Book Review: Michael Romyn, London’s Aylesbury Estate – An Oral History of the ‘Concrete Jungle’

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1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Regeneration, Southwark

Michael Romyn, London’s Aylesbury Estate: An Oral History of the Concrete Jungle (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

The estate was like a shiny new penny. It was lovely. It was really lovely. It’s hard for me to paint a picture for you but it was a beautiful place to live … The community side of it, you know? I mean you knew all the neighbours … You know you would never have got that sort of community in a row of houses as you did with the landings …

Robert Banks is talking about Southwark’s Aylesbury Estate. For many readers, his words might come as a shock and, to be honest, I’m tempted just to leave it there as a simple corrective to the unreasoned obloquy that the estate has suffered. As Michael Romyn writes in the introduction to his essential new book, ‘a reputation is usually earned; in the Aylesbury’s case it was born’.  Even on the day of its official opening by Anthony Greenwood, Labour’s Minister of Housing and Planning in October 1970, it was described by one local Tory councillor as a ‘concrete jungle … not fit for people to live in’. That might have come as a shock to the new tenants who felt ‘it was like moving into a palace’.

The estate was born in the laudable post-war ambition to clear the slums and in the 1960s’ fashion for large-scale, modernist solutions to housing need. It comprised 2700 homes in all, housing a population of almost 10,000 at peak, in 16 four- to fourteen-storey so-called ‘snake blocks’ (including what was allegedly the largest single housing block in Europe). Designed by Southwark Council’s Department of Architecture and Planning, it was built by Laing using the Jespersen large panel system of prefabricated construction. The estate’s regeneration – in practice, its demolition and replacement – has been planned since 1998.

Old against new, July 1976 (Courtesy of John David Hulchanski, University of Toronto)

Romyn’s book offers essentially another form of deconstruction, not of the estate itself, but of the myths and meanings that have become attached to it. Robert Banks provides one of the 31 past and present residents’ testimonies that lie at the heart of this thoroughly researched book. That residents’ voice shouldn’t be an unusual means of understanding the actual lived experience of council tenants – who find themselves and their homes so frequently misrepresented and maligned in the media and wider commentary – but, sadly, it is. In the case of the Aylesbury, it is all the more vital as no estate has been so unfairly vilified.

Wendover block under construction, 1969 (Courtesy of the John Laing Photographic Collection)

We should begin, I suppose, with that ‘reputation’: the estate portrayed as a ‘concrete jungle’ (indeed, almost its archetype), a scene of crime and disorder. Romyn quotes Sir Kenneth Newman, Metropolitan Police Commissioner, who in 1983 described London’s council estates more generally as ‘symbolic locations’ where:

unemployed youths – often black youths – congregate; where the sale and purchase of drugs, the exchange of stolen property and illegal drinking and gaming is not unknown … they equate closely to the criminal rookeries of Dickensian London.

We’ll leave aside for the moment the unconscious (?) racism of his comment and note its surprisingly conscious myth-making: estates, such as the Aylesbury, were imagined rather than analysed, just as, in fact, Victorian elites fearfully mythologised the slum quarters of their own large cities. (1)

As Romyn writes:

Simplified, fetishized, objectified, and finally commodified, council estates rendered in this way, were imaginary constructs, their meaning defined not by their histories or inhabitants, but by external agencies of control (politicians, police, the media, etc).

Newman avoided the word ‘gangs’ but Romyn reminds us how readily the stigmatising term was applied to very largely innocuous groups of young people, particularly those of colour, simply hanging out on their home turf. That so many of the estate’s population were young – in 1971, 37 percent of its 9000 population was under 16 – was, as he notes, an objective factor in such problems as did exist.

Balconies, sunlight, saplings and lawns, July 1976 (Courtesy of John David Hulchanski, University of Toronto)

If this sounds dismissive of those problems, it should be said that Romyn is scrupulous in assessing the evidence. He notes, for example, that in 1999 around 40 percent of estate residents expressed fears for their personal safety. It’s a disturbing figure but it was roughly in line with the proportions in Southwark and London more widely.

Romyn contends that what really marked the estate out was:

its physical attributes – the brawny slabs … the circuitous geography of elevated walkways. Immediately expressive of the ‘gritty’ inner city, the estate distilled many of the fears and fantasies of urban life embedded in the popular imagination. 

These, of course, were also grist to the mill of the ‘Defensible Space’ theorists who posited that elements of ‘design disadvantage’ – the illegibility of public/private space, multi-storey accommodation, shared entranceways  and those walkways – were the cause of crime and antisocial behaviour.  These, I hope, largely discredited ideas had become by the 1990s the ‘common sense’ of planners and politicians alike and featured heavily in the writings of the media commentariat.

Aylesbury landing, July 1976 (Courtesy of John David Hulchanski, University of Toronto)

But while lurid headlines and alarmist reports filled column inches, actual crime rates on the estate and the incidence of anti-social behaviour were similar to those of surrounding areas; the estate wasn’t an idyll (though many growing up in the era remember it fondly) but it was essentially normal.  Romyn quotes Susan Smith who has suggested ‘fear of crime may be better seen as an articulation of inequality and powerlessness so often experienced as part of urban life. So too can it mask deeper anxieties about changes to the social order …’. Media representations of, as one report labelled it, this ‘concrete den of crime’ were, as Romyn argues, ‘wildly disproportionate, and wanton, too, in that they stoked and projected an unearned notoriety’. (2)  

East Street Market, c.1970 (Courtesy of the South London Press)

Moving to the question of ‘community’, a leitmotif of planning since 1945, Aylesbury might again surprise those who have criticised it so freely.  Romyn charts, particularly in the estate’s early years, a neighbourliness and localism centred around the East Street market and nearby pubs and shops – in fact, a connectedness with the neighbourhood in direct contradiction to conventional wisdom surrounding estates and their supposed isolation.  An active tenants’ association, a range of community activities, informal cleaning rotas of common areas and so on complete the picture.

Changing demographics could fray this community cohesion. The arrival of larger numbers of ‘problem families’ – at times described as ‘rough’ by more established residents – under homelessness legislation sometimes led to tensions and difficulties. But Romyn reminds us, again with personal testimony, how life-changing for the families themselves this move could be. Linda Smith, who moved to the estate with her two young children in 1990 via a women’s refuge and bed and breakfast accommodation, recalls how, ‘in [her] time of need along came Southwark’. I don’t need to say how necessary it is that these services are properly funded and resourced and how vital social housing is to that.  

WACAT’s (the Walworth and Aylesbury Community Arts Trust) women’s dance group, 1982 (Courtesy of Su Braden/WACAT, Annual Report, 1982)

Race became another complicating factor for this initially very largely ‘white’ estate as black and minority residents moved in. But this necessary transition seems to have been negotiated well for the most part; the tenants association remained fairly old school but new grassroots community organisations emerged and made a vital contribution to Aylesbury’s life and vitality.

All this in an era of real and growing hardship. The data is profuse. As traditional employment declined and joblessness rose, by 1975 the average household income in Southwark was £1000 below the UK mean; by 1985, half its households were on Housing Benefit. By the late 1990s, Faraday Ward (largely comprising the estate) was the third most deprived ward in Southwark and among the fifth most deprived in England; half its children were on free school meals (compared to 16 percent nationally).

This wasn’t the time to cut public spending and services but the relentless Thatcherite urge to ‘balance the budget’ imposed swingeing central government cuts to housing grants and allocations. On the Aylesbury (as elsewhere), routine maintenance was cut and internal redecoration halted; caretakers were reduced and then removed completely in 1990; cleaning staff were reduced and then lost to Compulsory Competitive Tendering in 1991.

The real quality of Romyn’s book, however, is that it is not a polemic (and is all the more plausible for that). He acknowledges the inefficiencies of some of the Council’s services, its Direct Labour organisation, for example. He recognises the improvements achieved through new, more devolved forms of housing management. But the sense of an estate not failing but failed by others is palpable.

For all that, when in 1999 Southwark Council commissioned a ‘mutual aid’ survey of the estate, it found that 90 percent of residents knew and helped neighbours; 20 percent were helped by a relative living on estate and 35 percent had friends and relatives living nearby. This suggests a resilience and community challenging the dystopian stereotypes repeated most famously by Tony Blair in his first public speech after New Labour’s landslide victory in 1997 on the estate itself.

Tony Blair visits the Aylesbury Estate, 2 June 1997

We might, nevertheless, see the £56.2m awarded to the Aylesbury two years later as part of a New Deal for Communities regeneration package as an attempt to right past wrongs. In practice, it was for most residents a poisoned chalice which threatened established and generally well-liked homes and it came cloaked in a moralising language that insulted them and their community. This ‘moral underclass discourse’:

pointed to imputed deficiencies in the values and behaviour of those who were supposedly excluded – ‘an underclass of people cut off from society’s’ mainstream, without any sense of shared purpose’ according to Blair.

The apparently benign goal of ‘mixed and sustainable communities’ was expressed more crudely by Southwark’s Director of Regeneration, the suitably villainously-named Fred Manson:

We need a wider range of people living in the borough … [council housing] generates people on low incomes coming in and that leads to poor school performances, middle-class people stay away.

We’re trying to move people from a benefit-dependency culture to an enterprise culture. If you have 25 to 30 percent of the population in need, things can still work reasonably well. But above 30, it becomes pathological.

Local Labour politicians might, one hopes, have known better but the motion of censure for this intemperate and abusive language came from Tory councillors. The residents’ own response came in December 2001 when, in a 76 percent turnout, they voted by 73 percent to reject the transfer of their homes to the Faraday Housing Association (formed for the purpose) which would oversee the regeneration process. Fears of increased rents, reduced security of tenure, smaller homes and gentrification all played their part.

Tenants and campaigners, including Aysen Dennis, Margot Lindsay, Victoria Biden, and Piers Corbyn, celebrate the stock transfer ballot result, 2001

Since then, regeneration has rumbled on. It has had some beneficial effects. Increased spending and support for education, for example, increased the proportion of local students gaining five GCSEs at Grade C or above from a shocking 16 percent in 1999 to 68 percent – just below the national average – in 2008.  That this was achieved before any part of the estate was demolished testifies to the benefits of direct public investment and the fallacy that clearance was required.

A small part of the estate was demolished in 2010, existing blocks replaced as is the fashion with mixed tenure homes in a more traditional streetscape. Most of the estate remains though it and its community have been scarred by the interminable process and continued threat of regeneration.

Whilst thoroughly readable, London’s Aylesbury Estate is an academic book – with an excellent apparatus of references and bibliographies – and it comes unfortunately at a hefty academic price. For anyone concerned to truly understand the estate and its history, however, I recommend it as the definitive text.

Aylesbury Estate, 1971 (Courtesy of the South London Press)

I’ll conclude with some conclusions that I think apply not only to the Aylesbury but to estates more generally. The first is that we should eschew simplifications and embrace complexity. Actual residents, for the most part, experienced the estate very differently from its media portrayals.  Many didn’t even experience it as an ‘estate’ at all – they knew their corner of it and generally got on with their immediate neighbours. Some were fearful of crime and an unfortunate few experienced it but another interviewee recalls that he ‘didn’t come across anything anti-social in all [his] time there’. Many remember – and continue to experience – neighbourliness; conversely, some rather liked the anonymity the estate could offer.

Secondly, we must reject the idea of estates as alien. As Romyn argues:

Council estates are just homes after all. For most residents, they are not media props or architectural crimes or political rationales, but places of family, tradition, ritual and refuge …

Let’s allow the Aylesbury Estate to be simply – and positively – ordinary:

For all that was exceptional about the estate, and for all the mystification it endured, the Aylesbury, in the eyes of its residents, was mostly normal, unremarkable; a place of routine and refuge, of rest and recreation, of family and familiarity.

Thirdly, we might wish those residents for once to be not the object of other people’s stories but the subject of their own.

Publication and purchase details can be found on the publisher’s website.

Notes

I’m grateful for permission to use the images above which are drawn from the book.

(1) This is argued by Dominic Severs in ‘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) The reference here is Susan J Smith, ‘Social Relations, neighbourhood structure and the fear of crime in Britain’ in David Evans and David Herbert (eds), The Geography of Crime (Routledge, 1989)

I wrote about the Aylesbury Estate myself in two blog posts back in 2014. I’d revise some of my language and analysis back then in the light of my own further research and certainly with the benefit of Michael Romyn’s book but they might still serve as a useful guide to the overall history.

The Five Estates, Peckham, Part II: ‘It wasn’t all bad’

Tags

1970s, 1980s, Southwark

Last week’s post looked at the diverse origins of Southwark’s so-called ‘Five Estates’ and the ideals which inspired them.  This week, I’ll examine how those ideals failed or rather, perhaps, how they were betrayed by wider society. That also gives us a chance to assess some of the broader charges levelled against much of the mass housing of the period.

Already by 1987, an ex-local councillor was complaining how the snake-like design of the Gloucester Grove Estate amplified noise and – less a design flaw than a problem of upkeep – that towers and rubbish chutes at the end of each block were stinking and verminous. (1)  A Times report of the same year reported of the same estate that ‘gangs of youths roam constantly. Within days of being repainted, the miles of corridors and elevated walkways are an eyesore of filthy graffiti’. (2)

In happier times – Gloucester Grove: completed housing development 1978 (c) London Metropolitan Archives. collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk

In the 1994 bid for Single Regeneration funding, it was claimed £250,000 a year was being spent on repairing vandalised properties in the area. Some 42 per cent of residents of the Five Estates area as a whole reported that they felt unsafe. (3)

That proportion, though high, might seem low given the bid’s interest in accentuating the negative and the alarmist media portrayal of the estates. It’s maybe the more matter-of-fact assessment of one long-term resident which captures the reality better: (4)

It wasn’t all that bad once you lived on it, you knew your neighbours and you were basically fine if you were sensible…you don’t go around flashing your cash that’s for sure, but you were all right.

That, of course, was hardly a ringing endorsement and the truth of crime, and fear of crime, was real enough.  Back in 1987 again, the police had recorded 70 muggings across the Five Estates area in one week. (5)  The reality of crime, in its starkest form, became evident in November 2000 with the death of Damiola Taylor, a ten-year old Nigerian schoolboy whose family had recently moved to the UK – killed in an isolated stairwell of the North Peckham Estate.

The death occurred as the estate’s regeneration was already underway but it seemed to confirm the worst fears and strongest criticisms of those who blamed the estate’s design for its troubles.

That criticism had previously been most forcefully expressed by Alice Coleman. (6)  Coleman began with a simple premise: ‘Even without the scientific details one has only to think how criminal youths abound in problem estates and are quite rare in roads of single-family houses’. But she was adamant too that her King’s College research team which surveyed Southwark’s multi-storey housing – its aim ‘to establish whether there were specific design features contributing to 21 types of crime and social breakdown’ – had provided a ‘scientific’ explanation.

Sixteen such features were identified, for example:

two or three storeys are harmless, but more are harmful. Up to four flats per corridor are harmless but more are harmful. If an entrance serves no more than six flats it is harmless but with over six it is harmful.

And so on…North Peckham achieved a 13.1 design disadvantage score on Coleman’s index.

(c) Russell Newell

There was a common sense truth to some of this.  With 72 linked blocks in all, 92 vertical routes and 49 access points around the perimeter, the complaint of one resident that ‘you never know who’s prowling around because the walkways and the stairs are open to everybody’ seemed reasonable. (7) That article continued editorially:

These characteristics all contribute to a sense of anonymity due to intrusion by non-residents through each block, as well as providing escape routes for criminals.  The walkways are faceless with a series of doors to upper and lower flats, and the doors frequently front directly on what is a public highway.

This was the defensible space thesis incarnate.  It blamed both the nature of public housing – as neither literally nor psychologically ‘owned’ by its residents – and its modern form – its spaces encouraged and facilitated crime – for the rise of anti-social behaviour.

Normal residents but the kind of shadowy stairwell to give Alice Coleman nightmares (c) Russell Newell, 7 Bridges

Coleman’s sweeping analysis (we’ll critique it later) received more genuinely scientific backing in the 1994 study ‘space syntax’ study by Bill Hillier of the Bartlett School of Architecture.  He concluded that North Peckham’s design ‘had literally generated a pathological pattern of space-use by creating lacunas in the system of natural movement’; spaces into which ‘kids were moving unsupervised and forming gangs’. (8)

Image 1: Bill Hillier explains Space Syntax theory to a group of residents; Image 2: a diagram of the North Peckham Estate showing restricted sight-lines (screengrabs from the Tomorrow’s World documentary)

Back in 1966, the ‘case for segregating people from traffic ‘had seemed ‘urgent’ and those walkways were praised for their cleanliness, safety and promotion of neighbourliness. (9)  The irony that they had now become, as ‘space…structurally excluded from everyday patterns of use’, ‘terrifying’ (in Hillier’s words), is almost too much to bear. Damiola Taylor had been killed in just such a location, one suffering from what Hillier labelled ‘perpetual night syndrome’.

Alice Coleman discounted socio-economic explanations of council estate troubles as vigorously (to paraphrase Owen Hatherley) as she counted dog turds but her statement that problems of crime and anti-social behaviour were ‘rare in roads of single-family houses’ was simply empirically wrong. ‘Suburban’ estates such as Norris Green (Liverpool), Blackbird Leys (Oxford) and Meadow Well (North Shields) suffered similar troubles and worse.  What connects these very different estates to Southwark’s is, of course, poverty.

Let’s begin with straightforward demographics.  In Liddle Ward (since abolished but then basically comprising the Five Estates) in the 1990s, 28 per cent of the population was under 16 – a similar proportion had been held to explain the problems of Southwark’s Brandon Estate back in 1975. Fifty-seven per cent of these children lived in low-income households (the highest in London); 16 per cent of households were lone-parent (the third highest in London). (10)

(c) Russell Newell, 7 Bridges

At the same time, unemployment stood at 31 per cent (the highest in London) and reached, among 16 to 19 year-olds, a staggering 62 per cent.  This had been a long-term problem.  Unemployment had rocketed from 22 to 43 per cent in the early 1980s.  A local Labour councillor, Mary Ellery, described the North Peckham Estate as ‘brilliant’ till then but: (11)

Unemployment knocked six kinds of shit out of people. Careers officers came into schools with the bad news when kids were fourteen, and from then on they knew there was no bloody point.  All you need to know is how to write your name and how to go on the dole. If you’re forty-plus, you’re on the shit-heap.

To the local vicar, in this context, burglary, where you could make £200 a night (in contrast to the £40 or £50 a week that scarce, regular employment offered), was ‘the kind of work that’s seen to be viable’.  Drugs also played their part in this alternative economy.

Race was a further complicating factor.  Previously people from the ethnic minorities had frequently been excluded from council housing through residency rules.  The primacy of needs-based assessment after 1977 and the fact that minority populations were often confined to the worst private rented accommodation saw this change in the eighties.

The Five Estates, then, had a population disproportionately drawn from the black and ethnic minorities – 57 per cent by 1991; in two local primary schools, around 60 per cent of children spoke English as a second language. That liberal vicar commented on the disempowerment of the estates’ minority population and the criminality of some of the community’s young people as a compensatory way ‘to seek power in other ways’.  Of course, some longer-established locals saw these newcomers as the cause of their problems rather than as fellow victims and so another layer of tension was added to a toxic mix.

‘Martin’ (c) Russell Newell, 7 Bridges

By the 1990s, the annual turnover of homes on the estates had reached between 20 to 25 per cent and it was claimed 70 per cent of residents wanted a transfer though usually they found no problem with their individual homes.  As homes emptied, squatters moved in – generally transient and disinvested in the local community – with the Council and police seen as apathetic or powerless in dealing with the issue.

As the estates became hard to let and as the local council housing stock diminished through Right to Buy, new bona fide residents were disproportionately those re-housed as homeless or vulnerable.  Many, it was said, came from the nearby Maudsley Hospital as longer-term patients were removed as part of the (misleadingly named) ‘care in the community’ programme.

The Camden Estate (c) Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block (1984)

Such a combination of problems – and they were found most often on council estates, not because council estates were awful places marked out by some foundational flaw of concept or design but rather because wider society dumped its problems on them – naturally demanded greater resources.  They didn’t get them.  In 1979, Southwark had a budget of £60m to maintain its 36,000 homes.  By 1987, as Thatcherite cuts kicked in, its budget to manage 62,000 homes (more inherited from the GLC) stood at £28.5m. It would have required £90m just to maintain its 1979 level of spending. (12)

Despite this, and in a very changed world – which saw councils fighting against the odds to effect positive change in a context where they were seen as part of the problem rather than a means to solution – regeneration efforts began in the mid-1980s.  Those will covered in next week’s post.

Sources

Special thanks to Russell Newell, who grew up in the area and took the photographs featured as a young photographer in the 1980s.  Visit his 7 Bridges project for further evocative images of the estate and its African-Caribbean community in particular and to find out more about his larger body of work.

(1) Quoted in Robert Chesshyre, The Return of the Native Reporter (1987)

(2) ‘Culture Shock Strikes Home’, The Times, 14 July 1987

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

(4) Rose (in her 60s) quoted in Luna Glücksberg, ‘Wasting the Inner-City: Waste, Value and Anthropology on the Estates’, PhD in Social Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, January 2013

(5) Joanna Coles, ‘Is There Life in Peckham?’, The Spectator, 3 July 1987

(6) The quotations which follow are drawn from Alice Coleman, ‘Design Disadvantage in Southwark’, The Dulwich Society Journal, Summer 2008.

(7) This quotation from Mrs Emminia Onua and the following are drawn from Southwark Sparrow, February 1987

(8) Quoted in Matt Weaver, ‘Dangerous Structures?’, Building Design, December 15 2000.  You can see images of the North Peckham Estate and Bill Hillier explaining the application of space syntax theory to it in this fascinating video from a 1993 edition of Tomorrow’s World.

(9) Christine Rouse, ‘City Village for the Birds?’, South London Press, 6 December 1974

(10) These figures and the following taken from Glücksberg, ‘Wasting the Inner-City: Waste, Value and Anthropology on the Estates’

(11) This and the quotation from the Reverend Graham Derriman which follows are drawn from Robert Chesshyre, The Return of the Native Reporter

(12) 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

The Five Estates, Peckham, Part I: ‘Planning is for people’

Tags

1950s, 1960s, 1970s, Southwark

The ‘Five Estates’ were a figment of Southwark Council’s imagination.  That’s not to say that the five estates – wedged between Peckham High Street and Burgess Park – didn’t exist but rather that they were artificially combined for a £60m bid for Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) funding in 1994.  That bid required a single narrative of design failure and social breakdown and it succeeded – it secured the largest SRB award ever made.  Some £260m and ten years later, one of the country’s most sweeping regeneration projects was complete.  This post will examine the high hopes and ideals which inspired the estates’ initial construction.

The ‘Five Estates’, with thanks to 35%.org/north-peckham-estate

The five estates had little to unify them save that loose geographical proximity.  The Sumner Estate was the oldest – an LCC scheme from the 1930s comprising 13 blocks, all traditional brick-built four- to six-storey, walk-up and balcony-access tenements of their time.  It was extended in the post-war period with nine new blocks designed along essentially similar lines though now with lift access and jazzed-up, white concrete-faced balconies as a nod to modernity.  The older blocks had to wait to the mid-70s to get lifts and central heating.

Sumner Estate, 1973 (c) London Metropolitan Archives, collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk

The Willowbrook Estate between Sumner Road and the former Surrey Canal was anchored by the twelve-storey Tonbridge House, completed in 1963. The block’s striking acid-etched concrete cladding slabs designed by William Mitchell didn’t save it from later demolition.  A series of tile-faced, four-storey maisonettes followed, still standing and largely unaltered but for their new pitched roofs.

Willowbrook Estate, 1964 (c) London Metropolitan Archives, collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk

Willowbrook Estate, 1964 (c) London Metropolitan Archives, collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk

The other three estates form more of a package, at least in the sense that they were all completed in the early-mid 1970s, all at relatively high density and all incorporating contemporary ideas around the separation of pedestrian and road traffic and use of aerial walkways.  It was possible, they said, to walk from Burgess Park to Peckham Road without touching the ground

The Camden Estate (c) Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block (1994) captioned ‘Camden Redevelopment, from 1972, designed by FO Hayes et al. Ample car parking below to the communal facilities within the complex are provided’

The Camden Estate (including the earlier Monkland House built in the 1950s) comprised 874 homes of traditional brick construction.  The other two estates –Gloucester Grove and North Peckham – were more innovatory and, given their prominence in the arguments for regeneration, I’ll spend most time talking about those.

Gloucester Grove is the northernmost of the estates, fronting Burgess Park. It remains (substantially unaltered) the most striking architecturally, notable for its long, linked, snake-like construction – 1210 homes in 29 blocks in total, of brick-clad, heavy panel construction, between three and eight storeys in height joined by high, semi-circular, glass-tiled entrances containing stairways and lifts which provide a deliberately and eye-catchingly ‘modernist’ look to the estate as a whole.

An early architectural sketch of Gloucester Grove (c) Southwark Archives

Gloucester Grove: completed housing development, 1964 (c) London Metropolitan Archives, collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk

North Peckham is the best documented and – the most notorious – it’s often taken to represent the Five Estates regeneration as a whole.  It was the largest of the five – 65 five-storey blocks in all on a 40-acre site, comprising 1444 homes.  Despite its traditional, load-bearing brick, crosswall construction, this was the most innovative of the designs – a large-scale realisation of the ‘streets in the sky’ concept fashionable when construction began in 1966.

The estate was made up of two types of block – residential and parking.  In the latter, three lower floors provided lock-up garages for residents and parking spaces for visitors; at the second floor level a large platform contained ‘shops, pubs, laundries, and communal facilities such as halls and meeting rooms’.

North Peckham Estate parking block with shops and walkways at second floor level and maisonettes above (c) Southwark Archives

This was linked to a wide pedestrian deck which, according to the celebratory account in the Southwark Civic News, joined ‘the whole scheme together, forming a network of ways containing housing, shops and other facilities and forming the service route for postman, milkman, dustman and other tradesmen’.  Residents, it continued, could ‘walk freely along this two and half miles of deck away from the dirt, noise and danger of London traffic.’ (1)

Layout of the North Peckham Estate, 1972 (c) Southwark Archives

Let’s forget hindsight for a moment and examine the good intentions here.  There was the variety and mix of housing for a start – one to five bedroom maisonettes and flats, each with their own front door to the deck and the whole planned to serve a wide cross-section of the community. As the Civic News continued, praising the scheme’s ‘visionary planners’ led by Borough Architect FO Hayes:

Far from being the stereotype ‘Little Boxes’ the four basic types of homes will be put together in so many different ways that they will have individuality and variety.

North Peckham Estate with service road to rear, 1973

And the ground on which the Estate stood (excepting service roads) was ‘to be used entirely as an amenity for residents [as] a series of interconnecting courts, designed to cater for different age groups and family activities’:

Some will be planted with grass, trees, and shrubs where families may sit out, alone or with their neighbours, on summer evenings; others will be paved and out of reach of windows, so that the younger members may play ball games and make a noise in safety.

It sounds idyllic, doesn’t it?  And it had emerged with due deference to the community of the run-down streets it replaced. Hans Peter Trenton, who succeeded Hayes as Borough Architect in 1969 (he had earlier designed Southwark’s Aylesbury Estate), praised the ‘social coherence’ of the former terraced housing and described its ‘closely-knit social ties’ as ‘one of the foundation stones essential for the preservation of a civilised society’. (2)  This thinking informed preparations for the new estate.

The new design emerged from ‘detailed sociological and technical surveys’, initiated by the Council, and executed by the construction company Bovis, ‘before a brick was laid’. (3)  Trenton himself toured the old streets, talking to their residents and ‘explaining what was meant by such unheard of things as patios’.

If all this sounds like good PR or self-deceiving rhetoric, it’s worth pointing out that the finished estate earned widespread acclaim – to Lord Robens, it was a ‘European showpiece’.  A hard-bitten journalist (or perhaps I’m lapsing into cliché there) for the Municipal Review touring the Estate in 1972, found his ‘enthusiasm steadily mounting’: (2)

There are no towers or soulless slabs at North Peckham, no bleak expanses of exposed concrete, no grassed areas with ‘keep off’ notices to apply a cosmetic touch to harridan features. Instead there is grass which is meant to be played on and trees everywhere.  The authority’s adoption of low-rise, high-density – it was one of the first in the country to latch on to this – has been continued with a layout which disposes the buildings around a series of courtyards where children can play in safety…The courtyards and the soft contours of the buildings around them…convey a feeling of enclosure and intimacy rarely found in large projects of this kind.

This, he said, was an (apparently successful) ‘attempt to recreate the neighbourly atmosphere of old-established districts’ and he concluded almost lyrically:

the housewife can open the door to the tradesman much as she does in an ordinary street. The children can also run around unmolested by traffic, just as they used to do in the days of hop-scotch and the hoop…For once the idea that planning is for people has been infused with some meaning.

Residents’ views could be positive too.  Tina recalls (4)

her flat was beautiful…split over five levels, huge, with a big patio at the top…rooms for all her children, and the kitchen was so big they had a sofa and a telly in it, her children could play there, so they could keep the living room spotless for when family and visitors came along.

‘Mrs Smith’ remembers moving in: ‘We really liked it. It was more like a holiday camp.  It was very, very good’. (5)

North Peckham Estate, 1972

I’ve spent some time on this pre-history, not to exonerate planners and councils but, at the very least, to acquit them of the charge of ill intent.  It allows us too to examine ‘what went wrong’ without prejudgment because, if there was a honeymoon period, it seems to have been a relatively short one.

By 1977, the Peckham Society noted that the Estate was suffering ‘wear and tear’; the overall appearance of the Estate was ‘handsome’ but the ‘uniformity of the design and decoration’ (everything was cobalt blue apparently) left visitors, even residents, feeling disoriented. The vicar described an active community and the estate as ‘a place designed for neighbourliness and meeting’ but the walkways, according to the article, had become problematic – ‘used for a variety of games including primitive football, cricket and tennis with the result that windows in the public areas are frequently smashed’. Those promised play areas don’t seem to have materialised. (6)

Later, less inviting images of the Estate’s walkways

But this is tame stuff compared to what came later, a trajectory summed up in one magazine headline as ‘a dream in the 60s, a reality in the 70s and a nightmare in the 80s’. The report went on to claim that North Peckham had been described by the European Economic Community as ‘the most depressed housing area in western Europe’. (7)

We’ll look at the truth of that next week. What had happened to North Peckham and the other estates to turn such high hopes into ashes and what was the new thinking that would transform what were now so unquestioningly seen as the catastrophic errors of a previous generation of planners?

Sources

(1) ‘Life at Deck Level’, Southwark Civic News, July 1968

(2) HF Wallis, ‘A Living Showpiece at North Peckham?’, Municipal Review, November 1972

(3) Christine Rouse, ‘City Village for the Birds?’, South London Press, 6 December 1974

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

(5) Quoted in Robert Chesshyre, The Return of the Native Reporter (1987)

(6) Bob Smyth, ‘The North Peckham Estate: a Brief Guide’, Peckham Society Newsletter, February/March 1977

(7) Sky Magazine, March 1988

The Brandon Estate, Southwark II: ‘It was going to be paradise’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, 1980s, LCC, Southwark

The Brandon Estate was a concrete expression of the London County Council’s desire to build a better world.  It’s telling that, in these more cynical or simply more jaded times, I hesitated in writing that sentence but it’s fact, not hyperbole, however much the expression may jar.  Last week’s post looked at the ideals and design principles behind that aspiration; this week’s looks at how it all played out in practice.

An early image of the Estate from the south-west

To begin with, all was well.  The Architects’ Journal concluded the scheme was:  (1)

an important essay by the LCC to create a community in the true sense of the word rather than a mere housing estate. The diversification of design, although it has sometimes degenerated into inconsistency, reflects the provision for a wide variety of social activities…This is a positive attempt to overcome a major failure of much inter-war housing in the London area.

The Estate’s Civic Trust award plaque on the wall of ‘Hairy Mammoth’ clubroom

Even John Betjeman – admittedly most taken by the rehabilitation of the Victorian terraces – thought the Estate ‘attractive, habitable by modern standards, and probably the beginning of a general raising of the self-respect of the neighbourhood’.  (2)

More importantly, its early residents liked it. Ethel Frampton, reminiscing after 40 years of living on Brandon, remembered ‘vividly being asked, how do you like living on a showcase estate. My answer then was, I love it.’ (3)

All this is a tribute to the design of the Estate and a commentary on the slum conditions most had moved from.  As ‘Mrs Bedford’, a 77 year old widow, told Tony Parker in 1983: (4)

I couldn’t say I have any complaints about living on the estate at all. I never had had.  When I think about the conditions we had to live in when I was a kid, well those days will never come back again and a good thing too. People complain and you sometimes hear them talking about the good old days and that sort of rubbish.  All I can say is that they must have forgotten what the good old days were like because for the ordinary class of working people there was nothing good about them at all.

Another resident, who had moved into an 11^th floor flat in one of the towers, remembers:

it was all very, very smart, somewhere really good, somewhere you were proud to live.  Do you remember those what they used to call ‘garden cities’ before the war, Letchworth, Welwyn and those places?  Well that’s the nearest to it in atmosphere I mean, it was like them. All very well kept and peaceful, with a sort of rural air about it; hardly like being in a city at all.

Most often, it was simply the size of their homes that most struck new residents – ‘It was massive, it looked like bloody Buckingham Palace compared to what we were living in’.  This was, as intended, high quality accommodation.

Flats on Lorrimore Road

But beyond this, there was a community.  In one block of low-rise flats at least, they were ‘nearly all local people, all got moved in here together from the same streets when our houses were pulled down’ and ‘Joan Kirby’ describes singsongs along the balcony for someone’s birthday and landings cleaned for weddings and funerals when visitors would be coming.

Maisonettes on Lorrimore Road

There was a broader truth to this if the oral history is to be trusted; this from ‘Bert Weir’, a caretaker in one of the towers:

When they first built it twenty years ago or more it was going to be paradise, wasn’t it?  For the people who were coming to live here, I mean. They’d all been living in slums and places like that, and here was this marvellous modern new housing estate which was going to give them a wonderful new life. It’s true, in those early days there was a great sense of community among the people who came to live on [Brandon].  They all knew they had all come here to have a new start in life. They all knew the sort of background they’d come from and what sort of background everyone else had come from and it gave them a big feeling of all being in the same boat. It was a fresh start for everyone.

I make no apologies for quoting extensively from Tony Parker’s important book.  Most of what we know about council estates and their people comes from the concerned middle class; sometimes well-meaning sociologists, often a politically hostile commentariat.   In People of Providence, Parker allows them to speak for themselves.

If there’s an element of nostalgia in these recollections, comments on the later estate make less comfortable reading. For the fact is that much of this early shine had rubbed off by the 1970s.  As early as 1975, Neil McIntosh could write that ‘although the Brandon is a “show estate” it is also in some senses a problem estate’ with levels of juvenile crime and vandalism that rated it ‘among the worst estates’. (5)

Fleming Road and towers

By the end of the decade, Brandon was subject to an equal onslaught from the local press as its headlines made clear: ‘Vandal-hit estate goes to war’, ‘Corridors of Fear’, ‘It’s revolting! Slum estate tenants in new protest’. (6)

What happened?  According to one of those articles, the Brandon Estate was simply – even as a panoply of security measures was being taken – ‘a monument to the dogged determination of the vandal’ but this is to look at the symptom rather than the cause.

Others blamed the Greater London Council’s removal of resident caretakers in 1971 but, in fact, those caretakers were already beleaguered – lacking the authority and means to tackle vandalism and removed for their own safety.

For Parker’s older interviewees, one explanation was simply ‘new people’ coming in.  They could and would – as we’ll see – express this more pungently but, for the time being we might accept that an earlier community and perhaps a shared ethos were dissolving.

Walters House

To Alice Coleman, the explanation was straightforward – ‘design disadvantage’ was the (more or less) technical term she applied; what she meant was council estate high-rise caused juvenile delinquency.  It really was that simple: ‘two or three storeys are harmless, but more are harmful’.  ‘Defensible space’ was one solution; in the later 1980s, one of her intrepid team:  (7)

lived on the Brandon Estate and persuaded the tenants to use a small fund to fence in one of the blocks. The result was magical. Ground-floor tenants who had boarded up their windows and lived in artificial light to avoid the high risk of being burgled, felt safe enough to take the boards down and let daylight in.

If only it really were that simple.  Now is not the time to critique Coleman yet again (though the article from which the quotation is drawn is hubristic even by her standards) but her refusal to engage with socio-economic factors, her lack of curiosity about change over time and her wilful ignorance of similar problems of antisocial behaviour in a range of housing environments should be enough to invalidate her position.

Molesworth House

Still, to be clear, council tenants are entitled to be – and feel – safe so, of course, it made sense to install entryphone systems and beef up general security as the GLC and latterly Southwark Council have attempted to do.

There was another equally simplistic explanation to hand: ‘Enoch was right’. (8)  A number of Parker’s interviewees associated the decline of the Estate with the arrival on it of (in their words) ‘coloureds’.  We could dismiss this as white, working-class racism and move on but (apart from the fact that easy phrase lets the middle class off the hook) it’s more useful to look at the dynamics of what happened.

Moreton House

A second wave of slum clearance and rehousing in Southwark coincided with a change in council housing allocations policy from a system favouring established local residency to one prioritising needs.  In this context, a black population which had hitherto been confined to low quality privately rented housing became eligible for council housing.  In the competition for a scarce resource, what was ‘fair’ and progressive in policy terms – those in greatest need or those now being displaced being given housing – could be perceived as ‘unfair’ by those who felt they had longer-established claims. (9)

One of Parker’s interviewees described the Estate’s newcomers in stark terms: ‘Every one of them are all problem families…and all blacks, or nearly all of them’.  This was racism but it was not racism based on some primal antagonism between white and black (as I believe later history has demonstrated) but a conflict in which race was the cipher. For long-term white residents confronting a decline in the Estate, it was easy to confuse correlation with causation but, in reality, most of the newer black residents were equally victims of the criminal behaviour of young people of varying ethnicity.

Eglington Court

A final explanation rests on those youth demographics.  For the Southwark Community Development Group in 1975 the reason for the prevalence of vandalism on Brandon was ‘not hard to find’ – 27 per cent of the Estate’s population were aged between 5 and 16. This was almost ten per cent above the Borough average.

Is this sufficient an explanation – a kind of updated version of ‘boys will be boys’?  Surely not but in a context where traditional structures of authority were in decline perhaps it does represent a significant component of one.

Trevelyan House

Meanwhile, embrace the complexity.  Parker also talked to ‘Ian’, a young lad in his early teens (white as it happens) who artlessly describes the favourite pastimes of he and his ‘gang’ of mates – stealing milk bottles, ‘bombing’ people by dropping bottles from balconies, petty theft, ‘tagging’ buildings, and so on.  He had also embraced a school scheme which saw him helping out elderly residents with their shopping and odd jobs:

One old lady said to me when I did something in her house that she used to think children nowadays were all bad but it had made her change her mind.

Little did she know.  How little any of us really know.

All this is to accentuate the negative.  It dwells on a particularly dysfunctional period for the country as a whole, the strains and stresses of which were far from being confined to the Brandon Estate.  In reality, as Parker’s introduction is at pains to make clear the reality was ‘mixed’. More recently, the biggest controversy has been Southwark Council’s needless and insensitive programme to replace functional wooden window frames with uPVC which was eventually overturned (for the leaseholders at least) in the courts. (10)

Shopping precinct and ‘Hairy Mammoth’ clubroom (now library). The Civic Trust award is to the bottom right of the building.

Life’s too messy for the Estate to have ever fulfilled all the hopes placed in it in 1961 but an estate described as ‘perfect’ and the ‘closest to heaven I’ll ever get’ can’t be all bad, can it?  It’s had money spent on it – a significant refurbishment programme in the 1980s and a £1m repair programme in the early 1990s – but really this is little more than routine maintenance.

It has survived the worst of its social problems; with hindsight, a phase that afflicted estates of all kinds across the country (for which I’ve yet to see definitive explanation). It has been the only Southwark estate to escape major regeneration and it remains popular with the vast majority of its residents who value both the quality of their homes and environment.

The Brandon Estate has stood the test of time, a tribute to the vision of the Council and architects who planned it and, if it hasn’t created a better world – a tall order, it has certainly created a better life for many thousands of its people.

Sources

(1) ‘Housing at the Brandon Estate, Southwark’, Architects’ Journal Information Library, November 1 1961

(2) John Betjeman, ‘Making the Best of Brick’, Daily Telegraph, 9 February 1959

(3) The Brandon 1 TARA [Tenants’ and Residents’] Newsletter, July 2005

(4) Tony Parker, People of Providence. A Housing Estate and Some of Its Inhabitants (1983).  ‘Providence’ is the name Parker applied to the Estate to preserve its anonymity.  His interviewees are also anonymised though personal details are accurate.

(5) Neil McIntosh, Southwark Community Development Group, Housing for the Poor? Council Housing in Southwark, 1925-1975 (July 1975)

(6) These headlines are drawn from articles in the Mercury, 3 August 1978; South London Press, 12 March 1980; and Mercury, 28 May 1981 respectively found in the news cuttings files of the Southwark Local History Library and Archives.

(7) Alice Coleman, ‘Design Disadvantage in Southwark’ (2008)

(8) The quotation appears at least twice in People of Providence.  It’s a reference to the then Conservative British politician Enoch Powell whose ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in April 1968 foretold social breakdown and violence resulting from ethnic minority immigration.

(9) This is argued in far greater detail by Harold Carter in ‘Building the Divided City: Race, Class and Social Housing in Southwark, 1945-1995’, The London Journal, vol 33, No 2, July 2008

(10) Euan Denholm, ‘Million Pound Window Fiasco in Walworth’, Southwark News, 27 January 2005

The Brandon Estate, Southwark I: ‘New and dramatic’

Tags

1950s, 1960s, LCC, Mixed Development, Southwark

The Brandon Estate in Southwark is ‘one of the most novel’ of the London County Council’s housing schemes. (1)  There’s a lot to talk about – its visual presence, path-breaking high-rise, pioneering mixed development and, conversely, an early rehabilitation of Victorian terraces. Then there’s maybe the more familiar tale of descent – from ‘showpiece’ to ‘problem estate’.

Pointing to the future, an early image of the Estate from Lorrimore Square

To begin with, the Estate was intended as a statement – part of the LCC’s attempt to regenerate ‘the decaying and lifeless south bank of the Thames’.  This had begun in 1911 with County Hall, now shamefully debased (a metaphor for our times) into a tacky tourist attraction.  It was developed, in a grander post-45 vision, with the Festival of Britain and its legacy.  The LCC proclaimed: (2)

the slim white towers of the LCC’s  Brandon Estate at Kennington Oval have added a new and dramatic feature to the South London skyline…the 20^th century South London Panorama is at last beginning to rival the older glory of the scene across the river.

All this replaced, in the words of the Council, ‘a depressing area of dingy 19^th century terrace houses interspersed with bomb sites’, acquired by the LCC in 1952.  The housing was overcrowded, lacking basic amenities and in poor repair but it was ‘for the most part structurally sound’.  In another age, these might have become the des res’s of a gentrifying middle class; in social democratic Britain, 182 of these houses were converted into 328 self-contained council-owned flats and maisonettes which formed around one quarter of the new estate.

Rehabilitated Victorian terraces on Lorrimore Square

Facing new build on Lorrimore Square. The wooden figure is the adapted remains of another artwork provided for the Estate – William Mitchell’s 14 ft totem pole originally equipped with chains for children to climb on

These are best seen in Lorrimore Square, retained from an existing but substantially adapted street pattern at the western end of the Estate.  One side of the square is formed of substantial three-storey Victorian terraces and two sides of equivalent modern homes.  The other is occupied by the new St Paul’s Church, a modernist Grade II-listed building of reinforced concrete designed by Woodroffe Buchanan & Coulter in 1959-1960 to replace one destroyed by wartime bombing.

The rehabilitation drive is rightly associated with the later 1960s’ disenchantment with estate design but it had been prefigured in a neglected clause of Nye Bevan’s 1949 Housing Act which provided 75 per cent Exchequer grants to councils for the purchase of homes for improvement or conversion.  More famously, that Act declared a classless vision of council housing by removing the stipulation it be considered solely working-class accommodation.  Different times and a lost alternative history.

Forsyth Gardens, on the Estate’s main artery Cook’s Road, was a new square lined with brick-faced four-storey maisonettes designed by Gregory Jones, intended to maintain, in Pevsner’s words, this ‘revival of Georgian town planning traditions’. (3)

The original LCC plan for the Estate

Rehabilitation and the retention of an existing streetscape will please contemporary critics but the latter was the cause of some anguish at the time when the principle of separating cars and pedestrians was very much the governing wisdom.

The Council lamented that it had been ‘impossible to provide an ideally comprehensive system of independent footpaths’ but concluded that: (4)

by closing certain roads, through traffic had been canalised in Cook’s Road and every effort has been made to cater imaginatively for the pedestrian…a third of the inhabitants will in fact have uninterrupted pedestrian access to shops and open space.

Apparently, this wasn’t enough for early residents, two-thirds of whom wanted less traffic, and the author of the Architects’ Journal review of the Estate urged the closure of Cook’s Road too. You can make up your own mind of the rights and wrongs here but it’s a reminder at least that later judgments should be humble.

Napier House from Cook’s Road. You can see Hollaway’s decorative mural at the top of the block but the Canterbury Arms pub sign is missing.

Further east, the Estate assumes its more striking and daringly modernist form.   Across Cook’s Road lies the ten-storey Napier Tower, a gateway to the Estate’s pedestrianised shopping precinct, and beyond that its signature six 18-storey point blocks carefully set in a new extension to Kennington Park.   In 1957, these were the highest blocks the LCC had built.

The six 18-storey point blocks

If you visit the Estate, you’ll see that these towers are not some alien and overpowering presence in the terrain but fit, as the architects intended, comfortably into their landscape.  Their mix of bush hammered (providing texture) and precast finishes, pattern of strong horizontals and range of solid and glazed balconies gave, it was said, ‘a more humane scale and greater architectural sophistication than earlier points’. (5)

The high-rise development at the Estate’s eastern end was necessary to achieve the required density of 137 persons per acre – in total, the completed Estate would house a population of 3800, 600 more than had lived in the area prior to redevelopment.

The key principle of the Estate, designed by an LCC Architect’s Department team headed by Ted Hollamby, was ‘mixed development’.  This was the coming idea of the mid-1950s, promoting the ideal of a range of housing forms intended to break both the monotony of traditional forms of working-class housing – public and private – and provide housing appropriate to a range of people and households in different life stages.  It also licensed the idea of building high at a time when it was not envisaged that tower blocks would house young families.

Bungalows for old people on Lorrimore Road

Family houses on Greig Terrace

Brandon is the acme of the mixed development idea in a number of ways.  It’s seen, most obviously, in its: (6)

range of building types designed to cater for as many tastes and requirements as possible – bungalows for old people, two-storey houses and maisonettes for families who want gardens (and one person in three on this new estate will have a garden), together with flats ranging in height from three storeys to the 18 storey tower blocks.

But it’s there too in the variety of external materials used – ‘the list would read like a building exhibition catalogue of cladding materials’ according to one somewhat sceptical observer.  He went on to criticise ‘an exaggerated fear of monotony, reflected in some strangely inconsistent and unprincipled detailing and a wilfully random choice of finishes’.  But ultimately he was won over by: (7)

a conscious attempt to embody something of the visual intricacy and complexity which characterise, and attract us, in the organic and slow-grown parts of our older cities.  It succeeds in this, to a greater extent than most recently planned environments built in one piece.

This attention to a humane environment was seen also in other details of the Estate.  It included, for example, a number of small and secluded courtyard spaces – to the apparent consternation of the Housing Manager who foresaw ‘immorality in all sheltered corners’.  In this, of course, Alice Coleman would prove a worthy successor.

This early photograph of the Precinct also shows Hollaway’s ‘Hairy Mammoth’ and Canterbury Arms pub sign

It was seen as well in the artworks and decorative elements which adorned the Estate, notably the work of Anthony Hollaway and Lynn Easthope, employed by the LCC’s Housing Committee ‘as consultants for decorative treatment on housing estates’. Hollaway’s ‘hairy mammoth’ (marking the discovery of a fossilised mammoth tooth during site excavation) on the exterior wall of the club room survives as does his decorative frieze at the top of Napier Tower but the illuminated sign created for the Estate pub, the Canterbury Arms, and the broken tile mosaic in the precinct commemorating the Chartist meeting in 1848 on Kennington Common and other elements have been lost.

Cornish House with Henry Moore’s Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 3 to the foreground

All this art came at a cost of £3215 which included Hollaway’s £1760 annual fee.  He was rather resentful of the £8000 spent on the Estate’s masterpiece, Henry Moore’s Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 3 (donated at cost price by the artist), located in front of the Cornish House. (8)

All this is important as an indication of the care, attention and money (around £3.6m) that Hollamby and the LCC invested in the Brandon Estate, intended as a showpiece and not just another anonymous council estate.  But the Estate stands or falls as a home for its people and, in this too, standards were high.

Children at play on the Estate, 1976

Firstly, it was designed as a community.  Apart from the shopping precinct and club room already mentioned, there was a doctor’s surgery, a library, a housing area office and nine play spaces for toddlers and four playgrounds for older children.

The six point blocks contained 64 two-bedroom flats with all the modern conveniences to be expected in public housing – a bathroom and separate toilet, an electric drying cupboard, a linen cupboard and broom cupboard plus warm air central heating (from a central boiler room) and constant hot water.  Each flat also benefited from a full-length private balcony at its front and a second, smaller, balcony in front of the kitchen windows.

Living room of tower block flat

This image of the kitchen-diner also shows the Weatherfoil hot air heating system

At the top of each of the point blocks were four bed-sitter penthouses with private patios. The Housing Manager, moral antennae twitching, insisted that these be let to either all men or all women in any one block.  One observer described these as ‘the only genuine metropolitan penthouses’ she knew ‘to be had for £4 a week with heating thrown in’.

Living room of penthouse flat

It was with understandable pride, therefore, that the Estate was formally opened in December 1960 by Mrs Florence Cayford, chair of the LCC, as she ceremonially handed over the keys of no 62 on the 16^th floor of Cornish House to Mr and Mrs O’Brien.

Mr and Mrs O’Brien receive their keys from the mayor of Southwark in front of Cornish House

Another  early resident was Mr Lawrence Fenton – an accountant of a music publishing firm and perhaps a quiet embodiment of Nye Bevan’s classless vision of council housing, the 30 year-old chair of the Estate’s tenants association and a leading light of its cine club.  In the following year, the Estate was given a Civic Trust award for its design excellence. (9)

What could possibly go wrong?  We’ll follow up in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Elain Harwood, Space, Hope and Brutalism, English Architecture, 1945-1975 (2015)

(2) This and the preceding quotation are drawn from London County Council, Brandon Estate Southwark (ND)

(3) Bridget Cherry, Nikolaus Pevsner, London 2: South (1983)

(4) ‘Housing at the Brandon Estate, Southwark’, Architects’ Journal Information Library, November 1 1961

(5) ‘LCC Brandon Estate, Southwark’, Architecture and Building News, 3 January 1957

(6) ‘First of the “high altitude” tenants gets his key’, South London Observer, 21 January 1960

(7) ‘Housing at the Brandon Estate, Southwark’, Architects’ Journal Information Library

(8) Dawn Pereira, ‘Henry Moore and the Welfare State’ and ‘Current condition of LCC Patronage artworks’

(9) ‘Brandon Estate Clubs Get Off to Photo-Start’, South London Press, 23 December 1960. You can see some of the efforts of the Cine Club and much of the early life of the Estate on YouTube.

Dawson’s Heights, East Dulwich: ‘an example of the almost-lost art of romantic townscape’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Southwark

Kate Macintosh designed Dawson’s Heights back in the Sixties when she was just 26 years old.  If she weren’t very much alive and kicking – and still fighting the cause of high quality social housing – I’d call it a worthy memorial.  It remains much more than that in any case. Beloved by architectural groupies and a striking presence on the local skyline, most importantly it has provided a decent home to many.  Of course, it’s had its ups and downs.

Ladlands and the view to the north

The estate was conceived when Britain was building council housing on a massive scale, ambitious to clear once and for all the remaining slums (and many did remain) and house all its people decently and comfortably.  The best local authority architects and Housing Departments wanted to bring design quality to this numbers game too.  In Southwark, the Borough Architect and Planner, Frank Hayes, sought to achieve excellence through in-house competition.  Kate Macintosh won the competition to design Dawson’s Heights.

Kate Macintosh, c1966 (© Utopia London)

She had studied the existing alternatives, for one the five-storey walk-up blocks ubiquitous in London and specifically Speke House in Camberwell (since demolished).  Typical of its kind, she thought it ‘institutional’ – ‘all external expression of this is my home, this is where I live was forbidden’.

She was critical too of many of the point and slab blocks being built; they were ‘unrelated to the surrounding urban grain’ and she ‘found the anonymous grid expression of the exteriors of much LCC work repellent’.  In her words, she ‘absorbed the lessons’ of the far more innovative scheme of Park Hill in Sheffield ‘but disliked the apparent flattening of the hill produced by the constant height of each meandering super-block’. (1)

Dawson’s Heights would be different, not least because of its extraordinary site – a 13.8 acre hilltop site in East Dulwich: crowned with a refuse tip and ringed by interwar houses  now compulsorily purchased but many uninhabitable in any case due to the instability of hillside London clay. (2)

These circumstances dictated the basic layout of the new scheme – two large blocks (Ladlands to the north and Bredinghurst to the south) constructed on the more stable terrain and overlooking a central communal space, formerly the dump.  The buildings still required 60-80 feet reinforced concrete cylinders foundations.  The siren call of system building was resisted and a superstructure erected of load-bearing cross-walls, of brickwork in the four-storey blocks and of reinforced concrete for all but the top four floors of the higher buildings. (3)

Bredinghurst

Turning to the more creative aspects of the design, Macintosh devised a ziggurat-style scheme which ensured that two thirds of the flats had views in both directions and all had views to the north.  The varied height of the blocks, rising to twelve storeys at their central peak, made sure that every flat received sunlight even in deepest midwinter. (4)

To the scheme’s advocates – and I think most would agree – ‘the warm brick texture’ humanised the façades and avoided a foreboding monolithic appearance while the staggering of the blocks created ‘ever changing silhouettes’ adding ‘the beauty of surprise to a relentless suburb’. (5)

The approach to Bredinghurst from Overhill Road

English Heritage, whose recommendation for listing was rejected by the Secretary of State, was effusive in its praise:

The dramatic stepped hilltop profile is a landmark in SE London, and endows the project with a striking and original massing that possesses evocative associations with ancient cities and Italian hill towns…The generous balconies with remarkable views and natural light, the warm brick finish and thoughtful planning introduce a real sense of human scale to a monumental social housing scheme.

Still, not everybody loved it.  The Pevsner volume describes the blocks with ‘their chunky bands of balconies and access galleries’ as ‘disappointing close up’. (6)

Courtyard side of Bredinghurst

The Estate was constructed between 1968 and 1972 and cost in total a little over £1.6m to build.  It was a mixed development including a range of accommodation intended to suit individuals and families in a range of life circumstances and stages. Macintosh felt that:

if large blocks were to be accepted and loved, as a new way of living, they must try to replicate the best characteristics of the terraced street; that families of different sizes and age groups should intermingle, as their needs and strengths would be diverse and complementary.

However, unlike earlier examples of this principle, all the dwellings were contained within a single complex.  In Dawson’s Heights, there were 296 homes – 112 one-bed, 75 two-bed, 81 three-bed and 28 four-bed, all split-level dual aspect maisonettes:  a ‘Chinese puzzle of differing types to be assembled in various combinations’ is how Macintosh described it.

Medium-rise, generally larger maisonettes at the south end of Ladlands

Every flat has a private balcony, an amenity Macintosh fought for at a time when Housing Minister Richard Crossman was berating local authority architects for extravagance.  She designed them to serve as fire escapes (via a removable glass panel to the neighbouring balcony) and thus justified their inclusion on safety grounds.

Of course, the best-laid plans…

There were early problems with damp and condensation in the flats.  By 1976 the Council was embarking on a second programme of repairs to rectify the issue at a cost of around £0.5m.  Two overhead walkways which had originally connected the blocks were removed in the eighties in line with the ‘designing out crime’ ideas of Alice Coleman.

By 1989 some residents were highly critical of Southwark Council’s failure to repair and maintain the Estate and they sought an alternative landlord. (7)   No doubt the issue was real but the timing was fortuitous, coming a year after the introduction of so-called ‘Tenants’ Choice’ powers in the Conservatives’ 1988 Housing Act.  The latter were intended, in the government’s words, ‘to open up the closed world of the local authority housing estates to competition and to the influence of the best housing management practices of other landlords’. (8)

Such ‘competition’ was helped here by a Housing Corporation grant of £200,000 to the Samuel Lewis Housing Trust to do the groundwork for a possible transfer but all these efforts came to naught when the Trust withdrew in 1994 having failed to receive the funding it reckoned it needed to update the Estate.

The view south-east from Bredinghurst

And then things moved again.  A tenant vote in favour of transfer to the Trust in September 1997 was followed in 1998 – presumably not coincidentally – by an award of £3.354m from the government’s Estates Renewal Challenge Fund, with the Trust finding by some means an additional £3.3m from ‘the private sector’.  The new Labour Housing Minister Hilary Armstrong called it ‘a real opportunity to tackle the problems and get the estate back on its feet’ – ‘for many years the people living on the Dawson’s Heights estate have had inadequate housing’. (9)  Quite a comedown for a showpiece development.

Money was spent on rectifying some subsidence problems around the periphery of the Estate and on installing double glazing, replacing roofs and upgrading security.  But this wasn’t to be quite the Promised Land – ‘according to residents, that is when it all started to go wrong’.  One stated that the ‘windows and roofs started leaking almost straight away…the security doors are always smashed… the estate is never cleaned and lifts are broken.’  All this and they were paying higher rents. (10)

Ladlands and landscaping

This takes us some way away from the usual accounts of Dawson’s Heights which focus on the architectural excitement of the Estate.  To me, however, it’s a useful reminder of the ‘real world’ issues – structural problems which need repair, day-to-day management and upkeep, safety – that determine the actual experience of council tenants, however prestigious the development.  And, despite the anathematising of council-run estates and the murky process which has effectively forced transfer of homes from council ownership, it reminds us that good management and tenants’ interests are not necessarily best served by loss of council control.

In fairness, the Southern Housing Group (the new incarnation of the Samuel Lewis Trust) has upped its game considerably since those earlier complaints and residents – many, probably around one in three, of them owner-occupiers now – seem generally satisfied with the management of the Estate.  Certainly it looks good and what Pevsner called the ‘drab stretch of green’ at its centre is now an attractively landscaped play area and open space.

Central open space and Ladlands

It is still the architecture which compels attention, of course.  Close-up, it’s powerful without being overpowering, retaining that intimacy and sense of individuality which Macintosh sought.  From afar it’s a commanding presence on the south London skyline. It remains a benign monument to an era when high-quality housing for the people was a proud priority.

Sources

For plans and interiors and some additional views of Dawson’s Heights, do take a look at Modernist Estates posts on the estate.

(1) Quoted in Utopia London, Dawson’s Heights

(2) James Dallaway, ‘Dawson’s Hill before Dawson’s Heights’, The Dulwich Society Newsletter, Spring 2006

(3) AJ Information Library, ‘Dawson’s Heights’, Architects’ Journal, 25 April 1973

(4) Single Aspect, ‘Dawson Heights Estate – Twentieth Century Society walk, July 2010’

(5) Twentieth Century Society, ‘Dawson’s Heights: the “Italian” hill town in Dulwich’, May 2012. The comment on the ‘changing silhouettes’ is quoted from Philip Boyle in the Docomomo newsletter, no.19, Winter 2009. The English Heritage statement which follows is also taken from this source.

(6)  Bridget Cherry, Nikolaus Pevsner, London: South (2002)

(7) Carol Munday, secretary of DH Tenants’ and Residents’ Association quoted in Housing Corporation, Tenants’ First, no.2, Spring 1993

(8) Quoted in Policy Studies Institute, Changing Role of Local Housing Authorities: An interim assessment (1990)

(9) ‘Over £4m Funding To Benefit Southwark and Newham LBC Estates’, Local Government Chronicle, 27 February 1998

(10) Nick Triggle and Lucy Gooding, ‘We have been left up Dawson Creek’, South London Press, September 14, 2001

The Aylesbury Estate, Southwark: ‘State-led gentrification’?

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1960s, Multi-storey, Regeneration, Southwark

In 1997, as we saw last week and graced by a visit from the prime minister no less, the residents of the Aylesbury Estate had reason to believe that their homes would be safeguarded and improved.  In the event a £56.2m grant from the New Deal for Communities fund promised – or threatened, depending on your point of view – something far more radical.

The grant was provided as the first element of a £234m regeneration scheme which would demolish the existing 2700-home estate.  Residents’ tenancies were to be transferred to the newly-formed Faraday Housing Association.  To fund the overall redevelopment, 60 acres of the Estate would be sold to private developers and some 1000-1500 private homes built for sale. Overall housing densities would increase significantly.

A key element of the scheme was its belief in ‘mixed communities’ – in practice, the insertion of better-off middle-class owner-occupiers or renters – in the belief that this would ‘lift’ the area and improve local commercial and community facilities.

To ideological opponents, this was nothing less than ‘state-led gentrification’. (1) But tenants were suspicious too. Some did fear a middle-class take-over or were, at best, doubtful of its benefits.  More practically, many were worried they would lose gardens or access to open space and parking places.  They feared that their new flats would be smaller and feared their rights would diminish and their rents rise under a new social landlord. (2)

View from balcony © aylesburytenantsfirst.wordpress.com

In general, residents were happy with their flats and, in many cases, defensive of the Estate.  They certainly had complaints about poor maintenance and security but felt that these issues could be addressed by refurbishment and greater investment, at least in preference to a long drawn-out and uncertain redevelopment programme.

In December 2001, on a turn-out of 76 per cent, 73 per cent of residents voted against stock transfer.  The whole scheme was blown out of the water.

The Council initially considered refurbishment but it concluded that the Estate’s system-built construction made this prohibitively expensive – a price tag of £350m was claimed.  In 2005, the then Liberal Democrat-controlled council voted once more to demolish the Estate and rebuild.

In January 2007, another masterplan for the Estate – the sixth in this long-running saga – was agreed with a twenty-year programme and an overall budget of £2.4bn.  A deal with London & Quadrant Housing Group to redevelop the south-western corner of the Estate as the first phase of the scheme was agreed in the following year. (4)

Ironically maybe, in the meantime, whilst the physical appearance of the Estate declined during this long period of uncertainty, the social environment improved.  In 2007 The People reported – in tabloid-style but in sharp contrast to earlier media ‘exposés’ – that crime was down by a third, fear of crime had halved, drug use had fallen by a quarter and education results had improved by 300 per cent. (4)

The Aylesbury New Deal for Communities programme, set up in 1999 with a £20m budget for what were termed ‘social interventions’ and its successor organisation, Creation Trust, established in 2009, can claim some credit for these improvements.

It wasn’t all roses.  In 2009, 44 per cent of households were on housing benefit and a similar proportion reported at least one serious problem with their property. (5)  In 2012, the Estate’s unemployment rate stood at 16 per cent, compared to the Borough average of 11. (6)

Still, Aylesbury Tenants and Leaseholders First could claim very plausibly that: (7)

Our lived experience of crime on the Estate does not match the myth – and this is borne out by the statistics. We need to counter these pernicious negative stereotypes…We are not going to be bullied into giving up good sound insulation, light, views and space because of exterior neglect and delays in re-housing growing families due to current housing scarcity.

It’s worth pointing out that almost one third of residents have lived on the Estate for more than twenty years so there is an established community for whom the Aylesbury – warts and all – is home.

Nevertheless, ‘regeneration’ has proceeded.  Demolition of the Little Bradenham block began in September 2010 – Phase 1a of a nine-phase scheme slated to take fifteen years.  The new-build is up and occupied.

In a sign of things to come, the tenure mix of the new homes in the six new buildings is 48 per cent private, 39 per cent ‘affordable’ and 13 per cent ‘intermediate’ (generally shared equity).

In this context, of course, ‘affordability’ is a deeply suspect concept. In 2011, Southwark estimated that a median household income of almost £36,000 was required for two-bed affordable housing and £42,300 for three-bed. (8)  In the most recent data available (2008), almost half of Southwark households had annual incomes of less than £15,000.

Currently on the estate, there are around 2250 homes rented from the council and some 500 privately owned – around 17 per cent of flats have been purchased through Right to Buy.  The regeneration scheme will build around 4200 new homes of which half are designated ‘affordable’.  This, by its own calculations, represents a ‘small loss of 150 affordable homes’. (9)

To unpick this further, of 2095 affordable units in the regeneration scheme, 1568 will be socially rented and 527 will be ‘intermediate’ (meaning here that they will be available to rent or buy to those earning above the financial threshold for socially rented property). (10)

So – in fact, fewer socially rented properties and fewer truly affordable properties. If ‘state-sponsored gentrification’ might seem a bit strong, it’s undeniable that council housing is being progressively marginalised and that low-income families are being squeezed out of central London. It’s also hard not to see ‘affordable’ as an essentially fraudulent term.

In this context, there is a suspicion that even the new social rented housing will not enjoy the safeguards traditionally granted. Documentation relating to Phase 2 of the redevelopment omits reference to the National Rent Regime which normally governs rent levels in social housing. (See the comment below for discussion of this.)

View from balcony © aylesburytenantsfirst.wordpress.com

Personally – I’m an outsider, of course, and I completely understand how some residents of the Aylesbury would feel differently about their homes – the choice to demolish the current blocks seems plausible.

Elements of the regeneration scheme seem attractive.  I guess cynics would say they always do in the public relations outreach but an aspiration to revive ‘the traditional grain and pattern of the streets obliterated by the sixties estate’ seems positive.  The Aylesbury’s walkways never worked as envisaged.  You can admire the Estate for its scale and ambition, even for its aesthetic up to a point though few would argue it’s lovely and it’s looking far from its best at present.

It’s also positive, I think, that design differences between private and social/affordable housing are being eradicated – in other words, that social housing doesn’t ‘look’ different and can’t be stigmatised.

The computer-generated vision of the future from the Aylesbury Area Action Plan

More radically, Catherine Bates, a Southwark planning officer, says: (11)

We’re determined to break down the estate concept…By the end of the development we no longer want the area to be conceived as a single perceptible entity but feel that it belongs to the city around it.

I guess all this shows how far we’ve come from those days in the sixties when Southwark Council’s ambition was to build big and boldly and when the Estate itself was seen as a powerful statement of the role – and duty – of the state, local and national, to house its people.

‘Regeneration’ remains – quite rightly – desperately controversial. In principle, it’s a good and necessary thing for many run-down estates and neglected communities. In context, it is mired in a world of private profit and a definition of ‘affordability’ which is a travesty of the word.  In practice, while ‘social cleansing’ may seem too emotive a term, regeneration acts against the interests of existing communities and reduces the housing opportunities of ordinary working-class people.

Regeneration, yes.  This regeneration, no.

Sources

(1) Loretta Lees, ‘The urban injustices of New Labour’s “new urban renewal”: the case of the Aylesbury Estate in London’, 2013

(2) David Blackman, ‘Where did it all go wrong?’ in Regeneration, Inside Housing, February 22 2002

(3) ‘Urban Initiatives remodels south London’s Aylesbury Estate’, bdonline, 3 October 2008

(4) Jon Kirk, ‘Welcome to the Aylesbury Estate – once so grim its residents dubbed it a hell-hole’, The People, 24 June 2007

(5) Southwark Housing Requirements Study 2008.  Sub-Area Report: Aylesbury Estate, June 2009

(6) Karl Murray, Understanding the impact of the economic downturn on BAME communities: A case study of the Aylesbury estate in the London Borough of Southwark, June 2013

(7) Aylesbury Tenants and Leaseholders First website

(8) Southwark Council, Affordable Housing: Draft Supplementary Planning Document, June 2011

(9) Southwark Council, Aylesbury Area Action Plan, January 2010

(10) ‘Aylesbury Area Action Plan evidence base: projected tenure split and bedroom mix, 2009’ quoted in the blog Southwark Notes – Whose Regeneration?, ‘Aylesbury Estate: All changes subject to change’

(11) Quoted in Ike Ijeh, ‘Aylesbury Estate: Taking back the streets’, building.co.uk, August 3 2012

For a recent and thorough analysis of regeneration in a number of London council estates, read the UCL Urban Laboratory’s Urban Pamphleteer #2, ‘Regeneration Realities’.

Ben Campkin’s new book, Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture, has a chapter on the Aylesbury and looks at ‘regeneration’ more broadly.

The Southwark Notes website also provides full analysis of a number of the regeneration schemes currently affecting the borough.

Aylesbury Tenants First have also have a blog on the Estate and their campaign to defend it.

The Aylesbury Estate, Southwark: ‘all that is left of the high hopes of the post-war planners is derelict concrete’

Tags

1960s, Multi-storey, Regeneration, Southwark

Tony Blair made his first public speech after New Labour’s 1997 landslide election victory in the Aylesbury Estate.  This was a time of high hopes and Blair’s words capture the promise of the moment:

I have chosen this housing estate…for a very simple reason. For 18 years the poorest people have been forgotten by government…There will be no forgotten people in the Britain I want to build…

There are estates where the biggest employer is the drugs industry, where all that is left of the high hopes of the post-war planners is derelict concrete.

In the following year, the Aylesbury Estate was awarded £56m as one of 17 ‘pathfinder partnerships’ awarded cash under the Government’s New Deal for Communities scheme – ‘a key programme in the Government’s strategy to tackle multiple deprivation in the most deprived neighbourhoods in the country’.

That didn’t work out so well.  As we’ll see, the Estate continues to languish though it is now – fifteen years on – in the early stages of a second regeneration project.  Both – and the Estate itself – have been controversial.

The Aylesbury was ill-fated from the outset.  It was built on a 60 acre site, replacing a rundown area of terraces, tenements and works – a massive canvas for what would become reputedly the largest social housing estate in Europe.

Designed by Hans Peter Trenton and a team of young architects in Southwark Council’s Department of Architecture and Planning, it reflects the modernist ideas of the day.  Ben Campkin’s recent study of the Estate provides a better architectural description of their expression in the Aylesbury than I can: (1)

exposed concrete; ‘honest’ expression of structure; the repetition of geometric forms; and the elevation of slab blocks on piloti.

It would comprise around 2700 homes in all, accommodating a population of almost 10,000 at peak in 16 four- to fourteen-storey so-called ‘snake blocks’ including the largest single housing block in Europe.  It was built by Laing – whose interests exerted a heavy influence over the external appearance of the Estate – using the Jespersen system: a large panel system using prefabricated concrete slabs.

Construction began in 1963.  The collapse of the Ronan Point tower block in 1968 ensured this would be the last large-scale use of industrialised building methods.

If the construction – and, arguably, the appearance – were industrial, the overall design of the Estate reflected communal ideals, most strikingly in its ‘streets in the sky’ which were intended to ease pedestrian movement across the Estate, free from the danger and noise of traffic.

Walkways linked the Estate’s blocks – ‘route decks’ at second floor level for movement between blocks which included space for shops and other community facilities and ‘local decks’, with play areas, within the blocks.  Garaging and traffic movement took place below.  (2)

The flats were large and nearly always far better accommodation than new residents had known before as these three reminiscences remind us: (3)

To get a council flat was to go up in the world.

Oh, yes. There’s no doubt about it. Coming to the new estate for most of us at that time was like Shangri-La

We thought we was moving into Buckingham Palace!

But the overall ‘feel’ of the Estate was problematic from the outset.  The architectural press described it as ‘drab’ and ‘monotonous’.

Even as the first residents moved in and the Estate was formally opened by Anthony Greenwood, Labour’s Minister of Housing and Planning, in October 1970, one local Tory councillor described it, unoriginally, as a ‘concrete jungle…not fit for people to live in’. (4)

There were early design problems too – the walkways required noise insulation, some finishings were of low quality, little was spent on shared facilities such as lifts and open space

Southwark’s architects recognised this themselves and blamed the £1m cost-savings forced on the project by the Government prior to construction: (5)

There is little doubt that the public areas are the least successful part of the Development.  The lack of finishes and the poor quality of many of the materials provided has provided a very drab environment…This seems almost to have provoked mistreatment and vandalism.  The extensive areas of bare concrete, asphalt, and cheap obscured glass, contribute to the overall feeling of low cost Local Authority housing, and it is almost an insult to the many tenants who are proud of their homes…It is essential that adequate financial backing should now be given to put these deficiencies right.  Failure to do so will result in the Estate rapidly becoming a slum.

By 1976, the Council had spent £2.6m on basic remedial work.  And when Southwark’s housing chair formally ‘topped out’ the Estate in September that year, the local newspaper headlined its report ‘Epitaph to the “nightmare” Estate’. (6)

By the 1980s, the Estate was notorious for crime and anti-social behaviour and relished by the media as a potent symbol of the ‘Broken Britain’ of the day.  Naturally, it also became a poster-child for theorists of ‘defensible space’ including Oscar Newman himself who slated the Aylesbury’s design in a 1974 BBC documentary.

And, later, when Alice Coleman noted that ‘the notorious Aylesbury Estate has 18 km of walkways making it possible to reach 2268 dwellings from any single entrance without having to set foot on the ground’, she didn’t mean it as a compliment. (7)

That correlation might not mean causation, that similar problems bedevilled suburban ‘cottage estates’, that deeper social and economic causes might be at play was ignored – the superficial plausibility of the argument won the day and did, in its way, its own damage.

And the feelings and experiences of the actual residents were mixed and more complex.  Most liked their flats – they remained for the most part good accommodation.  Many liked their neighbours and resented the bad press the Estate received.  But the crime and fear of crime were real as were the difficult life circumstances of many of the residents.

And although, it’s a desperately unfashionable thing to say, Tony Blair was right to highlight the problems of the Aylesbury – and other similar estates – and to promise concerted, collective action to rectify them.  That would prove a rocky path, however.  We’ll look at that in the next post.

Sources

(1) Ben Campkin, Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture (2013)

(2) London Borough of Southwark Department of Architecture and Planning, Aylesbury Redevelopment, ND

(3) Long-term residents of the Estate quoted in Sarah Helm, ‘Lost souls in the city in the sky’, New Statesman, 17 July  2000 and Richard Godwin, ‘We shall not be moved: residents give their verdict on life on the Aylesbury Estate’, Evening Standard, 26 March  2013

(4) Cllr Ian Andrews, quoted in ‘”Showpiece” Estate is unfit to live in, says Tory councillor’, South London Press, 16 October  1970

(5) Borough Development Department, Aylesbury Development in Use, May 1973

(6) South London Press, 10 September  1976

(7) Alice Coleman, ‘Design Influences in Blocks of Flats’, The Geographical Journal, vol. 150, no. 3, November, 1984

My thanks to the Southwark Local History Library for help in accessing the primary sources noted above.

The Walworth Clinic, Southwark: ‘the Health of the People is the Highest Law’

Tags

1930s, Southwark

‘Salus populi suprema est lex’. Cicero said it fourteen centuries earlier but Southwark Borough Council translated the phrase into English and bricks and mortar and placed it proudly above the entrance of the new Walworth Clinic opened in 1937.

The state, by then, had come to recognise some responsibility for the welfare of its citizens but this had been a tortuous and piecemeal process.  Regularly employed male workers might enjoy National Insurance or trade union and Friendly Society benefits.  The poorest were stigmatised still by their dependence on charity or the Poor Law and its vestiges.

In 1929 the Local Government Act turned over remaining Poor Law services to the counties and boroughs.  It was an opportunity for progressive councils to build on functions already acquired – in maternal and infant welfare and tuberculosis care and prevention – to develop comprehensive healthcare programmes for their population. In this way, they would prefigure the National Health Service created in 1948.

Local health centres – such as those already examined in Finsbury, Bermondsey and Woolwich – were an important element of this programme and would be models for primary healthcare in the new post-1948 service. 

Walworth in 1946 from http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk. Image EAW000645 © English Heritage

Southwark first came under Labour control in 1919 when the Party swept to victory in local elections across the country. In the same year, the Maternity and Child Welfare Act was passed.  The new Council took up the cause, investing, for example, in a municipal store to supply cost-price or free milk and medicines to expectant mothers.

Southwark Labour lost power in 1922. The Municipal Reformers – antagonistic towards anything that smacked of ‘municipal socialism’ and jealous guardians of the ratepayer’s purse – scaled down these efforts.

But 1934 saw Labour back in power and committed to further reform. A Public Health and Sanitary Committee was established, a ‘complete investigation of the public health problems of the borough’ set under way.  The Medical Office of Health, William Stott, was asked to specify the premises he needed to deliver local health services.

The Centre illustrated in 1937 with white stone parapets now disappeared © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

The result? Three years later, Southwark was ‘the first borough to have the whole of its health services in one building’ – a building which Councillor Gillian, the chair of the Committee, claimed ‘beats Harley Street’.(1)

The Council took the view, Gillian stated,  that :(2)

Cllr AJ Gillian

when the health of the people, and particularly the poorer classes of the population, is involved, only the best equipment and the most modern scientific devices would suffice.

The Walworth Clinic, built at a cost of £50,000, would be  in form and content a practical fulfilment of these principles.

The building itself, designed by Percy Smart, still has a strong presence on Walworth Road.  Architecturally, according to English Heritage who listed it Grade II in 2010, it’s notable for its ‘strong massing, brick elevations, and jazzy details…a hybrid of Modern Movement and Art Deco styles’.

The Lancet was complimentary: (4)

The borough council have wisely decided that the building shall have a pleasing appearance and by the brightness of its interior give a cheery welcome, so that the inhabitants may be encouraged to make full use of an institution devoted to the improvement of their health.

Statuary group as shown in the opening programme © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

Easily missed but powerful when viewed is the statuary group, by an unknown sculptor, at the top of the building. A woman and three children of varying ages, the figures are both allegorical (the woman is holding the healing rod of the Greek god Aesculapius) and recognisably ‘real’ with their modern hairstyles and the child’s doll. These were: (3)

designed to symbolise the functions of the new building with relation to family health – motherhood, various stages of childhood and the spirit of healing.

But if these externals were important – and they were for the combination of dignity and accessibility they offered to the priority of the people’s health – you can feel from the contemporary descriptions that it’s the facilities and equipment that really excited the professionals.

The Centre today

The side and rear of the building from Larcom Street

Southwark, in the best form of one-upmanship, listed its innovations – the ‘first maternity department in the country to have an illuminated colposcope’ (you can look it up), the first to install an X-Ray department, and the only borough to have a ‘complete full-time chemical and bacteriological laboratory’.  The building was air-conditioned too.

Artificial Sunlight and Radiant Heat Clinic © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

X-Ray Clinic © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

The Centre, the Council stated, marked ‘a further great step’ towards its goal – ‘the betterment of the health of the people of Southwark generally’.

That meant administrative offices and qualified personnel (including a ‘Lady Sanitary Inspector’ and ‘Lady Assistant Medical Officers’) too as well as the vital front-line services – a dispensary, a TB clinic and solarium, a dental clinic, regular maternity and child welfare clinics, of course, and a weekly clinic for women over 45 ‘subject to illness and disease peculiar to this age period’.

The basement contained a ‘Tuberculosis Handicraft Centre’ where unemployed TB sufferers could learn craft skills which might lead to employment or might, at least, provide a useful hobby.

Rheumatic clinics and breast-feeding clinics were planned for the future.

And the Centre was only part of a programme which the Council understood quite clearly as a comprehensive assault on poverty and its causes. When rats overran one part of Southwark, the Council built a new sewerage system, costing £70,000. Opened just three months after the health centre, it too aimed to raise ‘the health of the people’.

Whereas Southwark once had the highest death rate in London and one sixth of its houses had been declared unfit for human habitation, Councillor Gillian could assert in 1937 that: (5)

This two-fold evil was being resolutely dealt with …Slums were being cleared, overcrowding was being overcome by new housing plans and Southwark was now one of the healthiest boroughs of London.

Over seventy-years later, the Elephant and Castle down the road is being redeveloped again and the centre itself looks slightly forlorn. There’s still an NHS clinic on the Larcom Street side but, as the signs in the contemporary photograph indicate, the building is to be let as office space. It’s a sad decline for a building which started with such bold and practical ideals.

In fact, the Walworth Clinic was a model superseded by the NHS a little over ten years after its opening.  There were plans for local health centres – based on these London examples – in the original NHS blueprint but the 162 envisaged, serving population centres of 20,000, were implemented only sporadically .

There was a loss here of democratic initiative, impetus and control that might have served the NHS well.  No-one would wish a return to the haphazard localism of the pre-NHS era but reforming and ambitious councils represented and practised the ideal of a community’s responsibility to safeguard and support its sick and vulnerable. The Walworth Clinic reminds us of that.

Sources

(1) Quoted in the Daily Telegraph, 17 September 1937 and South London Press, 1 October 1937, respectively

(2) Programme of the Opening of the New Health Services Department by the Worshipful Mayor of Southwark (Cllr CJ Mills) on Saturday September 25th 1937

(3) Programme of the Opening of the New Health Services Department…

(4) The Lancet , October 2 1937

(5) The Times, September 27 1937

Other detail and analysis comes from Esyllt Jones, ‘Nothing Too Good for the People: Local Labour and London’s Interwar Health Centre Movement, Social History of Medicine, vol 25, no.1 , February 2012.

The historic images come from the superb collection of photographs held by the Southwark Local History Library and Archive and are used with their permission.