2004, the Estate was ‘a blighted area where nobody wants to live’.  The rest is a masterclass in the demonising journalism which has so influenced perceptions of council estates in recent decades: (4)

When a man in a suit parks outside Canberra Primary School’s double-height wire fence, he cannot punch in the keypad security code and slip through the school’s fortified gates quickly enough.  Three blonde, pony-tailed girls pushing baby buggies display a similar heads-down, no looking left or right attitude, as they walk between the estate’s redbrick, five-storey blocks of flats. Nobody lingers on White City’s streets. Only a shuffling, middle-aged Asian man wants to chat, offering me a cigarette from an empty Marlboro packet.  “You live here?” he asks as I edge away. ‘No, just having a walk.’

One feels for the friendly (though ‘shuffling’) Asian man.  One wonders if the three young women with babies took such a hostile view of this stranger as she apparently took of them.  But, if you want to paint a picture of depressing anomie, the journalist had pressed all the right buttons.  Was it simply her brief or was she herself a product of how so many who didn’t live in council housing had been conditioned to understand it?

Champlain House

Five years later (and with, to be fair, some evidence of renewal taking place), rather more seasoned observers took a different view.  The Estate appeared – in contrast to earlier reports – ‘to be well provided for in terms of community facilities and amenities’ and ‘well maintained with evidence of repairs and maintenance work underway as well as new building’. (5)

Residents’ views were mixed.  Most would not recommend the Estate to others; some definitively (‘Not at all. Nothing to like about it’) but many rather more equivocally, as if reflecting how outsiders perceived the Estate as much as than their own experience:

It depends on what you’re looking for – for people who’ve got nowhere else to go it’s okay and they are upgrading it a lot, they are really doing a lot of work to it…

I love it. It’s where I know, I’ve seen it over the years. It’s my home…

I’ve been here twelve years so I like it but maybe it’s not for everyone, particularly if they want a house or need more space than these flats.

In general, the Estate’s actual residents ‘offered quite a balanced view’ of the Estate; some praising its quietness and convenience, many agreeing that young people in particular were poorly served.

Hard data provides another perspective.  By 2009, in terms of household income, White City was ‘among the most deprived areas of the whole country’, parts of it in the bottom five per cent nationally.  Three years later, another set of statistics gives chapter and verse.  Across the wider White City area, 29 per cent of households were single adults and 15 per cent lone parent with dependent children.  Members of ethnic minorities (mainly Black African, Somalian and Eritrean, and Black Caribbean) were also disproportionately represented, forming 46 per cent of the total.  Twenty-eight per cent of the population were under 18. (6)

Hudson Close

The point, of course, is not that these groups are the ‘problem’ but that they are the groups most likely to suffer problems.  To some extent, there was a continuity here; some had seen the Estate as ‘blighted’ from the outset by the large proportion of former slum dwellers who made up its first residents. Then most were probably in employment.  In 2012, 29 per cent of the Estate’s working-age residents received Income Support, Job Seekers Allowance or Employment and Support Allowance or Incapacity Benefits.

This reflected, of course, the residualisation of council housing that has occurred since the 1970s – the fact that it is increasingly confined to those with the most pressing and urgent needs.  This, in a sense, was an issue recognised by Stephen Greenhalgh who led Hammersmith and Fulham’s Conservative Council from 2006 to 2012: (7)

Social housing was meant to help lift people out of the slums. Instead many social housing estates have become the very ghettos of multiple social deprivation that they were supposed to replace.

‘Ghettos’ isn’t a very nice word but we might see some truth in this statement. Greenhalgh’s starting point, however, was that social housing was now ‘welfare housing where both a dependency culture and a culture of entitlement predominate’.

The view of Greenhalgh and Moss, Principles for Social Housing Reform. Question the labels and ignore the arrows.

There are two difficulties with this. Firstly, straightforwardly, it caricatures estates and their communities. On the White City Estate (where 74 per cent of occupants remained council tenants), local Labour councillor Jean Campbell articulated some of the anger and insult felt by local residents: (8)

My community on the White City Estate is a vibrant one. My neighbours include people working in health care, people working as police officers or people who are simply doing their best to bring up their kids and look after their families.

Secondly, it reverses cause and effect. Council housing is no longer seen as a response to social problems – the ‘safety net’ that even its minimalist advocates recognise – but one of their causes.  In one leap, Greenhalgh moves from correlation – the reality that many poorer people do live in council housing (for all the reasons of public policy that this blog has charted and because, fundamentally, they have been failed by the free market) – to causation.

To do so, of course, suits a free market agenda ideologically opposed to state intervention in all its forms which is seen in his astonishing solution to these alleged difficulties.  Greenhalgh recommended that social housing rents should rise to market levels and that a single form of (so-called) Assured Tenancy – assured for six months – should operate across private and public rental sectors.  Documents secured by Hammersmith’s Labour MP Andy Slaughter under Freedom of Information legislation revealing a 2009 meeting between Greenhalgh, Eric Pickles and Grant Shapps (then shadow Ministers of Communities and Local Government and Housing respectively) show the influence of this radical thinking upon the incoming Conservative government. (9)

Unsurprisingly when the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government’s 2011 Localism Act gave social landlords the right to introduce fixed-term tenancies, Hammersmith and Fulham were among to signal their acceptance of the offer, proposing five year tenancies for most but as little as two years for others, especially those under 25. It wanted, apparently, ‘to incentivise residents to make the most of the their lives’.  That actual tenants ‘better able to predict their housing future…reported being better placed to manage other challenges in their life’ (including employment) was not considered. (10)

Whilst the hard-core radicalism of that agenda has not yet been implemented, it was previewed in 2012 when the plans of Hammersmith and Fulham Council to relocate 500 of the Borough’s homeless families on benefits to the Midlands – to move them to rented accommodation elsewhere rather than prioritise them for local council housing. Tory Hammersmith wanted to favour ‘wealth creators’ rather than the ‘workless and dependent on benefits…not making a contribution that could help drive economic growth’. (11)

This was linked to a voluntary and accelerated programme of selling off council homes by Hammersmith and Fulham: of 256 homes sold between April 2011 and December 2013, 46 went through Right to Buy and 210 were sold at auction, mostly through Savills. (12)  The phrase ‘social cleansing’ might be overused but here it seems justified.

A surprise victory by the Labour Party in the 2014 Borough elections – the Party gained 11 seats and took control of the Council – has put paid to the most far-reaching and ideologically-driven of these proposals but they exist, of course, on a spectrum and ‘regeneration’ – in Hammersmith and across London – continues to be controversial and, in many cases, a threat to established communities. (13)

This view towards central London shows BBC Television Centre to bottom left and the Westfield shopping centre under construction

There should be nothing controversial in desiring and assisting the economic uplift of an area.  The White City Opportunity Area was first mooted in 2004 and has received broad cross-party support since then.  The project’s initial ‘Framework for Development’, produced jointly with the Greater London Authority, contains the laudable ambitions of most such documents: (14)

By the end of the decade, the White City Opportunity Area will have been transformed into a thriving new, mixed use urban quarter of the highest quality, with a strong sense of place and local identity shared with the surrounding community…The area will be recognised as an exemplar of sustainable urban development, successfully combining strategic and local aspirations.

It was also clear that in housing terms, ‘social rented accommodation should predominate and there should be affordable key worker housing’.

In later iterations, the emphasis has shifted to ‘affordable’ housing and most of you reading this will know that that is a very shifty term indeed – Boris Johnson, the former Conservative Mayor of London defined it as 80 per cent of market rates.  In 2013, the broad goal was ‘to increase housing choice’ in ‘White City West’ (including the Estate) and to ‘enable estate renewal and seek a mixed and balanced community’. (15)  If Greenhalgh represents the most extreme position, a broad critique of mono-tenure council estates has achieved wider political agreement.

An artist’s impression of the Westfield Centre and new housing

Back in 2004, it was projected optimistically that the regeneration of the White City area – the BBC Media Village, the Westfield shopping centre (opened in 2008 and currently being extended), the ongoing development of a new Imperial College campus, and more – might create 11,000 new jobs.  Training schemes for young people were part of the package.

Typically, these were concentrated in the retail sector whilst the London Development Agency promoted a scheme ‘to train the estate’s 30 per cent unemployed to fill hospital jobs such as receptionists, ward clerks and security guards’. Mark Billington, Hammersmith and Fulham Council’s head of employment initiatives, was quoted as saying ‘Life is easier if employers tell us exactly what the skills they need are, and what type of people they want’. (16)

You can draw your own conclusions here but, given that almost one in three of the White City Estate’s working-age residents remained jobless eight years later, the impact has been less than hoped.  One wonders too how many of these relatively unskilled and non-unionised jobs are on zero-hours contracts.

Welcome to the new world. The White City Estate was born into an era of full employment where secure and decent homes were viewed as the necessary accompaniment to secure jobs. Now it seems that insecurity is seen as the necessary corrective to some perceived failure of personal enterprise and the market must rule.

Sources

(1) The Shepherds’ Bush Blog, ‘Reprieve For Hammersmith Park?’, 28 March 2014

(2) This is well documented in Tom Crewe, ‘The Strange Death of Municipal England’, London Review of Books, 15 December 2016

(3) Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner, London 3: North West (1991)

(4) Susan Gray, ‘Great White Hope; What hope is there for a blighted area where nobody wants to live?’, Evening Standard, 22 March 2004

(5) Laura Lane and Anne Power (LSE Housing and Communities), Low income housing estates: a report to Hammersmith United Charities on supporting communities, preventing social exclusion and tackling need in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham (September 2009)

(6) White City Neighbourhood Budget Pilot Project produced for London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham prepared by NHS North West London and Research by Design Ltd (2012)

(7) Stephen Greenhalgh and John Moss, Principles for Social Housing Reform (Localis, 2009)

(8) ShepherdsBushW12.com, ‘Council Plotting to Get Rid of the Poor’, MP claims housing plans are ‘Shirley Porteresque’, 9 July 2009

(9) ‘Not Decent! The Evolution of Radical Tory Social Housing Policy: Full extracts from documents supplied by Hammersmith & Fulham Council in response to an FoI request from Andrew Slaughter MP’.  These documents can be found on the website of the site of West Ken and Gibbs Green – a Hammersmith and Fulham residents’ group fighting proposals to demolish their own Earls Court estate.

(10) Hammersmith quotation and residents’ views from D Robinson and A Walshaw, ‘Security of Tenure in Social Housing in England’, Social Policy and Society, vol 13 no. 1, January 2014. The damaging effects of insecurity of tenure are also discussed in John Bone, ‘Neo-Liberal Nomads: Housing Insecurity and the Revival of Private Renting in the UK‘, Sociological Research Online, vol 19, issue 4, 2014

(11) Randeep Ramesh, ‘Tory borough plans to move homeless away from London’, The Guardian, Wednesday 2 May 2012

(12) Dave Hill, ‘The great Hammersmith and Fulham council house sell off‘, The Guardian, 19 May 2014

(13) In Hammersmith, this is particularly true of the Earls Court scheme (mentioned in footnote 9) which has been extensively charted by Dave Hill in the Guardian.

(14) Hammersmith and Fulham Council, White City Opportunity Area: A Framework for Development (adopted 2004)

(15) Greater London Authority, Opportunity Area Planning Framework: Second Public Consultation, June 2013

(16) Susan Gray, ‘Great White Hope’

The Pendleton Estate, Salford II: ‘a distinctive neighbourhood with a strong identity’

Tags

2000s, Regeneration

You’ll find more on the Pendleton Estate at the current exhibition at the People’s History Museum in Manchester which showcases the work and archives of long-term residents John Aitken and Jane Brake of the Institute of Urban Dreaming.

Last week’s post examined what can only be judged in social and economic terms the failure of the Ellor Street comprehensive redevelopment of the 1960s.  As a further round of regeneration took off in the 2000s, new priorities and methods – and perhaps changed values – were in evidence.

Bronte, Madison and Fitzwarren Courts with clearance to the foreground

When Ellor Street and surrounds were first comprehensively redeveloped fifty years ago, it was understood that responsibility lay with the state or, to use a language less currently tarnished, with the tools of democracy.  One of those tools was cheap finance – grants provided directly by central government and backed by the assets of local government. From 1979, however, under both Thatcher and New Labour, there was a belief that the private sector offered resources and capital that the state lacked – although no-one ever argued that the latter was in any way cheaper money.

There were other changes too.  Once council housing had seemed the necessary (if not unchallenged) solution to the housing needs of the working class.   Now reliance was placed to a far greater extent on the market.  This, at least, was the rationale of the Labour Government’s 2002 Pathfinder Housing Market Renewal programme: a plan to demolish generally structurally sound – sometimes neglected but rarely slum – housing in order to build smaller numbers of new homes and revive local housing markets.  Much of central Salford was covered in the scheme.

Chimney Pot Park, Urban Splash

In Pendleton itself, the major intervention – well-known to planners and architects – occurred in an area of Edwardian terraced housing adjacent to Chimney Pot (or Langworthy) Park; the very same illustrated as an example of Edwardian bye-law housing in the first post of this series).   A joint venture between Urban Splash, English Partnerships, Salford City Council and the Northwest Regional Development Agency was agreed in 2003.  The first phase of the so-called ‘upside-down houses’ was completed in 2007,  remodelled with bedrooms and bathrooms on the ground floor, and living rooms and kitchens above where a new roof terrace spans the former back alley to create garaging and, on top, a communal deck.

Chimney Pot Park showing deck and parking to left with Salford Precinct and blocks to rear

It’s attractive enough though it all seemed, despite the architectural acclaim the scheme has received, a little sterile when I walked through.  ‘Achingly fashionable’, in the words of one report, the scheme was designed for ‘a new community of urban pioneers’ and ‘aspirational young couples’. (1) But, at an initial sale price of £120,000 (judged three times what might count as ‘affordable’ in local terms at the time), it had little relevance to the lives of those who once lived there or those that live in the social housing nearby. Urban Splash themselves pulled out of the project in 2014, replaced by the Great Places Housing Association. (2)

Pendleton Together’s masterplan for the current redevelopment

Still, in 2008, 93 per cent of Pendleton’s housing stock was council-owned.  In the next phase of regeneration, the ‘target position’ – outlined in the ‘Benefits Realisation Plan’ behind ‘Creating a New Pendleton’ in July 2009 – was to create ‘a mixed tenure residential area’.  The language is as telling as the detail. (3)

The vehicle for this shift – which would raise 1253 council properties to Decent Homes Standard, oversee the demolition of 860 homes including those in four multi-storey blocks, and ‘deliver a minimum of 460 units for affordable rent, circa 950 units for market sale and a minimum of 25 units for shared ownership’ – announced in 2013 was a Private Finance Initiative scheme.

I’ll quote from a contemporary report to illustrate the nature of the high finance involved. You might understand it better or differently but, to me, it’s an act of mystification; an example of the smoke and mirrors which currently reward capital at the expense of social need: (4)

Investec Bank arranged the bond issue on behalf of joint venture FHW Dalmore, with £71.7 million of Class A senior secured notes at 5.414 per cent and £10.9 million of Class B junior secured notes at 8.35 per cent.  The two-tranche approach sees subordinated B loan notes offering protection to A note investors, with the debt on-lent to the borrower as a single loan at a blended margin, and a standard project finance covenant package.

Pendleton Together, charged with delivering the scheme, was a consortium comprising, amongst others, the housing association Together Housing Group, ‘building and regeneration specialist’ Keepmoat, architects and planners Lathams, and Salford City Council.  Its vision is outlined in what is – and I don’t mean this quite as cynically as it sounds – a masterpiece of the type, a glossy brochure called An Ideal for Living.

For a total investment of some £650m, the Ideal envisaged: (5)

a distinctive neighbourhood with a strong identity…it will be a celebration of everything that is good about urban living. It will be an area of opportunity where anyone can make something of their life, set up a business and live happily, healthily and safely.

These are worthy enough aims although the idea that we should aspire to setting a business seems a far more sinister marker than intended – a sign of how far we have moved from the idea of dignified and secure employment, how easily we accept the current statistical lie of ‘self-employment’. The detailed agenda is  admirable: as well as improved housing, 10 hectares of ‘quality public space’, 500 new jobs, training for 3200, ‘healthy lifestyle classes and programmes’, a city farm and so on.  All this is accompanied by the new buzzwords – ‘secure by design’, placemaking’ and ‘people streets’. (‘Some would say’, the brochure pronounces, ‘that the 1963 Comprehensive Development Plan for the place was designed by a road traffic engineer. We think they are right.’)

Salix Court with the refurbished Sycamore Court to rear

Alongside this were other, linked initiatives. Some Salford council housing stock had been transferred to City West in 2008. A new stock transfer of 8500 homes from Salford Council to the arms-length management organisation Salix Homes was voted through by tenants in November 2014 – though almost 40 per cent of those who voted rejected the proposal. By writing off an existing £65.1m debt, the new registered social landlord was released to access new funds – a prerequisite (not available to the council) to the expenditure of £22m on modernising 2000 homes across the city in 2015. (5)

Salford City Council’s report, Shaping Housing in Salford 2020; a Housing Strategy for Salford, published in November 2015, confirms that ‘private sector investment in the city will continue to provide a vital role in delivering housing development’ and – in an understandable and perhaps necessary display of civic boosterism – proclaims the success of other local regeneration initiatives, notably MediaCityUK [sic] in the new Salford Quays.

‘New Pendleton by night’ as envisaged by Pendleton Together

Salford may still be, it admits, the 18th most deprived local authority in the country, but we have moved a long way from the politics of the 1980s when Hackney, as a form of political mobilisation, proclaimed itself. ‘Britain’s poorest borough’.  The report asserts that ‘Salford’s population and economy is growing, employment is rising and the social and cultural life in the city is thriving’. (6)

Thorn Court

There have been improvements. The flat I stayed in in Thorn Court at the top end of Broadwalk was modern and well-equipped.  Thorn Court and most of the adjacent blocks have been refurbished, albeit reclad in the now de rigueur dayglow style.

Mango Place with Magnolia Court to rear

There are new bright, shiny blocks too and suburban-style housing to please the new traditionalists. Of the original three slab blocks of the Ellor Street redevelopment, one had been demolished and those which remain now house students from nearby Salford University.  Social housing across Salford has been updated and modernised.

Clearance underway off Churchill Way

In the meantime, in the midst of the Pendleton regeneration, things are a mess.  There are swathes of wasteland where homes have been demolished, barren open spaces still very far from the parkland envisaged, and down-at-heel or redundant community buildings untouched by the new Salford apparently emerging. There’s an alienating mix of contemporary refurb and the unreconstructed past exacerbated by the drawn-out process and blight of actually existing regeneration as it is experienced beyond the pages of the glossy planning brochures.

Pear Tree Close where one resident remains, having refused to accept the level of compensation offered by the Council

St Paul’s Church, occupying a central position on the Broadwalk, still caters devotedly to those left behind by all this change.  The question remains – as it does for all such regeneration schemes (and I will acknowledge their generally good intentions here) – how far the plethora of training schemes and lifestyle programmes can address the intractable realities of non-existent or insecure and low-paid employment and simple, plain poverty.

Broadwalk with the closed Flemish Weavers pub in the foreground and Spruce Court to the rear

Nor is it controversial now to question Private Finance Initiatives as a vehicle for – what should be, at least – public investment.  The method’s convoluted and protracted deal-making, the additional expense incurred catering for all the special interests involved, the high cost of borrowing have been widely criticised as have – although the Salford example doesn’t seem especially egregious in this regard – the long and disruptive delays in implementation.  It’s been ‘an extreme form of contractualisation’, proven, in particular, ‘to be far more complicated and expensive to apply to the social housing sector’. (7)

In all, as Stuart Hodkinson has concluded, rather mildly in the circumstances:

The PFI experience…calls into question one of the underlying principles behind the modernisation of social housing—that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector in providing housing services.

And that’s a good place to finish.  Clearly, this extended Salford case-study demonstrates that the national and local state didn’t get everything right in its own rehousing programmes.  There have been errors  and inadequacies in process and implementation which have treated its citizens poorly.  Having learnt from those mistakes but with an awareness now of our contemporary failures, it’s hard not to see public finance and democratic procedures as offering the most cost-efficient and accountable solution to our current housing crisis.  Beyond that, the lesson from Salford – and other left-behind communities – is that we owe a communal duty to all those who have not benefited from our nation’s affluence.  In this, decent and affordable housing is but one component.

Sources

(1) Phil Griffin, ‘On the Terraces’, Special issue. Housing Building design, BD magazine supplement no. 8, June 15 2007

(2) ‘Urban Splash Chimney Pot Park Housing Scheme Eyesore Slated by Salford Councillor’, Salford Star, 17 June 2014

(3) Creating a New Pendleton Benefits Realisation Plan (July 2009)

(4) Luke Cross, ‘Together closes Salford PFI with £82.6m two-tranche bond’, Social Housing, 4 October 2013

(5) Pendleton Together, An Ideal for Living (ND)

(5) Pete Apps, ‘Salford tenants vote for stock transfer’, Inside Housing, 4 November 2014 and Neal Keeling, ‘Modernising 2,000 homes to cost £22m: Investment follows vote to transfer ownership of housing’, Manchester Evening News, 9 February 2015

(6) Salford City Council, Shaping Housing in Salford 2020; a Housing Strategy for Salford (November 2014)

(7) Stuart Hodkinson, ‘The Private Finance Initiative in English Council Housing Regeneration: A Privatisation too Far?’, Housing Studies, vol 26, no 6, 2011

The Pendleton Estate I: ‘A Salford of the Space Age’ or ‘Concrete Wasteland’?

Tags

1960s, 2000s, Regeneration

You’ll find more on the Pendleton Estate at the current exhibition at the People’s History Museum in Manchester which showcases the work and archives of long-term residents John Aitken and Jane Brake of the Institute of Urban Dreaming.

We left the people of Ellor Street last week facing the brave new world of comprehensive redevelopment in the early sixties with mixed feelings.  One reporter noted ‘a sense of uneasiness around…in many cases hidden by a joke or a resolution to face the new life’. (1)  Six years later, the scheme (with its ‘tree-lined open spaces, a community centre and a health centre all segregated from traffic’) well underway, another reporter – or perhaps the same one – described the residents’ embrace of their new surroundings.  He described the new Pendleton as ‘A Salford of the Space Age’.  ‘Small wonder’, he continued: (2)

that many Ellor Street folk have fought shy of moving to overspill areas or other parts of the City, and have waited eagerly for the chance of being rehoused here – if they leave their present homes.

Given the visionary idealism of the Report on the Plan which outlined the principles of the redevelopment scheme and the optimism which surrounded it both in Salford Borough Council and the local press, perhaps these hopes were understandable.

‘View of flexi-maisonette area from service road to the south’ from The Report on the Plan

It’s true that some of the rehoused residents had wanted houses rather than high-rise flats but the amenities of their new homes soon won them over:

We really wanted a house but these new flats are so nice and well-designed that I would not change for a house.  I like the underfloor heating, the nice living room, and bright bedrooms, we used to pay 16 shillings a week rent and now it is 44 shillings and 10 pence and well worth it.

This was the era – a brief one, in fact – in which high-rise took off.  A few years earlier, back in 1956, only 6 per cent of homes nationally had been provided in flats of over five storeys.  Ten years later, as the new Pendleton took shape, that proportion had risen to (and peaked at) 26 per cent.  Avoiding the obloquy that hindsight has visited on such high-rise construction, there seemed, at the time, many compelling reasons for this shift.

Ellor Street and Unwin Street under redevelopment (c) University of Salford and made available under a Creative Commons licence

The mass slum clearances of the period and the apparent requirement to build replacement housing at density in inner-city areas, compounded by new restrictions on greenfield construction and dislike of sprawling suburban estates, provided one causal bundle.  Salford, like many other inner-city authorities, also resented losing population and rateable income to beyond-border overspill.

There were less tangible but equally potent ideological currents too – a new concern for urbanism and a sense that high-rise represented the future, modernity in a new Britain sloughing off the obsolescence which seemingly characterised so much of its housing and townscapes.  The Report on the Plan claimed that the scheme represented ‘an unparalleled opportunity for Salford to think today what other cities would think tomorrow’.  In the end, the judgments of tomorrow would be far less positive but that’s to jump ahead. The Ellor Street redevelopment almost uniquely captures many of the hopes and ambitions of the period.

A contemporary view of John Lester and Eddie Colman Courts (Walter Greenwood Court was demolished in 2001)

The original plans had been devised within Salford, a council, according to Glendinning and Muthesius, ‘dominated by its formidable City Engineer, G Alexander McWilliam, and by its equally entrenched direct labour organisation’.  Three 15-storey slab blocks – Walter Greenwood, Eddie Colman and John Lester Courts, designed in-house – had already been started. (3)

Eight-storey flats at Salford as featured in Trussed Concrete Review, no 10, 1955

These and Salford’s earlier high-rise efforts – such as the Truscon flats in Kersal Moor – were judged drab and uninspiring by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government but it had little local power in this era of jealous municipalism.  Salford, however, wasn’t one of the big beasts of local government and here the Ministry – playing cannily on the Borough’s fears of loss of status – secured some influence.

Salford agreed, at the Ministry’s suggestion, to the appointment of former LCC Chief Architect and Robert Matthew and former LCC Senior Planner Percy Johnson-Marshall as architect-planners for the entire scheme.  The Architectural Research Unit of Edinburgh University, where both were now based, were to be executive architects for significant elements of it. The Ministry, for its part and against the preferences of the Edinburgh team responsible for detailed design, insisted on five 17-storey point blocks and prefabricated construction as central government sought to boost new methods of industrialised building – another contemporary manifestation of self-conscious modernity and seen as a necessary means of completing the rehousing revolution of the time. (4)

Thorn Court and Spruce Court (in the foreground) before refurbishment and Broad Street, the A6

In housing terms and in sheer numbers, this was a success.  Salford completions increased from 30 in 1962 to 1468 in 1966; into the early seventies it built more housing per capita than any other English city, even Birmingham undergoing its own high-rise revolution. (5)  The civic centre – a much vaunted element of the original planning – didn’t materialise and the shopping centre never took off as any kind of regional hub.

Peter Hook, invited to celebrate the demolition of one of the three 14-storey ‘Orchards’ tower blocks in 2013 (c) Manchester Evening News

On this occasion, there don’t seem to have been any particular problems arising from system-building but there were early criticisms of the housing. Peter Hook (‘Hooky’ of Joy Division and New Order) was no fan: (6)

All my friends moved to Ellor Street, which was all high-rise 70’s flats and a new shopping precinct all built out of concrete. It was rotten, horrible; like a concrete wasteland. And that was when it opened.

Nigel Pivaro (back in the day Terry Duckworth in Coronation Street – set in Salford, of course; now a respected journalist) speaks for many in decrying what was lost: (7)

the demise of the traditional street, the corner shop and small local pub…In short, a whole way of life ceased to exist and the way Salfordians interacted with their neighbours and the world around them changed dramatically.

‘Old institutions…were simply never properly replaced,’ he concluded; ‘what has replaced the old order is not only bland and characterless but actually has never been put back at all’.

New blocks  – probably John Lester and Eddie Colman Courts – under construction in the early 1960s. St Paul’s Church in the centre on the new Broadwalk remains a mainstay of the present community (c) University of Salford and made available under a Creative Commons licence

In this, he echoed the bleak reportage of an ITN news story on Salford high-rise, broadcast in 1988: (8)

Society has broken down in some of Salford’s tower blocks. Civic squalor has become a breeding ground for crime. Muggings, burglaries and firebombs are a brutal fact of daily life. Here thousands live in fear of losing their property, even their lives.

One tower block, it was claimed, had suffered twenty arson attacks in a single year.

The former Paddock pub (now a hostel) – one of the very few old buildings retained in the original redevelopment – with the unmodernised Albion Towers to the rear

The judgment between the competing narratives – bright-eyed modernity and its early welcome and the dislocation and loss it is subsequently held to have caused – seems pretty clear but there’s really no simple ‘truth’ here.  There are issues of timing and perspective. There is nostalgia both for the old and the old ‘new’. It seems to me that the romanticisation of the slums should be criticised just as much as we now attack the naivety (or worse) of planners.  And there are unexplored counterfactuals and neglected contexts.  Could slum clearance and redevelopment have been done differently, better? Very likely but we can’t re-write the wider history which has devastated our traditional working-class communities since the 1960s.

In 2007, Pendleton was rated the twelfth most deprived area in the country.  Some 41 per cent of its 18 to 24 year olds lacked any educational qualification (compared to the national average of 29 per cent); 48 per cent of adults were economically active (nationally, the figure stood at 63 per cent). (9)

A contemporary view of Salford Precinct and the Briar Hill Court  block of flats

In 2011, when riots broke out around the Salford Precinct (intended as the great show-piece of the Ellor Street redevelopment), the area was described as the third worst area in the country for child poverty, and the seventh for unemployment.  In the high-end stores of central Manchester, people: (10)

made off with £2,000 guitars, plasma TVs, and designer clothes from Liam Gallagher’s Pretty Green boutique, in the neglected Salford Precinct they were taking tins of food from Lidl and second-hand televisions from Cash Converters.

‘People who have got nothing wanted to show that they have nothing,’ said one of those involved. Behind this lay something both more diffuse – a resentment of local gentrification and the marginalisation it highlighted – and hostility towards the police as its enforcers.  The riots were, according to one study, a ‘response, albeit lacking in a formal political articulation, to perceived injustices that relate to poverty, exclusion and oppressive policing’.  David Cameron and others condemned them as ‘criminality, pure and simple’. (11)

Brydon Court: where the police amassed in a show of force and the riots began

Alice Coleman argued that there was no excuse for such behaviour – after all, there had been no riots in the poverty-stricken interwar period so graphically portrayed by Walter Greenwood in Salford – though Love on the Dole portrays a brutal police attack on a peaceful protest of the unemployed against the new Means Test.  But perhaps people brought up in a post-war period which undertook to despatch such poverty, in an era of rampant consumerism (for some) of which the Salford Precinct had once been both symbol and promise, had higher expectations and a sharper sense of grievance.

At any rate, the time was ripe for new regeneration initiatives.  These, however, would reflect very changed times.  We’ll examine them in next week’s post.

Sources        

(1) Salford City Reporter, 3 April 1959 quoted in Kynaston, Modernity Britain, p289

(2) Salford City Reporter, April 1965, quoted in Tony Flynn, ‘50 years ago: ‘Space-age’ Salford high-rise dream comes true’, 8 April, 2015. The following quotation is drawn from the same source.

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

(4) Soledad Garcia Ferrari, Miles Glendinning, Paul Jenkins and Jessica Taylor ‘Putting the User First? A Pioneering Scottish Experiment in architectural research’, Architectural Heritage, Volume 19, Issue 1

(5) Figures from Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block and EW Cooney, ‘High Flats in Local Authority Housing in England and Wales since 1945’, in Anthony Sutcliffe, Multi-Storey Living. The British Working-Class Experience (1974)

(6) Quoted in Pendleton Together, An Ideal for Living

(7) Nigel Pivaro, ‘Salford Street Loss’, Salford Star, 14 May 2010

(8) ITN, Salford Flats (1988)

(9) Cited in Luc Vrolijks and Maarten Königs, Urban Futures for Pendleton, linking city branding to urban regeneration, 43rd ISOCARP Congress 2007

(10) Helen Clifton and Eric Allison, ‘Manchester and Salford: a tale of two riots’, The Guardian, 6 December 2011

(11) Bob Jeffery and Waqas Tufail, ‘“The riots were where the police were”: Deconstructing the Pendleton Riot’, Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive

The Five Estates, Peckham, Part III: Back to the Future

Tags

1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Regeneration

‘After 10 years and £60m investment, five estates in Peckham, south London, have finally been transformed from pits of urban blight into shining examples of regeneration.’  So wrote one housing journalist in 2004. (1)

Cator Street – the new face of the Five Estates

In fact, as we saw in the first post of this series, the Five Estates hadn’t always been the pits and, in total, their regeneration cost something in the order of £290m.  Last week, I looked at what had ‘gone wrong’ with (or ‘on’ – there’s a significant distinction there) the estates to justify such expenditure.  This week I’ll examine and assess the thinking which underlay regeneration and the convoluted, troubled form it took.

It was said that £16m had been spent to improve the North Peckham Estate by the mid-1980s.  But already, there were many who felt that such palliative measures – chiefly tackling problems of security by adding bars to ground-floor windows and providing new front doors – were inadequate.  Some, allegedly tenants amongst them, felt that complete demolition was the ‘ideal solution’ but at the time that was judged both too expensive and – with 24,000 on the Southwark waiting list for housing – impracticable. (2)

Alice Coleman, the guru of design disadvantagement who had investigated Southwark’s multi-storey estates, lived up to her mantra that ‘two or three storeys are harmless, but more are harmful’ by proposing that all but the lower two floors of the blocks be removed. She was upset that this apparently simple solution to the estate’s problems was rejected as more expensive than demolition and as adding to housing shortage. (3)

This plan shows areas improved under the Estate Action programme

The first serious attempt to tackle the problems of the North Peckham Estate in particular was the North Peckham Project established in 1985 – a joint venture of councillors, officers and tenants formed to agree a bid to the Department of Environment.  This bore fruit in the Estate Action programme begun in 1987.

This programme saw the refurbishment of around 1200 homes across the wider area.  On the Willowbrook Estate, for example, a relatively untroubled and mainly low-rise estate of four-storey maisonette blocks, £350,000 was spent on renovations, asbestos removal and a new entry phone system.  The twelve-storey Tonbridge House point block was demolished in a later wave of Estate Action improvements after 1992.

A contemporary image of Shurland Gardens (with added pitched roof) on the former Willowbrook Estate

But the big idea and the focus of the bulk of the £40m pledged by central government was the radical remodelling of the North Peckham Estate – basically an attempt to rectify what were now widely accepted as the design flaws of the original plan.  The second-storey walkways would go, new ground floor entrances to flats would be created with front and rear gardens where feasible, and access points to the estate would be reduced.  All this, of course, was an attempt to create the ‘defensible space’ that the previous estate had lacked.

Gated entrance to new development

The five-storey parking blocks (to which few now dared to entrust their vehicles) were to be adapted – one converted into neighbourhood offices, others into workshops and a training centre. Rolf Rothermel (of Rothermel Cooke, the architects with the new design brief) was keen to get cars – so assiduously removed in the original scheme – back on the estate, given the residents’ unofficial attempts to do just that: ‘people will do anything to park their cars reasonably near their homes, although this has meant driving through bollards or over landscaped areas up till now’. (4)

Lynbrook Grove

If these plans had some significant local support, the next – from a Conservative government decidedly hostile to local authorities (especially Labour ones) and their management of housing – did not.  In 1988 the North Peckham and Gloucester Grove Estates were together designated one of six pilot Housing Action Trusts.  The Trusts were private consortia set up to take over and regenerate council housing in designated areas – their relatively generous funding (money denied to the local authorities’ own efforts) was in a sense both carrot and stick in this attempt to take the ‘council’ out of ‘council housing’.

Tenants, however, were suspicious of the initiative, fearing loss of council management would lead to increased rents and reduced security of tenure.  At a packed meeting of North Peckham tenants in November 1988, fears were expressed, against the assurances offered by Housing Minister David Trippier in attendance, that rents might rise fivefold. (5)  That might have been exaggerated but the higher rents of properties managed by Housing Associations (the likely successor bodies) and the planned replacement of secure tenancies with assured were real enough. Opposition in Manchester’s Hulme Estate established the principle of tenant ballots and when, in October 1990, Southwark tenants got their chance to vote, they voted decisively – by a margin of over 60 per cent – to reject the proposal.

This left the ball back in Southwark’s court but, without anything like the resources needed to finance the major changes still felt necessary, it was forced again to play the system and seek central government funds under the rules of what was, by the mid-1990s, the new game in town – the Single Regeneration Budget (SRB).

The Peckham Partnership’s area of operation

Critically, SRB was predicated on bringing in outside capital through partnerships with private developers and housing associations.  The Peckham Partnership formed in 1994 was a consortium (comprising Southwark Council, tenant representatives, Countryside Properties plc, the Laing Group, a number of housing associations and other interested bodies) to prepare just such a bid.

There were a number of implications to this approach.  Firstly, the Partnership had a clear interest in accentuating and homogenising the negative.  Some pretty bleak statistics could be justified (and I used some in last week’s post) but there was a need, in Luna Glücksberg’s words, ‘to make the area look as desperate, needy and dilapidated as possible’.  As a local councillor recalled, ‘It wasn’t as if the area was all a sink estate…when you read the big document, you’d imagine this area was sort of beyond repair, sinking, sinking’. (6)

Secondly, because of that private sector and housing association involvement, this was a strategy, that placed a premium on redevelopment – in which new houses could be built for sale and shared ownership – rather than refurbishment.  To Graham Towers, the implications were clear: (7)

Despite good evidence of the success of the comprehensive improvement schemes and despite the very much higher costs, large parts of [the North Peckham Estate] were scheduled for demolition. The decision was arbitrary and so was its implementation. Selective redevelopment might have been justified by social and environmental objectives. What was actually done was simply to demolish a swathe of housing blocks – the dividing line between new and old cut straight through the middle of each estate.

A contemporary image of St George’s Way with flats for private sale and rental

It’s true, however, that redevelopment also chimed with the wisdom of the day.  There was a growing belief that mono-tenure estates were problematic in themselves (though, strangely, this is never a criticism made of the middle-class suburbs).  Pollard Thomas & Edwards were the architects selected to oversee the new scheme and Steve Chance, one of its directors, was clear on their goals: (8)

The intention was to have a mixed tenure neighbourhood and make it possible for people to want to buy private property in an area that was not popular. We are not trying to build a new estate, we are trying to build a bit of ordinary London.

(I’ll leave you to decode what the words ‘popular’ and ‘ordinary’ actually mean in that statement.)

This was a philosophy Southwark embraced in its ongoing redevelopment of the Aylesbury Estate too –  the Council was, in the words of Catherine Bates (one of the Borough’s planning officers), ‘determined to break down the estate concept’.

The successful Peckham Partnership bid secured £60m SRB funding to add to the £47m contributed by the Borough, £37m from other public sources and £79.6m from private sources. It committed almost £180m to housing, £12.1m to ‘health, culture and sport’, £10.8m to education and some £9.7m to ‘enterprise’. (9)  This was, commendably, an holistic strategy, which recognised that the estates’ troubles were as embedded in hard social and economic realities as they were in any design characteristics.

I’ll focus on housing and here the plans were radical.  The number of homes on the Five Estates as a whole would be reduced from 4532 to 3694. Some 1854 new homes would be built, 70 per cent with gardens. And tenure would be diversified, from 99 per cent council-rented to 60 per cent – in precise numbers from 4314 council-rented homes to 2154 council-rented, 915 housing association and 625 owner-occupied.

Tilbury Close

The numbers can be confusing but the thrust was clear. The big idea, in design terms, was to return to a more traditional streetscape and more suburban style of architecture. The stated aim of the Peckham Partnership was to ‘provide family houses and a neighbourhood environment which encourages study, work, leisure and healthy living’.  The architect Will Alsop praised the new build’s ‘more traditional type of architecture with pitched roofs’ and a circulation around its buildings which felt ‘much safer and…more embracing’. (10)

Cronin Street

To Pollard Thomas & Edwards, the previous renovations, which involved the removal of walkways and partial demolitions but had left the basic layout of North Peckham intact, had been inadequate: the ‘homes themselves were fine, it was the bits in between that were disastrous’.  The new scheme, they claimed, would create a legible street pattern and a link between the shops and amenities of Peckham High Street and Burgess Park.

This was ‘back to the future’ with a vengeance, echoing all the tropes of the contemporary ‘defensible space’ movement which emphasised the ‘natural surveillance’ of the streets and the need to increase private space and reduce twilight zones of semi-public space.

The other big idea was mixed tenure and, more implicitly, social diversity.  Estates were held to have failed as estates: owner occupiers would bring capital into the area – social capital, if you will, which might raise educational standards and overall aspirations and just plain capital (money, in other words) that would improve an area’s amenities and retail. The Five Estates weren’t then an obvious site of gentrification but the potential was thought to exist.

Galleria Court, Sumner Road – a private development near to Burgess Park

Let’s critique all this. Firstly, the always over-extended process of ‘regeneration’ disrupts the lives of those who are its subjects.  As Anne Power observed of North Peckham, ‘whole children’s lives have been spent with the bulldozer’ –something which also sent the psychological ‘signal that the community is not good enough because they are knocking it down’.  Mike Rahman, a tenants’ representative, stated the project had turned the area into a ‘war zone’. (11)

Secondly, the process was experienced as top-down, the much-vaunted ‘consultation’ a sham, certainly in its earlier stages when the original masterplan emerged without tenant input (some modifications followed).  Besides, most tenants wanted to retain the council as landlord for the reasons touched on earlier and the promised ‘right of return’ was impossible to fulfil given that bedsits and one-bed flats were not replaced and given the overall reduction of council-rented homes. (12)

 

A contemporary image of Willsbridge, Gloucester Grove Estate

After ten years, the North Peckham and Camden Estates had been completely demolished, as had the older and more conventional tenement blocks of the Sumner Estate. Willowbrook had been largely and comprehensively refurbished in earlier phases of renovation. It is now self-managed by a Tenant Management Organisation. Gloucester Grove, though it retains its earlier and striking form, has also been completely refurbished.

Physically, Gloucester Grove is the one part of the Five Estates area to retain some of the built bravura of that earlier, now derided, phase of council house construction.  What’s replaced the rest – save for the odd hold-out – is a generic mix of terraced, two-storey housing and medium-rise blocks of flats and maisonettes in the slightly tarty style now favoured.

Kelly Avenue

It’s all pleasant enough in a low-key kind of way and – let’s be honest here – it almost certainly provides homes and an environment that are preferred by most of its residents. A Southwark survey in 2002 claimed 83 per cent of residents felt their quality of life had improved since moving. As someone who has defended the ‘pleasantness’ of the much criticised cottage estates, it doesn’t behove me to be too snooty about this later iteration.

What could be seen as the ‘official’ view is best expressed in this 2004 article in the trade press: (12)

After 10 years and £60m investment, five estates in Peckham, south London, have finally been transformed from pits of urban blight into shining examples of regeneration…Its trademark post-war high-rises were home to shocking levels of poverty and crime that were well above the national average. If you had told the residents that in a decade’s time, some houses in the area would be worth more than £300,000, they would have laughed you out of town.

Other than to question why the official measure of an area’s worth must always be the sale price of its property, there’s nothing much superficially to reject of this assessment.  But I hope – if you’ve managed to read all of this extended analysis – you’ll see a more complex truth emerging.

For one, not all the estates were ‘blighted’ and none from the outset.  What mattered most in their subsequent decline – more than any inherent architectural flaws – was the maelstrom of social (not design) disadvantage that shattered their community in the 1980s.  If the estates ‘failed’, they failed because we failed them. The historical truth is that council estates succeeded as flourishing and, in their way, mixed communities when their residents had decent and secure employment. It’s that simple.

As that traditional economy declined and as, additionally, council housing became increasingly confined to the most precarious of the new precariat, it was inevitable that the ‘respectability’ of estate communities would be eroded.  Their difficulties were a distillation of those suffered by those on the margins of the new economy. Design issues were triggered when these wider socio-economic factors come into play.

Most estates still provided good homes and good communities but, for some, by this point, ‘regeneration’ and the investment it released became a necessity.  The problem is that regeneration is too often a top-down process and is always, more than is necessary, a disruptive one.  It has also, almost uniformly, led to a loss of council housing and the diminution of tenants’ rights. The dependence on private capital to part-finance it makes this inevitable; the policy choice behind this isn’t and should be fought.

The irony of regeneration, here in the Five Estates and elsewhere, is that it seeks to reinvent architecturally a world that we lost through the political choices and economic dynamics accepted since the 1970s.

Sources

(1) Vikki Miller, ‘Peckham Rise’, Housing Today, 8 October 2004

(2) Dick Mortimer (coordinator of North Peckham Project) ‘Breaking the high-rise spiral of decline: one authority’s campaign of refurbishment’, Municipal Journal, 15 May 1987

(3) Alice Coleman, ‘Design Disadvantage in Southwark’, The Dulwich Society Journal, Summer 2008.

(4) ‘Walkways to go in five year plan’, Architects’ Journal, vol 187, no 3, January 20 1988

(5) Debra Isaac, ‘Rent Fears for the Tenants’, The Times, November 14 1988

(6) Luna Glücksberg, ‘Wasting the Inner-City: Waste, Value and Anthropology on the Estates’, PhD in Social Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, January 2013

(7) Graham Towers, Shelter in Not Enough. Transforming multi-storey housing (Policy Press, 2000)

(8) Matt Weaver, ‘Dangerous Structures?’, Building Design, December 15 2000, pp16-19

(9) Peckham Partnership, A Bid for Single Regeneration Budget Funding (September 1994)

(10) Robert Booth, ‘Damiola: could better design have saved his life?’, Architects’ Journal, vol 212, December 7 2000

(11) Both quoted in Weaver, ‘Dangerous Structures?’

(12) Discussed in Glücksberg, ‘Wasting the Inner-City’

(13) Vikki Miller, ‘Peckham Rise’