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

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1960s, Multi-storey, Tower Hamlets

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

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

Charles Dickens House today

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

The Lawn, Harlow New Town

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

Keeling House (to the left) and the Cranbrook Estate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Gibson in 1950

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

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

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

Ronan Point

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Dickens House today

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(8) Rightmove and Find Properly websites

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

Tags

1960s, Multi-storey, Tower Hamlets

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

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

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

Charles Dickens House today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bob Mellish, 1965

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

(3) Ibid., 1965-1966

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Scurr House, Stepney: ‘the greatness of the country lies in the houses of the people’

Tags

1990s, Regeneration, Tower Hamlets

As we saw last week John Scurr House was opened – to much fanfare and with justified local pride – in July 1937. Despite the plaudits, ‘Stepney Council’s New Luxury Flats’ (as one press headline of the day described them) were always most importantly homes to local people but as they became less new they also became very far from luxurious.  In troubled times, even that notion of ‘local people’ became a contested one. Nevertheless, in 2015 we can say the estate has survived these crises and remains to provide high-quality housing that Stepney’s pioneering reformers would recognise and respect.

The East End has long been home to a diverse population and one of the first families to move in to John Scurr House were the Kings – a black family resident in the borough for three generations.  War would find Mr King serving in the merchant navy and a son in the Royal Navy but when his daughter, Amelia, volunteered for the Women’s Land Army in 1943 she found herself rejected by the Essex committee, unacceptable, it was said, to local farmers.

The case was raised in Parliament by new local MP and serving councillor (in fact, the chair of the Housing Committee which had built John Scurr House) Walter (‘Stoker’) Edwards. He elicited an apology and a repudiation of the ‘colour bar’ from the Minister of Agriculture but there was no restitution for Amelia. (1)

Thirty years later, the ‘luxury flats’ of the 1930s were outdated, their decline compounded by systematic neglect by the successor landlord, Tower Hamlets Council, at a time when they were slated for demolition under a new road scheme. In fact, the planned Northern Relief Road was abandoned in 1982 but the deterioration of the Estate was so real and so severe that tenants’ complaints of faulty electrical wiring, inadequate heating, lack of washbowls in bathrooms, damp, and cracked and distorted window frames were formally upheld by the Local Government Ombudsman. (2)

The plan of John Scurr House from the programme of its official opening in 1937.

While the Kings lived in John Scurr House, it remained a showpiece development but, as the estate declined and as the district became a centre of Asian immigration, issues of racial discrimination would resurface.  The historic reality is that incoming migrants have traditionally been forced to accept the worst of the nation’s housing.  This, however, this took a particularly sinister turn in the Tower Hamlets of the 1980s when many Bengali families were desperate for accommodation – by 1987 they formed some 90 per cent of the officially homeless in the Borough.

Accusations of officially-sanctioned and systematic discrimination against ethnic minorities in the allocation of Tower Hamlets’ council housing led, between 1984 and 1985, to a formal investigation into the Council’s housing policies by the Commission for Racial Equality.  The CRE report, published in 1988, concluded that: (3)

the housing department over a period of 10 years had systemically allocated Asian applicants to poorer quality housing: specifically, John Scurr House where 49 per cent of the estate population were Bangladeshi compared to 9 per cent in the borough.

While the roots of discriminatory practice lay in earlier Labour administrations, the CRE argued that it had been maintained by the Liberal majority which came to power in 1986.  That majority would survive until 1994 and it advanced a populist localism that most commentators saw as a barely disguised racial politics. But that’s another story… (4)

Back to John Scurr House, in 1985 it had been decided to sell off the estate only for the decision to be reversed a year later.  In 1987, when only 23 of the 119 flats were occupied, it was agreed to pass the day-to-day management of the the blocks to a number of local housing associations; 59 of the flats to be set aside for homeless families nominated by the Council, the rest being let to single homeless people.

A rear view during the estate’s refurbishment in 1995

In 1993, these new residents – some of whom had lived in their flats for five years – faced eviction when the Council assembled a financial package that would finally enable the refurbishment of the estate.  The implementation of the £6.6m scheme (supported by a £2.8m grant from the Government’s Estate Action programme and funding from, amongst others,  the Housing Corporation and the London Docklands Development Corporation) followed between 1996 and 1998.

The line from a contemporary press report – ‘An eyesore estate branded unfit for humans is to get a new lease of life’ – conveys just how far the once proud estate had fallen. (5)

John Scurr House front elevation, 1937

John Scurr House, 2014

The £3.8m contract was won by Architype and included the provision of a new roof and windows, new kitchens and bathrooms, modernised heating systems, insulation and ventilation and a new entrance with concierge services.  The number of flats in the northern block was reduced from 84 to 72.

John Scurr entrance, 2014

The ‘light lid’ powder-coated steel roof jutting 2m out over the fifth-floor walkway is particularly striking; the ‘portholes’ (ventilating the stairways) and external flues offer a maritime touch, perhaps as a nod to the area’s docklands past. (6)

As you can see, it’s a radical transformation and one that will probably disappoint architectural purists.  The white and pastel, ‘industrial’ appearance of the refurbished block’s façade is eye-catching but critics might argue it lacks the strong lines and ‘honesty’ of the original modernist design.  I’m not an architect so I’ll let others adjudicate between conflicting architectural views of style and integrity – so long as they remember that for its residents John Scurr is not primarily a piece of architectural history but a home.

The southern block was demolished, replaced by six houses and six flats.  Sixteen new housing association self-build homes were built on an adjacent site.  The new flats were transferred to local housing associations.  Since 2000, two thirds have been managed by Tower Hamlets Community Housing (THCH – a local housing association which ooperates exclusively in the Borough), the rest by Newlon Housing.

Housing erected on site of demolished south block, 2014

The estate’s proximity to the entrance to the Rotherhithe Tunnel and gritty Commercial Road ensure the area remains for the time being a relatively poor and ungentrified part of the capital and THCH serves a diverse and vibrant community. Still, a two-bed flat in the block is currently on sale for £270,000 and, to the agents, it’s close enough to ‘sought-after Narrow Street and the popular Thames-side bars and restaurants’ to offer future pickings.

The Stepney councillors who celebrated its opening back in 1937 couldn’t have anticipated this or the turbulent future of their flagship project.  They would take pleasure surely in the fact that John Scurr House continues to provide much-needed housing for local people and might recall the opinion expressed at the estate’s official opening that ‘the greatness of  the country lay in the houses of the people’.

Sources

(1) Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984) and Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 23 September 1943 vol 392 cc390-1

(2) Lucy Ash, ‘Block was doomed’, East London Advertiser, 26 December 1986

(3) Jennifer Maureen Lowe, Social Justice and Localities: the Allocation of Council Housing in Tower Hamlets, University of London Queen Mary College, PhD Thesis 2004

(4) Sarah Glynn, ‘Playing the Ethnic Card – politics and segregation in London’s East End’ (2008)

(5) ‘Hello, John, got a new look?’, East London Advertiser, 3 March 1994

(6) Tender details from Construction News, 29 September, 1994 and David Birkbeck, ‘Economical with the Roof’, Building Homes, July 1997, Issue 7

My thanks to Tower Hamlets Community Housing for additional detail and resources.

John Scurr House, Stepney: ‘Stepney Council’s New Luxury Flats’

Tags

1930s, Multi-storey, Tower Hamlets

John Scurr House still looks quite special as you glimpse it from the DLR at Limehouse but it has an even more extraordinary history, both in its politics and its architecture.  It started life as a design showpiece – a daring example of municipal modernism and an exemplar of high quality tenement living for council tenants.  It came near to ending it as a slum but for its recent rescue and striking refurbishment.  This blog tells that story, one involving many of the leading names in social housing and addressing many of its key issues.

John Scurr House, 2014

The scheme was officially opened in July 1937 but the journey to that proud day for the Borough of Stepney was a complex one.  That the densely populated industrial borough needed new housing was not in doubt but what was desirable and what was practicable were fiercely controversial.

An aerial view of Shadwell and Stepney from the south-east in 1946. John Scurr House can be seen in the bottom right-hand corner. EAW000637 Britain from Above © English Heritage

Labour first swept to power in the Borough in 1919 but the local party felt its housing plans thwarted by government red tape, so much so that the mayor wrote to The Times: to Clement Attlee, it was clear that ‘either there is some influence at work endeavouring to prevent local authorities carrying out their work…or that Messrs Dilly and Dally have not yet been demobilised’. (1)

Ministry advice to make best use of the London County Council’s new suburban estates was also rejected – local dockers needed to be near their place of work and the Borough’s Jewish population near synagogues and kosher markets. (2)  However, it was estimated that there were just four acres of undeveloped land in Stepney and this in scattered pockets.  At this time London Labour firmly opposed what might seem the inevitable solution to this quandary – multi-storey blocks.  The Party’s members believed working-class families needed – and deserved – cottage homes.

In the event, Labour narrowly lost power in Stepney in 1922 to an anti-Socialist Ratepayers’ grouping whose leading figures were unusually both idealistic advocates of slum clearance and supporters of good quality tenement building. These combined in the Limehouse Fields scheme – an officially declared Unhealthy Area of ten acres and the largest borough slum clearance project in the capital – in which they proposed to build a ten-storey block of maisonettes.

Wainwright House in Wapping, opened in 1932, is an example of the more conventional five-storey walk-up blocks of the period

To counter the usual opposition to such ‘barracks-like’ constructions, this was to be a model of its kind, designed by leading housing reformers, Major Harry Barnes and William Robert Davidge. (3) Their plans included lifts, wide access galleries (almost a prefiguring of much later deck-access schemes) as well as private balconies, decorative facades and two acres of playground. The development’s principal supporter, Councillor JD Somper, even suggested that ‘fowl runs’ might be added to the drying areas and communal laundries that the scheme already included.

Despite such ambitions, Labour remained opposed to flats and scuppered the scheme when they regained power in Stepney in 1925. Still, the scale of local problems and the impossibility of building cottage estates in the Borough demanded some pragmatism.  The new Labour council commissioned Ewart G Culpin and Steuart Bowers – one of the most important architectural practices in public housing in the interwar period – to design a model six-storey maisonette block.

Riverside Mansions, 2014

Riverside Mansions in Wapping included lifts, clubrooms, laundries and drying areas as well as an on-site shop, maternity and child welfare centre and gymnasium. Its appearance was softened by the use of different exterior brick treatments and a mansard roof.

The battle over high-rise was not over yet however.  When Stepney Labour lost power in the debacle of 1931, a Conservative-led council commissioned another of the leading architectural partnerships of the day, SD Adshead and Stanley Ramsey, to draw up plans for another showpiece project.  The ten-storey scheme selected was opposed by Labour but it would form the basis, when Labour regained power yet again in 1934 (securely this time, winning all 60 seats on the council) of the modified six-storey project which would become John Scurr House.

John Scurr

John Scurr House was named after the Poplar councillor – imprisoned for his part in the 1921 Rates Revolt – and former Mile End MP who had died in 1932. It was built at a cost of £88,358 and contained 119 one to four-bedroom flats in two separate blocks but it was a more impressive scheme than the dry figures suggest.  The local press celebrated ‘Stepney Council’s New Luxury Flats’ – as well they might: the modernist scheme became the first municipal development to be accepted for the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy.

John Scurr House front elevation, 1937

In functional terms, the report praised the: (4)

automatically controlled passenger lift in each block; a system of refuse disposal by means of chutes from all floors into central containers, a splendid children’s playground on the roof of the north block; a gravel courtyard with tarmac pathways surrounding; a large window lighting the central staircase made of concrete and glass; hot water supply to each individual flat.

In course of construction before the days of health and safety – a good view of the buildings’ steel framework

In design terms, it was the light steel frame construction and appearance which attracted attention, particularly the sweeping access galleries running around the outside of the building (rather than being hidden at the back as was the practice in most contemporary LCC tenement blocks) in true modernist fashion.  Most flats also enjoyed small private balconies.

Interior of north block showing part of courtyard, 1937

Meanwhile, in the vital social context, it was estimated in 1937 that over 8000 Stepney families were living in overcrowded conditions and the Borough still contained 6134 illegal underground rooms.

Arbour House in Whitechapel may not be as strikingly modernist as John Scurr House but it’s another reminder of Stepney Borough Council’s architectural ambitions

Stepney’s housing programme of that year – the Borough also opened the impressive 76-flat Arbour House in Arbour Square – could only make a small dent in a problem of such scale.  The LCC, which rehoused 280 families (233 of whom outside the Borough, mostly on the Becontree Estate), could do little more. (5)

It was not surprising that the Whitechapel MP JH Hall declared at the ceremonial opening of John Scurr House that:

slums and overcrowding were tragedies and the greatness of  the country lay in the houses of the people.  It was sad to think that many people in Stepney had places not fit to be called houses.

Nor is it surprising that London Labour, in power in the LCC since 1934, had by this time shifted decisively in favour of multi-storey tenement building.  A housing research group, set up by Herbert Morrison prior to that election, concluded that in London ‘block dwellings [were] inevitable’ and that, furthermore, it would be unwise to be ‘dogmatic’ regarding their height. Among its members were Harry Barnes and Ewart Culpin and, no doubt, the Stepney experience had played its own part in changing opinions.

But while John Scurr House had played a significant role in London’s wider housing history, its own longer-term future was a troubled one. We’ll examine that story next week.

Sources

(1) Clement Attlee, ‘Housing in Stepney’, The Times, 12 April 1920

(2) Simon Pepper and Peter Richmond, ‘Stepney and the Politics of High-Rise: Limehouse Fields to John Scurr House, 1925-1937’, London Journal, vol 34, no 1, March 2009

(3) Harry Barnes was a Liberal politician who would briefly serve as a Labour chair of the LCC’s Town Planning Committee before his death in 1935; WR Davidge was President of the Royal Town Planning Institute in1926-27.

(4) Eastern Post and City Chronicle, July 31 1937

(5) Metropolitan Borough of Stepney, Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health FR O’Shiel, 1937

The contemporary photographs are taken from the official opening programme placed on the Facebook page of Tower Hamlets Community Housing. My thanks to them for sharing this resource and to the invaluable Tower Hamlets Local History Library.

Balfron Tower, Poplar: ‘they all said the flats were lovely’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Brutalism, Regeneration, Tower Hamlets

In last week’s post, we left Balfron Tower just as its first residents were moving in, among them the Tower’s architect, Ernő Goldfinger, and his wife, Ursula.  That affluent couple moved out after a couple of months.  It’s a cruel irony that Balfron Tower, conceived in the twentieth century as decent housing for ordinary people, will in the twenty-first become the preserve solely of the most wealthy.  How did it come to this?

Balfron and the Brownfield Estate © Theo Simpson, Lesser Known Architecture

Back in 1968, the champagne parties thrown by the Goldfingers for their neighbours made it easy for some to condemn their stay as a piece of show-boating by a wealthy couple who would soon return to Hampstead but Goldfinger was serious in his intention to discover the strengths and weaknesses of his design.  This is clear in his own account and in the careful notes drawn up by Ursula – even if they do smack a little of an ethnographic exercise in participant observation. (1)

Goldfinger at Balfron

For instance, good on detail, Ursula noticed how difficult the heavy swing doors to the bridges were for those with parcels or a pram.  And the access corridor was ‘appallingly cold in an East wind’.  These comments are tempered by her observations of the community: ‘everyone was helpful with the doors, not just to me but with each other or a child, or anyone at all’.  And that cold corridor was:

well kept, I have never seen rubbish in it at any time of day. Milk bottles are left outside the doors all day as people are at work, never turned over or broken. Some people have door mats outside, I have not yet heard that one has been stolen. This happened to me and friends of mine in Hampstead.

As regards the flats themselves, those she had visited were ‘ beautifully kept, people are going to a lot of trouble to install them mostly with outrageously terrible furniture, carpets, curtains and ornaments’ – although she did add that she didn’t think the fabric designs ‘much worse than those I see at the Design Centre’.

We might mock the condescension here and feel unsettled by her surprise that working-class people could actually behave rather well but it is worth making the point that this was a respectable and law-abiding community.  If things went wrong later, this wasn’t the result of some original sin in the building’s design.

Balfron Tower from St Leonard’s Road © Stephen Richards and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence

Some of the early faults were corrected. Ernő noted copper gaskets on the windows which made a ‘trumpeting noise’ in the flats when winds were high (they were replaced) and the need for thresholds on front doors (which were added), for example.  They both noted – the eternal problem of municipal high-rise – the inadequacy of the lifts and he added an extra lift to his plans for Trellick Tower, Balfron’s sister in north Kensington completed in 1972.

In general, Balfron seems to have been popular in their early years.  According to Ursula, one woman stated of her flat that she ‘wouldn’t change it for Buckingham Palace’.  Ursula continued:

I have heard many people who live low down say they would like a flat higher up. I have heard no tenant who lives high up say they would like a flat lower down…they all said the flats were lovely…I have never heard anybody express regret for the terrace houses they have mostly come from.

But three months after the Tower’s opening Ronan Point collapsed and the love affair with high-rise was very near its end.  Moreover, Balfron would not be immune from the social and environmental problems which afflicted council estates up and down the country from the late seventies.

For those who hated high-rise and hated in particular the uncompromising architecture of Balfron, the lessons were obvious: ‘high-rise living, at its worst, can be a ghastly and isolating experience’. (2) An intrepid reporter sent to the Tower found evidence to back this up: a 59-year old resident living alone on the top floor felt like ‘a battery chicken in a box’; he didn’t know his neighbours and had been burgled twice.  A young single mother complained, understandably, how badly being ‘cooped up in the flat all day’ was affecting her two pre-school children.

Sign in service lobby

There were criticisms too of poor maintenance.  On the abolition of the GLC in 1985 the Tower was transferred to the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.  Its new caretaker described it as ‘a disaster area…burnt-out cars, black soot stains, bin rooms full of old rubbish’. (3)

For all that, Balfron was never as notorious or troubled as Trellick – the same source describes it as having ‘had a boring life’ and possessing a more stable community – and it seems to have recovered quickly.  CCTV was installed in 1990 and that caretaker later reported few problems with vandalism: ‘I know all the kids, who their mums and dads are. I’ll knock on someone’s door if I’ve seen them doing something’.

Refuse chute in service tower

Balfron has worked, not for everyone and not all the time – not a modernist utopia for sure but a decent home to most of its residents.  It stood the test of time structurally too.  There was no experiment with system-building here and the concrete fabric is described as being ‘in good condition’ and many of the internal finishes ‘surprisingly resilient’.  That solid concrete – ‘spine walls and slabs that pass straight from the inside to the outside’ – does make for very poor thermal insulation, however, and requires substantial work to meet modern standards. (4)

Doorway. The original residents didn’t like the letterbox doubling up as a door knocker and installed electric bells with trailing wires much to Goldfinger’s disappointment

It was Grade II listed by English Heritage in 1996 and ownership was transferred to the local Poplar HARCA housing association in 2006 after one of those ‘an offer that can’t be refused’ ballots that marked the housing stock transfers from councils to housing associations of the time.  Tenants were promised new kitchens, new bathrooms, a whole range of repairs and improvements – basically the kind of necessary upgrade that local councils were financially unable to offer.

Poplar HARCA also planned to build 130 new low-rise homes on the Brownfield Estate for which Tower residents would have priority. If they moved out, their former flats would be sold to help finance the overall programme of redevelopment. (5)

One or two households were still holding out in September 2014

In 2010 it became clear – belatedly, it might seem – that the building’s repair and refurbishment would require all tenants to be – in that chilling bureaucratic phrase – ‘decanted’.  And the rules of the game changed.  The option for tenants to return to improved homes has been removed; all flats are now to be sold on the open market.

Poplar HARCA reckons it will spend £137,000 on each flat – an expensive job made more expensive by the need to safeguard the architectural integrity of a listed building. In December 2013 Londonewcastle, which describes itself as ‘a luxury residential property development company’, was awarded the contract to do the work.  In the words of its website: (6)

Whether clients move to us for a hip studio, neighbourhood apartment or luxury penthouse, Londonewcastle creates inspiring, vibrant environments which combine high specification residential services with select retail, restaurant and offices.

Understandably, the City types who move in (Canary Wharf is so close) or the speculators that buy won’t want poor people sullying their space.

God and Mammon – the view to the south and the likely workplaces of the new residents

In the meantime, as Balfron has emptied (one or two families are still holding out), its flats have been let out to property guardians and artists.  This brings in a little income, it provides a little security but it’s hard not to see all of them as an insidious gentrifying vanguard – embedded agents of regeneration, in the words of one critical participant. (7)

The view to the west showing the Chrisp Street market and clock tower and parts of the Lansbury Estate built for the 1951 Festival of Britain

The kind of ‘urban renaissance’ proposed for areas such as Poplar nowadays rests on conspicuous consumption and the affluence of middle-class incomers.  It displaces and marginalises existing communities.  By way of contrast, look just to the west, go back sixty years, and see a different world, different priorities – the Lansbury Estate, a council estate built in 1951 to meet ‘the needs of the people’ and the model then of a better and more democratic future.

‘Local housing association Poplar Harca has been seeking a partner to give a new lease of life to the 145 apartments in the late-1960s brutalist block designed by architect Erno Goldfinger for the Greater London Authority’. Image and blurb from the Londonewcastle website

Defenders of Poplar HARCA would argue they are doing their best to work the system – a sell-off of prime real estate here, some replacement social housing there.  The rules require that we sell off homes in the social rented sector to maintain the ones we have. The same rules imply that some homes are too good for ordinary people.  And, in practice, those rules break up communities and disperse too many tenants far from their original homes and neighbourhoods.

There may be some good people trying to make those rules work as effectively as possible for those that need housing.  But many more are making a quick buck and the rules need changing.  We have come to accept our society’s divisions and the exclusion of our poorest neighbours. The need to defend existing social housing and build anew has rarely been so stark.

The Focus E15 protest at the loss of social housing at the nearby Carpenters Estate in neighbouring Newham

As Balfron Tower, built to provide good quality and affordable housing for the ordinary people of the borough, is set to become a plaything of the hip and wealthy, there are 23,500 households on the waiting list for social housing in Tower Hamlets; 1500 households, officially homeless, are living in temporary accommodation. (8)

Its sell-off is a loss of housing for those who need it most.  For the rest of us, it’s a loss of common purpose and decency.

Sources

(1) Ruth Oldham, ‘Ursula Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower Diary and Notes’, C20: The Magazine of the Twentieth Century Society, 1 September 2010

(2) George Tremlett, Conservative housing policy director on the GLC, quoted from a speech to RIBA in the East London Advertiser, 21 July 1978.  The following quotations come from the same source.

(3) David Secombe, ‘Balfron Remembered’, The London Column, September 19, 2014

(4) Will Hunter, ‘The future’s golden for Balfron’, BD Magazine, October 2008.  The quotation is from Greg Slater of PRP Architects who are consultants on the refurbishment.

(5) London Borough of Tower Hamlets, East India Estates Offer, August 2006

(6) londonewcastle.com, ‘Our Aims’

(7) Richard Whitby, Angels, The Phoenix, Bats, Battery Hens and Vultures – The Bow Arts Trust Live/Work Scheme

(8) Tower Hamlets Citizens, ‘Tower Hamlets. A Report on the Housing Crisis in one of London’s most expensive boroughs’ (2014).  For detail on the attempts to remove tenants from the waiting list, read James Butler, Social Cleansing in Tower Hamlets: Interview with Balfron Tower Evictee.  The favoured tactic is to use the Rent Deposit Scheme for privately rented accommodation – more expensive and of inferior quality. Thus we spend money on Housing Benefit to subsidise private landlords rather than investing directly in homes.

Rab Harling took photographs of 120 of the flats over three years as a ‘portrayal of a community living with housing insecurity.’  View his slideshow here.

Balfron Tower, Poplar: imparting ‘a delicate sense of terror’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Brutalism, Regeneration, Tower Hamlets

Balfron Tower is now one of the stately homes of England – a National Trust attraction no less.  Recently it’s hosted an arts season, a Shakespeare play, and it’s provided live-work accommodation for twenty-five artists since 2008.  And all that, to be honest, makes me sad because once Balfron was simply housing for the local people who needed it – although its size and style and big name architect did always get it special attention.

Photograph taken in 1969 showing original concrete chimneys to service tower boilers (from LBTH, Brownfield Estate, Poplar Conservation Management Plan)

The site for what is currently the Brownfield Estate, in which Balfron is located, had been identified as early as 1951.  The now truncated St Leonard’s Road was one of Poplar’s principal streets; the area as a whole comprised a dense grid of old and substandard terraced housing.  The land was acquired in 1959 just as the new Blackwall Tunnel Northern Approach to the east was cutting its own brutal swathe through these old streets.  In 1963, the London County Council asked Ernő Goldfinger – one of the most celebrated modernist architects of the day – to design the first buildings of the new development.

Rowlett Street Phase I, as the Balfron Tower was originally known, was built – by the LCC’s successor body, the Greater London Council – between 1965 and 1967 and officially opened in February 1968 by Desmond Plummer, leader of the GLC.

It is 26 storeys and 276 feet high – in plain construction terms, ‘an in-situ reinforced concrete cross-wall structure linked to the service tower by precast concrete bridges at every third floor’. (1)  It contained 146 homes in all, 136 flats and 10 maisonettes.  The maisonettes were located at ground level and on the 15^th floor – the latter provides the distinct break which can be seen in the otherwise uniform façade of the Tower.

Service tower

The idea of a service tower had been pioneered by Denys Lasdun at Sulkin House and Keeling House in the 1950s.  Its advantage, as Goldfinger pointed out, was that ‘all noisy machines, including lift motors, water pumps, fire pumps, rubbish chutes, and the boiler house at the top, are completely insulated from the dwellings’.   Noise within the flats was also reduced ‘sideways by a 9 inch concrete wall and top and bottom by a 1 foot thick concrete floor’.  It wasn’t so easy to deal with the near-motorway just outside the block.

Service tower lobby

The service towers also contained two communal laundries and ‘hobby rooms’ for teenagers, one for table tennis or billiards and the other set aside – in language which must have been a little dated even for its time – as a ‘jazz/pop room’.  Decades later, in a rather more authentic demonstration of youth culture, the Tower was home to pirate radio stations which made good use of its commanding height.

Living room and access to balcony

Goldfinger hoped that the large balconies provided for each home would provide a play area for toddlers; ‘a sunken play area with slides, towers, water and a sandpit’ was located at ground level with a day nursery to follow.  He acknowledged that ‘common shopping and welfare facilities’ were lacking – as they were in so many estates in which councils understandably prioritised the immediate pressing need for roofs over heads.  This, he said, was a problem which needed to be solved on ‘a political plane’.

As for the height of the block, Goldfinger was sure this was a positive: ‘The whole object of building high is to free the ground for children and grown-ups to enjoy Mother Earth and not to cover every inch with bricks and mortar’.  (2)

Goldfinger was a larger-than-life character (to put it kindly) and this makes it easy to conflate the building and the man and see both as somehow ‘brutal’ – more concerned with a showpiece building than the lived experience of its residents.  In fact, he recognised clearly that:

the success of any scheme depends on the human factor – the relationship of people to each other and the frame of their daily life which the building provides.

‘These particular buildings,’ he continued, ‘have the great advantage of having families with deep roots in the immediate neighbourhood as tenants’.  Of the first 160 families in the estate, most were rehoused from the immediate neighbourhood and all but two from Tower Hamlets. They tried, where possible, to rehouse former neighbours together.

Goldfinger hoped, perhaps a little optimistically, that the access galleries – he counted the number of front doors on each, 18 on seven of the levels – would form ‘“pavements” on which the normal life of the neighbourhood’ might continue ‘very similar to a “traditional East End” street’.

Access corridor

Those corridors weren’t exactly ‘streets in the sky’ but he saw their design as far preferable to a traditional point block where only a few flats could be arranged around a single internal corridor.

Such were the good intentions and it’s worth recounting them to remind ourselves that these Brutalist blocks were designed – above all and for all their drama – to provide good homes for ordinary people.  (The same is true of the even more heavily criticised Robin Hood Gardens estate nearby, designed by the similarly controversial Smithsons.)

In fact, it’s often the acolytes rather than the architects themselves who most deserve criticism.  There’s an astonishing amount of writing about Balfron Tower which simply fails to register that it was housing at all.

Then there are the architectural descriptions which seem to celebrate the more dramatic but arguably inhuman features of its design, reaching their nadir in this account of Balfron by Goldfinger’s former collaborator, James Dunnett: (3)

It is as though Goldfinger, from among the Functionalist totems, had chosen as a source of inspiration the artifacts of war. The sheer concrete walls of the circulation tower are pierced only by slits; cascading down the facade like rain, they impart a delicate sense of terror.

Lynsey Hanley, perhaps unfairly critical of Balfron elsewhere, was very reasonably critical of this: ‘is living in a council flat supposed to be delicately terrifying?’ (4)

Internally, of course, the flats were spacious and airy with a quality of fixtures and fittings that very few of their residents would have enjoyed before.  And the views were wonderful.

The contemporary view to the west

Among the first to move in were an unusually affluent couple from Hampstead – Ernő and Ursula Goldfinger.  They moved in to flat 130 on the 25^th floor (now refurbished with sixties kitsch as part of the National Trust tour), paying as was proper the full rent of £11 10s rather than the subsidised figure of £4 15s 6d due from tenants.  They stayed two months.

Goldfinger wanted: (5)

to experience, at first hand, the size of the rooms, the amenities provided, the time it takes to obtain a lift, the amount of wind whirling around the tower and any problems which might arise so that I can correct them in future.

In next week’s post, we’ll see how that experiment went, we’ll assess how Balfron Tower succeeded as social housing for its more usual residents, and we’ll examine the twisted politics which have brought it to its current sad state.

Sources

(1) Ernő Goldfinger, ‘Balfron Tower’, East London Papers, vol. 12, no.1, Summer 1969

(2) Letter to the Guardian, 21 February 1968

(3) James Dunnett and Gavin Stamp (eds), Ernő Goldfinger: Works 1 (1983)

(4) Lynsey Hanley, Estates (2007)

(5) Quoted in Nigel Warburton, Ernő Goldfinger. The Life of an Architect (2004)