Single Aspect Blog

Have any of you been to the Heygate? Seen it?

No, I’ve never been to the Heygate. I just made this shit up; in fact I live in Hay-on-Wye in a Georgian terrace, and just like staring at JPEGS of concrete on my computer screen. Or maybe, you know, not. And if we’re playing class credentials, I grew up on a council estate built in 1929. Am I allowed to talk about council estates now? Thanks.

The Heygate isn’t an architectural masterpiece, it’s decent, unspectacular, rather dour housing, no better or worse than the Victorian housing it replaced, and similarly its problems could be easily and cheaply solved with decent maintenance, care and upkeep. There’s more than a little irony in a policy that consists in ‘these post-war estates broke up communities, so let’s break them up’. We’re making the same mistake all over again, except this time without even the excuse that we’re building something better for the poor. Put away your blinkers just for a second, and it should be blindingly obvious what a scandal this is.

Those asking ‘but would you middle class folk want to live there’ (incidentally, I would, yes, it’d be a step up from living above a chippy in the further reaches of South-East London, which is where I live now. You don’t get an automatic house in Islington as soon as you write for CIF) are missing one very, very big point.

What is happening here and elsewhere in London, Manchester, Sheffield, Glasgow, is that middle class people ARE being convinced to move into council estates; in fact the regeneration of the Elephant is designed to attract ‘creative class’ types like myself to blocks of flats with inferior space standards and with less green space in the vicinity to replace the likes of the Heygate. However – they’re much more brightly coloured! And you can’t see any concrete on the facades! So that’s alright then!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/08/heygate-estate-housing-gentrification

This last one is from the Pepys Estate courtesy of an article by Owen Hatherley who feels even more strongly about the theft of public housing as a gift to the middle class than I do.

http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.co.uk/2006/11/commieblocks.html

A radio broadcast by Owen Hatherley.

Writer and cultural critic Owen Hatherley attacks the architectural results of recent “urban regeneration”. He regrets the loss of confidence in a vision of how cities of the future should be. Defending the buildings of the 1960s, he says, “even the most reviled of blocks contain spacious apartments”, whereas, “The new blocks you can see everywhere are designed from the outside in – irregular windows and brightly coloured cladding hides the tiny mean proportions and a total lack of planning for human use.”
Four Thought is a series of talks which combine thought provoking ideas and engaging storytelling. Recorded live in front of an audience at the RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) in London, speakers take to the stage to air their latest thinking on the trends, ideas, interests and passions that affect our culture and society.
Producer: Sheila Cook.

Wed 17 Aug 2011 20:45 BBC Radio 4

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b013835z

Owen Hatherley Four Thought_17thAug2011

UPDATE: 13/5/12 I was on an architectural walk yesterday which included the Heygate and have posted a few more photographs on Flickr linked below:-

http://www.flickr.com/photos/singleaspect/sets/72157629704575430/

Last year the BBC Radio 4 programme Front Row broadcast an item about the Aylesbury and Heygate estates.  You can listen to it here:-

YouTube – Aylesbury_Heygate

It’s not looking good.  A land grab by overseas investors seems the most likely outcome unless Southwark have the balls to turn it down in November.

http://www.35percent.org/blog/2012/10/27/neo-elephant-social-tenants-not-welcome/

Thanks to Michael Edwards for the link.