The days of mass housing are over – updated
February 10th, 2014
“A ghastly and unforseen programme of gentrification undertaken with the excuse of creating mixed communities“
* I have been asked by a student of architecture . . .
I want to know what Single Aspect thinks makes a good design for mass housing. Is it a 24h concierge service?
The knowledge base on which this article builds may be found in the two films High Rise Dreams and Homes for Heroes with a more in depth look over two hours in the magnificent City of Towers.
Introduction
My reply has to be phrased in the past tense because the era of mass housing has gone. Many people who once had access to council housing with rooms to Parker Morris standards now struggle to afford a much smaller place in the private rented sector at a cost approaching or in some cases surpassing 50% of their net income.
The title stems from the fact that in London, Birmingham and Glasgow, and I cannot speak for the rest of the country except Sheffield, many post-war multi-storey blocks, some designed by well known architects, have been emptied of their former council tenants and in many cases demolished or refurbished and sold or let to private tenants at much higher rents.
In this way, solid and spacious housing built to move slum dwellers out of poor quality housing with shared facilities, and built to minimum space standards has become the preserve of the better off in a ghastly and unforseen programme of gentrification undertaken with the excuse of creating mixed communities but in practice simply expelling the poor.
Concierge
When you ask me “What makes a good design for mass housing?” I say to you look back at the history of post war housing and then imagine what might have been if local authorities had only thought to provide the 24hr concierge they put in later. While researching “families and tower blocks” on the web I came across this.
From their station by the entrance, the concierge’s surveyed live CCTV footage, took phone calls from residents, and answered queries from the general public. They ensured that the lifts were clean and that people felt safe. The level of antisocial crime fell dramatically.
Some of this was done with money from Michael Heseltine’s City Challenge and applied to my own estate, Pepys in Deptford, long after the dreadful 1980s decline and growth in anti-social behaviour, vandalism and reputational decline.
Families in tower blocks
What I think makes good design for mass housing and what is likely to be achieved in the next thirty years are two utterly different things.
Tower blocks for social housing were discredited long before the Ronan Point disaster in 1968 and the revelation that followed it that systems chosen by local government in the early 1960s to achieve Government housing targets, were designed in Denmark and other Scandinavian countries for blocks of fewer floors and that having chosen these systems the fabrication of the panels and subsequent construction was poorly supervised.
Architects have never liked the idea of housing families in tower blocks and I remembered a quote from Nicholas Taylor on this (below) then went on to find a couple more which I’ve reproduced.
It is one of the ironies of the present situation that, just at the time when progressive architectural opinion is giving up the effort to cram families into point blocks, every borough engineer, abetted until this year by the subsidy system, seems suddenly to have discovered the joys of building high.
The failure of ‘Housing’ – Nicholas Taylor – Architectural Review 1967
Families: High-rise living is particularly unsuitable for families because of the absence of outside space. One of the reasons that tower blocks have such a bad reputation is that councils placed so many families in tower blocks against their will. The reputation of tower blocks may begin to change if people have more choice about where they live. Doubts will remain, however, about a building type that is only really suitable for those without children.
For reasons such as safety, the size of units, and lack of direct access to the outdoors means that many landlords have adopted policies restricting the use of tower blocks for families with children. Often this is not adhered to because of a mismatch between the homes available and the type of households needing accommodation, but there remains a presumption against housing families in tower blocks.
As Pauline Greenstreet identified on the Ramsden Estate, the biggest problems afflicted families with children. In tower blocks children could no longer wander out into the yard, as they had done in the Victorian terraces, and were confronted by a row of blank doors rather than a bustling street of doorsteps and windows.
Shut up in a cramped flat, unable to play in the fresh air, they often became bored and irritated, creating more problems for their parents and neighbours.
To make matters worse, families with three or more children had a high priority on local authority housing lists, and most tower blocks therefore contained a disproportionate number of teenagers.
Not surprisingly high rise blocks became synonymous with vandalism and juvenile delinquency; with few amenities and no access to green space, adolescents often genuinely had nothing better to do.
The Ramsden Estate by John Pateman
Luxury apartments
It is still possible to build tower blocks for residential use and this is going on all the time along the Thames but for a different cross section of society, to a higher standard of construction though arguably poorer internal layout and design, and with all the things in place that would have ensured the success of council built tower blocks in the 1960s but which were omitted; such as access controls and a 24hr concierge.
I think it is obvious that if they can be designed badly for the rich then they can be built well for the majority. But there is no political will to do so. Quite the reverse.
At Rebuilding the City Owen Hatherley spoke about the buildings along the river and how New Labour had failed to take advantage of the opportunity to turn these to public housing but allowed the developers to run riot such that the Thames is now a ribbon development of private flats. He also made a clear distinction between social and council housing.
Why is it ok to build “luxury apartments” for overseas buyers and the rich when it’s not ok to build tower blocks for the hoi polloi? Go and look at the riverside near Vauxhall. Roger’s Riverlight single aspect flats (with thanks to @perry_jims) How is it that the higher in status an architect becomes the worse the standard of the housing they design and the more expensive?
Owen Hatherley has covered this subject in his two articles Gentrification and Tower blocks
Slow death of social housing
Astroturfing lobby groups such as CreateStreets led by Nicholas Boys Smith and linked to Policy Exchange led by Alex Morton argue in favour of demolishing tower blocks on housing estates but their transparent agenda is to see the end of council estates across London and their tenants who will be forced to move elsewhere.
In many cases to the fringes of, or even outside London, in a programme of gentrification which is going on at the moment in both Tory and Labour boroughs starved of Government funding for dwellings at social rent only too happy to welcome private development while paying lip service to their moral and legal obligation to house all their citizens.
Worse than this, the London boroughs are sitting on £161m in developer funds paid under legislation intended to ensure a proportion of dwellings are built to let at social rent, but instead the boroughs are in some cases using the money to demolish social housing such as at the Heygate where a valuable piece of land in central London was sold for £50m to Lend Lease.
The land which becomes available is classed as too precious to be wasted on the majority and reserved for the wealthier minority. Even that which once housed thousands as council tenants is taken from them in favour of the better off
I find myself wondering what would happen today to sites used in the past for council housing. Churchill Gardens by Powell & Moya and Pepys Estate Deptford by Hubert Bennett for the GLC were both built by the river and both estates survive even until today fortunately, although Lewisham Council have already had a bite of the cherry selling Aragon Tower (the tower closest to the river) to Berkeley Homes in 2002 for redevelopment as private flats.
Read the report linked below:-
8000 social homes lost in a decade
1977 Housing Act [Link to Guardian letter]
There was a terrible and unintended consequence of the 1977 Housing Act which compelled local authorities to prioritise council housing for those in need rather than those who qualified for it by reason of time in the district, job references and links to family (sons and daughters rules). Michael Collins made a film about it.
Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977
2. Priority need for accommodation.
(1) For the purposes of this Act a homeless person or a person threatened with homelessness has a priority need for accommodation when the housing authority are satisfied that he is within one of the following categories: —
(a) he has dependent children who are residing with him or-who might reasonably be expected to reside with him;
(b) he is homeless or threatened with homelessness as a result of any emergency such as flood, fire or any other disaster;
(c) he or any person who resides or might reasonably be expected to reside with him is vulnerable as a result of old age, mental illness or handicap or physical disability or other special reason.(2) For the purposes of this Act a homeless person or a person threatened with homelessness who is a pregnant woman or resides or might reasonably be expected to reside with a pregnant woman has a priority need for accommodation.
(3) The Secretary of State may by order, made after appropriate consultations,—
(a) specify further categories of persons, as having a priority need for accommodation, and
(b) amend or repeal any part of subsection (1) or (2) above.(4) No order under subsection (3) above shall be made unless a draft of the order has been approved by resolution of each House of Parliament.
(5) Any reference in this Act to a person having a priority need is a reference to his having a priority need for accommodation within the meaning of this section or any order for the time being in force under subsection (3) above.
Not everybody agrees it was the 1977 Act which caused the downfall of social housing and the decline of the estates. Steve Hilditch in his excellent Red Brick blog argues that the residualisation of council housing came about not because priority was being given to groups of people in need but because Right to Buy had led to a reduction in the housing available such that it was inevitable those most in need would have first choice. An illuminating comment follows the article:-
I was a councillor in Inner London for 12 years from 1982 and consider the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977 to have seriously undermined the previous points priority system for allocating housing. Inevitably people manipulated themselves into the top priority category by getting their parents to evict them from the family home.
This act, well-meaning in its intentions, did more to undermine confidence in the fairness of housing allocation than almost anything else. It was, I think I am right, pushed through under the auspices of the Lib-Lab pact between David Steel and Jim Callaghan, so I don’t wholly blame Labour for it.
But it was one of several causes for the abstention of labour voters that served Mrs Thatcher so well in the early 1980s despite the frightful things she was doing to the British economy and British industry.
Christopher Booker outlines very clearly in his film linked above (City of Towers) how the rehousing programme of the 1960s was mishandled such that there were more homeless families in the mid 1970s than there had been before the programme started in the 1950s.
“Amid the wreckage of abandoned housing estates and abandoned dreams perhaps the most shocking and remarkable fact of all was that by the mid seventies Britain had more homeless families than at any time in history.”
The end of tower blocks for social housing
“The era of flat building as a solution to urban housing problems came to an effective end in the late 1960s when the last major schemes were commissioned. Many identify the demise of multi-storey housing with the Ronan Point disaster of 1968. Five people were killed and many more injured when part of a tower block built of concrete panels collapsed as a result of an explosion.”
“In truth, by then, flats were becoming more and more unpopular and the focus of increasing problems. Policy makers had realised that the high cost of multi-storey housing did not represent value for money and the funding regime had already been changed.”
As Stephen Merritt succinctly put it:
The evidence suggests that the Ronan Point disaster . . . largely served to administer the coup de grace to a very very sick man rather than the disaster itself initiating the malady.
Merrett 1979 p.126
Shelter is not enough – Graham Towers
The future
Do you wonder now why I doubt there is a future for mass housing? My answer is a terrace or two for every town and village across the land, built in the local style. But I don’t think even that would be sufficient for the number of dwellings required and it would appear that even for the benefit of their own sons and daughters, the Nimbys will object.
With regard to your own project concerning Balfron Tower, Robin Hood Gardens and Keeling House, the story is not good for council tenants. Robin Hood Gardens by Alison and Peter Smithson was not listed by English Heritage and is due to be demolished.
Balfron Tower by Erno Goldfinger, despite being well built and not system built is nevertheless in need of some TLC and because there is no money available from local government to do it up, it will be refurbished and the flats sold to the private sector with the consequent loss of yet more housing from the national stock and another public housing icon lost.
Keeling House suffered a similar fate. With no money for maintenance it was sold for a paltry sum to private developers and lost from council housing stock and now houses private owners.
Epilogue
It is a sign of the times that the most desirable, well built, well located, and spacious properties should have passed out of public hands or be in the process of as with Balfron Tower.
Trellick Tower is still over 70% in council occupation although who knows the future there? From one of my earliest articles four years ago we can see that little has changed for the better.
Without Thatcher’s right to buy and the 1988 Housing Act stopping further funding for public housing we would be in a very different place. But we are where we are and have to live with it. Many of us however remember the 1970s when it was better and seek a return to those days.
Related articles:-
British_post-war_mass_housing – BRE
From slums to slums in three generations – Carter
Re-forming multi-storey housing – Towers
* Having struggled through this a number of times I decided to rearrange the paragraphs and add much needed links to improve it. It was never intended as an article, only ever as an open letter in reply to a query by a student from the UEL.