Holly Street Estate – research notes
September 5th, 2010
Holly Street and others, discussed.
http://www.singleaspect.org.uk/pdf/holly/hmr01.pdf
My Flickr photos here:-
http://www.flickr.com/photos/singleaspect/sets/72157627405668123/
Two films about the estates linked here:-
A tower block is a terrace stood on end – I’ve paraphrased that from a commentator in The Occupation who says that “just lay a tower block on its side” but you’ve still got the same problems same poor health services and lack of work.
Holly Street before and after is featured in both films linked here:-
The Occupation
http://vimeo.com/61824362
The London Particular
http://vimeo.com/61727960
Holly Street is one of the largest housing regeneration projects of its kind in the world. It took shape in 1991, in a proposal to demolish one of Hackney’s most notorious 1960’s system-built housing estates. The area has now become a mixed-tenure residential neighbourhood of streets and squares, containing a mixture of mainstream housing for sale, in shared-equity ownership, self-build housing and housing association rented homes.
The tenants of the old estate were involved in the design of the new neighbourhood from its inception. Having appreciated all too well that architecture can discriminate or stigmatise by its appearance and imagery as well as in its layout and detailed design, most wanted to live in ordinary houses on an ordinary street, in a neighbourhood that would not be perceived by others as either municipal or obviously experimental.
Many of the tenants had moved onto the estate with young families in the 1960’s and then ‘aged in place’, and the area had an unusually high concentration of older residents who had survived the decline of the area into a ‘sink estate’. The intention was that these could form the nucleus of a more stable and buoyant local community, if only they could be persuaded to stay.
Great stuff here
http://lovelondoncouncilhousing.blogspot.com/2010_11_01_archive.html
The Blairs take on it here:-
The dirty, troubled towerblocks of the Holly Street estate, barely a hundred metres away, served as a constant reminder of the shortcomings of postwar social democracy. “I remember how Holly Street represented everything to me we needed to change in inner-city life,” Blair said on a visit to the estate in 1998, as most of its buildings were being demolished. “I remember going canvassing … and the tremendous fear people had of living on the estate … You had to speak to them through their letter boxes.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2004/dec/09/property.britishidentity
No matter what my personal opinion on the success of rehousing people from the slums, I cannot argue with the facts and Blair’s experience outlined above in that Guardian article must have been representative of the kind of problems that triggered the Comprehensive Estates Initiative.
It is a matter of fact that I changed front doors on the Trowbridge Estate in 1977 – while working as a carpenter for the then GLC – owing to break-ins, so clearly life in those tower blocks wasn’t all rosy either. On reflection it would appear that the 1970s were the last trouble free decade of life on concrete estates and even then it was brewing. Both myself and some friends of the time obtained the keys to council flats in London in the second half of that decade under the GLC Hard to let scheme.
You have to ask yourself why they were hard to let don’t you?
Follow up . . .
Of course government policy would see this as a move in the right direction towards a social and tenure mix and a more balanced community. It probably does not feel like this if you are on the waiting list – mixed communities don’t seem to work in the opposite direction, as the recent nasty little episode about ‘million pound Council houses’ illustrated.
http://www.jonestheplanner.co.uk/2012/11/hackney-hipsters.html
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